M4700 Owners Thread

Hate Dell and my 4700... Worst laptop I've ever had...
I disabled optimus, disable-enable Ethernet adapter for several times in Windows 10, reboot laptop and all of that result in black screen... EDID is dead and i can't find LCD datasheet(LTN156AT28, LTN156AT28-202) or firmware dump. Resurrected my LCD with LTN156AT27 firmware using linux but it's not original EDID... =(

 

M4700 for me was a work horse as long as I did not stress the Radeon card in it. If I played my favorite game (at the time years ago), I had a 5% chance of a complete lockup. Dell replaced the graphics card twice, the motherboard once, etc. It was silly. So it was time for a new laptop, and I went shopping on Dell for their new Precision. Loads of issues. I don't have time debugging their crap.

 

I had a M4700 with Radeon and that thing was nothing but trouble. Week 1 and it was booting to blank/glitchy screens.

 

Bingo! I have that t-shirt. After it had happened a couple of times, I called Dell. Of course, they have to go through their troubleshooting process:

Dell: So, what seems to be the problem?
Me: Well, I think there is a problem with my graphics card.
Dell: Are all the drivers current?
Me: Yes.
Dell: and is this a BSOD?
Me: Nope. My screen looks like it's on LSD. (the screen is full of random shapes and colors). Want to see a picture?
Dell: Sure, send it to me.

Now I happen to be on my old XPS1530 (which is still running, loved that laptop) chatting with this guy, so I take a picture with my phone and send it to him.

Dell: Whoa, that's not right.

Me: Yes, I would agree.

And that began my multiple next business day calls. My theory is that there is a noise issue between the graphics card (which was on a mezzanine connector) and the main board. Clearly a design problem. Anyway, I'm happily thumping away on my Clevo which has a *real* graphics card in it. Rock solid since I resolved the driver issues.

 

Yep, that sounds all too familiar. If you're still not put off completely, I'd get an M4700 or M4800 with an Nvidia graphics card.

 

Amen to that, but I moved on.... for others, you should be able to pick up these units cheap now. They are good solid machines, just don't get the Radeon card.

 

Very late response but I confirmed awhile back on this thread that the fastest GPU that will function properly is a GTX 965M. You need to tweak the INF files a little bit but it is easy to do. Still running that card in mine and its my daily machine. Completely solid. As a few others have mentioned, I had some flaky experience when I had a Firepro in it, but once on an Nvidia chip its been smooth sailing.

 

Spoiler

Since the GTX965M is a GM204 chip, could we "mod" the board (change the chip basically) and put a GTX970M/GTX980M or even desktop 970 with modded bios (to keep low power consumption) on it?
Thanks

Oh I just see that GTX965M can also be a GM206 chip which is already maxed out :/

 

I've been unable to get an M2200 to function properly in my M4700. It came from an HP machine with a vbios for a desktop M2000 and I can't get a Dell M2200 vbios to flash to the thing. Damn proprietaries.

 

Maybe you need to use an external programmer?