Aaron44126

Download the ControlVault driver package and when you run it, pick the option for "extract" rather than "install". Find the MSI file in the stuff that drops out from there and run it.

The image on the right is the bottom side of the heastink. The bottom edge there with the blue thermal pads covers the part of the GPU card that is furthest away from the connector edge. There is a protruding bit in the center that will bump into the VRMs on the GPU card. Part of that has to be cut off. You'll have to do a physical inspection holding the card up to it to see which edge needs to be cut and how much. I haven't done this mod myself. You might want to engage with other users who have done the mod, in the thread that I linked above.

I don't have a good picture for you, but it is a part that hovers above the "top" of the GPU card (the edge furthest away from the connector) where the VRMs are. The VRMs on Maxwell and later GPUs are in a slightly different position than the ones on Kepler cards. You have to cut off a bit that is protruding "downwards" and hits one of the rearranged VRMs, so that the heatsink can fit. If you try to fit the heatsink on the card with this in mind, it will be obvious.

Please see this thread (especially the later pages). vBIOS images are here.

Important to note that the Precision 7540 and 7740 upgrades are different here. Dell added the 4000 and 5000 GPUs late for the Precision 7540, and those cards have a slightly different physical layout than the 3000-and-lower cards on that system, which is why the heatsink and power cable replacement are needed. On the 7740, all of those cards launched at the same time, and all of them have a similar physical layout, so really the only thing that you should need to replace is the card itself.

Err, I don’t know why you’d need a display cable replacement to upgrade the GPU. I’ve never heard that for this model. (You might need one to upgrade from a 1080p display to 4K, but that’s it.) If the screw holes are in the same place between your 3000 and 5000 GPU then your heatsink should be fine. I am not sure, but I think you just need a heatsink replacement to perform this upgrade on the Precision 7540, not the 7740.

Unfortunately the thumbs up icon is white, and on the default light theme, you can't see it. It is in the bottom right corner of every post, way off to the right of the "Quote" option. You should be able to hover the mouse around and find it, or switch to a different theme using the "Theme" dropdown at the very bottom of any page.

The answer is yes, but. (And sorry I haven't been following all of the ins and outs of this system, so my answer is a bit incomplete. I'm basing this off of experience with prior systems.) Dell laptops are just a collection of parts, and you can swap out parts to change the system from one configuration to another. You just have to determine what parts you need. Dell doesn't "force" any configuration to be permanent with motherboard/BIOS settings or lockouts or anything like that. So, you can put in a dGPU. It's not just a matter of dropping the card in, though, you'll need other parts too. An appropriate heathsink Possibly, the DGFF interposer connector things (not sure if the iGPU spacer card ones can be reused; Precision 7X70 and 7X80 had that card attaching to different ports on the motherboard) Possibly, a DGFF power cable? (Not sure if they're still using those; they were when the first DGFF cards rolled out.) Finally, and I'm also not sure if they are still doing this either, but with Precision 7670 and 7680 they had a "thin chassis" version and a "performance chassis" version, and the dGPU heatsink for the more beefy GPU models would only fit in the "performance" chassis version. So you'll need to confirm that there is either only one size chassis for your system, or that your chassis is appropriately sized for the dGPU+heatsink that you want to install. Dell won't sell you these individual parts in most territories. You'll have to look at eBay, PartsPeople, etc.

This is the case with most displays, but in these systems, the HDMI port is hard-wired to the dGPU and not the iGPU. (Unless you bought an iGPU-only system and it has the DGFF spacer card installed, whose purpose is to basically route the signal from the HDMI port to the iGPU.) So, connecting a display to the HDMI port will always cause the dGPU to engage.

I think the docs are right with regard to this. I haven't tested this system, but that is how prior generations behaved (Precision 7000 line starting with 7X30, when Dell switched to using DGFF GPUs). If you want everything attached to the iGPU, plug your displays in via the USB-C ports, either via a dock or directly. USB-C to HDMI or USB-C to DVI (...or even USB-C → HDMI → DVI...) should work fine, and attach to the iGPU. If it were me, I'd just use an USB-C → HDMI adapter as that will have more potential for future use, and then connect it to your monitor with an HDMI→DVI cable if necessary.

