Aaron44126

Rather doubt it in this case; its a Turing GPU, and NVIDIA has been supporting eDP only starting with Pascal. I thought other users had reported success with this GPU (and T2000 as well) in the M4800, but I haven't been paying close attention to what display was being used. I think M4800 with a 1080p panel is more common. Maybe flashing a different vBIOS will help. Just make sure that you back up the original one...

Works fine for me with Precision 7560, also switchable graphics off. What NVIDIA driver are you using? I've heard other mentions before that screen brightness can break if you use the "upstream" driver (i.e. from NVIDIA's web site) rather than the driver from Dell. You can also set the screen brightness in BIOS setup. Clunky but I think it should stick when Windows boots up?

Read impressions on the Surface Laptop 7 which seems to fare better than the Asus Vivobook. Benchmark results are mixed. Surface Laptop 7 beats MacBook Air M3 in multi-core Geekbench and Cinebench. (You could argue the comparison isn't quite fair since MacBook Air does not have active cooling but Surface Laptop does. I didn't see any comparison against the MacBook Pro 14" with M3, which does have active cooling.) MacBook Air M3 wins in single-core Geekbench and Cinebench, though. ...Sounds like The Verge is going to do another piece specifically focused on benchmark comparisons, so more to come soon. Battery life seems quite good, actually, easily meeting the "all day" claim if you aren't running an intense load. The "translation layer" in Windows 11 to run x86/x64 software seems to be hit-or-miss. Lightweight apps seem to work fine (which has also been my experience with Windows 11 ARM), but the article mentions Adobe Premiere really struggling to run. The system also struggled with a number of games, and by that I'm not just referring to performance, but the fact that they just don't quite work right running under Prism (crashing, limited options for resolution, ...). I don't think they've caught up to Apple here yet. Also, some apps like Google Drive refuse to run at all. Blender can't "see" the Qualcomm GPU so it falls back to CPU rendering. Anything that needs a "driver" (VPN apps, security apps, backup apps, ...) will definitely not work unless there is an ARM version available, and that kind of support is still quite spotty. Still, there are now ARM64 builds of all major browsers, and many productivity apps like MS Office and Photoshop. Some other apps mentioned here (Premiere and Blender) have ARM64 builds in development. Depending on your use case, you may be able to run an all-ARM software stack, if not now then "soon", which would make this system pretty fine to use. This situation should only improve over time, if ARM-based laptops are finally here to stay...

I think there is recognition that, if Qualcomm is able to offer a platform that offers a MacBook Air-like laptop experience (respectable performance + great battery life + low heat/noise), then that's not something you want to let your competitors be ahead on. I wonder if Qualcomm had an "internal marketing blitz" to try and get OEMs onboard, similar to what we have seen from them and Microsoft when these were publicly announced in May. For the moment, I haven't heard about one of these being offered with a discrete GPU. However, I already mentioned that NVIDIA is strongly hinting about launching their own ARM SOCs for Windows laptops in 2025, and they also appear to be partnered with Dell in that effort.

This was an incorrect post, you can't use that CPU, I think he was actually talking about a M6800. GPUs have been rehashed recently. You can use GeForce 980M or Quadro M5000M without trouble. With Pascal, you can only use P3000/P4000/P5000 with "engineering sample" vBIOS (must be flashed separately, you can't do it in this system). Even then there might be stability issues. (I tried P5000 myself but got rid if it because it would cause a BSOD once every day or two.) No other Pascal cards will work (Quadro P5200, GeForce 1070, ...). With Turing, it has been reported to work if you use an HP Quadro RTX GPU but they do not have standard layout so you will need to mod the heatsink and chassis just to get it to fit. With Pascal and up, LVDS is not supported. If your laptop has an LVDS display panel you must use it with Optimus enabled.

Born in mid-80s. I consider it to be a good time to experience technological progression. I am able to remember what the world was like before the Internet and cell phones, experienced the world of the early Internet and dial-up, and broadband was mainstream by the time that I went to college. Still a long way to go, too. Lots of "dangers" but lots of potential for progress as well. I do miss the days when computer specs were doubling every couple of years. Things have flattened off a lot. Funny how I have come to think of myself as an "old school" tech guy. I prefer spending time on my laptop over spending time on my phone, I prefer forums like this to big conglomerate sites like Reddit, and I don't consume social media and have never spent any time on TikTok. I also appreciate being able to experience the progression of video games; I missed the Atari, but definitely remember spending a fair amount of time with the NES. I am a bit wary of the games that kids are into nowadays ("live service" / microtransaction style games seem to be in the mainstream). Though on the flip side... I've been playing through some older games with my kids and they have never, ever complained about bad graphics, ha.

