Possible GPU upgrade for Precision M4600

Might want to get some mosfet heatsinks though as those are covered with a heatsink traditionally.

 

I'd love to, as well as somehow cool the RAM on both sides of the card, but I'm not sure how to go about that as the component height is so varied.

 

You can purchase mosfet heatsinks on their own, little squares typically.

Since you have no way to actively cool them I would go with aluminum over copper as copper can soak more heat but with no dispersion may not work as intended.

 

Something like this... Find something like this that is the size that you need.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/252865678695

 

Yeah, the MOSFETS are crazy tiny, like 5mm? So that's not happening. I think what I'll do is get some thermal padding (already ordered/shipped, not arrived) for the RAM and the MOSFETS and then get some thin copper sheet and make heat spreaders for them, like what is used on RAM.

My delay in getting back with testing is due to frying my motherboard when trying to find a 12V source for the GPU fan. I was testing the case lock pins for voltage and my meter probe slipped and shorted 5V and 12V (oops!) and blew a MOSFET on the motherboard.

Just got a new motherboard today and even with the GPU fan running at 5V with the copper block I got 687 in Valley Extreme at 1600x900 windowed; max temp was 59 C. This is with stock vBIOS.

Even though the temp isn't going above 60 C, I think there's still some throttling going on. I'm seeing the core speed drop from 725 to 575 and go back in FurMark. I'll continue to investigate.

 

I also have a Dell M4800 with LVDS (FHD) and the AMD Raedon M5100 and i just ordered the m2000m with dell bios off ebay.
will the amd heatsink work on the nvidia m2000m?
any info you care to share would be greatly appreciated.
thanks

 

New here, been following for awhile now. I want to upgrade my Quadro 1000m to a firepro m5100. I checked and i have a 6-bit samsung TFT display in my 4600 @ 1080p. The heat sink will fit as the quadro 1000m fits according to people on here. I'm looking,... I was wondering if anyone bought one and if it didn't work in there m4600 becuase of some other reason, would want to sell it to me. I can get one on Ebay for around 80$ CAD but thats a bit to steep for me right now. Also if i missed anything in the 96 pages on this fourm that i should be told about, have at her. I'll check back for replies over the holidays.

I know about the fan controller problem but i can solder a wire from the CPU fan pins to the GPU fan pins and use it as a full on fan controller for both.

 

Hello,

I was following this thread some months months ago and on my Dell M4600 I went from Quadro 1000M to M4000 and then to M5100.
On M4000 I had some problems sometimes with laptop booting up with blank screen - nothing really troublesome, as it just needed restart and worked great (happened in 1 out of 20 startups).
On M5100 laptop boots just fine, but I couldn't control screen brightness in Windows 7. Well...I could change brightness when windows was booting up and logo appeared on screen, but just when logging screen shows up, brightness control won't work.
However... recently I've updated to Windows 10, I've installed AMD's newest drivers for FirePro M5100 and brightness control wasn't working either. But...I've needed to reinstall Windows 10 and this time I let Windows find newest drivers by itself and now believe it or not, brightness control works perfectly.
If someone will ever be interested drivers in question are: 26.20.13032.13 from 26.11.2019 from AMD (installed by Windows Update). At least on those drivers I can control brightness of my LCD display with M5100 card.

Oh, and since I'm on topic of M5100 and Windows 10... I've experienced really bad sound latency problem - after 15 minutes watching Netflix sound was really visibly out of sync by 0.5s to the video.
DPC Latency Checker showed spikes over 8000us every other bar. I was looking for the cause and it turned out to be HWInfo64, which I use for controlling fans on my M5100 card. After a bit of fight with it, I switched off everything I could in HWInfo - no frequency monitoring, no disk monitoring, nothing except for CPU/GPU temps and CPU/GPU fans speed. It helped a lot, now DPC Latency Checker shows up to 1000us. It's still a bit on the high side, but I suspect my WiFi card (Intel Wireless-N 6205), as it doesn't have proprietary Windows 10 drivers. I'll switch to the Intel Wireless-AC 7260 (which has official Windows 10 drivers) and report if it changed anything.
In terms of DPC Latency I don't recommend installing Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver. Laptop works just fine without it and this driver caused a lot of latency for me as well on Win 10.

If there is any other way to control fans, I'll be happy to learn. Oh, and I mean automatic fan control, over set hysteresis (I'm yet to try SpeedFan on Windows 10, but it didn't work for me at all on Windows 7).

 

Second this because I had latency issues caused by the Intel Rapid Storage driver on my M6700. But only when the system was in SATA mode. In RAID mode (where the Intel Rapid Storage driver is actually required) it doesn't seem to be an issue for me.

 

I wanted to come back and give my experience on upgrading my M4600 from a Quadro 1000M to a M5100.

First off i bought my M5100 from ebay from a seller in china for 70$ CAD. I took a chance and i actually got it in 3 weeks and works flawless. The seller was
"kenyang2010".

The heatsink i had on my Quadro 1000M fits perfect, you'll have to reuse some of the rubber thermal pads you will find under the heatsink. Also have some thermal paste to redo the CPU and GPU after.
Use the disassembly guild from dells web site and be very gentle taking out the ribbon cables, the power one was in tight in mine and i had to use a bit of force. Wouldn't hurt to clean everything with rubbing alchol seeing as you are in there. And clean the heatsink vents as well.

I had a 1080P TN screen in mine and it was almost a gamble to find out what it was. I tried the product service number on the bottom of laptop, but dell gave me nothing. In the end i found a Panel ID bit of software that reassured me. I read here that some panels won't work with this GPU. Mine did however so i can comment no further.

The dock still works and other monitors can be hooked up to it via at least 1 DVI which was another worry of mine.

The BIOS does not recognize the GPU as stated above, and windows 10 thinks its something its not. But no issues at all and i am not doing a bios update and fixing something that isn't broke.

I did however update the laptops bios to A17 a few months ago, you can find that on Dells site as well.
I did not remove the drivers prior to installing this GPU, i did once i got inside windows after the install. Windows automatically updated the drivers and restarted before i got into windows on the first boot. I went to dells site afterwards and grabbed the drivers for the M4800 for the firepro M5100 and they installed just fine. Again it don't recognize the videocard correctly.

My Firestrike score when from a 750 to a 2260 after the whole switch.

I've had no issues with games or anything to report, I gave Sins of a solar empire a drive and it worked fine, even with mods. I had one or two crashes on start but i think that was to do with the mods i have.

My Current M4600 now has
16GB DDR3 in the lower chasis and 8GB in the keyboard part totaling 24GB. Both are running at 1333 if memory serves.
I have a 480GB SSD as primary and a 750GB WD Black as secondary a CD tray drive conversion. Something i bought on ebay.
It sports a Core I7 2820QM but i disabled speedstep so it does not go past 2.3Ghz

I use this laptop for Video Editing and Sound Recording, AND NOW, a bit of light gaming.

Anyways, hope someone finds this useful. Take care...bye.