Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

ya... upgrading the gpu is I what i might consider as this laptop reach toward the end of warranty period.

 

something just came up to mind... but I bet someone probably already asked: does optimus functionality comes with the gpu card? or it also has a thing or two to do with the mobo as well?

 

Can you elaborate on this? I'm currently using the Firepro M5950 and was considering switching to Nvidia.

Also, I have an i7-2620M (Dual Core) in the laptop now. Curious what my options are to swapping that out for a Quad Core. Is *any* i7 Quad compatible, as long as it is Sandy Bridge?

EDIT: Nvm, read up on MXM a bit. Just the interface. Seems we are limited by the Type A choice.

 

I couldn't tell you about swapping a 2 core i7 for a 4 core ones. However, there is no real choice at the moment regarding the graphic card. The 5950M is about as powerful as the M2000, both have the same Windows index ranking, and the 5950M even has the edge in gaming performance. Note sure the nVidia is a worthy investment.
If the 660M was to be released as an MXM 3A card, it would be a different deal, but I doubt they will do that as it's almost an obsolete format now

 

Yeah, you are right. When I said Nvidia, I wasn't talking about a 2000m and hadn't even looked into what was available yet. I chose the M5950 over the 2000m intentionally because of performance but was hoping there was something better than the 2000m that might fit. Oh well.

 

How is MXM 3A an obsolete format?? To my limited knowledge, I Think type A is just meant for smaller form factor and smaller power spec cards. Unless manufacturers are no longer making mid-high range modular gpu cards, type A shouldn't be going anywhere sooner than type B.

 

So, these specs represent what we have with Nvidia 2000M (from a reply on another website - GPUGrid):

Quadro 2000M GF106 40nm PCIe 2.0 x16 2048 550 1100 1800 192:32:16
Performance would be ~1/5th of a GTX570/GTX480 - realistically ~381GFlops peak;

Definitely, laptop GPU's are really quite poor. Even the Quadro 5010M (GF110GLM) only has a rating of 691GFlops peak (less than half of a GTX470).

Based on these evidence I'm thinking about Vidock solution, that seems to fit well with out Express Card slot.
The only one limitation is that the BIOS not easily recognize the comtemporary presence of two Nvidia cards, so on Vidock (Vidock 4+) the only one solution would be an ATI card (I'm not an Nvidia fanboy, but a performance fanboy of research calculations, so welcome ATI... ).
Moreover, I think that this external system does not corrupt the Dell warranty.

Have you some experience on this system?

 

The vidock could only use 50%-70% performance of the external GPU, you may read the eGPU experience thread for more information.

 

Lets all hope that a better mxm type a card comes out as that would definitely extend the life of this rig. As of now the most powerful mxm type a cards out are no faster then what we have.

Its an nvidia technology so based off the GPU.

 

I am not sure if people have already figure this out, but I am assuming those people with the fan on/off noise "issue" are ones with firepro or those with IPS screen not able to have optimus? Coz I do notice the fans are being triggered by the GPU temp passing approx 55C (which is quite often!). Fans would then turn off when GPU temp is down to about 52. While all these happen, CPU temp remains rather constant. Guess there is a reason to spend extra money to get the optimus function after all.. lol

This frequent on/off is really gonna shorten fan's bearing life. but o well... it is actually quite easy to replace them..

any other observations?