6800 Go in a Latitude D810

Kaaaaaaaaaaaaatie

Ok Don Rico. Explicame la mierda de Kaaaaaaaaaaaaatie?

Ahhh

I returned an D810 for an 9300 'cos dell told me there would be no upgrade path for it

I think the D810 motherboard has less power, less watts, maybe not enough for the card

Fantastic try though, good luck, and you have a very trusting friend there

Nice to experminent with the warranty behind you. Be sure to get a brand new 6800 from dell (should get more on ebay for it! lol)

k6, great idea.

Flash the D810 to a M70

the M70 is the same motherboard as your D810, and they come with nvidia quadro chips, which should be very close to the 6800go. I would try that before flashing it to a 9300, since they have some different pci ports

If you can get the bios to recognize the 6800go, I'm sure it will work fine and be a great upgrade.

Are you sure it's a bios problem, and not a windows driver problem? Can you enter the bios and change things? If so, it is likely a windows problem.

Good Luck!

rallycobra that is a great idea, and there is a thread where someone used rivatuner to detune an 6800 to a quadro in an 9300, so if the motherboard does have too little power then maybe a soft-detuned 6800 will convert it to an M70?

Don't worry about power. All of the laptops mentioned use the 90W powerbrick. The only gpus that run into trouble are the 6800ultra and 7800. They need 130W and a bios that know what to do with the brick. That PCI slot must be good to 130W with the proper brick, so a standard 6800go that uses a 90W will be fine.

yep, your right, 90watt standard

checked proces too, lowest dell canada d810 is around $1600cdn (1.86) with lowest M70 $2400cdn (2.13 processor)

potentially a nice conversion! Good luck.

Tom's Wife. Katie.

The softmod does not work. Sorry to get your hopes up.

I'm interested to see if this works. Maybe it might up the demand for the vanilla 6800Go so that I could potentially get more if I decide to pawn it on ebay.

maybe contact whomever hacked the 9300 bios and xps2 bios to do the same for the m70 on an d810?

I know before it was hacked (9300) the 9300 would check and not acept the xps bios

(family guy is excellent)

If you check out the D810 service manual it looks like it should fit no problems....

Here is a post with the H guy's name.
Why does the bios need to be hacked? Can't you tell awdflash to force flash an incorrect version from DOS?



Old 10-01-2005, 12:59 AM #20
big_fat_clown
Registered User



Ok People, Thanks to Hazridi for providing us with the Hack Bios. Next: Lets get he show on the road and get our 9300 up to XPS speed. Let quit the mambojambo and get serious on this.

The Clown

Hey guys, let me give you some light.

For at least two generations now, Dell just takes the D8x0 model and puts a better video card in it, changes some plastics, tweaks it a bit and issues "certified" drivers to sell it under the Precision line. Dell does it because engineering a laptop is expensive and they simply don't want to invest much money on a line of laptops that isn't going to have a high demand.

Like with my previous D800, the newer D810 can take any video card the Precision line has without any modification. It's simply because the modular card isn't anything but a mini desktop card. The connector was a regular AGP on the previous generation and is PCI Express in the current. Theorically speaking, it would be possible to plug a desktop video card trough the interface and make the laptop use it as the default video adapter.

The idea of flashing the D800 with a Precision M60 bios has nothing to do with video card support. The purpose of doing so is to enable DDR333 support on a D800, because the stock BIOS supports only DDR266. So don't flash a D810 with an M70 BIOS because you will not gain anything and it is still unknown if the swap is really possible.

Altough the cards of the 9300 and D810 are essentially identical, the cooling solutions are not. If you look at the cards carefully, you will realize that the X600 uses four discrete BGA memory chips (=128MB) on top of the card, hidden by the heatsink. The 9300 has eight chips (=256MB) on both sides.

The X600 uses 128 bit DDR, while the 6800 uses 256bit DDR. I might be mistaken, but it's the physical chip what gives you the bus width and not the arrangement. That means that the chips on the 9300 run hotter, because they run at higher frequencies and have a wider bus.

If you look carefully at a 6800 video card, you will notice that the memory chips are in contact with the heatsink. The chips on the X600 aren't. So overheating on the memory could be the reason fon instability.

Honestly speaking, you can run any card on the D810, includding a 7800 GTX. The problem is that you really have to be a "pro" to get it working stable and not damage either the motherboard, the video card or both. It implies phisically exchanging and modifying the heatsink and patiently try several voltages and frequencies to make the card comply with the TDP, wich requieres underclocking.

Here is some information you might find useful.

A D810/M70 uses a video card with a TDP of 27W.
For reference, a 6800 Ultra has a TDP of 66W.

The stock frequencies and voltages of a Quadro 1400 are:
(wich is a regular 6800; nvidia does the same as dell here)

Level 0: 125/166 @ 1.0v
Level 1: 200/200 @ 1.1v
Level 2: 275/295 @ 1.3v

According to my tests, the voltage only applies to the core. It is impossible to change the memory voltage.

Finally, my experience with my Thinkpad showed me that it is very possible to prevent booting trough a BIOS routine if an "unauthorized" hardware is found. It happened when I tried to put a generic wireless card. The Thinkpad only accepts IBM parts. Dell seems to not care about it, but the possibility is open.