Precision M6700 owner's thread

[JadeRover]

4 hours ago, loopster said:

Would you be so kind as to share this 100w version of the p3000m bios here?
I'm tempted to give it a try on ZBook 17 G1. Would it work 🙂?

 

Yes, here you go, I tested this one as working on precision 7720. Flashed with CH341a & 1.8v adapter.

 

I could get it to hit 100w @ 1650mhz in furmark.

 

In other benchmarks and games, it would hit 75-80w @ 1820mhz

 

The card is still limited by that max clock, with no way to overclock via software, vbios OC is possible but you have to be one of the wizards at macrumors. For example my GTX 1060m that I modded to 110w can be sotware OC, 2100mhz on core is possible + you can OC the vram.

 

Also keep in mind the only change I made is bumped the TDP to 100w, using the method I described you can also enable more options that mobile pascal TDP tweaker gives, such as throttle temperature + power slider in msi afterburner.

 

When I get my m6700 back in a few weeks I will try my p3000 in it and attempt to make the "Ultimate p3000 vBIOS" that I'll post on techpowerup (if sucessfull).

P3000_ES_m6700_100W.bin

[unstable]

@JadeRover thanks for the help!  GPU did post before, its just it doesn't work in the OS, drivers can't detect them. I tried your method with removing header, using early engineering vbios as base, but windows still refused to boot and linux drivers complained about vbios.

    I modified the vbios I found in macrumors forum using mobile pascal tdp tweaker to set max TDP to 150W with power slider set to adjustable. I don't experience thermal throttle, core and memory frequencies were at max and stable but performance got significantly worse.

 

    I tried limiting TDP to 100W via nvidia-smi software utility without reflashing the gpu and it got better, but seems like setting max TDP to more then 100W causes performance to get worse. vbios before my modification had 115W max TDP and performed better compared to if I set max TDP to 115W through nvidia-smi when card is flashed with my modified vbios.

 

    Am I missing something? maybe something else needed to be changed in the vbios? I will upload my vbios as well as link the one I used as base if anyone is willing to take a look. 

    vbios I used as base: https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/p5000_r1-bin-zip.2084769/

p5000_R1_oc1.bin

[JadeRover]

15 hours ago, unstable said:

@JadeRover thanks for the help!  GPU did post before, its just it doesn't work in the OS, drivers can't detect them. I tried your method with removing header, using early engineering vbios as base, but windows still refused to boot and linux drivers complained about vbios.

    I modified the vbios I found in macrumors forum using mobile pascal tdp tweaker to set max TDP to 150W with power slider set to adjustable. I don't experience thermal throttle, core and memory frequencies were at max and stable but performance got significantly worse.

 

    I tried limiting TDP to 100W via nvidia-smi software utility without reflashing the gpu and it got better, but seems like setting max TDP to more then 100W causes performance to get worse. vbios before my modification had 115W max TDP and performed better compared to if I set max TDP to 115W through nvidia-smi when card is flashed with my modified vbios.

 

    Am I missing something? maybe something else needed to be changed in the vbios? I will upload my vbios as well as link the one I used as base if anyone is willing to take a look. 

    vbios I used as base: https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/p5000_r1-bin-zip.2084769/

p5000_R1_oc1.bin 512 kB · 0 downloads

 

Ok, so I'm guessing you have an LVDS m6700 as that imac vbios disables eDP on DP_D, meaning impossible to get the internal screen to light up unless you are using a eDP backlight mod cable.

 

You are in LVDS switch graphics right ?

 

Looking at the imac vbios : https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/imac-2011-maxwell-and-pascal-gpu-upgrade.2300989/post-31573011, it's supposed to have +250mhz core and +1000mhz vram.

 

Did you test the stock ES vbios (no modding) ? As for the p3000 the ES vbios has higher clocks than the imac vbios : 1820mhz vs 1657mhz. 

 

Your modded 150w imac bios performs worse than the 115w imac vbios correct ?

