M6800 Owners' Thread

Yes, you can.

The 2x4GB are installed from the factory in the 2 DIMM slots located underneath the keyboard. The 2 DIMM slots underneath the base cover are empty. These are the easiest to access.

 

Thanks Michiko. Do you have a preferred brand for the RAM?
I haven't received the laptop yet, but am hoping there's no big issues using and calibrating my older NEC LCD2690WUXi monitor.
I'll also remove the stock HDD and install a 1TB Crucial M550 SSD that I have... and have to find all the device drivers and the install order to load them back in. I have notes for the install order for my M6500.

Cheers, Ralph

 

You can use memory from Crucial, Corsair, Kingston, etc.
Personally, I have no preference.

Just make sure you get the low voltage ones (DDR3L). The M6800 supports DIMMs upto 1866 MHz. DIMMs with higher speeds are clocked down, and hence a waste of your money.

As an alternative to a clean install, you could also clone the HDD to the SSD (or make an image from the HDD and restore the image to the SSD). Just make sure you don't boot from the HDD before cloning/imaging it. Personally, I always use a bootable DVD with Acronis True Image and create an image on a NAS or a PC.

From the factory, the HDD contains a pre-install version of either Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, depending on how you ordered your M6800, with all the required drivers included. During installation (on first boot), both OSes will detect the SSD and make the necessary settings for an SSD (enable TRIM, disable defragmentation, etc).

 

eGPU possible on M6800

i7 4810MQ
8Gb DDR3
AMD FirePro M6100

eGPU:
nVidia GeForce GTX 760 + EXP GDC v6 (via Express Card)

Only connect eGPU when notebook is in sleep - wont boot windows with eGPU plugged in, other than that its Plug n Play. Makes windows restarts a bit tedious as you need to unplug eGPU each time prior to windows boot.

eGPU is only able to power external monitor(s) which are connected to it. For internal/notebook connected monitors its Intel/AMD.

Using eGPU for rendering is possible if you work on notebook connected monitor, also if you are on monitor connected to eGPU you can use AMD card for rendering. Tested with running Cinebench 15 and LuxMark 2.0 in both configurations.

 

guys question, I'm planning to buy a laptop and I found a second hand m6800 which price $1500
the specs is

17.3" FULL HD 1920x1080 : Dell UltraSharp™, wide view, anti-glare, LED-backlit, Premium Panel Guarantee
Intel Core i7-4900MQ QUADCORE 10MB L3 CACHE 2.80GHZ -turbo boost up to 3.60GHz
RAM 16 GB
AMD FirePro M6100 Mobility Pro with 2GB GDDR5 dedicated memory
AMD Radeon HD 8950 ( TOTAL 6GB graphics memory )
SSD 256GB
HDD 750GB


Is this a good buy? mostly use more than 8months I think and the battery life is 4hrs.

Also in your experience is dell a good choice in terms on quality? will it last 3 to 5yrs?

I was planning to buy this or a macbook pro for my work (usually going home to office as a secondary work station)

thank you

 

Hello.
I am soon becoming an owner for a refurbished Dell M6800.Unfortunately I was not attentive and I already buy it with i7-4600M (2 cores). My question is: can I do an upgrade of the processor? I have found i7-4700MQ.Will it be possible with the original heat-sink (using a 35W heat-sink for 45W processor ) or it does not matter?
Thank You.
igor.

 

My AMD M6100 driver started crashing constantly a couple of days ago. It crashes in normal windows use, using the browser etc. The screen goes blank for a few seconds, after which windows reports the driver crashed but was successfully recovered. This started after the latest windows updates were installed, so it might be related to them. I already tried to update the GPU drivers but that didn't help.

Anyone else experiencing such crashes?

 

Have you checked the temperatures?
Are you using the FirePro drivers or the Catalysit one?
Could also be the switchable graphics crash...one solution to this is to disable the Intel HD graphics and to remain totally on the discrete M6100.

 

Temps are normal and the crashes happened under extremely light browsing load. I tried both Dell's drivers and the latest Catalyst from AMD. Both of them keep crashing and the crashes just got worse (corrupted graphics in Chrome, one bluescreen). I just tried to disable switchable graphics in BIOS and haven't seen a crash yet, so let's hope it helped.

I'm planning to try a Linux update as well to see if the M6100 happens to work any better now. Does anyone know a working Linux distro+driver combination to try? The last one I tried was Linux Mint 16 Petra and I didn't manage to find any working drivers (so that for example Open/WebGL would work).

It's really annoying Dell forces us to buy these "workstation class" GPUs instead of the more powerful, cheaper and better supported gaming cards they are based on...

 

Had same issue but i didnt want to revert not using switch-able graphics. Trick is to untick "Allow additional power savings" in Switchable graphics global settings.

When that option is on as soon as you alt tab out off app that uses firepro it will turn off completely and app will not know how to turn it on, resulting in an error and sending windows request to reset the drivers at is falsely assumed gpu has crashed which in turn crashed app you were working on since apps still dont know how to swap graphics used on the fly. With this option disabled upon alt tabbing firepro will stay in lowest power mode and drivers wont reset and your app wont crash as it will keep using firepro all along.

You can get gaming gpus in alienware, asus rog, clevos, msi, but then you sacrifice build quality, warranty and support.