Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

tnx bro.
i saw some guys's positive feedbacks about ATI M5100? does it work?

and my another problem is my battery.
when i charge it , it stop at 70% and it show not charging (in bios : Idle) and when i reconnect charger it chrage normally until 100% but when it get 22% i have shutdown

 

Currently my setup is as follows:

M4600 with 1080 IPS panel.
I7 2960XM
8GB x 4 1600mhz DDR3
Samsung Evo 850 500GB x 3
Firepro M5100
E-Port Plus Replicator(USB 3.0 - 2x DVI-D - 2x DP)
Intel 7260 2x2AC+ Bluetooth
Windows 8.1

Over the past year I have purchased and tried many other components for this computer as well, so I will let you know what has and hasn't worked for me and what I've learned.

The Firepro M5100 works flawlessly. While detected as a Radeon R9 200X, it still downloads the firepro drivers, and I use the card to play some games (CSGO, Rocket League) but mostly work.
I have also used the Firepro M4000. I got it working, but had an issue with the computer resuming from sleep which I never resolved. Otherwise the card worked fine. It should be possible to get working.(more information on page ~203 of this thread)
I have also used a m5950 and a Quadro 1000m which all worked fine.
I have an I7 2620M that also worked fine with this setup.

I use an Intel 7260 Wireless card. The only issue I have with that currently is I don't know if I can achieve full speeds. The card only has connections for two antennas labeled 1 and 2. the M4600 has 3 antenna wires. I randomly chose two of them to use. Anyone have any insight?

When switching between AMD and Nvidia, the same heat sink was used. You will however need to apply thermal pads to everything on the card, as they are in different locations on the board. I used the most popular stuff at amazon (grey strip ~9$) and have had no thermal issues.

I bought the M4600 refurbished from Dell, and have had no issues, except for the battery. It completely died in ~4 months. I discharged approximately once every two days. I did have express charging turned on in the bios. I haven't purchased a replacement yet.

These computers can be gotten for incredible prices and can still be upgraded to be extremely useful and powerful even by todays standards. There are a few limitations with this older hardware, and here are the ones that have affected me the most in no particular order.

1) Drive bays. There is room for 3 SSD in the computer (standard bay, msata, and the optical bay). Only the standard hard drive bay has Sata 3. I have a 500gb Samsung SSD in each of the 3 slots, and obviously the Sata 2 drives perform significantly slower. I am interested in doing a raid between the two, to double the read and write. I am not sure if software raid is the only option, and if anyone has done this. Let me know if you have experience. I should also mention the esata connector on the computer is also 2.0 speed.

2) USB connectivity. There are two USB 3.0 ports on the right side of the computer. I have the eport replicator USB 3.0 dock, and cannot utilize any of the 3.0 ports on the dock(they function as 2.0). What I understand is that the 3.0 ports were added at the last second to sandy bridge, and dell didn't do a great job of integrating them with the 4600/6600, it was more of a last second add-on. So none of the ports on the dock are on a 3.0 usb controller. This is probably the most disappointing of the issues for me personally.

3) Support for multiple displays. I ended up with a Firepro rather than a Quadro because I had the need for multiple displays, and although extremely confusing, it appears that I can have more displays by using AMD (no optimus). However there are still several limitations that affect me. Also if you are setting this up, do your research or PM me because there are several quirks in what types of connectors you can and must use to get the most displays working(especially with the dock). I currently Have 4 displays setup. Two are connected to the docks display ports using active DP to DVI connectors. The third is connected with VGA. All three are 1080p, and running at 75hz, 72hz, and 72hz. I have used several other display configurations with this computer/dock as well. You are required to use the display on your vga port, if not, the signal will be sent to the laptops lcd. There is no getting around that as far as I know - the vga will always count against your video bandwidth which allows for somewhere around four 1080 60hz displays. I am interested in purchasing a 4k display, but am not sure if it will work. If i was certain it would, I would purchase the Crossover 32" 324k 4k monitor(Korean) on ebay. If you have used 4k, please let me know.

Dell: NOTE: To connect a 3rd, 4th or 5th display, The DVI connections on the E-Port Plus or the HDMI connection on the system CANNOT BE USED.
This is the reason for the Display-Port adapters(ACTIVE!)

4) For gaming, it would be nice to find a more powerful GPU. As far as i know, the Firepro M5100 is the most powerful card that anyone has gotten to work so far. If this is untrue, please let me know. It is however a fairly good GPU for a laptop/workstation.

5)Locked Bios Even with my unlocked XM cpu, I can not overclock, do to the nature of the bios that ships with these computers. It may be possible to overclock the M5100, and I am interested in doing that if possible, but have not found enough information, and I have little experience. I have found a couple people on other sites who have attempted to mod a bios for the M4600, but they were not experienced, and did not have any success as far as I know. I am still looking into this.


I got a very powerful workstation for a very reasonable price, and continue to use this as my main machine. I love being able to bring it with me, and drop it on the dock when I get home. I run several VM's OSX (with windows host), ubuntu, and windows guests as well. I do mostly web development on the machine and often run 5 or 6 VM's at a time. It has it's caveats, but given the spectacular prices they can be found for -- a year after purchasing it, I would still recommend purchasing the M4600 so long as the above issues are not deal-breakers. I do eventually plan to upgrade to Windows 10, I'm just scared..

If anyone knows whether or not a 4k display will work, has gotten USB 3.0 through the dock, knows anything about using two Sata 2 drives in RAID, please let me know.

Sorry I'm not sure how this post got so long, I just got on here and started rambling... I think it would be nice to come up with a google doc or something, listing all of the hardware/driver versions people have had success with and to what extent . I'm not sure if there is a place for that on this site; but I know that it would have been great to have, much better than reading through hundreds of pages on this forum loll.

I am also willing to sell all the other components I am not using, they were only used for a couple of weeks. If anyone is interested in a i7 2620M, Intel Ultimate-N 6300, Quadro 1000m, Firepro M4000, Firepro M5950 let me know, I will be putting them on ebay soon. I also have an unopened M4600 factory refurb from dell. with a I7 2620M, a Quadro 1000m, and 1080 IPS display if that particularly interests someone.

 

What do you use the space mouse for?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I have been using it with Autodesk Inventor. Couple of side-projects that I have been drawing & 3d printing prototypes for.

 

Hi my friend.
can you help my by answering my questions?

My quadro 1000M was burn last month and now i want to upgrade it to m5100
Is there a special driver for it or i can use m4800 driver for it?
Does quadro 1000M's heatsink fit on m5100 or not?
Where did you found m5100 for your m4600? (and price?)
Does it work correctly on windows 10? (without driver issue and etc)

 

I have problem with INTEL HD Graphic driver in windows 10.
when i install it , i can't change brightness.
how can i solve this problem?

 

Just go on ebay and search "M5100" also "5FXT3" is another search term you can use to find them.

Here is one for 90$. He actually has 8 of them.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/AMD-FirePro...710559?hash=item2eed4c84df:g:1DEAAOSwI3RW9ywq

You don't need any special driver. Just use the AMD autodetect tool. http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/auto-detect-tool

 

what about the heatsink?
can i use my quadro 1000M's heatsink?

 

http://www.amazon.com/Thermal-Pad-Ultra-1mm-120x20mm/dp/B004230RUO

 

Hello everybody.
Informations here are very usefull and thanks all for that. But i have some questions about this thermal pads. I have dell m4600 with quadro 2000m with default heatsink. I wanna replace my graphic for m5100 and where is should put this thermalpads? It's obvious that on memory and power section, but what about main core? And i realize that gpu fan control didn't work m5100, so they only control is hwinfo?