M6800 Owners' Thread

I agree with Hamoon, take the M6800. If it was a 4910MQ it's be a no-brainer, but the 4810MQ wouldn't be bad either. The big deal to me is that the M6800 has 4 USB 3.0 ports; the M6700 has 2 USB 3.0 and 2 USB 2.0. If the OS is on the HDD, I'd get an mSATA SSD and transfer the OS to that; use the 1TB for storage (or, better yet, get a slim 2TB drive...). I would also think seriously about upgrading the RAM to 32 GB (max). You'll have a nice little screamin' machine there!

 

Hi,
I bought a Dell Precision M6800, but the screen does not display colours correctly.
Could someone share a calibrated icc profile for this laptop?
Thank you

 

Hi,

Ive succesfully upgraded my M6800 from a K4100m to a M4000M. I got the card fro 200 USD on ebay and I flashed a compatible vbios (from 84.04.49.00.14 to 84.04.47.00.12). I used the same heatsink and cut the extra copper and the aluminum part just a bit. I've been using the K5-Pro thermal paste for a while so I used it instead of the thermal pads. I used to play the GTA V with the k4100m at 30-38 fps now I can easily play it around 55-60+ fps with the same settings.

 

hey everyone,

recently got a m6800 with a 4930mx cpu in it and a k3100m.
im looking to upgrade the gpu to a 970m and from what i gather around here i need to either modify my current heatsink somehow or buy a maxwell heatsink for it?
was wondering if anyone had any links to instructions for doing so or knew how to go about doing it, also if i go with a 970m should i also be looking at the m4000m and go with whatever i find cheaper?
is there anything else i need to do for this upgrade besides the heatsink bios wise for it to work with my laptop?

thanks!

 

Doesn't really matter if you pick 970m or M4000M, the specs are almost the same. (M4000M is actually clocked 50 MHz faster.)

You have the best chance of success if your card is pre-loaded with a Dell vBIOS. A Quadro pulled from a Dell system is the best. HP vBIOS is known to cause the most issues... Anything else will probably be fine.

I believe there are two different GPU heatsinks for the M6800 with the same part number. One will work without modification while one has a piece that juts out into the new VRM added on the Maxwell cards. Unfortunately they have the same part number so there is no way to know which you have without opening the system up to look. If you have the bad one then you can dremel off the piece that sticks out to make it work... If you have access to that sort of equipment.

You'll have to do a driver INF mod to get the NVIDIA driver to load when you're done. There are lots of sites that have details about this.

 

Seems easy enough, I'll rip apart the laptop to see what heatsink I have and contact the 970 seller to see about the vbios
There's also a 980m for sale but it says compatibility with Alienware, I'm guessing that won't work at all even if Alienware is technically Dell anyway?

 

Cards that work with Alienware have been known to work fine in the Precision.
Really as long as it isn't from an HP system I think that you will be fine for Maxwell cards.

 

ooo that changes things then, the 980m isnt that much more than the 970m, might be worth it for the longevity.

 

got the 980m installed, had to dremel out the heatsink but i think i did an ok job at it, strange thing though i didnt have to modify any driver inf files and the nvidia driver just installed normally? weird but im happy about it lol

there is one small problem, my power led is very dim at like half the brightness it used to be and it stays on while powered off and plugged in and im not sure what happened. maybe something got messed up while reassembling? tried replugging the power button cable but its the same thing, any ideas?

 

Has anyone ever tried to use 2 msata ssds in a m6800? one in the msata slot and another in the WWAN slot?