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

I am fairly sure they are different. The 5870M is based on the desktop HD 5770. The 4870M was based on of a desktop 4830, which is a very different card than the 5770.

The only way for you to find out if it works is to get a M7820 and just plug it in and see if it works? I am sure it would work since Dell has a habit of leaving old GPU codes in the BIOS of newer units intact.

 

Is there a way to get the 485/570/580 gtx parts to work with the IPS panel in Dell?

I spoke someone familiar with the hp 8760w and said it was not possible there because these parts had different shapes than the quadro 4000/5010 equivalents.

 

Unsure on my part. I haven't seen the IPS Panel myself so I don't know if it has different connections and such so Alienware-sourced cards don't work with it. I know that Clevo and Alienware GeForce-sourced cards do work in the MXM 3.0b slot booting up but to work with IPS I have no clue.

 

Yeah, but they're not exactly easy to get or very affordable

Which BIOS with the old GPU codes are you referring to? The question was if the M7820 (supported by M6500) would work with the older M6400 model (which only supported M7740 out of ATI cards).

 

There is a chance that the BIOS Engineers when coding for the last M6400 BIOS may have put in the VBIOS Codes for the M7820. There is a possibility that Dell used a M6400 platform to test the M7820 before releasing it officially on the M6500. If you are lucky, the engineers might have just let the codes in the M6400 BIOS'es, so you get a near PnP experience.

 

Hmm, if an affordable M7820 comes along, I'll try it as I'm not so in the mood to replace a perfectly working M6400 with an RGB screen for the resolution reduced M6600 (since I'd buy those outlet ones, I'm not in the mood for the display gamble, I'll wait for an ATI+IPS combo).

I suppose the M7820 cards from e.g. HP won't work because of a different video card BIOS? Is it possible to at least boot the laptop and flash them even with a black screen?

 

Yes that is correct and also Dell uses a proprietary MXM card format for the M6500 and M6400 while HP uses weirdly the standard MXM 3.0b format that is used on other gaming laptops. Therefore even physically the HP card won't fit in your M6400.

 

Ok, thanks for the info. I'll wait till the M6600 gets the Ivy Bridge refresh hoping that they'll have the ATI (either M8900 or some FirePro variant of these new 79XXM graphics)+hybrid graphics+IPS combinations available by that time.

 

I think a 10bit output is necessary, so not all GPUs are compatible

 

Did you ever do the swap?