[GUIDE] Dell Precision M6800/M4800 sBIOS mod

@Aaron Thanks! You were right, I had cloned the wrong device for Optimus. I ended up needing the following device:

NVIDIA_DEV.13B3.15CD.1028 = "NVIDIA Quadro K2200M"

Ironically the bit you outlined was 0 for Optimus had nothing to do with it, but rather this flag in the [SectionXXX] portion:

NVSupportOptimus = 1

I hope this encourages others with M4700s and M4800s with LVDS displays to upgrade to Maxwell without fear of being unable to drive the internal display!

 

Indeed, following the trail down from my 0 and 1 versions of the device leads to one section that has the Optimus flag and one that does not (and I had them mis-matched). There are other differences as well so it is of course important to clone the one that is most similar to what you need.

 

Thanks for this info! Hopefully this will get the clevo 965m working in my m4800. At this point I'm in the exact same boat as aznchum was -Can't get the built-in display to use the discrete gpu.

Sorry to get off-topic -You might want to copy this info over to the m4800 gpu upgrade thread, as I ran into your post by accident.

 

Aron44126, You mentioned that you have an M5000M working in your M6700. I have an M6800 and just installed an M5000M p/n N16E-Q5-A1 and the BIOS does not recognize that the card is installed. Did you need to do anything with your M6700 to get the M5000M working? Is there a problem with the card I purchased or does a custom BIOS need to be used on the M6800?

 

That is odd, the M5000M should work straight off with the default M6800 BIOS. It has already been tried and tested by other owners of M6800 laptops. I have a 980M (same family as M5000M but for games) in my M6800 with the default M6800 BIOS plus modded drivers and it works flawlessly.

You might have a bad card. Is there any way you can get it checked out?

 

Since you say it is supposed to work I guess that the card I purchased does not work. I do not have any way of testing the card but it is a New card and it has a 180 day warranty. Before I return it I will check to see what BIOS version is installed and if it is not the newest BIOS I will flash it with the newest one on Dells website. The laptop had an AMD Fire Pro that works ok but only has 2GBs of VRAM and for what I want to use the laptop for I was hoping to get this newer card with the 8GBs of VRAM working.

 

Oh my... the Maxwell cards need a Nvidia heatsink fan (HSF) and you can't really use the HSF from the AMD Fire Pro, on the M5000M, without modding it.

There are two types of Nvidia HSFs for the M6800. One is for Kepler gen (the most commonly used and available) and one is for the Maxwell gen (available but not that common). Their main difference is the copper shim covering the voltage regulators on the top part of the card. I have pictures of the difference somewhere, just need to dig it up.

You are in luck, I found one on eBay for the Maxwell HSF for the M6800.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Preci...e=STRK:MEBIDX:IT&_trksid=p2060353.m1438.l2649

 

It should work without modification to the BIOS. The card shows up as "unknown GPU" or something in the BIOS. In Windows it can be seen in Device Manager as an unknown video card, you have to grab the device ID and modify the driver INF file to get a driver loaded, and after that it works as normal (except you have to repeat the procedure every time you want to update the driver, or when Microsoft pushes down one of their semi-annual major Windows 10 updates).

So don't worry about what the BIOS says, does it show up in Device Manager? Do you know where the M5000M came from? I understand that HP-sourced cards can have issues, you may have to flash a Dell vBIOS on it.

 

Thanks for the info, however I had already purchased one of these a week or so ago and is what is installed with the M5000M.

 

hello. could you please help... im stuck at a03 bios and having the exact problem. i need some guidance on how you did it. thank you.

edit: rzrwolf guided me to get my bios to unlocked version of A16. Thank you. Also thank you to valuxin for taking the first step to share his wonderful work