Aaron44126

We have some P16 Gen2's at work. I haven't used one as a daily driver myself, but the feedback I would give from what I've seen is: They are on the bulky side, in line with Precision 7000 series, notably thicker than an XPS that you'd be coming from. They are also on the slightly noisy side, pretty quick to ramp up the fans while you're doing relatively light work. Really solid build though, and the Thunderbolt dock works fine if you need that. (Everyone is complaining about the position of the Fn and Ctrl keys on the keyboard, but there is an option in the BIOS setup to swap them.)

Might not just be the screw mount positions, you should check things like the number of heat pipes or the type and size of the cooler on the GPU side. I think in Precision 7770 and 7780, they use a more skimpy cooler for systems with the lower-powered GPUs.

BIOS will be fine. You will possibly need to replace the heatsink in addition to the GPU card, though.

You don't have to physically access the CMOS battery. If you can't access the BIOS setup to do the reset from there, hold the power button down for a long time (30-60 seconds?) without the AC adapter connected, and that should reset the BIOS to default settings. I did it once on my Precision 7770. I've seen that dock message pop up before too. "Fixed" by just unplugging and replugging the dock cable until it was happy. The docks seem so finicky on these things to me, I've stopped using one at all with my Precision 7560.

Dell Pro Max 18 Plus won't be released until probably summer time. It hasn't even been officially announced... we just have a decent leak.

Any 9.5mm SATA drive optical drive will work in that bay. You will just have to remove the mounting bracket on the back and attach it to your new drive. You should also be able to remove the front piece / trim and attach it to the new drive so that it will be color-matched, if you like. I installed my own BD-RE drive in the Precision M6700, and replaced it with a UHD BD drive later in the system's life, and never had any issue (other than all commercial Blu-ray playback software for Windows being bloated / garbage). You can also install a SATA SSD or hard drive there instead of an optical drive, if you purchase a caddy to mount it.

If your more of a techy-type and you tinker (willing to install your own drives and so forth), I have to point to Framework Laptop 16. https://frame.work/products/laptop16-diy-amd-7040 You can pick all of the components that go in (including which ports it will have — they are little modules that can be swapped around). It supports up to 96 GB of RAM and 10 TB of storage (8 TB + 2 TB), and you can add up to an additional 16 TB (two additional SSDs) if you add the dual M.2 adapter (fits in from the back, in place of the graphics module, which you don't really need if you're not gaming). Every individual part can be ordered standalone from their web site as well, and in the future you will be able to upgrade it by replacing components. I love the idea of a modular and future-proof laptop, but I understand that this thing had some rough edges when it first launched. Maybe check a couple of YouTube video reviews and see if it is something that you'd be interested in.

Because they have the same 100W power limit (which is low, for a GP104 chip that wants to run at 150W+ in a desktop), performance of the P4000 and P5000 is going to be within about 5% of each other ... unless you have a workload that uses the extra vRAM of the P5000. You can indeed also find a GeForce 1070 in "standard" MXM format as well, I have seen someone try to use one of those in a Precision M6800. It is also GP104 and will perform about the same as the others.

Dell isn't the one that decided what CPUs would be supported and not supported on Windows 11. There is no "supported condition" for Windows 11 on this system. You can use Windows 11 (unsupported) — which will be fine, but updating to each new "major release" might be a minor hassle — or you can use Windows 10 LTSC, or you can use Linux. Installing Windows 11 on an "unsupported system" is well documented and not hard. You'll have even less trouble with this system because it does have a TPM 2.0 module. It's only the CPU that is one generation too old.

No, the chassis are different and the boards are not physically compatible in this case.

Announcement has come and gone. (See video in the post above.) New boards for Framework Laptop 13, including up to AMD's latest Ryzen 9 CPUs An individual keyboard switch that people/companies can use to make custom keyboard layouts/designs for the Framework Laptop 16 (...Nothing else new for Framework Laptop 16, which is what I was most interested in seeing, though they did promise that more stuff is coming...) "Framework Desktop", a small form factor desktop with a mini-ITX board hosting AMD's "Ryzen AI Max" CPU; seems sort of like Apple's "Max" CPUs with "everything" (including a decently powerful GPU) integrated onto one chip Framework Laptop 12, a new form factor for them that has a touchscreen and can fully flip over and work like a tablet

Just discussed a few post up. You can't do cross-gen GPU upgrades for these two.

1. Save a copy of your "original" vBIOS, in case the new one causes more problems, so that you can flash back to it if you need to. 2. Do the flash with graphics switching / hybrid graphics enabled in BIOS setup, so that the Intel GPU is driving the laptop display and not the NVIDIA GPU. If it creates a problem with your NVIDIA GPU, you will "probably" be able to still use the system and flash your "original" vBIOS back on without any major hassle. 3. ...If you are comfortable doing so, do the flash from Linux (a "live USB" environment is fine). Less chance for trouble if there is less stuff running during the flash, and I've had cases when I tried to do it under Windows and just got an immediate BSOD that interrupted the flash, leading to a more difficult recovery situation. The newest GPU that I ever tried to flash was a Quadro M5000M (in Precision M6700). I'm not sure if there are any additional tricks that could help with these RTX ones.

If Intel GPU is not in Device Manager, and the laptop display is showing attached to the NVIDIA GPU directly, that is another problem. It doesn't look like the system is running in Optimus mode. First thing to check — Is Optimus still enabled in BIOS setup? Is it even showing as an option there?

