Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge *Part 2*

Be extremely careful:
Corsair Vengeance 4Gb SoDIMM DDR3 (P/N: CMSX4GX3M1A1600C9 didn't work on my M6400 (you may find the story back here at page 58).
I doubt that it has been corrected with newer bioses.

I tried to use one, two or four of them and it failed (all of them worked fine on other newer laptops), while my M6400 is now equipped with 4x4Gb Kingston and worked perfectly for more than a year.


Ciao

GB

 

My guess is either the M6400 does not support DDR3 rams running at 1.35V or it does not support 8pcs by 512Mx8bits ram configuration.

 

Thanks for the info, where would I get a card and is it hard to install?

I tried putting in a 640gb (as secondary) that I have kicking around. It sat at the Dell post loading screen taking forever to post moving along a pixel or two every 30 seconds or so. I lost patience and turned everything off and yanked it. Is this normal for a new HDD install?

 

I got mine from eBay. There's a couple of auctions there, search for "m7820 vygkk". Price is around US$105, give and take a few bucks.

It is pretty straightforward to install. Just download the service manual from Dell for the M6400 located here and follow the steps.

It should not take very long for a new HDD install. However, a change of hardware (like upgrading to the M7820 graphics card) will result in the system taking a long time to go pass the post screen (around 5-10mins in my case). The system will attempt to verify everything is working before loading the OS.

Just give it more time. It will work eventually.

 

Yeah, ebay here as well. But, I remember having those long posts (with Dell logo) from time to time even with no hardware change (but more like 3-5 minutes IIRC).

 

Thanks guys, I gave your both respect... right now I'm looking to buy Samsung SSD and take the current HDD and make it the secondary... then when I'm a bit more comfortable ram or video card.

 

Oh, one more piece of information for you. I see that you have a Quadro FX2700M, which is the same for my M6400 when I first got it. When trying to upgrade the video card, you do not need to take out the CPU fan. All you need is to take out the CPU heatsink and followed by the old video card.

You might need to break off a piece of plastic/metal from the CPU heatsink, it guides the air passing the heatsink fins to the outside. You will know when I mean when you see it. This piece of plastic/metal will block the tail end heatsink fins for the M7820. I broke it off to fit my M7820 into the M6400.

Hope that this will help you along.

 

I upgraded from FX3700M and I'm positive I didn't have to break anything; it was a straightforward replacement. The CPU fan has some black tape holding it to the heatsink which might be what you're referring to, but in my case it could be removed carefully and then replaced again later. After several replacements, the glue was lost so I had to use some scotch tape on it for it to hold.

On a side note, I did mess up one screw head; I wanted to replace the CPU fan together with the GPU, but the CPU fan was for M6500 (not really compatible as it has 5 wires compared to actual 4 IIRC for the M6400 - the black one is used for two connections) - anyway, mounting this fan completely messed up the functioning of both fans (I guess the fan controller got stuck in some weird mode where the fans were continuously getting spinned up and then stopped after a second). I must have reassembled the thing 10 times trying out various combinations of fans and GPUs to get it working again and then stumbled by chance on smth which I suspected was the CMOS battery and I guess it was since it seems to have also reset the fan controller.

 

If you had the FX3700M, your CPU heatsink will not have that extra plastic/metal piece due to the tail end heatsink fins that is on the FX3700M. The extra bit on the CPU heatsink only exist for those with the FX2700M.

 

Oh, thanks, I understand now - the lower TDP FX2700M cooler doesn't have the second heatpipe which extends to the CPU fan, so on those laptops there is an extension mounted to guide the exhaust air through the void between the CPU heatpipe and the laptop exhaust opening. Sorry, I thought all the M6400 heatsinks were the same.