Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

I know i could buy Quadro 3000M or 4000M from some online stores, which the sellers claim "DELL specific", but i am not sure if it is really possible for M4600 to support such GPU models since it officially supports only up to Quadro 2000M. And after changing, would its cooling system still be working adequately for such more powerful GPU?? And we will also have to replace the BIOS with a Nvidia one, right? Seems a bit too complicated.

 

It won't be possible as the Quadro 3000M and 4000M are MXM-B cards.
Would work on the M6600, but not on the M4600 which only accepts the smaller MXM-A format. You're basically stuck with the 1000M, 2000M and 5950M, but the 2000M and 5950M are already fire breathing monsters.

 

That sounds bad, but actually M5950 is good enough for me, except lacking of the Optimus feature like Nvidia cards. Thanks!

 

I have the m5950 but I am contemplating buying a quadro 2000m for the optimus (really could use the extra battery life whilst working on customer sites). My worry is the ddr3 128bit bus, surely 30gb bandwidth is not going to be enough for 1080p gaming. Has anybody tried? If it could run BF3 at 1080p I would swap it in a heartbeat (don't even care if its 1080p all low).

The 2000m has an amazing amount of shaders, it seems really unbalanced having only ddr3, with ddr5 the card would be a monster.

 

DDR5 draws more power, probably why they went with DDR3

So 1 GB DDR5 Vs 2 GB DDR3

Many have said the ATI card is = to the 2000M just no optimus

Price of the 2000M cards I have seen were @ 450.00 USD on Ebay, no heat pipe assy.

Not sure you can use the ATI heat pipe assy.

 

Cheers Dave, I am sure they use the same heatsink.
I know they are similar, my concern is gaming at higher resolutions where I think the ddr3 will be a bottleneck. With an m5950 I can play bf3 at 1080p low settings fine (I hate no native res gaming). If the quadro can do the same I would swap to get the better battery life.

 

Does IPS screen work with M5950 card?

 

I suspect this actually fixed it for me. I put the driver you linked, and I also hooked up a second screen (so, three screens in total), and now the fan is blowing steadily at a low speed, like I wanted in the first place.

Maybe it's because the additional screen makes the FireGL work more than before, so maybe it needs to be cooled down steadily instead of every now and then.

Anyway, I'm still interested in finding a way to have more control over the fan. Thanks so far!

 

No. That card does not have 30bit (10 bit per component) output.

Also, with the IPS display and Quadro 1000 or 2000, there is no Optimus support (same reason, Optimus switches between the video card for heavy tasks and the motherboard Intel chipset for light graphics; the motherboard graphics doesn't have 30bit output, either).

 

But does IPS screen work with Quadro 1000M? Dell site suggests only 2000M with IPS.