M6600 Owners Thread

Thanks for your input everyone, I just picked up 2 GTX 675M's on ebay, one of which I'll sell to recoup some cost. I know its old, but I didn't want to spend 200-400 for a 7970m or 680m (just going to be playing some easy-ish games to run at lan parties).

Will let you know how it works out when I recieve the card. Its a 580 thats been flased to a 675, I wonder if I'll need to fiddle with the drivers at all...

 

In light of the topics I've seen on this thread most recently, would appreciate your expertise & guidance on the topic of thermal pads & thermal paste. I switched out FirePro M8900 for M6100. Sadly, somehow AMD Raptor Gaming Evolved came bundled w/ my driver & really freaked out my M6100...spiked it to almost 100 degrees Celsius. Thankfully, I removed it & things were much better. Now, games like DC Universe Online, Battlefield 2, & Battlefield 3 don't make the card come very far out of the 70-degree range. That temp is OK, right? Old FirePro M8900 had thermal pads on the card, some of which were stuck to underside of the heat sink. I re-used as many of these as I could but the M8900 & M6100 cards obviously aren't constructed exactly the same. Person who sold me the M6100 did include a light blue/green squishy material w/ the card & it was stuck to the underside, where most of the large raised squares are on the card (sorry, don't remember their technical name). This was a thermal pad & after install, sadly, he pinged back & said don't remove the one big piece of thermal pad material. When installing the M6100, I cut out some squares & put them on top of the raised areas of the card, just like I found the M8900. Specifically, the GPU has a new pad on top of it. What I've found is that just running a Windows Experience refresh is immediately making the M6100 go from under 60 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius. Is this card bad, heat sink bad, or do I need to go w/ thermal paste on the GPU & thermal pads on top of the large squares on the surface of the graphics card? Thank you all again for your good guidance. Machine in question is 2011-era Dell Precision m6600, i7-2720, 32GB RAM, Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. Using FirePro Control Center 2014.1120.2123.38423, driver signature shows M6100 FireGL V 14.301.1010.0, 11/1/2014

 

Sadly, now have to eat my words. Battlefield 3 just made the temp spike to the 90-degree range, so I clearly need to tear this machine back down & do some heat investigation & work. Perhaps arctic silver paste on all the squares/raised areas of the card? I know that's always the magical heating fix for Playstation 3's & the Yellow Light of Death (YLOD)

 

bad contact probably , check the spread of paste, make the thermal pad thiner. Don't use paste on the square (vrams, they make a mass.

Do it again, (use the dot method) after screw it tight then lift it back up to check the spread.

 

I'll post you some photos how pads are placed on M6100 in M6600 tomorow when I take it out.

 

So I have had my laptop since monday afternoon and have been working just about every day after work to get it up to snuff, this has been probably the most exhaustive migration I've made in a while now lol.

Took it all apart and cleaned it up, air can, repaste, some newer thermal pads, the works. Surprisingly the system came with an extra 500GB drive in the hot swap bay, must have been configured for RAID at some point. I put my i7 2670qm in there along with SSD + 500GB HDD. Overclocked the m8900 to 830c / 1000 Mem

Combination of low/med/high I get around 75 FPS in Arma III and finally a solid 60 FPS in Ghost Recon Phantoms. Ill be playing PayDay2 and Company of Heroes 2 later tonight as well.

The m8900 is sooooo much better than my previous 540m, Im glad I got this machine. Barely fits in the back pack though lol


Regarding eGPU, has anyone tried Folding@Home and/or Physx at all?

 

I'd be really cautious about overclocking the M8900. I've had one fail on me (at standard clocks), and others have reported going thru multiple GPUs. Fortunately I have an M6100 now, and performance is just fine for me. At least if you burn it up, you can swap in a new one, or upgrade.

 

Man, that would truly be a gargantuan blessing. I'll keep an eye out for your most excellent photographic work!

 

Hey Scott, What thickness of pads did you use?

Thanks!

 

Just got the 675m in, system lights up and seems to boot (hdd activity), but the screen remains black (lights up but no video). Going to take it apart again... see if I missed something...