M4800 Owner's Thread

Hey guys
I've scored myself a decent deal on a second hand unit (scratches on the lid, minor cosmetics but apparently otherwise fully working, so the guy has done a great deal on it given normal UK prices), which I should be going to inspect and collect tomorrow. It'll be for the father in law who's retired, so wanted something solid and with great performance, at a budget, which this seems to tick really good boxes for (4900MQ seems to be about same performance as the 7700HQ which is not that old still). All the information I've seen seems to suggest these are built very solidly and tend to just keep going. Reviews also seem to suggest these bad boys aren't prone to throttling. Perfect!

Anything specific about the M4800 I should know about this unit to look out for?

Plan is I'll take a USB stick with some benchmarks and a few quick stress tests just to make sure things seem to check out on the surface at the very least before handing over the cash; but if there are any quirks or idiosyncracies of this unit I should watch out for?

Specs I'm collecting:
I7-4900MQ
8GB RAM (will likely swap to 16GB)
K2100M
500 GB HDD < Got a 250GB SSD waiting>
FHD panel
Newly replaced battery
Original 180W charger

@Bulwyf, how much did the M2200 cost, where did you pick yours up from? I can't seem to find them shipping to the UK (and even M1000M/M1200s are rare). If I could find one cheap I'd definately take a shot with it as the performance gains (and newer architecture and thus longer support) definately seem decent. (Albeit as its quadro even the K2100M still seems to get support which is great).

 

Mobile Quadros on the Kepler architecture are at the end of their support lifecycle. They are stuck at the NVIDIA driver version 418 branch which is getting security updates only (and might be done already/soon because it is over one year old). Newer cards can use drivers from the 450 branch. If you get a Maxwell card installed then you will be able to use the newer drivers.

 

To be honest, security updates only is fine. The father in law isn't a gamer at all; its more just to ensure it's running properly and stably for general purpose computing, web, netflix etc etc, with at least 'recent' official support, so even if its more or less end of life at least it's not a case of last released drivers being 3+ years old, which is the case with his current system (he has a habit of sticking hold of tech until it is truly obsolete).

I am considering seriously an upgrade to a Maxwell based card (M1200/2200/M2000M) for him at a later date but finding them at a reasonable price from somewhere reliable to the UK seems pretty hard. Most of the ones I've seen are about the price he'll be paying for this full machine, which is just nuts.

My father-in-laws budget was very shoe-string, and only barely covered the machine, even at a great price, so right now at least he won't be able to get one, but keeping my eye out for a cheap one (~£50) I could justify just picking up without asking him as I can almost confirm he won't cover it and won't see the point; probably easier to convince him once the official security drivers cease.

 

Hey! i got mine from Ebay, it took me some time to find a good deal tho, and since i'm from Chile i had to use a local service that takes care of the shipping too, but it was worth it, i got mine for 174 bucks plus shipping, considering that the Dell branded m2200 is more expensive and hard to find than the HP models it was a good price for it, and mine came from the US, there are a few for sale on Ebay right now but all the sellers are from china, so the prices are higher, i had to wait until i found a good chance to grab it.

 

Quadro M1000M isn't on your list but would be the cheapest. I am seeing it available from around $65.

Quadro K2200M is another choice; despite its name, it is a Maxwell card. (Looks like it is more expensive than the M1000M right now though.)

...Or, you could just remove the dGPU card altogether and run with the Intel integrated GPU only, which would be fine if he doesn't really use 3D graphics at all. Intel is still providing security updates for the 4th-gen GPU drivers. Probably would also improve the battery life. Downside is you would not be able to use the HDMI or DisplayPort outputs without a dGPU card installed.

 

Ah, wasnt aware of the M1000M, thanks for making me aware of that one, it does get a bit confusing/hard to find good info, will keep an eye out (and also the K2200M, had no idea it wasnt Kepler). Unfortunately availability of MXM in general is much more expensive and harder in Europe, we tend to end up having to import and that just ends up costing; or getting stuck with sometimes unreliable chinese vendors. Even the M1000M seems like its probably a decent upgrade over a K2100M.

I believe the M2200 (which I can't find any of which ship to the UK atm) is apparently Maxwell 2.0 based; are there any other Maxwell 2.0 cards I could keep an eye out for? (Just to ensure longest driver updates/most up to date NVDEC support)

If I can find one that just fits in with no need for any driver finangles, then that'd be awesome. This being said I need to make sure the machine works fine first and look at this later; I did try another machine (not an M4800) and that things had so many quirks it had to go back. Got to make sure this unit is solid first

Is there anything else I should be looking at with these(other than just running a bunch of benchmarks/stress tests and make sure all seems good)?

