M6600 Owners Thread

F12 gets you into the UEFI. There isn't a whole lot you can do in there. No control over memory timings, voltages, or half of the stuff that would have been in a traditional bios.

I'm reading up on a hidden bios on M6500, the M6600 probably has one as well.

 

Please post if you find anything on M6600 hidden bios.

Also, suggestions anyone on removing Intel i7 and Win7 stickers without damaging surface?

 

They are meant to come off. Just peel it.

 

I'd be very interested in hearing about a 'hidden' bios if you turn one up as well. I'm not surprised that there aren't any options for adjusting multipliers and clockspeeds, voltages, timings, etc. in the UEFI menus, though. I can count on one hand the number of laptops that offer ANY control over anything like that and I'd probably still have fingers left over.

//EDIT: Would someone with a quad core CPU (ideally the 2920xm, but...) mind firing up Prime 95's "in-place large fft" test and Furmark's extreme burn-in mode at the same time for me? I bought two ASUS laptops for work last week-a G73 and a G74-and both of them have an issue with the CPU throttling to 800MHz and staying there whenever the GPU is extremely heavily loaded. HP has evidently had the same issue with some of their sandy bridge notebooks and I'd like to double-check that the M6600 isn't going to be a problem. You'll be able to see it if you run Furmark in windowed mode and keep an eye on the CPU clock with CPU-Z. Grabbing the temperatures with hardware monitor or whatever would be interesting, too.

If you decide to do this, please note that these tests push the CPU and GPU very, very hard. nVidia actually considers furmark a 'power virus' because it puts an unrealistically high load on the GPU-higher than it will encounter in any kind of real-world situation. Thus, there is a small chance that you will damage the machine while running these tests; you shouldn't, but that's dependent on Dell, Intel and nVidia/ATI having designed their components properly. I've only fried one piece of hardware (a factory OC'd BFG GTX285) doing it and it's a standard part of my burn-in procedure for every machine that I build or purchase, but it's still a risk, so keep that in mind.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with the programs, both of them will loop their tests until you stop them manually, and Prime95 will minimize to the systray rather than closing if you hit the close button so you need to right-click on the systray icon and tell it to exit.

If it's going to throttle it should do so instantly; running it for just a minute or two would tell you for sure. Temperatures should stabilize after 15-30 minutes. If you wanted to run them both as a stability test, I personally run them for a minimum of 12 hours (ideally 24-48), but that may be overkill.

 

Yes it should, and it does here, and (probably) it does with you too. The thing is that the first boot with Optimus off (after an incident of it turning off by itself, and spontaneous reboot), may end up with a system with:

- Quadro driver not installed at all (this is what happened to me once; the system found the hardware and installed its original "Dell" driver instead of the newer nVidia one I had installed earlier)

- or the Quadro driver installed, but not configured (it's then enough to change resolution from VGA to FHD).

You can check this by right-clicking on the desktop; you will see the nVidia control Panel item, but no Graphics Options (Intel) in the context menu....

 

For sure that info from DELL is wrong, the M6600 preset for Nvidia 4000M is indeed 475MHz core, 1250MHz memory.
That said the 4000M can indeed run at 675MHz (i tested it up to 750MHz) and would be faster than a stock 8900M, but for the sake of reliability i would not "overclock" it much.

I already owned a Quadro 3700M on a DELL M6400 ( with a Core 2 T9600 ).
The new 4000M is running up to 20°C cooler than the 3700M (keep in mind that M6600 cooling is better than M6400 though).
I could not force the 4000M to break 70°C even with > 50% core overclock, whereas the 3700M did hit 75-78°C on stock settings.
Normally the 4000M on stock settings stays in the range 60-66°C under stress (i'm not really a gamer, but i did run Mass Effect 2 demo on maxed settings and i had 62°C max and steady 60fps);
Also i think the 4000 it's significantly faster.

That said gaming performance wise the 4000M would probably get on par with 8900M once we get better drivers.

About Optimus: personally i haven't had a single (serious) issue with it.
It would be interesting to know whether people having problems did update bios to latest version (A03).

EDIT:
I bet the 3700M was rawly equivalent to current Quadro 3000M.
Also, looks like the GTX 580M scores around P3100 in 3dmark11, supposed clocks are 620 / 1240 / 1500.
When clocked at 620 / 1240 / 1625 the Quadro 4000M scores about the same.
That's not surprising, since GF114 chip is just a power optimized GF104.

So, as long as heat is not an issue (it wasn't at all in my 30 minutes test) , looks like an overclocked 4000M can perform as well as a GTX 580M.

 

Will test for you.
2920xm. quadro 4000m

 

Another bug: in some applications (like Autodesk Moldflow), my mouse (both the touchpad and a BT mouse) doesn't work properly on an external display in Extended mode - at least not on the VGA! All functionalities are fine, except double-click... So I cannot launch apps, or pick menu items on the external screen (meaning I'm unable to run presentations properly)...

Anyone observed this?

 

So, I turned off Optimus in the bios. Same thing - Standard VGA Display. I reinstalled the Verde drivers, something as a rule I never do w/o uninstalling and doing Driver Sweeper, but it's working. Quadro is the only display listed in device manager.

Seems to be working both with and without Optimus now. I'm going to use it with it turned off for a week or so and see if it crashes again.

I'm using the Verde 275.50 Beta drivers, btw.

 

What software are you using to overclock?!? I have an 3000M and MSI afterburner maxes out way too low. I can't figure out how to get rivatuner to set clocks...