Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

I switched to UEFI before the install. Later I enabled Fast Boot and, pretty pivotal to this story, Secure Boot.

After your post I rechecked and noticed that the A08 BIOS was not installed (even though the installer ran fine and reboot was ok, though I could not see anything since the display was dark).

So I figured I might get some error message and perhaps the option to enter the bios when I removed the hard disks. No luck. Screen remained dark, no error message, nothing.

After that I removed the BIOS battery. That re-enabled the DELL logo and I was finally able to enter the BIOS again. But Windows 8 would boot no more, even though I enabled UEFI. So first of all I switched out my new hdds, inserted the original hdd with Win 7 and updated the BIOS to A08, hoping that would help with Win 8. It didn't. And as soon as I reenabled all BIOS options that I had when Win 8 worked, I could not enter BIOS again. So after a couple of BIOS battery removals I found out that it is turning off the Legacy Boot Rom Option that causes this behavior. Since you need to disable that in order to enable Secure Boot, there is currently no way to enable Secure Boot and still change the BIOS, it seems (or am I missing something here?).

Anyway, after I figured all this out I left the Legacy Boot Rom option enabled and was able to enter the Win 8 boot manager by pressing F8 (didn't work with Secure Boot on). Then I disabled automatic reboot after failure and saw that Win 8 could not boot because the boot device was inaccessable. After that I simply booted to Safe Mode. To my surprise that worked and then I rebooted and Win 8 booted normally. Pretty wired, huh?

 

You're actually the second person to complain about this I think. Which graphics card do you have?

Option ROMs are a funny story with secure boot. Naturally, they can't be executed because they don't meet secure boot's digital signature requirement.

On my M6700 (with NVIDIA Quadro K5000M) I am able to boot up with secure boot enabled and options ROMs disabled, no issue.

Now, side story. Last week a friend of mine bought a new machine. It was a Gateway desktop that used the integrated Intel graphics but had a PCI express slot for future expansion. It worked fine with the integrated graphics. He also bought a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 to put into said PCI express slot. With the card installed, no video. But, the machine appeared to boot up (you could ping it on the network, toggle num lock, etc.).

After a lot of messing around we found out that the problem was that legacy option ROMs were turned off. After turning them on (which required turning secure boot off), the GeForce would output video.

So, apparently, there exist graphics cards that won't complete initialization or output anything if their option ROM is not executed. We managed to fix this on the desktop but it never occurred to me that the M6700 might also have this problem, until now.

...Which is why I'm wondering which video card you have. In particular I'm wondering if you have the AMD card (since I have a Quadro and I do not have this issue).
(You'd think Dell would run into this quickly as all M6700 sold with Windows 8 pre-installed are supposed to have secure boot enabled before they leave the factory. Fwiw, mine was in the first batch back in August and shipped with Windows 7, and I didn't enable secure boot until it became available with BIOS A06 in October.)

If it's not the graphics card, I wonder if there is any other hardware difference that we can tease out that might be responsible. I don't know what else would have an option ROM to run (besides the RAID controller and network PXE boot thing which should be the same in all M6700).

[Edit]
Another couple of questions, if you happen to have the NVIDIA card. Do you have Optimus enabled? Do you have the IPS screen?
(I have Optimus turned on so the Intel GPU is actually the one driving the display. While I have used the machine with Optimus both on and off, I don't remember if I've switched it since turning secure boot on.)

 

Hi all, is it posible to install win xp 32bit on my config?

Dell Precision M6700 • Core i7 3740QM • 16GB DDR3-1600 • NVIDIA Quadro K3000M 2GB •17.3" 1920x1080 anti-glare • 128GB SATA SSD, 256GB mSATA SSD • 9-cell (87Wh) battery • Intel 6300 WiFi (802.11n dual-band) •

 

XP 32-bit is supported but you will be limited to around 3.5 GB of RAM.

 

4gb is ok but how is it with the graca? is it posible to disable intel?

 

Turn off Optimus in the BIOS to disable the Intel GPU. You must disable Optimus for versions of Windows older than Windows 7 if you want to use the NVIDIA GPU.

 

Actually, you will most likely be stuck with 4GB-2GB because of the GPU. I was limited to ~3GB on my Asus N50 with 32-bit because of the 1GB of VRAM the GPU has. Is there a reason why you want XP, for most of the basic stuff, XP Mode usually gets the job done.

 

well folks, after 2 phone calls and some waiting... finally got to join the m6700 owners...

typing this on my new covet m6700
specs as in sig.

installed -32GB Corsair Vengeance (4x8) 1600MHz (CMSX16GX32MA1600C10) -OK
installed -Samsung 840 Pro Series 2.5-Inch 256GB -OK
used Acronis True Image to clone OS to SSD -OK (feared this but was pretty painless...)
installed -Crucial m4 256GB mSATA Internal Solid State Drive CT256M4SSD3 -OK (purchased from amazon and screws did come with it)

everything else is just installing my necessary programs, setting up email... and getting used to the 1920x1080...
but colors are quite amazing...

oh, yea, one minor issue was dell did not "click" the keyboard bezel down correctly... but no scratches on screen and i was able to snap it fully after installing RAM...

and the originally configured 1TB HDD is being used as my storage for my archives files and stuff i don't access much...

so far so good...

red color is not a "ferrari" red... more of a pearl-ish blueish red tone... was kinda hoping a ferrari red... but anyways... all happy now.

Oh and WEI:
Processor 7.7
Memory 7.9
Graphics 7.6
Gaming Graphics 7.6
Primary Hard Disk 7.9

 

My Covet did not come with PremierColor installed. Without it, the display defaults to sRGB.

Download PremierColor and set it to "Full". You will get your reds.

Have a friend with a 308. Will try to get pics for you.

 

hahaha... Bokeh, i did not mean the way the reds show on screen... i mean the red case of the covet...

and btw, i'm not quite a ferrari kinda guy, hence i went with an aston martin v8 vantage