Eh. I knew about the GPU being meh (complained about it in a post above). You might be able to play current-ish games ... if you are OK with 1080p / 30 FPS / low settings. But the main disappointment is that it doesn't seem to hold up in terms of power efficiency / battery life / low noise. They really touted how favorably these systems compare against M3 MacBook Air in the press bonanza last month, but it is not looking like those claims really hold up. And if you can't even beat x86 systems in these areas, then why would someone buy one of these — with potential compatibility issues, but no "upside" to balance that out? There's also the stink in the air regarding Microsoft's attempted rollout of the "Recall" feature. I can't understand... how they were not able to foresee what the reaction to that would be like? And why do they have this tiered system for testing new features (canary/dev/release preview Insider builds) and then just push something like this through with an announcement just a few weeks away from launch, without going through the process? Anyway, I'm interested to see some reviews of the business models (from Dell, HP, Lenovo). If I run into any of these systems, it will be one of those. I will try to poke around and see if there is anything out yet sometime today. Wonder if anyone else can do better. In addition to NVIDIA, it looks like MediaTek is going to get into the game next year, plus there have been rumors in the past about AMD being interested in launching ARM systems. (Qualcomm has also made comments about wanting to push into the desktop space.)

I saw something similar on another model a couple of days ago. Seems like Microsoft and Qualcomm maybe over-promised a bit… (Never mind M4, currently only available in iPads until the fall, but which seems to kick single-thread performance up another notch yet, beating Intel’s flagship *desktop* chip? https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apple-m4-scores-suggest-it-is-the-new-single-core-performance-champ-beating-intels-core-i9-14900ks-incredible-results-of-3800-posted)

I haven't heard for sure, but I do not expect them to work. It looks like the module shape and connector are a bit different. Precision 7X70 and 7X80 users were "proof of concept" guinea pigs ... a good idea, but maybe put into production too early? (Dell does sell standalone modules for upgrading these systems on their site, but the price is probably not what most people would like to see.)

You might have been meaning to cut the CPU speed down by 5%, but you did way more than that. Setting any limit below 100% will also disable Intel turbo boost, so the max clock speed will decrease from 4+ GHz to the high 2 GHz range. (Check the speed in Task Manager, Performance tab while you have a load running. You'll be able to see the change immediately after "applying" the configuration change in Power Settings.) I regularly run my laptops with turbo boost disabled because it is not "necessary" for many workloads and makes them with less heat and noise. I have a link in my signature about different ways to quickly toggle turbo boost on and off.

Yes. There is a PCIe version of the AX card which is AX210. The CNVi version though isn't a full Wi-Fi card, it's just some parts of it, and the rest is handled by the system PCH (chipset). The Wikipedia article linked explains that somewhat. For this reason, if you have a system with a CNVi Wi-Fi card, upgrading it might not be possible if the slot doesn't also accept PCIe. To get Wi-Fi 7 ("BE") using presumably the BE201 card, it would have to also be supported by the chipset/PCH, which is not the case in these systems.

AX211 is CNVi. BE200 is PCIe. They are not the same thing, even though they are physically compatible. I don't know if anyone has confirmed that PCIe-based cards work in this slot...? If it supports CNVi only, then AX211 is probably the only card that will work there.

Apple announced GPTK2 today. https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/ People are still digging into it, but apparently it supports both AVX2 and ray tracing when running Windows apps on macOS. AVX was previously a hard-blocker from running certain newer titles on any ARM system (Microsoft does not support it on Windows 11 ARM). (I've been using GPTK under CrossOver to play through Horizon Zero Dawn, and while I have seen some small graphical bugs here and there, overall it works quite well and is super smooth.)

