Latitude D800 / Precision M60 Owner's Thread

Did a search; thread didn't exist and merely 11 years overdue, but wth ...

Code:

Systems:      Dell Latitude D800 Series
Version:      A00
Build Date:   03/10/03
Initial release of the BIOS

Ok ... "Why bother?". Because it featured the world's first FHD screen (at least, in a laptop), predating the advent of Blu-ray by 2½ years and with 11% more pixels to boot. Remember that the first HD videos didn't ran well at the time, but recently dusted off my D800 and thought I'd see whether it could be pimped to run 1080p fluently; it can!!

For nostalgia (and perspective): M60's cost and configuration in 2004. The D800 or M60 can be used interchangeably, only the initially offered (up-gradable) gpu differed. Anyway, bought this D800 with Pentium M 1.6 and the WUXGA in 2003 (or '04) for some $1899+350+149=$2400 (that's $3050 today). Currently, that configuration can be had for some $40, so that's a '99%-off' type of deal .

For 1080p see next post.

 

To run 1080p we need:

1.) Hardware

• $28; a matching WUXGA screen (there are more, but these have decent contrast ratio)
• $13; a 400 FSB Dothan, an M 745, M 755 or M 765 (533 FSB's run too, but their multiplier is lower)
• $26; 2x 1GB DDR1 SODIMM PC3200 400MHz (seems to make no sense on a 100 fsb board, but it does for the OC)
• $0.50; a heatsink for the audio chip (SigmaTel Stac 9750); otherwise the OC may kill it (did mine, but use external dac anyway)
• $0.01; a piece of copper wire for the voltage mod

GPU's anything goes as there's no CUDA support with these and copy-back only makes sense when doing post-processing (too much to ask for with 1080p). Also, no worries about lcd cables, cooling and tinkering; these things are a breeze to upgrade.

2.) Voltage mod
Same basic idea as with the famous 400>533 pin mod on Intel 915 chipsets, except we're only interested in voltage. Made a simple spreadsheet to determine desired maximum VID:



... only to up fsb to 123 later, which required an even higher voltage:



3.) Overclock
Hardware done, we can oc using ClockGen (CPUID stopped hosting this, but the latest version is 1.0.5.3). It only changes the fsb, which is a rather crude method, but works fine nonetheless. Apart from the dac, apparently, but just slapping on a heatsink would've prevented this (chip is underneath the mb, bottom left). Anyway, select the correct PLL; Cypress CY28346 (on my D800). Might be different on the M60 or on different revision mb's. The usual advice is to 'try and see what happens' ... that's just silly, of course; the chip's on the motherboard, so might as well look (next to the northbridge, underneath the gpu).

Had an M 780 too (533 FSB), so compared them; FSB was stable up to 133 MHz (except for offing the audio chip), but that made only for 17x133 = 2261 MHz, whereas the M 765 ran at 21x123 = 2588 MHz. Memory and hdd were faster, of course, but the bottleneck's still the cpu and to run the 780 on par with the 765 it'd have to use a 152 FSB ...

4.) Media player
MPC-HC is good, but any light-weight player would do. Just don't do anything fancy-pansy, like deinterlace, bicubic upscaling and RGB>255 conversions (uppity stuff, really ). MPC works best with "Overlay Mixer Renderer", this ditches subtitles, so to get these back you need to add DirecVobSub as an external filter (VSFilter.dll).

5.) Optional #1
Had a spare 840 EVO mSATA, so what the hell; let's run it from the PATA bay (IDE > mSATA adapter). Made a live OS clone from IDE to mSATA, swap & reboot ... it works ... at ~100 MB/s max:



6.) Optional #2
Sometimes ran into undesired SpeedStep switches, so changed power scheme to force 21x multiplier only:

Code:

powercfg /change t456 /processor-throttle-ac NONE
powercfg /change t456 /processor-throttle-dc NONE

Lastly, ran a QwikMark benchmark (no 3DMark on XP?):



That's all; Blu-rays play back effortlessly on a 2003 laptop.

 

@t456 does that 250GB 840 Evo show up correctly in BIOS? I have a M60 with the latest BIOS and it only shows 137GB in BIOS. Haven't tried installing XP yet though.

Oh, and overclocking definitely works on models with that one PLL.

 

From the screen shot, his drive was just 120GB.
From the age of this system, I am sure that it has the 137GB limit for IDE drives. The largest 2.5" drives available at the time were around 60 or 80 GB. I remember trying to put a 160GB drive in an Inspiron 5150 (which would be from around the same timeframe) and it would not work.

 

Interesting thing I found out: overclocking doesn't kill your audio permanently, setting the FSB too high (110 MHz+) will break audio until you reboot.