9300 users : upgrading from 6800 to 6800 ULTRA

Well my friend has a 6800 in his 9300 and my xps 2 is noticably faster. If you got a good price for it than definetly go ahead and do it. Remember though you need the 130 watt power supply and 9 cell battery for it to work properly.

hey man, Im sure that there are plenty of people that have done it, Im fixin to do it in just couple of days. I got 6800 ultra for 100 bucs of ebay.
They have the same number of pipes but there is a huge difference in the clock speed... I mean from 300core 700 mem to 450core 1100mem.

The cooling on 6800 ultra is much more advanced. I worked with both non ultra and ultra and I noticed that there is no copper on nonultra. Few days ago I took ultra and removed that little thermal film, cleaned it really good and put some arctic silver 5. I checked the print and it was perfect. Anyway... Im hoping to prove many people here wrong, because mine 6800 ultra is going to run cool

I will let you know in few days. What is the price you are paying for ultra? I am sure that you can sell your 6800 for 150 bucs, just enough to get you an ultra and 130w brick!

peace!

I put a 6800 ultra in my 9300 it was cake then i put the XPS Gen2 palm rest on and the XPS lid on the back... but i have a question all the led connectors are only on the XPS boards. The 9300 boards dont have extra led connectors BUT when i bought my 6800Ultra it had a 5pin led connector thats identical to the connector on the M170 for the Leds on the XPS Lid. It looks like the GEN2 had the Led connector on the nvidia card instead of on the M170!! So i tried to hook it up, i did the bios mod got all the battery and ac. The 6800Ultra works great but the XPS lights only lightup for 1 second when the lappy starts then no power after that.

After i hacked the 9300 bios to the Gen2 i got the system led options in the bios to change colors but no light... i dont get it! I wonder if the bios choice has something to do with it, although it does GEn2 bios... Any ideas would be great.

I found a boost in my 3dmark05 from 3000+ to 5000+ after doing the mod.

Definetly worth it! When you consider you can buy a 6800ultra for $20-50 over what a 6800 Costs its definetly worth it...then when you consider that you can sell your 6800 on ebay and if you list it good you can stand to make almost as much as the ultra sells for. So that will even further lessen the total amount you have to spend.

Also i would get the XPS M170 lid... even if you cant hook the leds up to it the lid looks awesome they can be bought for $30 shipped on ebay (if you look for a good deal thats what i paid for both of mine) and the best part imo is the lid feels much more solid when closing and opening, the hinges are nice and tight and it gives the laptop a much more sturdy feel. If youre going to that i would also spend an extra $30 and get the m170 palm rest it completes the M170 look...and will probably pay backwhen you go to sell the laptop. Also you can sell your 9300 Palm rest and Lid for close to what the m170 lid goes for....hooray ebay! (even if it is the most expensive to do business marketplace ever)

Personally I never thought the extra heat generated and the extra power required where worth the Ultra. I was getting 4500 with the 6800 and the jump to 6000 just wasn't enough considering I'd lose a lot of battery life and generate a LOT of heat. When I found the 7800GTX gave a jump to 7000+ then that seemed enough to crack it open. The GTX doesn't have the reliability problems of the Ultra I believe...

Good luck!

If by much more advanced you mean it has an extra heat pipe then you are correct. Other than the heat pipe on the CPU side the Ultra and the Vanilla are the same chip; the only GPU difference is the clock speed. The memory on the ultra is also DDR3 so this is faster as well but there are no core differences that would assist in cooling.

dude the whole card is different if you take a look at it i have both and the entire card has way more transistors and parts on it. And judging from how much better Battlefield 2 looks and runs JUST from switching from the vanilla 6800 to the Ultra i can personally attest that for $100 its worth the upgrade!

I get $100 spent from....

6800 Ultra: $135 (thats what i paid) All prices include S&H

AC Adapter $30 ebay going rate

80WH Battery $55 ebay going rate, if you look (220total)

Now sell the 6800 back on ebay for $100 easy, the 90W ac for $10 and the Battery for $30 so $140 total minus $20 for ebay fees and misc so $120 minus the $220 you spent total for the upgrade and youre at $100!


I have played FEAR, Sin Episode 1, Half Life2, Quake4 and BF2 and the difference is AMAZING, all these other people saying the differnce is small havnt tried it. The amount of extra heat generated iS iMMENSE but the graphics power is a lot better and games look great. Plus the display is 1 notch brighter on my WUXGA. no exxagerations

Also 6800 ultra $125-175 7800Gtx $280-330 .... so if you dont have a ton of extra cash to spend the ultra is definetly worth it. Also since youre upgrading to a higher power batter it offsets the power drain a good amount....not totally, but it does.

do the upgrade! ive done it for a month and i'm surprised about playing BF2. max. resolution, all high detail, 2xAA and the speed is incredible.

I'm not debating the transistors on the card as I count that to be inconsiquential since I have never heard a video manufacturer brag about board transistors; it's the actual GPU transistors (190 million in this case) that matter and it's the same for both of these cards. They all started using the same NV41 core (moved to NV42 later I believe), they have the same number of pixel pipes (16), and the only difference in the two was/is the clock speed of the GPU and the Memory speed. I don't think you can put much stock in just the visable differences in the two (other than the extra pipe already mentioned).

Check out this link http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2356


Here is an excerpt:
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Today, Dell is introducing their Inspirion XPS Gen 2. The DTR notebook features a 2 or 2.13GHz Pentium M and a GeForce Go 6800 Ultra with 450/550 core/memory clocks. Rather than just ship their Go 6800 at the high core speed, NVIDIA has given it the Ultra moniker to differentiate the product.

The "new" GeForce Go 6800 Ultra graphics card is exactly the same as the original Go 6800, except that we are finally seeing it at the high clock speeds NVIDIA originally promised we would see. For an explanation of the differences between NVIDIA's mobile and desktop products, please see our initial review.
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I'm not saying that the Ultra is not faster, I'm just saying it's mostly because of the higher clock hence more heat as opposed to the GTX which had major architecture changes and can do the same stuff cooler. The Ultra is still outstanding compared to other solutions and if that's your budget then rock on.

Chez, your name looks familiar.. (I just sold my 7800)

Anyway, to the original poster: I really think you'd see more of an improvement going to a 7800 instead of the 6800u. Since you plan on investing more money into a pinmod, etc.. you might as well just save a bit longer and grab a 7800. If you're gonna mod it to turn it into a beast, why not get the best it can handle?

The 6800 ultra is very fast i noticed a big diffrence when i got that card. The 6800 regular is on par with the 6600GT the 6800 ULTRA is way beyond that. Also lookit this:

6800 Vanilla: $90-150
6800 Ultra: $125-200
7800GTX: $250-350

So for the price paid consideration its waaay more then worth it.

i just bought all the stuff for the 6800 ultra mod...

$130 for the card on ebay
$55 for the battery
$30 for the 130 watt adaptor

i've also recently done the pin mod, and 2 gigs of ram, so i've dropped a loooot of money on my laptop recently.