Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge *Part 2*

Yeah, but I'm talking about a speedy boot from a USB 3.0 drive. It would be useful for copying large iso images from USB stick into RAM faster for further boot.
Sadly Dell didn't integrate a USB 3.0 driver into M6500 UEFI.

I just love Core 2 platform. It's very interesting in terms of FSB overclock. For instance, I can do FSB downlock to save power when traveling.

Of course. It's a very powerful thing.

This is the only thing you need to do. I can do all the other difficult intellectual stuff for you

 

I wanna post a small update on my mod


Molex port provides 5V 5A and 12V 15A power sources. 5V is provided from Pololu Step-Down Voltage Regulator D24V50F5 which is supplied from PD20 (on the right from the SIM card connector), it turned out to be the best connection point to the M6400's power source for all of the voltage regulators.
12V 2A line is provided to the SATA ports from Pololu Step-Up/Step-Down Voltage Regulator S18V20F12. The peak 12V power consumption of two 3.5" SATA hard drive motors is around 1.9A (approx 0.9A each) when spinning up. Then it goes down to 300mA for each during the normal operation. Nevermind what's printed on the label (0.45A). So obviously we can't connect more than 2 hard drives to a 12V 2A voltage regulator because of the spin-up peak power consumption.
You can make up an adapter for charging different power consuming USB devices like powerbanks or phones which support fast charge, the power is more than enough. 12v can be used for fans and desktop lamps as well as HDD power source etc.
Internal SATA ports (ODD and the first HDD) are used for my 6TB hard drives. Very convenient for using 2 hard drives at the same time for doing backups. Both working well. Try to use a short (15cm or less) SATA cable to maintain stability because those internal ports don't have SATA signal repeater/amplifier compared to the eSATA port. I'm also planning on getting an expresscard-eSATA and cardbus-eSATA to have more SATA ports. One per each (PCIe and cardbus) port. I wish I could get a native IDE (CompactFlash) to cardbus adapter. But unfortunately, they don't have x64 drivers which is very sad.

Spoiler: Photo

This is a 12V 15A Step-Down Voltage Regulator D24V150F12 from Pololu hidden under the battery and providing power to the molex port. I'm using a thick copper wire to provide output power. It's occupying the free space left from the HDD the SATA port of which has moved outside. It can be turned on/off by an outside switch which is the case in my M6400.



And the last thing is an improved switch array for CPU voltage regulation and FSB mode switching.


Now I can set the QX9300 up for the lowest performance mode. Thanks to the switches, I can set up any FSB speed except for 400MHz which QX9300 can't probably hold. I've cut the CPU off from the PLL to fully control the switching algorithm and split the FSB switching lines into 2. One is set by the standard onboard setup for the north bridge (BSEL0 and BSEL1 are set by the CPU by default, I installed R392 (500 Ohm) to force BSEL2 to 1 and so the north bridge thinks it's working at 333 and sets up FSB:RAM divider to 5:6 as long as the CPU is out putting 0 for BSEL0 and BSEL1). And the other FSB switching line is the most important which is the PLL frequency set up. I wired them out to the outside switches. Now I can set these up from this table.


I can go down to 100 MHz whenever I need to go for a travel and save battery. This frequency is enough for watching downloaded videos.
When working at 100 MHz and with speedstep off (x6 mutliplier), you set up QX9300 voltage to 0.7125V. It's enough for watching videos. There's no point in doing heavy testing at the lowest performance mode, but I can say that this is the lowest safe voltage that doesn't cause freezing when watching downloaded videos. The CPU temperature was around 33 degrees and the battery life increased by approx 20 minutes (their wearout level is more than 30%) compared to when working at [email protected] (speedstep on). If you get in trouble, you can always go for a higher voltage.
0.7125V can be set by the switches as 0111111 (off-on-on-on-on-on-on).
What I want to mention is that when using QX9300, it cannot work stable with voltages lower than 0.7125V. So the first switch for VID6 becomes useless and all the other switches would be enough for setting up the other available voltages. So that switch can be used for something different. Actually, we could use the 2 unoccupied switches for setting up FSB:RAM divider. The north bridge supports 200, 266 and 333 frequencies, so (FSA/BSEL0 can be set on the board as it stays the same in all of the 3 cases)

Here's a screenshot of the lowest performance mode resulting frequency

 

Hi there.
Trying to revamp my old M6400 I found out in device manager 2 entries with caution marks.
"Base System Device"
"Broadcom USH"
Added to that when watching videos the sound gets a bit corrupted for a second.
Running Windows 10 ver 1909.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

 

Try to check CPU load at that time and see what if any program puts it at 100% load.
Is it just about online videos? Does it happen to files opened from the local storage as well?

 

Thanks for the tip....it seems that the speakers are not working propperly. I think it is time to replace them.
Does any one know the dell part number?.Also...are the M6500 speakers compatible?
Thanks

 

Yeah, both are using the same speaker panel. But I wouldn't recommend you to waste your money. Mine died again in a month after purchase.

 

Thanks a lot.It seems to me that are very fragile.
Cheers

 

There are different speaker bars out on the market like Logitech z-305


Or these



My logitech speakers didn't serve long (got them used), they died too, so I had to buy a replacement from ebay. Installed new speakers into the bar and got it revived, but they were very cheap, so they were not functioning well at high volume.