Trov Posted April 14, 2022 Share Posted April 14, 2022 Hello, I wanted to share my success of upgrading an M4800's GPU to a Quadro T2000 I happened across a listing that was selling one for $180, which seems to be fairly cheap considering this is effectively an MXM A form factor GTX 1650. I was surprised it is offered in the MXM A size; as normally one would see a Quadro T1000 instead. This card is from I believe an HP Z2 Mini G5, and there is also a Quadro T1000 from the same machine, with the same non-standard board shape. More on that below. About The Card Not only is there a protrusion in the top right corner, it is slightly wider than a standard MXM A card by a couple mm. The back; unfortunately there are some SMD components blocking the "X" shaped attachment plate for the heatsink. I do not know how the heatsink attaches in the HP Z2 Mini; it must sit on some standoffs or something. Installation There are 3 concerns for installation: -The card being slightly wider -The top right protrusion -Components on the back blocking the possibility of an "X brace" heatsink attachment plate. Thankfully, nothing in the M4800's frame or screw posts blocks the card from being inserted. The only thing stopping it are the corners of the MXM slot intersecting with the T2000's wider body. The slot corners can easily be cut away with an exacto knife. This shouldn't pose much if any danger of damaging the MXM slot itself since you are just cutting plastic on a metal tab away from any of the connector pins. After cutting the corners of the slot, the card lowered down onto the screw posts. One should not worry about performing this permanent alteration; normal MXM cards will still slot in just fine after doing this. The next challenge is the corner protrusion. This doesn't cause any issue until you attempt to place the top bezel and keyboard back on. It turns out the speaker assembly would intersect with it. However, the part that intersects is just a hollow plastic chamber that can be cut away with an exacto knife without damaging the speaker itself. This may affect the sound quality but the sound quality was dire enough beforehand that I don't notice any meaningful difference. And lastly, the heatsink. Since there is no way to put the X-Brace on the back that the heatsink screws into, I had to use some nuts instead. Since there is no reinforcement on the back, I recommend avoiding tightening the 4 heatsink screws too tight. Also, you must install the heatsink before slotting in the GPU since you won't have much of a way to hold the nuts in place before screwing in. This means having to pull the whole motherboard out of the bottom case to insert the card, then putting it back. This isn't much extra work though, it's only a couple more screws than you already had out to get there in the first place. I had the Nvidia heatsink; it seems to be the correct distance for this card, I screwed the heatsink in without paste as a test and saw no daylight come through between the GPU die and the heatsink surface. VBIOS & Drivers I didn't need to touch the VBIOS. The laptop happily booted into Windows without any change (other than resetting CMOS) directly after putting in the T2000. The Nvidia installer would not detect the card. However, using Device Manager, selecting the GPU and selecting "Update Drivers" and then "Have Disk" and navigating to the Nvidia installer extraction folder and manually selecting the .inf worked. No changes were made to any .inf files. After a reboot Nvidia Control Panel was installed and the card was ready for running. Performance & Thermals On the desktop, the card idles at 43C, though I think Chrome was open with a good number of tabs. Here is Time Spy results, paired with i7-4900MQ: Conclusion The main downside is the card gets pretty hot at load, reaching 85C. After a few minutes of gaming, the M4800 will kick into maximum jet engine fan speed. It's not much of a wonder why, the card is rated as 60W TDP and the HP Z2 Mini's GPU heatsink is probably a good 2 or 3x the size of the GPU heatsink in the M4800. However, I did compare this thermal performance to my newer Precision 5540 that came with a T2000 built-in; and I noticed that laptop allows the GPU to go all the way up to 95C and thus the TimeSpy performance on that laptop throttled down to the 3100s. So, you might be able to get away with manually keeping your M4800 fans at Medium speed to keep the noise down at the cost of thermal throttling. It would be nice to be able to lower the power limit of the card to perhaps turn it into something akin to T2000 Max-Q, but unfortunately the VBIOS locks everything down, and MSI Afterburner cannot change any settings at all of this card. Therefore, the Quadro T1000 may be a better fit. I expect a T1000 from an HP Z2 Mini will work with all of the same steps as above, and stay below 70-75C according to a Youtube video I saw of someone putting a T1000 in his M4800. This HP T1000 may in the coming months be a far more accessible T1000 than the ADLINK ones that rarely pop up on Ebay. I did not test any external outputs; it is likely the GPU won't work in dedicated GPU mode. With Optimus mode, internal display works as you can see in the photos. This is quite a potent upgrade; games such as Doom Eternal run very well. This still isn't the end of the line for this laptop I suspect, as the RTX A2000 is being made in the MXM A form factor. In a few years those will probably be much more plentiful on the used market. 