 

The only "second round" Maxwell Quadros are the M1200 and M2200. I don't think that it will make a difference for driver support; I fully expect NVIDIA to drop support for all (mobile) Maxwell GPUs at the same time regardless of when they were originally released. In the past they have always dropped support for an entire architecture all at once; Kepler is the first time they split it up, dropping mobile cards before desktop ones (but they still dropped all of the mobile cards at the same time).

 

Great, stuff, well this is all future planning. Gotta check the machine works properly first! Got a USB stick preloaded with IBT, Passmark Burntest, Asus Realbench, Heaven, GPU-z and a few monitoring tools so all but ready to go.

I assume ALL of them will need probably modded drivers at the very least (I know Bulwyf didnt for some reason). Any upgrades from the K2100M that would be 'plug and play'? I've been there done that with driver inf modding, but my father-in-law wouldnt have a scooby

 

Yes, in nearly all circumstances, installing an "unsupported" graphics card will require an INF mod (on the NVIDIA side). In this post I explain the mod (straight-forward find-and-replace)... entries in the INF file include the identifiers for both the card and the system type together, so you won't see entries for systems and cards that weren't originally paired together.

 

Ok well got the machine in hands. Its overall in reasonable condition just cosmetic damage, looks like its had an interesting life. Some of it I've been able to tidy up already though, and the father in law surely won't care about this.

WiFi card had already been upgraded to an Intel 7260HMW and the battery has been recently replaced with a 87wh unit, which Dell bios reports to be in excellent health, by previous owner. System seems stable, and proper Dell 180w charger supplied. Screen also seems to be in perfect condition, no dead pixels, lines etc so bar it not being an amazing panel which I already expected, good start!

One 2.5" SATA SSD and a Windows reset later and she seems to be very capable, albeit 4K60 Youtube VP9 is still a little on the hard side and stutters a little, 4K30 or 1440P60 are perfect though.

In line with this I've already got an mSATA Samsung 256GB SSD on the way and am keeping my eye out for 16GB of 1866 Kingston Hyper X CAS 11 RAM to go in the machine at a reasonable price, and maximise performance as much as possible (if I can't get any 1866 CAS 11 at a reasonable price, I'll probably go 1600 CAS9, although 16GB 1866 CAS 13 might be an option [either will be better than the 8GB of 1600 CAS 11 in here right now])

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My only query is that the 4900MQ seems to more or less immediately settle at 3-3.2GHz under a heavy multithreaded load ie CPU-Z stress test/benchmark, and doesn't go to the 3,6GHz which this CPU is rated for 4 core turbo.
It does however in use deliver higher single core spikes into the 3.5-3.7ghz range and I have seen it spiking to 3.75GHz so everything seems fine at least for single/dual core. (from memory 4900MQ turbos up to 3.8GHz on a single core, 3/7 on dual, so 3.65-3.75GHz being seen in task manager would be normal to my mind).

The machine is set to ultra performance in Dells power manager, Windows 10 is set to the balanced power plan (as that's all you see by default nowadays) with the toggle when you click battery/power icon in taskbar set to better performance (shifting the slider to high performance didnt improve load clocks, just stopped it dropping at idle which was wasteful and generates unnecessary heat/power consumption). I loaded up Throttlestop to see what the limits are and it seemed to be EDP Current and not temps, with maximum wattage load seeming to be in the 42W range, a bit lower than the rated 47W. I've done a small undervolt on the machine of 55mv, which seems to have increased the loaded clocks a little; so maybe this is just a thirsty 4900MQ that hits Dell's stock power caps quickly?

Even under an extended load, the machine seems to drop to base clocks of 2.8GHz and doesn't seem inclined to drop further (which is more than I can say for the last machine I tested for my father in law which struggled to remain above base clock); so I am not devastated as it is at least delivering that expected base clock as a minimum, but wanted to check if this is normal?

Given how chunky this system seems, and that half the time the fans aren't even ramping up that hard, I feel like I'm being capped by current limits, rather than the more normal thermal ones. I cannot see anywhere obvious I can adjust this current limit (which you'd figure would already be at maxed stock with Dell's own Ultra Performance profile).