Two Windows 7 installations on one M6600 for gaming/CAD work?

Maybe this has been asked and answered somewhere elese. If so, mods please close this thread.

I am thinking about getting a M6600 with an AMD FirePro M8900 video card.

My idea is to have two 750GB hard drives, each with a Windows 7 installation on them. One would have Windows 7 Home Premium loaded with games and some audio and video encoding software. Probably would split that drive to add Ubuntu Linux also.

The other drive would have Windows 7 Ulitmate loaded with CAD (Solidworks, Inventor, Revit, Autocad) and FEA software for work and school.

For file storage, I have (2) 2 TB external drives, though I am looking at a small NAS server down the road for at home.

The main reason I was looking at the dual Windows install and two hard drives was to run the Home Premium version with drivers for the M8900 to downgrade it to a Radeon 6990 for gaming.

Then I could have the best of both worlds on one machine. A gaming/work powerhouse.

I guess my question is for anyone running the downgrade process on the M8900, how stable is it while gaming? Have you had any issues with it running as a Radeon 6990 as far as clock stability or heat issues? I don't overclock ever, just wanted to know how well the Radeon drivers behave with the M8900 without having to do the whole Vbios flashing thing.

I am spending a large sum of my income in getting this laptop and I want to know if it will be as stable and reliable as my Gateway M-6862 has been after 5 years and thousands of hours of use.

Thanks for any info.

 

M8900 works great as a 6970m. I am using the 12.1 catalyst preview drivers with no issues even while overclocked. I don't know for sure what the performance difference is between the two drivers, but it may not be enough to warrant a separate install.

 

If the M8900 with stock drivers will work for games like Starcraft II and other RTS games of that type, than I won't bother with the dual install.

I will mainly use this system for work and school with CAD software, but I do like to game sometimes and I don't know if the additional cost of going to the Nvidia Quadro 3000 is worth taking the hit in gaming performance. I figure the Quadro can game, but I have always liked AMD cards for gaming.

 

If you plan on gaming I would skip the 3000M. The 4000M overclocks nicely and the M8900 does well even at stock clocks.