Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge *Part 2*

Last call for the battery - $20 shipped.

If it doesn't sell by tomorrow, going into the trash. Not worth my trouble to sell it any cheaper, so don't try to offer anything less

EDIT: Threw it away.

 

Hi, did you manage to install the FX3800M? My fx3700m is dead and I am thinking of upgrade..

 

Try installing MSI Afterburner, reduce the clocks, lets say by 10%-15% (or even more for the first time to make sure it fixes the problem), remember to save the settings.

The problem should be gone..

Use 3dmark06 instead of games for testing..

 

Hi, I am a quite happy owner of an m6400 with qx9300, fx3700m, and, an RGB LED screen I bought used some time ago. I wouldn't want to change it for any other notebook but as it goes one favourite game of mine needs a 2 MB grasphics card to run in a decent way.

Can you upgrade an m6400 with a Quadro 5000m? I know that this card was never on the official lists from Dell, but probably it just fits and the BIOS is compatible ...

 

Yes it might as the M6400's chassis and internal part design does match with the M6500.

 

I might be totally wrong about all of this, but I don't think it's necessarily so. If I understand correctly, the M6400/M6500 (like the HPs 8710/30/40) didn't really come with a real MXM slot (but some proprietary) and thus the video card BIOS (or some of it?) is on the system BIOS (thus, the card has to be supported in system BIOS).

The M6400 BIOS only supports Nvidia's FX2700M, FX3700M and ATI's M7740. I do think that FX3800M might work since it's technically the same GPU (overclocked FX3700M, both with 128 shader units) with the same amount of memory but built on a smaller technological process. FX2800M is also from the same family of GPUs, only with 96 shader units, also with 1 GB of GDDR3. Perhaps M7820 might work too, though the GPUs are different (different number of cores), but the memory amount and type is the same.

I remember people tried to run FX3700M on HP 8710W (normally comes with FX3600M which is the same chip, but with half of it shader units locked and half the memory size). It did work, but the reported amount of RAM was only 256MB (instead of 1 GB). So, I'm not technically sure what's really contained in BIOS regarding the video card support, but from this example, the memory configuration obviously is, while the shaders are not.

Based on this, I'd conclude that M7820 might actually work since it has the same 1 GB of GDDR5 (800 shader units vs the 640), but the 5000M GPU is totally different than the old G92 chip and comes with 2 GB of RAM so I wouldn't bet on it.

I think I've read that the M6600 supposedly has a real MXM 3.0b slot and the video cards are autonomous BIOS wise and thus you have much more options for a sure upgrade.

Now, I'm mostly feeling my way through like a blind man at an orgy, so maybe somebody who's in the know can chime in on this?

 

All of what you said is true. However there is a M6500 variant of the 5000M that is designed to fit in the proprietary slot design of both the M6500 and the M6400. Therefore it should work if you can ever find said card. (They are very rare and very expensive as Dell only released the 5000M for the M6500 for like a month and a half).

Also for the M6600, we can more options to tinker since it can take any MXM 3.0b card. However in order for them to work properly, they need to have a vBIOS equivalent to a FirePro or Quadros.

 

Yes, I'm aware of this as I was rather unhappy about it not being 5010M instead of the 5000M which IMHO (at least in games) doesn't really justify the power guzzling that it does (compared to the 5010M) as it seems to be matched by the M7820. If it was 5010M, then I would seriously consider getting an M6500 with its 16:10 screen as a worthwhile upgrade to the M6400's FX3700M.

I'm not sure about the BIOS thing needing to be equivalent to a FirePro or Quadros as I remember somebody (in the M6600 thread, I guess) trying out the 6970M (or 6990M?) in the M6600 and it worked normally IIRC (except maybe the card's name).

 

Has anyone used the Intel 310 for a boot device on an M6400?
I want to put Win7 on that and use the other drives for a regular 2.5" SSD and a larger normal disk for archiving.
J.G.

 

hi there,

i did alot changes to my m6400 last time
and know i must say its a beast

1.) put the org. 160g hdd in a box an forget..
Just bought Samsung 830, put in, installed bios a11 before and set ahci mode), installed Win7 64 (drivers installed like told on dell site)
2.) changed fx2700m to an ati firepro 7740 (just picked the ~380mb driver from ati site)
3.)put a 1tb hdd in second bay
4.)picked a qx9300 instead the t9550

now my win7 speedindex rose to 7.2 instead the ssd with 7.7,
temps with speedfan are a dream:
temps scanned after 1hour .m2ts file running on second screen,
serveral flashsites open(derBauer® Audio Visual Media since 1999 | LU: 2011.10.30) and performing an win backup::
Imageshack - screenqx93.jpg

dunno why but my machine is much quiter than before and ive until now not the need to buy a new i7

greetings