Questions regarding elitebook 8770w upgrades

So let me start by saying I’m currently in the market to buy either a 8770w or a dell precision m6800.

1. as far as power delivery , are all 8770w created equal? I had an old asus k55a that came with an i5 to start and I was unable to upgrade to a 45w tdp i7 cpu because it lacked a couple power inducters. However , there was a specific model and motherboard that shipped with those extra inducters.
Reason I asked is because if I buy a 8770w my plan is to buy cheap as possible with some i5 cpu and then upgrade to a faster i7

2. What’s the fastest gpu that’s supported by the 8770w?(besides the gtx1070 which requires the super rare dream color display)

3. For those who went through a similar dilemma in deciding between the 8770w and m6800 or those who may have owned both at some point in time … which do you prefer and why ?

 

1: I'm unsure, however the dual core models ship with two RAM slots instead of 4. They've already modified the lower end boards, so it's more likely than not.

2: GTX 980M or Quadro M5000M. I originally went for the M5000M since it is more efficient, has Quadro drivers, and can be better overclocked, however I settled on the 980M because the M5000M I bought was dead and the 980M was significantly cheaper than the next M5000M option.

3: I would pick the 8770W, but my reasons are very unlikely to be your reasons. I wanted legacy compatibility, so Ivy Bridge is about the highest I could go for now. You'll likely be better served with the M6800, unless you want to disable Optimus, where you may run into some issues. 8770W does not have Optimus at all, which is better for Linux and legacy compatibility.

 

Thanks for the reply ! Regarding the m5000m , why is it a better overclocker than the 980m?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...pare-to-a-quadro-m5000m.834651/#post-11059425

 

Seeing as the 980m was more of a “gaming card” does the Quadro 5000 series still get driver updates for newer games ?

 

I'm not sure about the Quadro driver support, check the Nvidia site. I do know that the 980m still gets driver updates and those gaming drivers can be modded for use with the Quadro.

 

And when you say legacy compatibility, are you saying you can’t do legacy boot with haswell CPU’s? It’s gotta be a uefi boot ?

 

No, legacy boot works fine on even some new laptops. Haswell+ just has a cheaper and worse clock scheduler or something similar in the CPU and some operating systems very much hate it.

 

I am not the most techy and smart. So in lamen terms.......So are you saying that m6800 and a haswell chip might give me worse performance in windows 10 vs something on ivy bridge? Am I choosing the wrong laptop by going with the m6800(I am bidding on one right now on ebay lol)

 

No, the newer architecture is still better, however they used a cheaper clock scheduler. It usually doesn't impact performance, more so stability, however if you use Windows 10 or 8 or 7 you'll be fine. It only really becomes an issue on Vista where it fails to boot and crashes.