M6800 Owners' Thread

Just finished to upgrade the M6800 with an M6 Tesla equivalent to an M5000M.
I have stalled in my pogress.After turn in on the computer I have no video whatsoever.Just a blank screen.
I did try with an LVDS lcd panel.Is that the reason?.Should an EDP panel be the key to sucess?.
I understood that there is no ban list for the mxm upgrade on the m6800,am I wrong?
I just need a bit of help.Any new ideas would be great.

 

Do you have graphics switching turned on?

If no, you should turn it on (may require swapping the old GPU back in) so that the Intel GPU can handle output while you check to see if this even works. The Tesla is not a laptop GPU and it may not have a vBIOS set up to handle laptop display output. (You could also try with an external display...)

If yes, well, if you aren't getting any display then that means that the laptop is failing to POST, the BIOS and vBIOS must not be getting along...

There is no "ban list" or "whitelist" for GPUs in these machines but that doesn't mean that upgrades always work, it just means that Dell is not intentionally blocking them.

[Edit]
Actually, I think that resetting the BIOS to default by disconnecting the "coin" battery will reset it to graphics switching on.

 

Hey guys, can anyone please share bios dump of m6800 latest A23 version?

I am unable to update via official updater due to some kind of lock, however full reflash helped with update A05-A16

 

Hey guys,
Would I be correct in thinking that Dell Precision M6800 Bottom Base VD7N7 - is the same for all M6800?

A colleague has dropped by M6800 slightly (dual core) landing on the latch. The base lid mechanism is damaged - easier to order a good condition used base online.

 

The bottom base is same for all M6800 as far as I know. There haven't been any options/changes like addition or removal of ports that would lead to different revisions. (Note, M6700 or M6600 bottom bases would not be compatible.) Of course, replacing the bottom base means basically taking *everything* out of the laptop, that'll be fun!

 

Hello to all,
a few days ago I upgraded the BIOS of my M6800 to the A23 version. It's equipped with Firepro M6100, i7 4800qm, 32GB ram, 3x crucial m550 512GB raid 0 and I immediately noticed a decline in performance mainly of the video card.
my operating system is win 10 pro and the video card drivers are the latest ones downloaded from the amd website (Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Edition for Dell Mobile_18.Q1.1).
I performed various tests with passmark and specviewperf 12.1 and the results were disappointing, in particular with 3ds max from 35 FPS to 22 FPS while 2D passark gives me about 412 as a score against 814 with the old BIOS.
I work with 3D cad and with 3d max and I need a pc that is always responsive. Why do the latest BIOS updates make performance worse instead of improving them? Is Dell aware that the Precision M6800 computers are designed to work well and fast, or does Dell think people have time to waste?
Has anyone noticed the same problems?

 

Could be the spectre and meltdown bug fixes which cause slow downs.

You can disable them in the Registry. Reboot is necessary:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"FeatureSettingsOverride"=dword:00000003
"FeatureSettingsOverrideMask"=dword:00000003

Now you can check the performance again.

To reenable the fix set "FeatureSettingsOverride"=dword:00000000

 

Thanks for your help,
I looked for this string in the system registry, but it does not seem to be there.

 

You have to add the two values to disable the Spectre fix. (And reboot afterwards.)

 

hmm... thinking of flashing the new bios... anyone else haveing slowdown issues as this other guy mentioned ? Id like to hear other peoples experiance before I update. I run linux only...