Possible GPU upgrade for Precision M4600

So let me get this straight.
My dell m4600 have a displayport. Does it mean w5170m will work?

 

The two items are not linked.

Do you mean to say that you are ok with not having the internal display?

Any particular reason you desire that card over the m5100?

 

It was for $27 on ebay some days ago and seller was accepting offers. Got one for $25.

Now cheapest one is $85, so I don't think it's worth it.

 

iirc m5100 and the w5170m are essentially the same except for DX12 feature support.

After looking at the going rates on ebay I see you are referring to the w5170m. m5100 is 40 USD right now.

 

I need this

 

Welp, its a 100% price increase for that level of support. Though I would probably just move off of the M4600 at this point.

 

Yeah, I agree with Reciever.

You'll probably have better options with M4700 or M4800, like WX 4150. Unfortunately, this is also out of stock at the moment for the price that I think is worth it ($69).

 

Got it.
Thank you for your time

 

Regarding using the Nvidia m2000m GPU in Precision M4600, ref. posts
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-precision-m4600.772547/page-31#post-10542793 and http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-m4600-owners-lounge.581542/page-239#post-10850020,
I bought and tested the *green PCB* GPU. It works fine on Ubuntu 20.10 (only Linux OS I tried).
Tested both the A17 and current A19 BIOS. I could install Nvidia's drivers and CUDA for computing tasks, the card tested fine.

For what it's worth the Optimus BIOS setting could be whatever, iirc. I could see the Windows setup screens on external displays with and without Optimus enabled.

The machine would always BSOD or crash on boot with both Win7 and Win8. I haven't been able to try Win10.

During Ubuntu boots there was a warning msg regarding APIC* that I should probably have dug deeper on but it didn't seem to affect boot and GPU utilization.
During boot was also the message "Intel management and security application Error 207 - Aborting", I'm not sure what that's about and again didn't seem to have an effect on using the GPU on Linux.

Now, the Win8 BSOD gave 0x0000005C as the error code. Googling that leads to suggestion #4 here: https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-fix-stop-0x0000005c-errors-2624094, stating the following which I suspect is relevant:

These errors only occur on Windows Server 2008 when x2APIC mode is enabled in BIOS. According to Microsoft: This issue occurs because the ACPI driver (Acpi.sys) incorrectly creates a duplicated physical device object (PDO) when some APIC IDs are larger than a value of 255.


STOP 0x0000005C ( parameter1 , parameter2 , parameter3 , parameter4 ) HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED
A driver has enumerated two child PDO's that return identical Device Ids.
​

Dell's BIOS might have quirks but imo doesn't seem to be the true reason Windows fails to boot with the m200m. To my uneducated ears it sounds like Windows has trouble resolving the GPU's device ID. Perhaps the BIOS should have handed poor Windows a good ID but it is interesting then that Linux seems to resolve the problem and move on.

I'm sure someone knows more about this, perhaps the bug can be patched outside the BIOS.


*been over a month now but my note from the tests says APIC, not ACPI.

 

See this thread on GeForce 1070 + Precision M6800, which I believe has a similar issue. (Linux boots fine but Windows always crashes.)
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/trials-and-tribulations-installing-a-1070-in-a-m6800.828000/

The exact issue might not be the same but the process of working around it may be similar...