M6600 Owners Thread

Geez the k5000 is $2500 by itself? That's pretty ridiculous. Could spec me a nice Alienware with a 680m for that price. But that's a different market.

 

The 5010M (Dell part# 5PGK8) is still around $1K (here is one of the cheapest I found) so if you find any at or below $600, let me know.

The best bang for your buck right now is the 4000M, which has dropped down below $500. In fact, this one is only $350. Yes, it is a HP part, but they do work in a M6600 and show up as a Dell GPU once the driver is loaded.

Lastly, the K5000M beast is a MXM-3.0b card so it IS compatible with the M6600 if you have the $$$. However, I am not sure if the previous series heat sink will work.

Scott

 

Thanks for the answers! Rep to you

 

I posted the C-states 'fix' and until today it has been working but waking from sleep today the M6600 had a black screen. So clearly C-states is not enough. Oddly after messing with Fn-F8 I could get login screen, but logging in would give blank screen. A hibernate/resume cycle fixed this issue.

Anyone else experiencing similar issues with sleep/resume mode?

 

I have not experienced this issue, but the M6600 does incorporate a Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) with BIOS extensions.

Microsoft has confirmed that, in certain scenarios, Windows 7 on UEFI-enabled machines would not boot [or resume], but instead freeze, displaying nothing more than a black screen to end users. They released a brief that states, "...a recoverable error occurs when Winload.efi or Winresume.efi is loaded, and then the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) is started. In this case, the startup process may stop at a black screen.”

Microsoft has been offering customers a fix for this issue. A hotfix can be downloaded from Microsoft Support HERE, which is already integrated into the first service pack for Windows 7. It is possible the issue could have returned after a BIOS update or software/hardware install so it never hurts to re-run the hotfix.

Scott-

 

Has anyone successfully flashed their Seagate 7200rpm HDDs with the new firmware I just found on Dell support pages?

I have 2 of 750GB drives in RAID0, so the possibility of something going wrong with the update is doubled. A little scary

 

Yes. It seems less noisy...

Best Regards,
Alex.

 

tried the hotfix, when i came to run it it said not compatible with my system so wouldnt install

have since narrowed down the problem to the nvidia driver.

i recently installed the latest update and now that i have reverted to the previous version of the driver the sleep issue has now gone.

only thing is my previous driver version is from 11-11.

 

Less noisy spinning? Or trashing?

My 2 drives used to make loud noise one after the other, in quick succession, but I set the spin down time to "Never" in the power scheme settings, and now they are silent.

So - unless somebody comes out with some performance-related reason to update the firmware - I guess I wont mend it when it isn't broken

And as to performance, yes - my RAID 0 transfers are a tad slower now than they used to be when new...

 

These so far cheaper than quote I've received from Dell which is x2... so tempting