I can answer a couple. 1. If you get an iGPU-only system, you will be able to use the HDMI port and it will be attached to the iGPU. 2. You can do firmware updates from Linux if capsule updates are enabled in BIOS setup, and you can also do pre-boot BIOS updates (regardless of the OS), if you hit F12 at the boot screen there will be an option to update the BIOS using a file stored on a USB flash drive. Dell very rarely posts gGPU vBIOS updates, most systems never get one.

It's in BIOS setup (hit F2 key at boot), you should have a page with an option for the startup type. Set it to "thorough" instead of "fast" or "automatic".

With my M6700, I swapped GPUs many times and always just reused the pads that came with the original GPU card, putting them back in the same spot. Maybe that's not "optimal" but it never caused me any problems. The higher-end GPUs will be power-limited before they become thermal-limited, you just need something that works "good enough".

Alright then, I missed that. You should be fine. You'll need a Dremel or similar tool to cut a little protruding piece off of the heatsink, most likely, where it hits one of the VRMs at the top of the card.

I didn't say that it works; I tried to point out the caveats. I would say this GPU does not work in M6800 unless you plan to use it with Linux. Getting it to work with Windows requires "extreme measures" which you should familiarize yourself with before purchasing. I don't think that anyone here will be able to help you with it. The only one I know who has gotten it to boot Windows successfully is @jeamn and he did not end up using it for very long. Quadro P5000 would be a better option. We've had discussion about that going on recently.

It has been tried. https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/trials-and-tribulations-installing-a-1070-in-a-m6800.828000/index.html There is a vBIOS issue if you wan to run Windows. You will get an ACPI BSOD no matter what, even if trying to just boot install media. For Pascal, you need an engineering sample vBIOS to get around this (...or some steps that I don't understand like @jeamn did, see link). We only have engineering sample vBIOS images for Quadro P3000, P4000, and P5000; no GeForce.

Are you talking about if there is an administrator BIOS password set? You can have it removed even if you don't know the password. Dell laptops have a procedure for this (it varies depending on the system).

Feedback on some of your questions. 7 — Optimus / ongoing power draw from the dGPU I have had issues like this with every Dell Precision system that I have used. I am not sure if it is just an issue with these things, or with Optimus in general. The dGPU tends to get stuck "on" even when nothing is using it. It might be drawing power even when the NVIDIA system tray thing says that it is off. The fix for this is — after booting the system and logging in, wait a minute or two, then go to Device Manager and disable / re-enable the dGPU. After that, it seems to behave properly for the remainder of the session. (At least for me.) I actually have a script that fires at login and uses DevManView to do this automatically. (DevManView supports command line arguments to do things like disable or enable a device without bringing up the GUI.) Also note that tools that monitor the GPU (like GPU-Z) may keep the GPU awake. So if you're "watching" to see if it is behaving, that might be what is causing the problem. 9 — Fingerprint reader dropped I have experienced this occasionally with multiple Precision systems. (I'm talking on the order of maybe 3-4 times a year.) Hopefully it was just a fluke for you. If it is something that happens every now and then, I don't have hope that replacing any component would fix it. 11 — SmartCard reader errors The SmartCard reader is the long, skinny slot on the side, and doesn't have anything to do with the WWAN card or SIM slot. It's for inserting SmartCards which can be used for authentication or I don't know what else. (I have a family member who works for the VA and she always has a SmartCard inserted in her laptop...)

