M6800 Precision - Tesla M6 & Firepro 6100M - Working/updated/switchable graphics

Comparing this on Nvidia vs AMD is a bit tricky as GCN vs Kepler are very different beasts. GCN for just about its entire life span was starved for ROPs, L2, and a decent VRAM amount. If you look at GCN giving it a massive bus width with HBM didnt do much for performance as long as you have enough VRAM. What it needed more than anything was L2 and ROPs. Kepler on the other hand was somewhat starved for bandwidth on the low end (high end cards had fast VRAM) and you could see this by enabling even 2x AA and watching framerate tank which wasnt much of a problem for the GCN cards.

 

Card received. Was 150 bucks, not bad for some tinkering! But now evidently I'll have to shim some copper in on the vrms because there is a huge difference in die-height between the w7170m and the m6100. If I were to guess, like 1.5 to 2 mm! I'm not 100% certain how to go about shimming, but I'll get it done in the name of science. I'll google it and see what I can come up with! Maybe I'll start a new thread.

 

If it's vrm just get different height of thermal pad

 

I would, but it seems too severe. The vram is still even 1-2mm away from the 1mm thermal pad that I installed, a 3mm pad seems a little excessive!

 

To each their own

 

I have made a video tutorial, in this post, I will leave a link here:


I also noticed that the nvidia Geforce Experience options don't work, those like recording etc, I wonder if I did something wrong? : /.

 

I am considering putting in a tesla m6 into a m6800 just wanted to double check. I saw something said about hdmi out not working or rather just not working with the gpu. So if I am just sitting in windows and I wanna stream a movie from my laptop and hook it via hdmi to my tv, I can do that as long as it's using the intel hd graphics right?

 

No. On this system, the HDMI and DisplayPort are hooked directly to the dGPU. They cannot run off of the Intel GPU. They won't work with a Tesla card.

 

Ah okay. So you’d only wanna use this card if you had no plans to ever hook up external monitors to the laptop ?

 

Right... you'd have to run it with Optimus on all of the time (Intel GPU driving the laptop display). You could get an external display via the VGA port, and with a PR02X dock, one of the DVI/DisplayPorts on the dock. The Tesla card isn't intended for laptop use but it does "work" with these caveats.