M6600 Owners Thread

Hi M6600 owners. Did you notice there is a new BIOS out there to mitigate the Intels security holes?
I have tried to ask Dell to also review the ACPi table in this BIOS, that causes the impossibility to use kepler and newer VGA cards, but don't know if someone has been looking into that when creating the new BIOS image.
Can someone perhaps test a newer grpahics card with this BIOS?
The BIOS is located here:
https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=jxcn9
The thread, where I ask for digging into the ACPi table is here:
https://community.spiceworks.com/to...?page=6&source=subscribed-topic#entry-8096827

 

No.

They have no reason to when they already added m6100 to this laptop. You either have to use AMD or get a new laptop.

 

I am using gtx 680m now which is IMHO a better card than the AMD heating device.
Well, I did not expect Dell to give a poo, but at least the guy seemed to listen.
Anyway, did someone already install the A18 BIOS?
Maybe I'll do that and compare some synthetic benchmarks like Cinebench or such, as I think the CPU speed can suffer from this patch.

 

OK BIOS update applied. Went from 443 to 436 in Cinebench. I have noticed one interesting thing when applying the BIOS update (did not make the screenshot before). Look at the picture, what do you think?

 

It's normal for more stuff to show up in the bottom "UPDPATE" part of the confirmation screen than the top "INSTALLED" part.

 

Of course, but the thing is, that there is something done by Dell in regards of ACPI. I have seen somewhere, that ACPI is the reason why newer graphics cards do not work in the m6600.

 

Not necessarily; have you checked to see if the version number listed there is higher than the one displayed in previous BIOS updates? All of the firmware components are included in each update even if there is no change.
(At 0.0.0.1 I'd be rather surprised if they changed anything...)

 

You were right. The A16 BIOS also has 0.0.0.1 version of the ACPI OS Support. I was maybe too much optimistic here. Nevertheless, the BIOS so far works OK, as said, I am using a GTX 680m from Alienware notebook(so produced by Dell?).

 

Realistically, I highly doubt that they will fix the NVIDIA GPU support issue. If you think about it, they have no incentive — it would take a fair amount of engineering effort to make sure that the problem is understood and then get it tested on all configurations to make sure that nothing else breaks... This is to support an unsupported configuration of an old system, to fix a "bug" that does not impact any systems that they shipped, and they don't get anything out of it (other than the good-will of a very small number of people); simply not worth the resources.

 

So earlier this year i ended up acquiring an m6600 for 300$ with an i7 2960xm. I looked up the information for its original config on dells website and this unit actually originally was configured with the 2960xm from Dell.

Now here is my issue, when im loading the CPU it very quickly will hit 100c on Core 1 and throttle (none of the other cores ever reach 100c), and when i do an all core load it likes to float between 90-95c. Ive repasted, cleaned, and even used some rubber pads to put some extra pressure on the heatsink to try and increase mounting pressure but none of these seems to help. Im currently using PK-3 thermal paste because of its higher viscosity.

Is this a normal temp for the 2960xm in the m6600? Im going to try and replace the heatsink soon just to see if it helps. The GPU temps are amazing, the m6100 overclocked to 1100/1500 hardly reaches 80c so its pretty perfect.

The unit runs fantastic except ill notice times during gaming where the CPU is obviously throttling and causing frame times to jump which i can remedy by limiting the CPU to 3ghz max which never sends it to the throttle point.