It definitely does, I used it for years in my M6700. I had issues with it not working when I first put the card in and it was because the driver INF mod was done wrong. I have notes about doing the mod manually (properly) over here — https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-7530-precision-7730-owners-thread.820539/page-253.html#post-10937563 You have to pay attention to different subsystem ID depending on whether Optimus is enabled or disabled in the system. If the driver is installed off of the wrong one then the flags for Optimus will not get set and it will not work. (I would assume that NVcleanstall can handle this, but I never used that.)

I agree, I have found the extra Dell software to be more "unnecessary fluff" than helpful and I always install the minimum that I can get away with. The only things I can think of is Dell Power Manager so that you can change the "thermal mode" without having to go to the BIOS, and Dell Optimizer is unfortunately required to set some settings for the integrated audio Realtek/Maxx setup.

I bought a M5000M and used the x-bracket that it came with, never bothered swapping. If the heatsink screws can attach to it, you’re fine. If the threading is not the same, you’ll have to transfer the bracket from your old card. It will probably take some heat to get it off.

I am doubtful that the palmrests are interchangeable. It seems like it has to line up with the positions of screws that attach to components further down (at least I remember the GPU card position mattering, one of the top mounting screws for the palmrest goes into one of the MXM screws) and also the screws that attach the palmrest would have to line up with the holes for them in the bottom chassis. The problem is, the internal layout is *completely different* between M6700 and M6800. Despite looking similar on the outside, they moved a lot of stuff around on the inside. You can’t even use the same fans (I tried that). Still, if you can find decent photos of both, you can see if it looks like the screws go in the same place.

In a laptop, the GPU’s subsystem ID is derived from the laptop’s motherboard, not from the GPU card itself. That’s why it is reported as a Dell card in some tools, and that’s why you have to do some mucking to get the drivers to install. Nvcleanstall can “fix” this for you (as you have found), but you could also make some manual edits to the driver INF file to get it to install cleanly. You can still flash a different vBIOS on it by passing a command flag to nvflash to ignore the difference in the subsystem ID. There is no “working as intended” setup for this because this GPU+laptop combo was never “intended”. But if it works, it works, and I bet it is a step up in performance.

Modular parts like CPU, RAM, SSD, battery, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules will be compatible between the two. Dell was using the same keyboard in many business PCs at the time (Precision 2011-2013 models, and also Latitude E-series from around the same time), if you see one that has the same appearance and layout then it will most likely fit and work fine. (Do note that there is a backlit version and a non-backlit version.) Most other internal parts will not be compatible between the two. (Motherboard, fans / heatsink, pieces of the chassis, etc.)

Tools I have used for this type of thing are Macrium Reflect and Acronis True Image. These products both have an option to do a drive-to-drive clone, or also to create an image of the drive and then write that image back to a different drive. There used to be a free version of Macrium Reflect which you can still find with a simple web search, but it is no longer available right on their site. It should still work fine. If you have some comfort level with Linux, you can just boot a Linux "live" environment and do it from there. Look up using the "dd" command to clone a disk. You can also use "dd" to make a disk image and then write that image back to a different disk. This will leave you with the same partition layout that you currently have (1 TB volume size, with the "extra" 3 TB unallocated) which you can easily fix afterwards using GParted, a straight-forward GUI partition management tool for Linux which is also included in most "live" environments. If your laptop only has room for one NVMe drive, you can get a cheap USB enclosure to attach the other drive to while doing the clone. That will allow you to do a drive-to-drive clone without having to find room on another drive somewhere for an image. I wrote all of this and then realized that Samsung has their own clone tool as well. It is now integrated into Samsung Magician. ...I've never personally used this one before, but it should be "free" if you are migrating to a Samsung drive. https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/tools/

What parts are you interested in, specifically? Some parts like the keyboard are shared, but I would say that most are not.

Here's some sad news on Asahi Linux ... https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/ I use Firefox ESR + uBlock Origin, just like I did on Windows and Linux, and it works great for me. I have no idea what the ad blocking situation is like on Safari.

This happens when you do copy/pasting into your post from somewhere else. The "black text on white background" text styling can get copied in as well ... and it is not obvious unless you are running a dark mode theme.

I mean, that's exactly why I am moving away from Windows... When I have to ask "Whose computer is this, anyway?", I've got to wonder if I am using an OS, or if the OS is using me to make a buck. Apple is guilty of some of the same stuff, but (currently) to a much lesser degree than Microsoft. As a recent example, they're turning "Apple Intelligence" on by default starting with macOS 15.3 / iOS 18.3, and the 15.3.1 / 18.3.1 updates that came out a couple of days ago apparently in some cases turn it back on even if you turned it off. Turning Apple Intelligence on by default makes sense to a degree — they think it is a selling point and they want people to experience it — but it could have used at least a splash screen with some information and an option to opt in or opt out. Turning it back on after the subsequent update is probably a "bug", someone didn't think through the post-upgrade script/actions, and I doubt that it will happen again. Still, I can see why it would rub people the wrong way for sure. On the plus side, Apple Intelligence largely runs on-device (not in the cloud, unless you go out of your way to enable the ChatGPT support, and even then they will ask you if it's OK every time a query is about to be sent to OpenAI). They're being very privacy-conscious with the implementation. Really, the worst thing about it is that it gobbles up several GBs of disk space to store the models. On top of that, the whole bit with not being able to replace or upgrade components in your system... Still, for me, macOS is easily the "least bad" of the three major options for now (Windows / Linux / macOS). Professional applications just aren't there on Linux, Windows is a hot mess, and despite the cost and lack of hardware flexibility, Apple Silicon Macs are actually ... quite nice systems when it comes to the balance between power efficiency (battery life + low heat, noise) and performance potential when you need it.