Precision M6800 questions and upgrades

[AaronD]

Hi guys!  This thread has gotten pretty long and I'm not looking forward to reading all of it.  Is there a TL;DR for what to upgrade the GPU in my M6800 to in 2025?

 

Ubuntu Studio 24.04 (the latest LTS) seems to have completely dropped my Quadro K5100M (it needs something newer than NVIDIA's 470 driver, which is the latest that still supports that card), so I'm looking for something with long-projected support, and hardware video encoding.  Single boot, no Windows.

 

If it makes a difference, the screen appears in the display manager as "eDP-1", and includes a touchscreen that appears as "Wacom ISDv4 4001 Finger touch".  In addition to the built-in screen, I regularly use both of the DVI outputs and the VGA output on the dock, and the HDMI output on the notebook itself.

 

Thanks!

[Aaron44126]

11 hours ago, AaronD said:

Hi guys!  This thread has gotten pretty long and I'm not looking forward to reading all of it.  Is there a TL;DR for what to upgrade the GPU in my M6800 to in 2025?

 

You can use the NVIDIA driver team PPA and possibly get "old" NVIDIA drivers installed on your "new" Ubuntu distro. They have NVIDIA 390 and 470 drivers available for Ubuntu 24.04 to support "old" GPUs.

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

(This repo is maintained by the folks that actually package the NVIDIA drivers in the Ubuntu production repositories. They package older versions for newer versions of Ubuntu, and they also release NVIDIA driver updates to this repo usually within a few days after NVIDIA kicks them out.)

 

For a GPU upgrade...

Really, you can look at the Maxwell cards, GeForce 980M and Quadro M5000M. They have nearly identical performance and both work as a more-or-less drop-in replacement on this system. Maxwell is the oldest currently supported generation from NVIDIA though, so chances are you will run into the same problem again soon when they drop support.

 

Next up would be Quadro P5000, one generation newer. It works as a drop-in replacement under Linux only. For Windows, you have to flash a different vBIOS on it to get it to be bootable.

 

Both of these require a minor mod to (most) GPU heatsinks in the M6800. They have the VRMs at the "top" of the board in a slightly different position. There is a bit "jutting out" of the heatsink that bumps into these such that you cannot install it flush. You have to use a Dremel or something to cut that bit off.

 

If you are largely relying on the cards for hardware video encoding, you can look at "cheaper" versions of these cards (GeForce 970M, Quadro M3000M, Quadro P3000, etc.). 3D performance will be less but video encoding performance is the same among all cards in the same generation.

 

There are later generation cards from NVIDIA (i.e. Quadro RTX 5000, which is Turing) that can be made to work, but the MXM board format is changed so they require more substantial physical modifications.

 

(If you are running Windows, you need to do an INF mod for any "unsupported" NVIDIA GPU to get the driver to load, but this shouldn't be an issue under Linux.)

[AaronD]

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

You can use the NVIDIA driver team PPA and possibly get "old" NVIDIA drivers installed on your "new" Ubuntu distro. They have NVIDIA 390 and 470 drivers available for Ubuntu 24.04 to support "old" GPUs.

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

(This repo is maintained by the folks that actually package the NVIDIA drivers in the Ubuntu production repositories. They package older versions for newer versions of Ubuntu, and they also release NVIDIA driver updates to this repo usually within a few days after NVIDIA kicks them out.)

 

Huh.  That looks a lot easier than changing hardware!  I wonder how long *that* support is going to last?

 

Excellent summary too.  Thank you!