RX 5500 upgrade for M6800 Covet

[knarf802]

Hey all, haven't posted in a great long time since the death of all the old forums I used to frequent. Had to actually make an account. I'll post some of my other zbook/precision exploits here too if its useful; nice to be back, etc.

Not especially shocking news as far as upgrades go, its a pretty straightforward process but I do have a Dell Precision M6800 Covet running with a RX 5500 extracted from a sonnet puck; in fact I have been running it that way for a pretty long time. Works good in windows and in Linux. the LCD is an EDP with touchscreen 40pin, nice little bonus on the covet... the standard m6800's are LVDS unless you solder a connector on for edp. The bad: the touchscreen doesn't power off and on correctly sometimes in linux; never fixed it so I just disabled it via the linux settings to stop forced mouse input at the top left of the screen. Works fine that way; everything works great in windows, but yeah, not going to win11 personally, and 10 is out of support.

Just figured I would post some details and photos of the upgrade to help out anybody else going down that path. Also Had it running in a standard M6800 before finally getting my hands on the parts to fashion a Covet Edition.
 

Works with the Linux and windows, with power limit and basic clock control tools, did a little bit of tuning, but not much. 
The biggest issue with running this card is the need for a die contacting copper plate extension to meet the GPU. I did not document this as well as I should have because I was convinced it would not be so easy as simply soldering on a copper plate to the heat sink face and I would surely run into trouble elsewhere and need to tear it all out; not really as it turns out and i have been running fine since, it likely would be better reflowed with a new plate extension due to surely a cold joint on the surface; this was due to my extreme care to not damage the heatpipes thus not heating quite enough.

it would have been fine if i had simply added a heat sink to the pipes during soldering but i did not think of that at the time, nor did I think of simply desoldering the heatpipes for later replacement. Hindsight is 20/20.

 

I need to scrounge around for some more screenshots, but I'll update this with them as I go. Runs helldivers great with it, feels like a nice modern thing again, with the fancy modern mesa graphics driver stuff in linux.
The main thing is I just 'stole' a great deal of parts for my zbook 17 G2, which i plan to add the 5500 to. I really am after the thunderbolt 2 port.
I plan to 'backfill' parts back into my covet in order to get it going again, and I will properly document it this time; I promise.

pwmconfig was used by piping in the very janky and constantly breaking (due to rolling kernal updates breaking the address malarky; thats a rabbit hole if you dont know already) dell fan EC control module via i8kmon exposing the control. as of late the i8kmon broke in a recent kernal update and has not worked since; i8kfan no longer works but i8kctl does; I don't know it just breaks a person. re-installs from upgraded kernals occasionally fixed this. Its a whole thing and frustrates me for its sheer simple stupidity; on the part of dell making a somwhat (?) innocent if odd fan control choice. I plan to eventually just add in a PWM control fan module and solder it to the board to control through a usb serial pipe, to forgo this nonsense and control that way; no coms? full speed. This issue is part of the reason I jumped to the zbook; it works with NBFC out of the box.

power control via few options of the gpu adds capability. you can move the power limit around and adjust the volt to freq control without issue on this card. if you change it over in the control software, sensors properly reports the new PPT on command.  > "watch sensors" does this well, but its also accessible by the widget monitors on linux which I like a lot(when the overhead from the poll rate is low enough...).

i think its mostly covered; i will get physical photos of the arrangement when i rip it all out and rebuild everything. 
had a 4910mq and a 4940mx in it earlier, took the 4940mx and threw it in the zbook, it undervolts really well. Love me some G3 socketed CPU's.
32 gb of hynix 1866ddr3, the low voltage stuff, Fast for what it is.

Any questions I will try to answer, but If I can't I should be able to when i get everything all rebuilt. 
Its an RX 5500 in a covet m6800, so its what you expect, nothing more.

edit: I'm not sure if the pictures are uploading correctly, the image size limit is tiny is what it seems like, not sure. Like near floppy sized.

[SuperMG]

Hello. So as I can see, the card has the backlight pins enabled.

 

Does the MXM card has any mentions? Like manufacturer name?

 

So modern AMD ones have the backlight pins enabled, interesting.

 

Because the Nvidia RTX Turing, Ampere and Ada don't have these so we have a blackscreen and no signal.

 

I made an adapter so the cards work on every eDP screens.

 

[knarf802]

It may or may not; I am using it in passthrough mode with the iGPU handling the output. 
In attempting to map out the accessible ports I did not find an EDP port; it may yet exist if a vbios could be flashed which has the mapping. The sonnet puck has a... odd way of mapping the outputs. a teardown and node map diagram of the way it functions in the dock in relation to the thunderbolt port is out there in the web. During testing I could not get the disable hybrid mode working. it outputs to the DP port correctly in that instance however, but does not detect the EDP screen from what i remember, unfortunately. 

In linux there is a higher efficiency copy buffer frame mode which can be enabled to move PRIME display modes without some of the hiccups encountered in other outputs, I used this, I believe it is actually defaulted on if it detects the system is capable these days (not sure since when).
In system environment variables,  have a hard DRI_PRIME=1 set, along with specifiers for globally selecting the 5500 for vulkan renders, VP9 and video codec decode calls, etc. This causes anything which can be run on the dGPU to run on it. Exceptions are steam, which throws a fit and resets the PRIME directive, and firefox in some older versions ( I think it is fixed now).

The passthrough to the DP port is direct; running 4k at 60hz outputs goes directly through with a higher FPS in most games, but the brunt of the 5500 is decent enough i do not mind it when in hybrid. 

VP9 decoding for videos is a huge plus for me.

A major contributor to running the card in hybrid is the iGPU copy buffer speed ( and thus mem speed); 1866 is a must, and the max config for the igpu (the i7-49xx) seems to be a requirement. Things are not so rosy with the i7-4700. i am getting a couple more 5500's off of some suspect sonnet docks to play with; I will pull some more info from them soon enough.