Possible GPU upgrade for Precision M4600

OK, tried that. Didn't work either. I also started outputting the results of commands to text files. -p commands give no output, but -i says "adapter not found" regardless of whether pins are shorted or not. If the card had a totally broken vBIOS, would that produce the error? Because it seems like that might be the case at this point.

(By the way, thanks for all your help. I think I'm just about ready to give up, though, unless anyone else has any bright ideas...)

 

Sad to hear about that. I guess, the last chance for you to unbrick the card is desoldering epprom and flash it with programmer.

 

K guys, some news for you about my testing of M2000M. As previous M1000M, this card don't want to work as it should. Just for now, only I can use is DOS and Ubuntu with acpi=off. HDMI, VGA and DisplayPort work fine. Under Ubuntu with acpi=off it works in P5 performance level (405 gpu, 800 mem). There is no "whitelist" in dell BIOS for cards itself, but there is an optimus whitelist modding which didn't help at all.

AMT firmware was disabled via F10 button. So there is no error 207, but still system can't boot with this card normally. If I boot Ubuntu without acpi=off, I'm getting kernel panic. My old GT 240M works without any problems. I guess, the GPU needs a legacy vBIOS or we need to edit systems DSDT and ACPI tables...

 

I am really ignorant when it comes to that subject, I could never get my m5100 to output 1.1v with your vbios mod.

So in short, still digging to see if its compatible is what I read from that...

 

I was asked to make this mod by some person and I couldn't test this mod by myself. It's not me who share this mod with people. BTW, all mods tested by me, should work flawless almost on any device

Some more info about the project: looking deep into sBIOS I found out that AMD cards should work fine. I wish, I could have Polaris in MXM to test this out.

 

Iirc Polaris mxm is eDP only I believe isn't it?

 

Pobably yes. But who knows... BTW, I'm not using internal screen, so it's ok for me.

 

Makes it easier for sure, heres hoping for success of the m2000m or 965m. The m5100 just cant hack it for newer titles.

For older games its a great GPU though.

the 2860qm are getting a bit cheaper too so I guess I might get that if you can be successful with the GPU upgrade

Unless I missed something the CPU still cant be overclocked due to encrypted locked BIOS so the 2920xm would be a down grade in comparison.

 

BIOS is not encrypted, mods are possible. Currently, I've ordered custom board to have two BIOSes with switcher: one for experiments, second for recovery. After that, I'll start modding hard and mb solve the ACPI capability problem.

2860qm is better than 2960xm. Yeah, 2nd one is overclockable, but TDP and current limit are the bottleneck. So you'll probably not gain from upgrading to XM. On my previous Dell Precision M6800 I had 4930MX and I should say that 4910mq was far better for the laptop - performance is the same due to current limit of the motherboard, but MX runs far hotter and more power-hungry.

 

Yeah, its why I never bothered with the XM's for the m6600/m4600, at the very least the 2860qm can hold 3.4Ghz 4 core turbo iirc and maintain a 1600Mhz RAM.

I tried 2133mhz but it didnt work out, defaulted to 1600mhz.

Would love to get working again so I can get back into playing with hardware lol