Possible GPU upgrade for Precision M4600

Yeah I suppose thats right, I just didnt like the atmosphere. Lots of sitting at work, lots of sitting in the commute = BMI 10 points over whats considered norm with stress that shouldnt have anything to do with work. Maybe I might try something in Korea but who knows.

The issues that people are finding with the RX 480 and assume rx 560 are that the cards work fine but are meant for mining. As such the vBIOS was found to be lacking the ability to send signals to the eDP lane or others like HDMI (for set top boxes). I suspect this might be an issue for the RX 560 cards as they come from the same or similar source.

HWInfo should work fine, I used it for when I ever I played games. The m4600 does not have a sensor read for the m5100 so the fans will default to temperatures from the CPU sensor.

Maybe if you can buy another GPU heatsink for the m4600 and add the heatpipe from it to the GPU side that might help offset the heat dump to the GPU exhaust.

If you end up removing the heatpipe from the CPU side it will just keep the GPU being hot like in the m4700/m4800

 

So that's a risk of no output to any external display at all then? ._.

The only sensor read that failed everywhere but in HWInfo for me, afaik, was the GPU fan tachometer. GPU-Z reads the m5100 temp just fine it seems, always did here, and shutdowns due to GPU overheat happens at around 110 deg C (hurts, I know).

Guess I'll give recompiling a modified HWInfo a go as fan control works best with 0ms respin time or thereabout. At least do that as a start, then move on to more physical mods like you describe. I actually bought an extra heatsink, but that was for the CPU, not sure why I didn't for the GPU as well. The machine is becoming a stationary franken-m4600, but that's ok (got this one for free). A different CPU heatsink can in principle be moved directly onto the CPU, likely with custom fasteners. Then a 3rd fan can be added and controlled from the CPU fan PWM & tachometer pins (I got the m4600 schematics PDF), then connect the original CPU fan's PWM. pin to the GPU side. Something like that, maybe (with a capital m). Will have to power the 3rd fan from somewhere.


EDIT: LOL nvm the open source part. That's what happens when doing sloppy googling all sleepy in the middle of the night. HWInfo is not open source.

 

That would be awesome, I know how to do exactly none of that kind of thing (I'm a professional jazz musicians who likes taking laptops apart). It would be a huge benefit to a lot of Dell precision laptop owners, from what I can tell.

I'm a little confused about your temps, my overclocked m5100 never got over 72C. I have a 2920xm but it's an engineering sample that's a little lower clocked. The weird thing is that the CPU gets real hot (grizzly kryonaut keeps it under 90) but never seems to affect the gpu.

 

The issue you will find however, is that the radiators are aluminum and cant contain that much energy (for us, heat) so you will likely hit that wall if you haven't already.

110c is way high, on mine I never breached 80C on stock fan curve, with full fan speed I would get around 75C iirc. That was with 1.2v which shot temps up a lot.

For CPU prowess it would be best to use Valuxin's methods to impart an XMP profile so if you have 1600mhz RAM it will actually boot and use 1600Mhz. Do that and lower your CPU consumption if possible.

 

Ambient temp in this room is usually between 24 - 26 deg. C, it's just way too hot and luckily not where I'll end up using the laptop after finishing handling the issues at hand. You guys have an idea about your ambient room temps? At the moment the most CPU intensive task is my browser, CPU is at 43 deg C, GPU is at 51 deg C, both fans running lightly constantly. Guess it might be ****ty placement on this bench. It's lifted an actual inch above the desk, with what should be enough space behind for ventilation, no obstacles.

 

I think im usually around 74F-75F I dont spend much time at home of late but at least thats what the thermostat is at...

 

I used that gpu for several years, a lot of variation in ambient temperature. It always ran cool, but then it ended up dying somehow so the vram was not so cool I guess...

I will say that the power settings have some kind of special gravity for the cpu on these laptops, no matter what I do with the "advanced settings"(processor power management) or throttlestop, the "high performance" setting always allows more cpu power consumption than balanced. I just cut a couple degrees from my gpu on my m6700 by setting it to balanced instead of high performance. The gpu itself performs exactly the same, but the CPU seems to stay under 25 watts.

I'm going to do more testing on this tonight

 

Seems I can't undervolt this CPU. Intel XTU only shows Advanced Tuning (no Basic Tuning tab) and the options are grayed out. Gave Throttlestop a go, no options there. Googled around but found no helpful explanations. Does the CPU not support it, or is it just Dell at work here?

In other news, I repasted with Gelid GC-Extreme, the previous paste was from an old Thermaltake tube. Seems to have dropped baseline maybe 4-10 degrees (fuzzy and bad science at work here). Will give disabling BIOS fan control from the "hidden engineering menu" a go, if that can be accessed on this machine. That should let programs like HWInfo and Speedfan control the fans without interruptions.

 

Thats Dell at work, overclocking is disabled.

 

Hi. Thanks alot for creating this thread. I have a precision m4600 laptop with i7 - 2760QM and quadro 2000M.
The quadro just gave up to smoke last year. (I sent the laptop to the local store, they just take out the card and even forget to put some screw back in, charge me about $20 for that. I had to replace 2 blown mosfet on the mainboard myself). Luckily the laptop can still works without the external gpu.
Any way, thank to the information here, bought a Firepro m4000 from ebay ($29, approximately $50 shipped to VN). It works like a charm. i had to bend the heat sink a little for it to fit in though.
AutoCAD and SolidWorks performance is now a whole new level compared to the intel HD 3000.

The temperature when full load (furmark +prime95) is about 84C for CPU and 75C for GPU. The GPU fan only run at 35%. Is that normal? I have seen some review which report the temp to be only 69C for GPU. Im afraid that bending the heat sink may cause some problem.
Ambient temperature is about 30~32C.