M6600 Owners Thread

Hi Guys,

Thank you all for the feed backs.. I was really hopeless in having my 8970m relive the life I had imagined for it. It was working great in my Dell M6600 until I foolishly flashed a bad vBios on it from TPU which was not verified and came with a warning. Well.. in hopes of fixing it I tried many alternates mentioned on multiple forums up to no gain. Finally the only solution left was to desolder the vBIOS (8pin SOIC model: Pm25LD010) from both my M8900 and 8970m. Boot the system from M8900 and its original vBios chip to flash the bios. Hotswap the bios chips when on the flash screen. Flash the bogus chip with new bios. Turn off the system. Solder back the bioses to their original cards and BAM!! Didn't work. Instead I lost one of the legs of my bios chip of M8900 in the soldering process!! In frustration I broke another one of the legs just to make sure it doesn't work anymore. The card was dead anyways..I had it repaired once but it couldn't take much of the stress. So no loss I guess.

I'm still sitting with the bad bios chip of the 8970m. Looking for someone with a programmer in my area to flash the correct bios. OR .. buy a cheap one to work with. I'll definitely look for the Skypro programmer and there was a cheap Chinese one P2010 something. Anyways ..I'll get back to you guys once I get my hands on a Programmer.

Thanks again.

Regards!

 

Hey Everyone!

Back again with more stuff!.. I was successfully able to get my hands on a Programmer! TL866 CS Mini-Pro. Was pretty neat and did what I expected. I had to use an adapter to link the chip to it and was detected in the system. What I found inside was that the chip was already containing the Right BIOS which I wanted to flash and the Bad one was already removed. So upon playing with the device some more I came to the conclusion that the chip was fine and had the right BIOS in it. But what was stopping the system from booting? I inspected the card pretty closely and found this.
Front Side!
Back Side! I think the connector is fried! for the sole reason of me trying to fix it with hotswapping in the laptop! Is there anyway to fix this? or am I going to need a new GPU for this?

 

Hi guys,
i have some problems to get Optimus to work properly in my M6600 with a K5000M 4gb (from a M6700).
First of all, i can't install the drivers from Dell without modifying the .inf file.
I can install the latest Nvidia driver from the Nvidia page thought, without any problems.
But i couldn't find any driver that lets me use Optimus the right way.

If i have the lowest brightness and max power saving profile enabled:
-when i remove the Nvidia card from the notebook, the power consumption is avg. 13W
-with the Nvidia card installed, optimus disabled i get avg. 23W
-with Optimus enabled and both cards i get avg. around the same 23W maybe even more. I selected the integrated card in the Nvidia settings page.
It seems like the nvidia card is constantly consumpting power, even though i use the integrated graphic. The load on the nvidia is 0%, its only using the intel.

Is there any way (vbios modification, other drivers, modified inf) to get the card and Optimus work properly?

I used the notebook stationary without Optimus and latest Nvidia drivers for around a year now with the K5000M, and it works pretty nice, but now i need a bit more mobility now.

Regards,
Matthias

 

In the NVIDIA control panel, select "Desktop -> Display GPU activity icon..." from the menu at the top. This will place an icon in the system tray that shows the status of the NVIDIA GPU. It could be off (grey) or on (colored). Also, you can click this icon and see the programs that are using the NVIDIA GPU.

When installing a non-supported GPU you may have to tweak the INF to get the driver to load (as you mentioned), and when doing so, you have to realize that there are separate "Optimus on" and "Optimus off" versions of the GPU listed in the INF file, and if you do not realize this it is easy to get an "Optimus off" device profile installed for your "Optimus on" device. In this case, Optimus will not work properly. See my recent posting here for more information on this. Since I used to have a K5000M, this posting spells out the device IDs of the K5000M in each mode and you should use the "Optimus on" device ID from here as the base device for your INF modification. (Find references for this device ID and copy or modify the lines to match the device ID that is showing in your system.)

I rarely hear of a case where a driver will install for an unsupported GPU without an INF file modification. It's possible that the driver for the NVIDIA page is not set up properly for this use case.

 

Thank you very much for your answer. I will try to get that working, but maybe u can answer another question of me.
I tried different driver versions and when i looked up the SubVendor ID in the device manager, it was 14A4.1028, GPU-Z showed 04A4.1028
Now, after i messed a bit around, the device manager shows 04A4.1028 aswell...?

Yes, i looked up the inf files myself and saw that those 053F and 153f profiles, link to different sections.
Can i modify the entries just like this, to get both entries to the same section?

%NVIDIA_DEV.11BC.04A4.1028% = Section122, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_11BC&SUBSYS_04A41028
%NVIDIA_DEV.11BC.14A4.1028% = Section122, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_11BC&SUBSYS_14A41028

Or can i somehow change the subvendor id of the card back to 14A4 again?

Thanks for your help.

 

As mentioned in my post, there is a number in the device ID that swaps between 0 and 1 depending on whether you have Optimus turned on or not in the BIOS. I have always used Device Manager to get the device ID.

There should be no need to change the section number. Change the device ID only. (If you are sure that you have Optimus turned on and it looks like you have the "optimus off" device ID, I guess, go ahead and change the section number.)

In addition to the lines that you mentioned, you also need to modify the lines that look like this.

NVIDIA_DEV.11BC.053F.1028 = "NVIDIA Quadro K5000M"
NVIDIA_DEV.11BC.153F.1028 = "NVIDIA Quadro K5000M"

 

Well, its kind of working now.
Yeah, i changed these lines as well, i forgot to mention them.
Ah, ok! So if i disable Optimus in bios, my device is 0..., when it is activated it is 1...?

I have the grey symbol now aswell. The power consumption is down to 20w avg. i guess so it is a bit better. But its still nearly doubled the consuption like without the k5000m installed.
I thought it will reduce the draw a bit more.
I used the newest Intel and Nvidia drivers, is it possible that i get much better results with the "optimized" dell drivers?
I tried to install the last published dell version, but it gives me bluescreens and black screens when i try to enable Optimus.

 

I think that you will find that this won't make much of a difference.

 

I think so aswell.
Do you (or does anyone) have experience with the time you can get out of the battery with that configuration M6600/M6700 with K5000M?
My old battery gave me around 2-3 hours with normal work on max saving settings. My new one is around 4 hours.
On a german review site, they tested it (M6600 4000M) with around 6h wlan usage. I hoped to get around the same.

 

Start shutting down devices to cut consumption