I finally swapped the video cards between the M90 and M6300 today. The M90 has a Rev00 3500 and the M6300 has a G92 Rev01 3600M.

The M6300 runs great with the 3500M. No issues and brightness controls work great.

The M90 is another story.

The power/led connector can not be hooked up. The 3600m is a bigger card and the power/led connector is about 1/2 inch to the left on the M6300. This means that the right 4 pins are covered up by the video card's circuit board and heat sink.

There is also a piece of plastic to the right of the card that would have to be broken off.

I was able to boot the machine using the D-Dock power button. I had the same dim display brightness issues. I also has issues with the card heating up and no fan coming on.

The heat issues became too much of a risk, so I powered the machine off before installing the 175.75 drivers or flashing the bios.

Since the 3600M is really powerful (in terms of performance, heat and power) I believe old laptops couldn't handle it very well. Does anyone know if the 17 inch XPS have the same form factor (a good motivation to upgrade the 3600M in the future) ?

The form factor in the 1730 is much more modular than the 9300/9400/1705/1710/M90/ chassis. The are not the same at all.

The M6300 shares the same overall chassis with the M90, but things have now moved around inside the case to accommodate the physically larger video card.

Have you tried 3D Performance (FX 3500M on M6300) ?

I have installed a FX 2500M on a M6300 system board A10 Bios, the card is working but its clock is fixed to 100MHz (100MHz core + 100MHz mem).

FX 2500m doesn't switch to 3D Low mode (200/300) or 3D Performance mode (500/600).
It always remains on 2D Mode (100/100)

Off Course the same card works correctly on M90 System Board

I have done more or less the same, installed a FX 3500m rev A01, into a M6300.
Work almost perfect, brightness controll works the opposite way, meaning "Fn +
↑ " gives a darker display and visa vera.

My problem is that the dell bios will not recognize the video card. Device info in bios says "unknown video card". Can you recall if your bios did recognize the FX 3500m card?

Kurt

No surprise here, as we know the older M90 would not reconzie the newer GPU VBIOS. even if the physical limits could be over come.

Dell has a habit of keeping preveous GPUS in the BIOS config for newer laptops. (within the same product line aka Precision, Inspiron etc)

IF there's a upgraded bios you will have full control.

This was a problem with the E1705 until just recently when they updated the bios, inadvertantly allowing the 3600M to be recognized.

Sucks for m1710 users for now.