Having been using Windows 11 ARM for almost a year now (in a VM, but with regularity) I can say that the emulation of x86/x64 software is "fine". You don't really have to even know what's going on, it "just works". Everything these days is done with dynamic recompilation — it will take a chunk of x86/x64 code and convert it to ARM code for execution, and keep that cached for future runs through the same code — so performance is pretty decent. I'm sure it could be made better. (Microsoft is touting that with Windows 11 24H2 you can get an up to 20% boost in performance for emulated apps for example, probably done by making their recompiler smarter.) There are some gotchas. Software that installs a driver (.sys file) will not work unless said driver is compiled for ARM. That could be device drivers, obviously, but it could also be other low-level software like antivirus/firewall apps, disk/backup utilities, or even multiplayer games that use kernel-mode anti-cheat protection. Software that uses AVX instructions will not run on ARM systems. That includes a number of newer "AAA" games, it's becoming pretty common to see there. AVX has been supported in Intel CPUs since 4th gen (2013) but Microsoft is not supporting translation of these instructions in their Prism recompiler. It could have been excluded for performance reasons — ARM didn't even support vector instructions until ARMv9, which is pretty new and would be limited to newer Snapdragon chips from 2022 and up or the Apple M4 lineup. But I think that more likely, it is excluded for IP/patent reasons. Since I wrote this, a couple of other interesting things have happened. NVIDIA gave a tease about offering their own ARM platform next year. It probably won't be just Qualcomm offering these soon. Windows 11 LTSC has dropped and there is an ARM64 build... which I have already switched my VM over to. (But, there was an ARM64 build of Windows 10 LTSC 2021 as well, that I just somehow didn't know about.) Anyway, I think there's a real chance that there will be a surge in Windows ARM systems within the next few years and that market segment will become impossible to ignore for software developers. They will have to start offering ARM support for things like anti-virus and backup tools, and make sure that there are AVX-free code paths in games even if the performance is a bit lower (if they don't want to offer a full ARM build). On the subject of games, that's one area where I think Qualcomm still needs to do major work. They are touting their system as gaming-capable, but performance is middling as I mentioned above (Control running at 1080p/30FPS/low settings should not be touted as a massive success). But it is not like an ARM system can't game — Qualcomm just doesn't have the GPU up to snuff yet or hasn't bothered to build a truly high-performance chip there. Apple’s (admittedly expensive) "Max" chips smoke Qualcomm’s in terms of GPU performance. You can see on YouTube that Mac users have shown Control running at 1440p/60FPS — effectively quadruple the performance that Qualcomm is touting. On my end personally, I just started Horizon Zero Dawn on my MacBook Pro a few days ago. And it's not just "sort of working"; it is actually a really good experience. I'm running at 1510p resolution at "original" (medium) graphics settings, it looks great and is running at completely smooth 60 FPS. And it’s not even a native port. That's a Windows (x64) build of the game running on CrossOver and being translated to ARM through Rosetta 2, and using Apple's D3DMetal to handle graphics conversion. (I can also get 60 FPS with "high" graphics settings at 1080p, but I prefer the higher resolution…) This is running on the same system that I left unplugged and powered on for 13 hours yesterday and the battery level was still at 70%! (It was not being actively used a lot, but never actually "sleeping", I have disabled the sleep function so that I can access it remotely whenever I need to.) The Dell Precision systems that I have can't make it more than 3 or 4 hours away from the charger even if they are running idle. I know there are better battery laptops out there but I'm not aware of any that can also do hard-core gaming. I don't know if Qualcomm has plans to roll out higher-end chips, but I hope that Qualcomm or NVIDIA or someone makes a decent high-performing but otherwise high-battery low-heat/noise non-Mac laptop finally possible.

My M6700 had the LVDS 8-bit panel so I am not familiar with the ins and outs of how the 10bit works. I do have this tidbit though. Another display option offered in the M6700 was a "3D" panel which allowed for using NVIDIA's 3D Vision feature with apps/games if you had appropriate glasses. 3D Vision would only work if the NVIDIA driver could validate your setup, and it was more picky than it is for just installing the driver. This feature would break if you tried to install an "unsupported GPU" like the Quadro M5000M or GeForce 980M. ...You could still use the system, and you could still use the "3D" display panel, just the actual "3D" functionality of it would not engage. All this to say it wouldn't surprise me if there is trouble getting the 10-bit display to work with the Quadro M5000M or the newer drivers. Though I'll also say that Dell also offers new-ish drivers that support the Quadro M5000M (+M4000M,M3000M) — you can grab them from the support page for the Precision 7710. You'll have to mod them to install on the M6700 (like you would have to do with any NVIDIA driver) but maybe the Dell magic bit that allows the 10-bit display panel to work would still persist in those ...?

