HP ZBook 15 G1/G2 Quadro M2200 MXM Upgrade, vBIOS & Benchmarks

[cloudinskyline]

zbook 15 workstation here,cpu is i7 4800mq,recently i just bought a lenovo M2200 card,after installed,it didn't need to modify anything,installed the official nvidia driver,runs great! no need to flash vbios at all,and the gpuz shows hp's card,my zbook's bios was at the newest.

[FoxAlky]

I just upgraded my gpu in hp zbook 15 g2 from quadro k2100m to quadro m2200. I changed whole cooling system to the new one (cause old was damaged) and used honeywell ptm 7950, and cpu is cooling down just fine but the gpu on the stock temp limit easly can hit 90 degress, after undervolting and lowering the temp limit, gpu hits 86 and when starts hitting 87 it is dropping clock, please help

[gluon]

I looked into further GPU upgrade options for this specific laptop model. Here's some things I've learned.

ZBook 15 G2 GPUs have a hard power-limit of 75W. This plateaus the performance of cards with larger TPD.

 

All Pascal and Turing cards are supported. No BIOS whitelists. Any supported card with any vBIOS should work out of the box. Hybrid Graphics need to be enabled for anything above Kepler.

 

Ampere cards and newer require Above 4G Decoding (maybe on) and ReBar. 

The G2 BIOS does not support ReBar. Also, HP BIOS's are said to have RSA checksum protection.

 

MXM-A is the default form factor. B-type cards can be installed via hardware mod. In such case, the heatsink should also be upgraded to the 17 G2 model. The bigger heatsink has a different temperature sensor, suitable for MXM-B. The native heatsink only works properly with A-type cards. Mismatch causes constant fan spin.   

 

With these caveats in mind, the Turing gen offers some alternatives.

 

- T2000 Mobile. 4gb, MXM-A, 60W power draw. An easy update from the M2200. Performs at around GTX 1650.

- RTX 2060 Mobile. 6gb, MXM-B, TPD > 80% (max draw 80-90W). Best performance/power balance.

- RTX 6000 Mobile. 24gb, MXM-B. Should boot up and work, with a third(!) of its TPD.

On the AMD side, Polaris cards are confirmed to work. The ones that stand out are the RX 550 (4gb, MXM-A) and RX 580X (8gb, MXM-B).

 

Hope this helps my fellow ZBook users should they need further upgrades.

If anyone gets into testing, do post your results!

Further reading:

T2000 on a Dell

ZBook MXM-B hardware mod

ZBook MXM-B cooling mod

HP MXM Update Megathread (archived)

[cfyt01]

Bros I have an HP Zbook 15 G2 Laptop
BIOS L70 01.07 (10/01/2014)
GPU MXM-A
NVIDIA Quadro K1100M 2GB

VBIOS 80.07.B2.00.0A

TDP 45W

 

NVIDIA GTX 1050 4GB MXM-A TDP 75W

Do you know if it would work on my Laptop?

[cfyt01]

On 10/27/2022 at 7:28 PM, ryan said:

nice good job, I was wondering what the nvidia geforce equivalent of the m2200 was? 1050?

 

also maybe you could post a cinebench r23 bench. and or a timespy bench?

 

 

Bro I have an HP Zbook 15 G2 Laptop
BIOS L70 01.07 (10/01/2014)
GPU MXM-A
NVIDIA Quadro K1100M 2GB

VBIOS 80.07.B2.00.0A

TDP 45W

 

NVIDIA GTX 1050 4GB MXM-A TDP 75W

Do you know if it would work on my Laptop?

[gluon]

Sure, it would. It has a Pascal chip. With 4 Gb, it looks like the Max-Q variant (specs here). TPD is at 75W, so it's right there.

 

But you might wish to consider a Turing card. The T2000 has an equal amount of vram, the same form factor (MXM-A), lower TPD (60W), and it's a lot faster.
    
Here's one offer with a lower asking price than that 1050 above.

 

 

I'd update that BIOS, btw. The latest one is 01.26 Rev.A, dated May 8th, 2020. You can download it from the laptop's product support page.

[loopster]

The T2000 you linked is not an MXM card. I'd be quite amazed if he got that one running 🙂

[panda_zzz]

1 hour ago, loopster said:

The T2000 you linked is not an MXM card. I'd be quite amazed if he got that one running 🙂

 

[gluon]

More on the G2's Above 4G Decoding support. There's no BIOS setting for it, yet GPU-Z shows it as enabled. Many other Haswell systems are known to lack the option - and in those cases, GPU-Z agrees. It deduces the capability for Above 4G support, so there might be something to it. I started thinking, could the G2 BIOS keep it always enabled?

This led me to read more about PCIe memory-mapping. In short, PCIe devices have two-way traffic with the CPU and each other. MMIO controls all that by assigning memory space and addresses for all the devices. Legacy systems have a memory address range of 4Gb. With UEFI, devices can be assigned to memory above that (himem and config.sys, anyone?).

This thorough article studies Haswell's use of MMIO, and should thus apply to G2.

In x64 architecture, a special register in the CPU - part of the PCIe root complex logic - controls the [address range above 4G]. This base address register must be initialized by the platform firmware on boot...

This step above actually consists of two sub-steps:

1. Initialization of the critical PCI configuration space registers in all of the PCI and PCIe devices via the legacy PCI configuration mechanism that uses CPU IO port. This step is required because only the CPU IO port used for the initialization is hardcoded; thus, it can be used right away.


This step also includes the step to initialize the PCIEXBAR in the hostbridge. The PCIe enhanced configuration space registers cannot be accessed before this register is initialized via legacy PCI configuration mechanism.


2. Initialization of the PCIe enhanced configuration space registers. Once PCIEXBAR is initialized and the PCIe devices identified, the platform firmware can initialize all of the PCIe configuration registers, including the PCIe enhanced configuration space registers...


The PMBASEU and PMLIMITU registers control access to the PCIe graphics memory range if the external PCIe graphics uses memory range above 4GB. Both registers are part of the PCIe controllers integrated into the Haswell CPU... This provides a way to initialize the register... very early at system boot.

 

So, on Haswell and newer, UEFI checks early if the MMIO is above or below 4Gb. Certain registers take hold only with MMIO >4Gb. With MMIO <4Gb, Above 4G Support is unused (yet it remains to be deduced by GPU-Z).

If Above 4G is always enabled, the next thing is ReBar. Again, the G2 BIOS has no option for it. Modding it is dicey, due to $SIG verification identifiers in two encrypted, non-UEFI data regions.

Yet, newer Linux kernels can automatically allocate a static BAR for GPU-CPU traffic. With that and Above 4G, the G2 could boot to Linux with an Ampere or Ada card.