 

What is the limit reason in GPU-Z when testing a benchmark ? You can do one run of 3D mark time spy with 150w + record in GPU-Z and do another run with the 115w + record in gpu z as well to compare what is limiting your performance in GPU-Z "PerfCap" as well as to see when the clocks are dropping and to what values.

[unstable]

Yes, sorry for not sharing enough details.

I have LVDS display with optimus enabled. GPU is working through optimus. seems like imac vbios only disables HDMI since after further testing displayport on laptop seem to function just fine.

I am currently running linux. Windows 10 can not boot with imac vbios, just like the other vbios except the ES. I did manage to boot windows 7 but nvidia driver setup keeps complaining about windows 7 being not supported even though I specifically downloaded old version that suppose to. Maybe my windows 7 is too old and I have to update it.

So for now, until I get windows 7 updated, I can only test on linux.
 

    I tested GPU with the plain ES vbios. It worked fine and performance seemed reasonable.

    After I tried imac vbios and performance got noticable better, and card was stable. The only notable issue is HDMI not working and inability to boot to windows 10.

    After I tried enabling adjustable power bar and set max TDP from 115w to 150w on imac vbios. After this If I set from software TDP limit to more then 100W performance starts to degrade. I tested this with couple games and unigine superposition benchmark.

    Unfortunatly linux doesn't have GPU-Z, so what I am planning to do is get windows 7 to work and monitor the card there with GPU-Z.

 

EDIT: Ok, apparently the only reason Windows 7 booted at all was because vbios got corrupted. ES vbios is still the only one that lets you boot into windows. On windows 7 when any other vbios is installed windows complains about BIOS not being ACPI compliant. Right now I am trying to make modified vbios on my own using ES vbios as base.

[JadeRover]

There is also this interesting link on how some of the hex editing can work for pascal vbios, I had a look but couldn't really get much out of it. It doesn't explain the header section.

 

 

[unstable]

3 hours ago, JadeRover said:

There is also this interesting link on how some of the hex editing can work for pascal vbios, I had a look but couldn't really get much out of it. It doesn't explain the header section.

 

 

    Thanks for the link. I was trying to parse it on my own.

    For now I went back to the ES vbios and edit it with the Mobile Pascal TDP Tweaker. I flash it with external programmer.

    However, no matter how small the modification, nvidia drivers seem to reject GPU with error code 43 in device manager. I tried disabling driver signature enforcment but nothing changed. GPU-Z reports bunch of fields as Unknown, Memory size is 0, clocks are also 0. I'll include the screenshots.

    I suspect this is some nvidia vbios signature validation issue, but Mobile Pascal TDP Tweaker says both ES vbios and modified vbios have the same checksum.

[JadeRover]

12 hours ago, unstable said:

However, no matter how small the modification, nvidia drivers seem to reject GPU with error code 43 in device manager. I tried disabling driver signature enforcment but nothing changed. GPU-Z reports bunch of fields as Unknown, Memory size is 0, clocks are also 0. I'll include the screenshots.

    I suspect this is some nvidia vbios signature validation issue, but Mobile Pascal TDP Tweaker says both ES vbios and modified vbios have the same checksum.

 

Yes I had the same problem with both my p3000 and 1060M (tested on 7720), TDP tweaker killed checksum, the fix was after modding with mobile TDP tweaker, saving, I manually removed header section in hex editor (I think I showed it earlier) tho this might not work on m6700 as it needs header section from ES vbios to not give ACPI error I think.

[JadeRover]

12 hours ago, unstable said:

I suspect this is some nvidia vbios signature validation issue, but Mobile Pascal TDP Tweaker says both ES vbios and modified vbios have the same checksum.

Maybe there is a copy of the checksum in header section ? As mobile TDP tweaker only edits bytes in the "please" string. Because removing header section lets the drivers install and the card functions with no errors on precision 7720.

 

What's interesting is the parser I linked has entries for "Clock table" and "power tables" however I wasn't able to dicepher it more then that, according to the guys in imac forum, they did manually edit clock and voltage tables with a hex editor, so there must be a comprehensible to read the data and edit it.

 

Unfortunately guys from imac are AWOL so we'll have to find these data entries on our own.