M6600 Owners Thread

Well Ray.. Lucky for you your card is behaving like a good boy and is working as told. While I'm stuck with this annoying little piece of MSI garbage.. Since its a 2GB version there is no good vBIOS out there for it. And I can't get a boot on the stock Bios and I have to flash a 4GB one from Dell / Clevo which makes it think its a 4GB one. Also, it doesn't monitors fans and rpm in GPU-Z making it unable to control the fans at high temps. There are people who were able to run this on an Alienware with a Clevo Bios. But my Precision has plans of its own. I'm left with thinking that I may need to mod the stock BIOS and change its Vendor IDs making it think its from Dell or something but I don't know.. Still looking for solutions.

Anyways.. have fun man! You got this!

 

I took my m6600 off of the Cooler Master cooling pad I use (U3 Plus) and played a while last evening, and temps were 72-76c (same games as i noted earlier 1 -1.5 hours play time). tried again this afternoon, both on the U3 and just sitting on my desk, and temps are higher without the cooling pad (in line with what i reported). I use the U3 all the time, and glad i purchased it. no surprise here, but was a good exercise non the less. U3 it is!

Sorry your having issues EvilD... I saw a 2gb version of the m290x a month or so back, but was not moved to upgrade until i also was getting a memory increase in addition to more horsepower in a GPU. I do however. know the frustration you feel. pls post your results with the Device/Vendor ID. I would like to know the results in case I run across the issues you're having.

 

Welp!! I ..bricked it!

 

Ouch, sorry to hear that. Have u exhausted reviving? Or is it really dead Jim?

 

Its not posting at all. No Numlock or Caps working. No external display no matter what I do.. but I know Its not dead yet.. just a bad clevo bios. have tried multiple things to revive it but none has worked so far. Including shorting of its PINS 3 and 8. The only thing left to do is to unsolder its vbios and place it to a running M8900 flash it there.. and put it back. Sounds simple though but I gotta learn how to unsolder first. As I don't want to fry my card. I have a friend who does things like this so I'll give him a visit tomorrow.

 

There is also external programmers that you can probably use. I would pursue that route if your friend throws his/her hands up.

I would contact @Falkentyne I believe he can point to a post that references the particular components needed to do it correctly.

Just to be clear, it sounds like it's just the video card thats possibly soft bricked and not the actual sbios of the laptop?

So the m290x works in the m6600? If so there's chance it might work for the m4600 with some modding. My m4600 is no longer my DD so I'm open to experiment in the near future

 

Um what's going on? Someone bricked the video bios of their card?
If it uses a normal sized SOIC8 pin IC, you can force flash it with a Skypro (coright.com) programmer. But if that's a 1.8v chip you need a 1.8v adapter with it. If it's 2.8v-3.5v you can flash it without the 1.8 adapter.
And you can buy a Pomona 5250 clip and some jumper cables to wire the Pomona clip to the 1.8v adapter (or the Skypro) directly, like these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LZF1ZSZ/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_7?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A3KL3JVC9E1BY6

That's assuming it's a regular sized video bios chip.

Hitting "Detect" when you wire up the pins 1-8 correctly and the pin 1, on the skypro software, should tell you if a 1.8v adapter is needed to flash the chip (detecting it without the 1.8v adapter isn't a problem. Just read and writes; you don't want to put 3.3v into a 1.8v chip).

Can't help more because I know absolutely nothing about that card. I'm just a regular user.

 

Thanks, it looks like he bricked his video card by flashing another vBIOS unto the card.

Its looking like he will desolder the vbios chip, solder unto another card and reflash but I was thinking that programmer may also be a viable solution in the case the route he is going doesnt work out.

 

If it's a regular square bios chip like those nvidia pascal bioses, he won't need to desolder anything.

 

I wanted to give a shout out of thanks to dmgzd and valuxin for blazing the way to fixing and improving my m6600 with replacing my failed NVIDIA Quadro 5010m to an AMD Radeon m290x (functioning as an HD8970m).

Thankfully, my system fit all of the criteria to make it work smoothly:
- I didn't upgrade to A16 BIOS. I was still at A15.
- My system wasn't completely bricked as I was able to switch to Win10 low-rez mode to download and install the Radeon drivers.
- I was able to find on ebay the "green board" m290x for under $300
- The x-bracket from the Quadro needed to be removed and modified with 2 bend joggles on each leg to properly fit the hole pattern in the m290x. The original x-bracket on the m290x will not work.
- I used IC Diamond thermal paste on the CPU and GPU upon reassembly.

Following the instructions, I installed the Dell fan utility and Speedfan. After disabling BIOS fan control within the utility, the CPU fan whirred up from 0 to ~2500rpm. Once completing the temp curve graphs for the GPU in Speedfan, the gpu fan kicked on as well. My CPU temps are around 42-50c and my GPU is at 35c nominal and 52c max for gaming (Diablo III) and CAD modeling (CATIA v5).

I admit the fans do get loud when the graphics are needed and sleep mode is no longer functional.. Outside of that, I have no complaints. My system works really well without issue.

For anyone else trying to do this, keep in mind.... Until some genius creates a clever device driver or BIOS mod to allow the m290x play nice with the fans in your Dell m6600, you have to run the fan utility and disable the BIOS fan control then start Speedfan every time at startup of your computer session! Your fans won't spin otherwise.

Best of luck!