M6600 Owners Thread

I definitely agree with you there. I've been playing a lot of games on max details with 4x AA and 16x AF and most of them ran pretty easily above 30fps. But you gotta consider the fact that most people buy these systems for work and hence would prefer a quadro.

P.S. - As for me I'm most trilled with the way my 8900M has been performing. As I said earlier it's a great VFM and the Quadro 3000M wasn't worth the 800$ upgrade. (at least that's how much it costs here)

 

It's true that M8900 is the best bang-for-buck and a formidable card.
I't also true that on stock speeds M8900 is faster than Quadro 4000M gaming wise, but thing is (as Bokeh already pointed out) the latter sports very conservative stock clocks, meaning it's de-facto factory-underclocked.

That's the only way i can explain myself how a 475Mhz clocked card can run up and over 700Mhz ( >+50%) without showing a single glitch nor having the temperatures skyrocketing.

I bet the M8900 is clocked more aggressively than 4000M out-of-the-box, all in all hardware performance seeming equivalent.

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Now, slightly OT:
I see some people having very high CPU temperatures on their M6600.
Speaking of notepad cooling pads, i've tried half a dozen in past years without finding really any "miracle" solution.

That said there's a cooling pad i find brilliant in both design and usability.
It's the Cooler Master NotePal U2, which i'm using (sticking with it for 1 year now) and i take anywhere.





Why i think it's so brilliant? 5 Reasons

* It does make my M6600 run 3-5°C cooler;

* Strong, built with Aluminum and rubber, not plastic;

* It has 2 detachable USB powered 80x80mm. fans: you can freely attach them where's more needed; fans run @2000rpm, so they're not much noisy.

* Simple, not cumbersome. No fancy/geeky design, hence suitable for business.

* Most important: You can take the Fans off and put them separately in tour backpack or leave them at home. Then your the notebook wil fit completely *into* the pad, so no extra space needed in your backpack. The pad will also protect your notebook from some accidental damage.

 

Or Dell is using an ultra cooling system to keep potential overclocks in check.

Well i've got a question here - If I fry my GPU while overclocking it will it be considered in Accidental damage?

 

I think 475Mhz is just a plain low and conservative value for the 40nm Fermi architecture.
As a rule of thumb (i'm leaving architecture out to simplify) the lower the "nm", the relatively "cooler" the card may run. Hence it may run at higher clock.

My ancient Nvidia 7800M GTX (110 nm) did run at about 430MHz, quite some years ago.

My 3 years old FX3700M was clocked 550Mhz. FX3800M was 675Mhz.
They were 65nm and 55nm respectively.

Nvidia GTX485M, which is based off the same GF104 40nm chip as Quadros is clocked 575Mhz, which is already +20% compared to 4000M.

FirePro M8900/6970M (40nm) clock is 680Mhz i think.

Then it would be surprising if a 475Mhz card (Quadro) would outperform a 680Mhz (M8900) same-generation card (infact it does not), it would mean the architecture of the former is fairly superior.

 

Running the Samsung 128gb mSSD. It has better overall performance than my Intel SSD and lets me run 2 storage drives. I work with a lot of video, so storage is a good thing.

RAM is 12gb of 1600mhz.

 

Here are the results from a oc m8900 at 825/1100 speeds

Viewset |Composite Multisample Performance
catia-03 |20.39 no result
ensight-04 |20.65 no result
lightwave-01 |51.35 no result
maya-03 |58.77 no result
proe-05 |4.25 no result
sw-02 |42.33 no result
tcvis-02 |22.92 no result
snx-01 |26.62 no result

 

I see. I kept thinking the 4000M is based off of the 560M GeForce, but I then realized it is based off of the 570M architecture, which in the GeForce equivalent is on par with the 6970M. The GeForce variant is stock clocked at 575 MHz from nVidia and the 4000M is at the low 475 MHz.

Nope as long as the overclocking can't be verified from the Dell Technicians, you are fine and over 99% of the time it is hard to verify so you are fine.

 

Can someone verify if this is adjustable with Throttlestop. Please..

 

I guess if you're not some super pro at professional 3d work, the 8900 is more than enough for most people unless high benchmarks help with your purchasing decision (supposing money is a factor). Doubt many people are working with a 9 million polygon optimus prime model everyday.

But what do I know? Thanks for all the benchmarks guys!

Edit: those temps with the 8900 are rather high. Looks like I will have to repaste it out of the box!

 

Thks a lot!
A clean reinstall of the dell drivers (last update on the dell website A01) give me :
3Dmark 2011 : P3044 (graphic 2759/ physics 6629/combined 2940)
3Dmark Vantage : 12347

My mistake was to install the 11_5b CCC driver before the dell driver when I recieved my m6600. The graphic card was detected as 6900m serie and when I installed the dell drivers after, the old drivers from 11_5b CCC stayed.

Another small question : which software did you use for Overclock? Atitool? Atioverdrive? Or other software?
Thx again