I looked into further GPU upgrade options for this specific laptop model. Here's some things I've learned.
ZBook 15 G2 GPUs have a hard power-limit of 75W. This plateaus the performance of cards with larger TPD.
All Pascal and Turing cards are supported. No BIOS whitelists. Any supported card with any vBIOS should work out of the box. Hybrid Graphics need to be enabled for anything above Kepler.
Ampere cards and newer require Above 4G Decoding. The G2 BIOS does not support it. Also, HP BIOS's are said to have RSA checksum protection.
MXM-A is the default form factor. B-type cards can be installed via hardware mod. In such case, the heatsink should also be upgraded to the 17 G2 model. The bigger heatsink has a different temperature sensor, suitable for MXM-B. The native heatsink only works properly with A-type cards. Mismatch causes constant fan spin.
With these caveats in mind, the Turing gen offers some alternatives.
- T2000 Mobile. 4gb, MXM-A, 60W power draw. An easy update from the M2200. Performs at around GTX 1650.
- RTX 2060 Mobile. 6gb, MXM-B, TPD > 80% (max draw 80-90W). Best performance/power balance.
- RTX 6000 Mobile. 24gb, MXM-B. Should boot up and work, with a third(!) of its TPD.
On the AMD side, Polaris cards are confirmed to work. The ones that stand out are the RX 550 (4gb, MXM-A) and RX 580X (8gb, MXM-B).
Hope this helps my fellow ZBook users should they need further upgrades.
If anyone gets into testing, do post your results!
Further reading:
T2000 on a Dell
ZBook MXM-B hardware mod
ZBook MXM-B cooling mod
HP MXM Update Megathread (archived)
