M6600 Owners Thread

great! I had not thought about it, I attached a monitor in hdmi and it worked, activated optimus since before there was an amd card, it seems that activating optimus detect everything perfectly. Thank you very much

 

Sorry to bump up the thread.
M6600 in the office spins up loudly often. Opened it up to find the the thermal pad was replaced with gooey glue like thing.

I've cleaned it and ordered 1mm thermal pad, as well as 1.5mm thermal pad for the graphics. Does anyone have a link of an instruction of how to prepare the heat sink with the thermal pad? Thanks

 

Don't worry about bumping an owner's thread... These are meant to be long-lived threads.

Here's a picture of the GPU heatsink with the proper thermal pad placement (from this thread, credit @Bokeh).

If you scroll down in the thread a bit you'll also see that it looks like one of the thermal pads remained on the GPU during disassembly.

There isn't much preparation to do, if you've cleaned the heatsink ... the pads just stick on. Basically you need to make sure that the memory chips and some power regulating components up on top are covered properly.

 

In my laptop with gpu m6100 and i7 there is an adapter for 210w. The system works perfectly and consistently

 

210W is actually fine for the M6600... It is just much less common than the 240W, and also bigger IIRC.

 

Hi guys,

Can someone help me in flashing the vbios of 8970m MSI to work with Dell? The problem is that the Dell version of 8970m or 290x is 4gb while the MSI version is 2gb. Im unable to find any bios which could correctly replace the the 2gb MSI to work with Dell.

Thank you.

 

Well.. I've successfully installed the 8970m 2gb in my M6600. Flashed it with 7970m 2gb from dell and it did the trick. System is booting up pretty fine. Fans are revving up beautifully... bios show an unknown card with 2 gigs of memory.. BUT!!!!! ... the screen goes black in a minute or two with NUM and CAPS lock still working. The same thing happens if I'm connected to an external screen, losing the display there as well. I have tried the diagnosis and all of them tests including VGA passes with no issues. I still haven't been able to log in to the windows because on the windows 7 logo it just flashes a BSOD for half a second and restarts. I was able to record the stuff on my phone and played it in slow mo to find what it was saying. It was something about my hard drive not being compatible. Since I was messing with my system without my hard drive and installing it back caused the BSOD. I tried re-installing the windows but there again.. the Black Screen comes up and I'm left alone staring at the eternal nothingness. I tried cleaning, re-installing, re-seating the CPU and the GPU countless of times as well as the heatsinks of both to no avail.

Currently I have bios revisions of 7970m as .17 and .21 something (2gb). Also, an 8970m original bios from Dell (4gb) and an 8970m original bios backup. Haven't flashed the 4gb one because I'm afraid of the unforseen results.

Any insight from the Pros would be appreciated.

 

Hello, I am new to this board. I am impressed by the longevity of this thread. I own a m6600 (BIOS A16), i never had any issues with the AMD/ATI m6100 that came with this system but, I happened across a Radeon R9 m290x 4gb Alienware for an awesome price. So, i bought is and installed. making sure everything was in contact with heatsink/thermal pads and some AC 5 on the die itself. booted up and entered BIOS, was "unknown" video 4gb RAM. I expected this, installed drivers in Win 10 x64, and system showed m8970. Again as expected. I have had not issues gaming, having played various games for 4+ hours on it, once re-assmebled and running some benches to compare against the m6100. However, monitoring Temps and fan speed has me more than a little skeptical. not so much with fan speeds but 61-66c under load? I expected higher. Is there an issue with the current Alienware vBIOS not reporting temps accurately? if so, is this remedied with editing/modding the current vBIOS? I guess i am asking others with M6600 and R9 m290x what their temps range? bottom line is I do not wish to damage or fry the GPU and would like input as to how i can guarantee accurate temp and fan readings for my GPU. Thanks.

This is my GPU-Z for the card in question: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/details/88u7w

 

Hey Ray!

I've been swimming in the great pile of forums all over the internet for months now and no one seems to bother in replying due to the laptop being too old I guess. Anyways, as reported on multiple forums the Alienwares and the Precisions both suffer from the thermal trip on these cards (M290X and 8970m) as the fans do not spin accordingly to reduce the heat under the load due to vBIOS or drivers being incompatible (mine included). In your case if the fans are running in sync with the temps then you should have no issues with heat dissipation. The temps being monitored by GPU-Z are correct. I'm actually surprised with the temps you have reported and if it is the case, I'll try the vBIOS you have mentioned and give my card another go.

 

Thank you for your reply. I have been using gpuz, and adrenaline driver reporting and TThrottle to monitor temps and fan speeds. So far fans are keeping my temps to 68c when I play crysis and Skyrim for prolonged times. No stutter or artifacts, so I am becoming less skeptical that my gpu will be damaged and working within tolerence. I realize the m6600 is a little long in the tooth but, i7 2820qm and m290x do what I want. If it ain't broke ... Better than the m6100 for under 80 bux. I'm happy!