M6800 Owners' Thread

That's what I thought as well (and my original post included the enabling the Optimus part) until I went to re-read the link I posted. It seems like @iieeann was able to run it with and without Optimus enabled. He had a screen capture to prove the part where Optimus was disabled. I'm just not sure whether his M6800 is eDP or LVDS.

@iieeann is your M6800 eDP or LVDS?

 

His M6800 is eDP (see past post).

 

Yes the P5000 would be nice but at 3X the price of the M5000m I picked up it is not that much faster! YMMV And I have an LVDS m6800

 

Next question, I have always had AMD cards in my laptops M8900 and M6100 and the switchable graphics options never worked well at all for the m6100 and was not available for the M8900. Is optimus worth the effort to set up for the M5000m and does it actually work well without to much of a penalty?

 

I've found that switchable graphics works well with NVIDIA GPUs, without very much of a performance penalty. When I did 3DMark testing early on with my M6700, I found that some scores were a little bit lower with Optimus on but some were actually a little bit higher. But, there can be odd behaviors with Optimus on depending on the application or game that you are using. A few things that I can think of are, games with diagonal tearing when running full screen on the NVIDIA GPU on the laptop display (DirectX 9 2D games), and games that refuse to render on the NVIDIA GPU without a good amount of config work (Valve Source engine games).

This is even more true if you use a multi-display configuration with some screens attached to the NVIDIA GPU and some attached to the Intel GPU. (The laptop display is attached to the Intel GPU but the HDMI port is attached to the NVIDIA GPU, for example.) Things usually work fine but I've had cases of applications working on one screen but showing up black when moved to the other screen. (Visual Studio suffers from this regularly, and also running a multi-monitor Remote Desktop session leaves one monitor black.)

Even with the issues, I always ran with Optimus on until recently to avoid the NVIDIA auto-contrast-on-battery issue. This has been finally fixed in the NVIDIA 390-series drivers so it is no longer a problem.

I think that things have improved somewhat with later versions of Windows 10. I can't test much on my M6700 because Intel never upgraded the Ivy Bridge GPU drivers to fully support Windows 10 (they are still WDDM 1.3 drivers), but they have upgraded the drivers for the Haswell generation chips that the M6800 uses. Windows 10 1803 has options to configure which app runs on which GPU built in to the "Settings" control panel thing, so you don't have to go to the GPU driver provided control panel to manage this anymore.

I say, if you're going to be running on AC power most of the time, just run with Optimus turned off; it's a simpler configuration. But, feel free to try it and see how it works for you, I think that you'll find that it works better than AMD's solution anyway.

If you turn switchable graphics on but later decide to turn it off, go to the "uninstall programs" control panel thing in Windows and remote the Intel graphics driver. (It leaves behind some startup items and services that you won't need if the Intel GPU is not in use.)

 

WOW other than moding my AMD heat sink with my mill to make the M5000m fit (and i did order the NV model cooler and it was way off for the M5000m). Life is awesome M6800 with M5000m rocks Thanks A million for this forum I would never had the guts to try this otherwise.

edit copper is really soft and leaves a large bur use a dremel/rotary tool to clean the edge up and not a deburring tool.

 

Aaron, thanks for your help but I was wondering if there are any tricks to using multiple docked monitors with switchable graphics enabled. My normal setup is a docked m6800 going to three external monitors. 2 Acer AL2216W monitors, one connected via VGA and the second connected via display port 2 using an active DP to DVI adapter. 1 dell E2210H connected via display port 1 with the same model active dp to dvi adapter.

If i enable switchable graphics and attempt to install the intel 4600 video driver it shows up as working in display manager but only outputs to a single display if i am docked or undocked. aero is disabled.
I can then install the nvidia drivers but nvidia control panel will not launch and the laptop only detects one screen. I have tried several uninstalls and re installs with intel's latest drivers and dell's "official" drivers. same results. any ideas as to what I am missing?

note if I disable switchable graphics everything is great I figured I would try using optimus it based off of your recommendation above.

 

Are you using a new Windows 10 install by any chance? I noticed the recent Windows 10 will disable the additional monitors until you enable it in the "Display settings". Caught me out a few times and it made me change cables and monitors only to realise the OS has disabled them. I've learned a hard lesson from it.

 

Don't know what to suggest here. I didn't have any trouble getting things working with the Intel graphics drivers. I've used multiple monitors with Optimus both on and off without any trouble except some of the odd behaviors that I mentioned in my previous post.

You mentioned that Aero is disabled so I am guessing that you are on Windows 7 still. (Aero / desktop composition can't be disabled on Windows 8/10, even the "basic" display driver supports it.) It almost sounds like the Intel GPU driver is non-functional even though you have it installed, and Windows is just operating off of the "basic" driver. Ever since I got my M6700 I've been on Windows 8 or higher so I'm not sure if there is any difference or special things that you have to do for Windows 7.

 

Hey mate!
Can you please share the full guide for upgrade to the Tesla M6 card? Step by step guide will be much appreciated!
I ask you help, because I had the same card and have no luck to make it work