1 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aaron44126 Posted April 14, 2022 Share Posted April 14, 2022 2 hours ago, Trov said: Hello, I wanted to share my success of upgrading an M4800's GPU to a Quadro T2000 Amazing... Thank you for sharing. This is additional confirmation that Turing GPUs work fine in these machines, if you can find one (and get it to fit). Pascal GPUs tend to cause an ACPI-related BSOD at startup on M4800/M6800 and just hang up in the BIOS on M4700/M6700, unless you have a specific ES VBIOS that can be flashed on. I'll share these old posts regarding doing an INF mod to get the NVIDIA driver to load cleanly, if you are so inclined. https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-7530-precision-7730-owners-thread.820539/page-253.html#post-10937563 https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-m6700-gpu-upgrade-k5000m-to-m5000m.807061/page-3#post-10797664 1 1 Dell Precision 7770 (personal) • Dell Precision 7560 (work) • Full specs in spoiler block below Info posts (Dell) — Dell Precision key posts • Dell driver RSS feeds • Dell Fan Management — override fan behavior Info posts (Windows) — Turbo boost toggle • The problem with Windows 11 • About Windows 10 LTSC Spoiler Dell Precision 7770 (personal) Intel Core i9-12950HX ("Alder Lake"), 8P+8E 8× P cores ("Golden Cove"): 2.3 GHz base, 5.0 GHz turbo, hyperthreading 8× E cores ("Gracemont"): 1.7 GHz base, 3.6 GHz turbo 128GB DDR5-3600 (CAMM) NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 16GB (DGFF) Storage: 2TB system drive: Samsung 980 Pro, PCIe4 24TB additional storage: MDRAID, RAID 0 2× 8TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, PCIe4 1× 8TB Inland Performance Plus, PCIe4 Kubuntu 23.04 (KDE Plasma 5.27, Linux kernel 6.2) 17.3" 3940×2160 120 Hz display Intel Wi-Fi AX211 (Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth) 93Wh battery IR webcam Fingerprint reader Dell Precision 7560 (work) Intel Xeon W-11955M ("Tiger Lake") 8×2.6 GHz base, 5.0 GHz turbo, hyperthreading ("Willow Cove") 64GB DDR4-3200 ECC NVIDIA RTX A2000 4GB Storage: 512GB system drive (Micron 2300) 4TB additional storage (Sabrent Rocket Q4) Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 15.6" 3940×2160 display Intel Wi-Fi AX210 (Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth) 95Wh battery IR webcam Fingerprint reader Previous Dell Precision 7530, 7510, M4800, M6700 Dell Latitude E6520 Dell Inspiron 1720, 5150 Dell Latitude CPi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reciever Posted April 14, 2022 Share Posted April 14, 2022 Interesting, I have a M6800 sitting in the garage that I have been slowly cleaning up. Might put the 4980hq back in it. Telegram / TS3 / Twitter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trov Posted April 16, 2022 Author Share Posted April 16, 2022 I figure an M6800 would cope with the thermals a lot better since the heatsinks have a lot more heatpipes going around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MELOCODI Posted November 11, 2022 Share Posted November 11, 2022 Where did you get it? DELL Precision M4800 : Spoiler GPU: NVIDIA Quadro T1000 CPU: i7 4800MQ (Undervolted) RAM: 32 GB G.Skill RipJaws 1866 mHz (4 x 8 GB) Storage (SATA1): Samsung SSD 870 EVO 512 GB Storage (SATA2): Samsung SSD 860 EVO 512 GB Desktop : Spoiler GPU: ASUS ROG STRIX GTX 1070 Ti (Custom heatsink mod) CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X MOBO: MSI MPG X570 GAMING PLUS COOLER: Noctua NH-D15 RAM: 32 GB HyperX Predator 3733 mHz (OC, non-RGB, 4x8 GB) Storage (NVME): 2x 512 GB Samsung 970 EVO PLUS Storage (SATA): 2x Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aldarxt Posted November 18, 2022 Share Posted November 18, 2022 Hey @Trov I think you might be the first M4800 to score with a T2000 and G3 socket!! Go post your score on 3DMark!!! 1 Clevo P870DM3-G i7-6700k-32.0GB 2667mhz-GTX 1080 SLI Alienware M18x R2 i7-3920xm-16GB DDR3-Quadro P4000 Alienware M17x R4 i7-3940XM 16GB DDR3-1866 Quadro P4000 Alienware M17x R4 i7-3940XM 32GB DDR3-1600 GTX 680M 120hz 3D Precision m6700 i7-3840QM - 16.0GB DDR3 - GTX 970M Precision m4700 i7-3610QM-8.00GB DDR3 @ 1600MHz-K2000M GOBOXX SLM G2721-i7-10875H RTX 3000-32GB ddr4(Gave to my Wife) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burntstew Posted November 27, 2022 Share Posted November 27, 2022 Impressive. Glad i decided to check in here i was under the impression that MXM A was functionally dead with the best gpu available being m2200's and the occasional 1050. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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