ruboj

Thanks to the information found on this thread and on this forum, i have been able to successfully install the P4000 in my M6800. Big Thanks go to: - DynamiteZerg of the late, great notebookreview forums that posted their experiences with installing a P5000 on their M6800 here: https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/graphics-card-upgrade-for-m6800.806352/page-17#post-10748094 - @Aaron44126 for the key posts post here: and for his helpful presence on the Dell forums. - @TheQuentincc for posting the P4000 VBIOS here: that we need to flash in order to avoid ACPI issues on boot. - @Jers6410 for their detailed post here: that went through their experience in installing a P4000 on their M6800 that has approximate specifications to mine. it was this post that finally pushed me to go for the GPU swap on my machine. by using @Jers6410's experience i was able to modify my heatsink and use the thermal pad sizes in their post to replace the stock thermal pads. a note on the thermal pads: in my case, the 1.5 mm pads were to thin and were moving around when the heatsink was installed. i sorted this problem out by adding a 2 mm pad on top of the 1.5 mm ones and now they stay in place. i ran into an issue when using a Linux Mint live CD to boot up into Linux in order to run nvflash, Linux Mint Cinnamon would get stuck at: ACPI AML tables successfully acquired and loaded. i downloaded Slax: https://www.slax.org and i was able to use acpi=off in the Grub boot parameters to boot successfully into a Linux desktop environment. the rest of the process was smooth with the VBIOS being flashed successfully at the very first try and NVCleaninstall working wonders with the driver install for the P4000. a massive thanks to everyone who made this possible. thanks to your efforts, we can continue enjoying this beast of a laptop that is now over ten years old. they truly do not make them like this anymore.

indeed, the underhand tricks that Intel played in the past might have been a factor but given their current condition and with AMD now having attractive processor options, this situation may be changing sooner rather than later. and it seems to be finally happening. according to this blog post on Dell's site: https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/dell-transforms-ai-pc-portfolio-for-anywhere-productivity/ the Pro Max series will feature both Ryzen and Threadripper processors, though it isn't clear whether this applies to the mobile workstations.

do not understand why ryzen processors are still not a common offering in mobile workstations. it is exciting though, to see 18" laptops making an appearance in the mobile workstation segment.

i came across this workaround a while back on a long forgotten forum. it had to do with usb compatibility issues between the M6800 and the MC7455. covering up those pins enabled the card to work normally.

you could try cutting a thin strip of electrical tape and covering the contacts indicated in the image. make sure to cover the contacts on both sides of the card.

this is useful information, Thank you for sharing it with us.

it is good to know that Turing cards work with the M6800, i have some questions on the process you used to achieve this: - which panel does your laptop support LVDS or eDP ? - which heatsink(AMD or Nvidia) did you modify in order for the RTX 3000 to fit ? - do you have any pictures of the modifications that you made to the heatsink and if so can you please share them with us ? - did you have to do anything special with the VBIOS in order to make it work with the M6800 ? - what driver modifications did you do so that they could install on Windows ? Thank you for your post as it encourages us to refresh our veteran M6800's with newer hardware.