If you have the IPS / 10-bit display panel, then it is eDP. Quadro M5000M is the easiest upgrade. You just drop it in and mod the INF. Or, there is an easy GUI tool that will do that for you now (nvcleaninstall?). Also, you can use GeForce 980M, it might be easier to find / a little bit cheaper and it is basically the same thing. (There is also Tesla M6, but you must use that with Optimus enabled, which isn't possible with the IPS panel.) Some users reported newer drivers not working with Maxwell GPUs in the M6700. I took the M5000M out of my Precision M6700 in August 2021 and I never ran into that. There aren't a lot of M6700 users left (especially with "unsupported GPUs") so I am not sure what the current status is. If you run into trouble, you might want to first try loading drivers from before that time. If all you really care about is HEVC (H.265) video decode, then you could use M3000M / M4000M / GeForce 970M and be fine. I believe the video decode unit is the same in all of these Maxwell GPUs and performance doesn't depend on vRAM or the number of CUDA cores or anything like that. Pascal still has the VBIOS issue. You must flash an ES VBIOS on. You need to do that in a different system or with an external flasher. Also, when I tried it, I had stability issues (periodic BSOD) — looks like you saw my posts about that. Not sure if it was just something off with my card, but @jeamn ran into something similar with GeForce 1070 in Precision M6800, as I recall. Turing does *not* have the same restriction with the VBIOS. HP's RTX 3000 MXM card has been confirmed to work in Precision M6700. However... the card isn't standard MXM layout, you'd have to do some modding of the heatsink and chassis to make it fit.

New upgrades for Framework Laptop 13. It is now available with Intel's "Core Ultra Series 1" CPUs, and a new high-resolution 120 Hz display. (Of course, you can order new parts to fit into your old Framework Laptop 13 as well.) https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-new-framework-laptop-13-with-intel-core-ultra-series-1-processors

Haven't tried Turing RTX cards in the M6700 myself. Here's an old thread about it. User razor0601 reported success with an RTX 3000 in Precision M6700. https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/dell-precision-m6700-nvidia-turing-rtx-card-discussion-thread.833140/index.html The X bracket can indeed be difficult to remove. The best solution is to heat up the card with a heat gun or hair dryer to loosen up the glue and then hopefully it will come off more easily.

Installed the ARM64 version of Windows 11 LTSC in a VM on my Mac. No problem “upgrading” from “regular” Win11 using the method described in the OP.

These systems can't run most Pascal cards (VBIOS issue/confclit with the system BIOS — M4700/M6700 can't boot at all, M4800/M6800 can boot Linux but get ACPI BSOD from Windows). But, Turing cards "should" be fine and have been shown to work.

I do not have high hopes that a P4200 would work. I remember someone trying P5200 without success. There is a conflict between the M6700 BIOS and the NVIDIA Pascal final/production VBIOS — the only cards confirmed working are cards for which an earlier "engineering sample" VBIOS has been found which works around this conflict, and those cards are just Quadro P3000, P4000, and P5000. The Turing VBIOS don't have the issue. I didn't mention T1000/T2000 but those should also work fine, just some minor work may have to be done to get them to fit right.

Yeah, that is my understanding as well — You can plug in a 330W but it won't actually do you any good. Shame, too. Pascal GPUs in this system can use so much power that if you fully load the GPU then it will cause the CPU to throttle, just because it is power-starved. (I also observed this with the P5000.)

Both GeForce 980M and Quadro M5000M have the same performance as Tesla M6 but should work with eDP + video output. Those were a common upgrade target for people back when M6700 was more commonly in use. You can use Quadro P3000 or P4000 as well. They have the same thing as P5000 in that you have to flash a compatible VBIOS image on first, but we have those available. (Can't comment on stability. I haven't tried them myself. I think @TheQuentincc had P4000 in M6700 for a while?) Finally, HP's Turing MXM Quadro cards ("Quadro RTX 5000" and similar) have been shown to work. But they have a different layout than a standard MXM card so some hardware modifications to the chassis and heatsink are required. Pascal and Turing GPUs do not support LVDS, so you must use them in an eDP system or with Optimus turned on.

You can use both LVDS and eDP at the same time. I believe it was @TheQuentincc who confirmed this. GTX 1070 will not work in Precision M6700. It locks up on boot before an OS can load. You can use Quadro P5000 but you must first flash an engineering sample VBIOS on it using another system or an external flasher. …I tried this myself and ended up with stability issues, periodic BSODs from the NVIDIA driver, and ended up going back to Maxwell.

Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is launched. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/internet-of-things-blog/announcing-windows-11-iot-enterprise-ltsc-2024-empowering-edge/ba-p/4148329 Gotta digest (no time right now) and see if I can find an install image through Visual Studio. Looks like they are supporting ARM64 as well.