Seems like there should be potential for manual fan control. The BIOS system diagnostics includes a test that manipulates the fan speed. If someone could reverse engineer that and figure out what commands that it is sending to the embedded controller, then you'd have a starting point. (The manual fan control solution that existed for earlier systems, used in many tools like SpeedFan, HWiNFO64, and the Linux kernel, was also reverse engineered from a Dell support tool.) I actually spent a good amount of time fighting with embedded controller commands to figure it out. I ended up discovering some endpoints for reading the fan speed (and system temperatures) that no one else had figured out yet. But I couldn't find a control mechanism. My investigation was pretty brute force, not really based on reverse engineering anything, I don't have the skills for that. Fan behavior in the Precision 7770 is a part of what turned me off from this line of systems altogether. There are a lot of things about my MacBook that I wish were different, but fan behavior is not one of them.

AFAIK, there is still no manual fan control option for Dell systems released on 2021 or later.

Some notes. Installing Windows 11 on "unsupported" systems typically is smooth, but there could be ongoing attention required, as Microsoft likely will not drop out their yearly "major upgrade" via Windows Update to such systems. So, next fall when Windows 11 26H2 comes out for example, you may need to take manual action to install it if you are running Windows 11 on an "unsupported" system. (Microsoft only supports each version for two years, unless you are on Enterprise edition where you get three years of support.) There's also a chance that Microsoft will break the experience for unsupported systems when one of these major updates comes out. Windows 10 LTSC is still supported for a number of years. You can grab one of those licenses if you would prefer to stay on Windows 10 and continue to receive security support. Even though it is not "supported", there is a path to migrate from "regular" Windows 10 to Windows 10 LTSC in-place (without doing a fresh Windows install), and I have done it a number of times without issue. ...I have particular issues with the direction that Microsoft is going with Windows 11, so for "ideological" reasons, I am taking steps to get myself off of Windows. All of my personal workloads have been moved to macOS. I was using a Windows VM for a while, but I have managed to ditch that recently as well. I'm still on Windows for work, but that will be changing within the next 12 months hopefully (I am ready to go, but my local IT dept is holding me up). There's never been a better time to investigate macOS or Linux. I was on Linux for a while, and though some productivity software is missing, it is a great OS for "basic use" (if you can do most of your stuff in a web browser) and also for gaming (if you don't play multi-played games that use kernel-level anti-cheat). (macOS 26 "Tahoe" is also a mess, but that is one that will hopefully get cleaned up over the next few months.)

So they made it look like a MacBook Pro ......... (The color & shape of the palmrest area / lower chassis strongly evokes "MacBook Pro" to me, including that "notch" in front of the touchpad which is there to allow you to open the lid. I had to do a double-take the first time that I saw it.) But I guess actually using aluminum for the palmrest just costs too much ...? And if I am understanding right, it is also not the "soft" / "rubber"-like texture that Precision 7XXX and M6XXX series used on the palmrest? It's just ... plastic, with a silver "metal-looking" paint/finish?

IIRC, Zbook 17 G1 uses LVDS for the display and not eDP, so this mod would not apply. (Newer NVIDIA laptop GPUs do not support LVDS at all. You can only use them by passing through the Intel integrated GPU.)

You can only buy these workstations from the Dell "business" store, but you can order as an individual without a problem, you don't have to be a business. I always have used a small business sales rep to order, not the web site, you can almost always get a better deal that way even if you are just buying a single system.

RTX 4000 Blackwell ≈ GeForce RTX 5080 mobile RTX 5000 Blackwell ≈ GeForce RTX 5090 mobile These days, if you're looking at NVIDIA GPUs of the same generation in a laptop, the main thing that is going to determine the performance is just the power limit that is set in your system. If RTX 4000 and RTX 5000 have the same power limit, they will have the same performance for most loads (<5% difference), even though the RTX 5000 has more CUDA cores. The main reason to pay extra for the RTX 5000 would be if you can make use of the extra VRAM, or if you will be running AI loads that use Tensor cores only (using all the Tensor cores without using the CUDA cores might not push it to the power limit, so you could actually benefit from more Tensor cores in the RTX 5000?). I haven't been paying close attention, so I am not actually sure if RTX 4000 and RTX 5000 have the same power limit in this system. But that has been the case for the past several generations of Dell flagship workstations, so I think it is a safe bet.