M6600 - Should I Swap Nvidia 4000M with AMD 6990M?

If you need the additional acceleration/features of the quadro driver go for a 4000M or 5010M. If not, go with the ATI M8900.

The other factor is optimus. I personally don't need it (I use HDMI out and I'm plugged in 95% of the time) but every user is different.

 

The 6990M will work with the M6600. It even takes the M8900 VBIOS and will still record its 715/900 and 1120 SP's accurately.

 

How about the M6400

 

Does the m8900 have bit outbit to work properly with the IPS screen?

Dell doesn't allow the combo on their screen obviously.

 

Impossible. The M6400 uses MXM 3.0a and the best card you can slot in that MXM slot is the HD Radeon 6770M or the ATI FirePro M5950.

Unfortunately there is no way to get IPS working with ATI for reasons even I have no clue. HP is able to get ATI working with their DreamColor 2 IPS perfectly fine but Dell just opted to run PremierColor with only nVidia solutions. There is a port on the FirePro that works like the nVidia, but the BIOS doesn't allow it at all for it to work. Again, I don't know why.

 

The unfortunate part of course is that HP only offers the 5950 with the 8760w and not the m8900. Hence if you want 6970 like performance you are paying through the nose for the 5010m (even the 4000m is pricey for what is 570m basically).

 

I think it is due in part that the ATI Drivers for FirePro doesn't always work well with 10-bit IPS based on previous iterations and Dell somehow thinks the nVidia Drivers are better suited for it.

 

Isn't the M6400 standard M7740 faster than that? Plus, I always wondered if the M7820 with its BIOS flashed with M7740 BIOS might work on M6400 (similar to how the 6990M works when flashed to M8900)?

 

Wait sorry, I totally misread the model. My apologies. I thought you said the M4600...

In that case, the M6400 uses a proprietary MXM 3.0 format. In other words, the highest ATI GPU you can use on in is the M7820 FirePro that is sourced from Dell. So therefore the M7820 is a bit faster than the M5950 and the M7740 is also a tad faster (but gets crippled a bit by its use of GDDR3 VRAM though).

With that said, you can't cross VBIOS flash your M7740 with the M7820 VBIOS. The reason is that the architecture between the M7740 and the M7820 is totally different. The reason why the 6990M can be VBIOS flashed to a M8900 is that they use the same architecture, just the 6990M has fully unlocked shader processors, while the stock M8900 (basically a 6970M) has some shader processors locked. However both the stock M8900 and the 6990M uses the same exact architecture and same die setup per se. That isn't the case between the M7740 and the M7820. The M7740 is one generation older than the M7820. Basically the M7740 is really a 4850M and the M7820 is a 5870M. Totally different generations.

 

IIRC, when the 5870M (M7820) got out, I remember being disappointed as it was more like a rebranded 4870M (M7740) and my flash thoughts were based on this notebookcheck.net page ATI FirePro M7740 - Notebookcheck.net Tech from where one might get an impression that they are the same architecture (with 1 GB GDDR5) with just a different number of shaders (being listed one on top of the other with different number of shaders). I didn't study it further than that (read: just talking out of my ) so it may as well be that they are different tech, although, knowing the mobile GPUs, they could very well be the same tech, too (e.g. the recent 7XXXM mid-level cards are rebranded previous gen cards).

Though, if they are different tech and cannot be flashed, how would the M7820 work on the M6400 if the BIOS doesn't support it (M7820 was only released on M6500 models)?