Latitude D820 Upgrade Time

There is no appreciable performance difference between the FX350M and the NVS 120M. I have a D820 with the 120, another member here, gerryjoson, used to have the M65. According to him there is no difference between the Performance of the 350M and the 120M the only difference is the BIOS and all that does is let you use the OpenGL and CAD certified drivers.

Having worked on my own D820, and M65's under warranty, there is absolutely no appreciable difference between either system. In fact, the graphics chip on my motherboard has "FX350M" silkscreened on it.

I would also not overclock the GPU in a D820. The GPU in the system pretty much shares it's heatsink with the i945GM chipset and the CPU. On a system that has a completely dedicated heatsink for the GPU, like the M90, the GPU being overclocked really won't effect the Northbridge or the CPU. But definitely not something you want to do on a D820.

You can always upgrade to a Merom Core 2 Duo CPU, that would give you a bit of a performance boost. The D820 should support the T7600 without a problem.

As far as the RAM goes, the system's FSB is limited to 667, if you buy DDR2 800 it'll just downclock.

I had a precision M65 before my Vostro and my game performance was pretty much identicle to anybody's Latitude W/120m,the D3d performance between 7400go,NVS120m,FX350m is exactly the same apart from versions that have more/less video memory or GDDR3 video memory like the XPS m1210 that enables higher memory clock rates to be used.

You will gain nothing in games by flashing an M65 bios to your 820 and the only way I know you can do it is by knowing Dells "forcetype..bios" command line to force the wrong bios onto the machine,but some of the methods the 17" guys use for flashing different bios's would probably work too...I don't know.

The only performance increase the quadro has over the 7400/120m is in openGL MCAD and digital content creation,where because of the M65 bios identification it adds openGL extensions and tweaks from the unified NVS/FX drivers to enable better performance and stability in those type of cad applications........the D820 obviously has different bios enabled optimisations to the M65 because I loaded Solidworks on to a friends D820 and it couldn't enable the "realview" realtime material rendering that my FX350m could and it also consistently froze at having 6 parts windows open,where a FX quadro is like......name your number.

To answer your questions
1.there is none,our resident Dell technician Mr Evil replaced his D820 motherboard and the soldered on GPU had FX350M printed on it,so the differences are bios and cosmetic only.

2.as above.its as optimised for games as its ever going to be,except for the usual overclocking [which does pretty much nothing in my experience]and driver versions,which seemed to have a huge effect for me on a few of the games it was struggling with.

3.highest i could get my FX350m was 505/820...it made 3dmark go up,but made next to no difference in games,stock clocks are the same as your nvs120m....BTW my GPU never got anywhere near as high as those[95 deg C] temps,highest I saw was about 70 if memory serves correctly,maybe you should disassemble it and give the fan/heatsink a lint clean out.

4.no it can't utilise the faster ram.

5.sorry,I don't know.

Lol,Mr Evil....beat me to it

Hey, I mentioned you buddy

There really isn't a fan mat that works with the docking station. And in all reality you don't really need one considering the DPort and DDock give the cooling fan a very nice gap to draw cool air from.

As for your laptop already being outdated. It might be for games, but it's still more than viable for everything else. You have to remember, when you buy a Latitude you're buying a system with the corporate bean-counter in mind. They're not built for gamers.

No such thing as a best driver for ALL games,I had quite good general performance out of the old 84.25,but for some games that were really struggling like R6Vegas,GRAW,I had to try many drivers [can't remember which versions]but I'll fly in the face of the convention here and say that the newest drivers are not always the best,unless it is a tweaked version for a specific game.Personally I think nvidia's drivers have taken a bit of a dive in the last year,probably because of them having to split resources between writing XP and Vista drivers.

I did have a quick look to see if tweakguides.com had any guides on NFS pro street but couldn't find anything,but I will be surprised if somewhere on the interweb,someone hasn't listed tweaks to .ini files or something to improve performance,usually at the loss of visual quality.

I truely miss my dock,I hope the E series have a bit more poke in the graphics area than what the later D series have had.....just for that small percentile that I fall into,who like business features and also like to play games