gluon

Adlink has announced Blackwell MXM's for the second half of the year. Their launch video features a B-type card with 8Gb, which could be the 5070M.

Sounds good. Will follow with interest. A downtuned Ada card would be a big leap forward, given that the G2 would indeed support A4G. GPU-Z says that's possible. Testing is needed to be certain. As for ReBAR, found this article on how BAR works with MMIO. It focuses on PCI-systems, but the early phases are the same with PCIe. ReBAR, on the other hand, provides the CPU with a larger VRAM aperture. vBIOS delivers the PCIe config BAR to UEFI. This (dual) BAR is then mapped into CPU memory. ReBAR requires user config, so it has to be mapped into a new (third) BAR. Any supported PCIe device can also boot without it.

Here you go. If you start testing, you'd like to have the 17" model. They're otherwise nearly identical, but the 17 G2 gives the MXM-lane ~115W. That matches the TPD of the 4060M. 15 and 17 G2 appear to have the exact same MXM compatibility. The only known difference is that the heat sensor that control 15's fans is problematic with B-type cards.

More on the G2's Above 4G Decoding support. There's no BIOS setting for it, yet GPU-Z shows it as enabled. Many other Haswell systems are known to lack the option - and in those cases, GPU-Z agrees. It deduces the capability for Above 4G support, so there might be something to it. I started thinking, could the G2 BIOS keep it always enabled? This led me to read more about PCIe memory-mapping. In short, PCIe devices have two-way traffic with the CPU and each other. MMIO controls all that by assigning memory space and addresses for all the devices. Legacy systems have a memory address range of 4Gb. With UEFI, devices can be assigned to memory above that (himem and config.sys, anyone?). This thorough article studies Haswell's use of MMIO, and should thus apply to G1/G2. So, on Haswell and newer, UEFI checks early if the MMIO is above or below 4Gb. Certain registers take hold only with MMIO >4Gb. With MMIO <4Gb, Above 4G Support is unused (yet it remains to be deduced by GPU-Z). If Above 4G is always enabled, the next thing is ReBar. Again, the G2 BIOS has no option for it. Modding it is dicey, due to $SIG verification identifiers in two encrypted, non-UEFI data regions. Out of the two, Above 4G seems crucial for Ampere support. This is because the card will always need proper MMIO. ReBar is a secondary function, which adds performance instead of compatibility. This leads me to think the G2 (as well as G1?) could boot to W10/Linux with an Ampere (Ada) card. The Linux kernel would even allocate its own BAR for the GPU.

Sure, it would. It has a Pascal chip. With 4 Gb, it looks like the Max-Q variant (specs here). TPD is at 75W, so it's right there. But you might wish to consider a Turing card. The T2000 has an equal amount of vram, the same form factor (MXM-A), lower TPD (60W), and it's a lot faster. Here's one offer with a lower asking price than that 1050 above. I'd update that BIOS, btw. The latest one is 01.26, dated March 3rd, 2020. You can download it from the laptop's product support page.

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. The screen's eDP port won't recognize newer cards during boot. ZBooks with Dreamcolor may display lack the Hybrid Graphics option. Ampere and Ada cards require Above 4G Decoding (maybe on), or a modded vBIOS. The G2 BIOS does not have an option for ReBAR. Modding it can cause issues. Also, if ReBAR functions as VRAM aperture, it's a feature instead of a requirement. 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. Both G1 and G2 use Haswell. They may have the exact same MXM upgradeabilty. 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 3000 Mobile. 6gb, MXM-B, TPD ~ 80W. 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)

Hi, I have the same model laptop as @Easa (ZBook 15 G2) and made the same upgrade (K2100M -> M2200). I bought a Dell card (green) and flashed it with the ZBook G4 vBIOS found in this thread. Dualbooting to Win10/Linux Mint, and the card works fine. A good and much-needed upgrade. Definitely recommend this route for other ZBook users. The information in this thread proved very helpful, thanks!