Could I upgrade the Quadro FX 3700m in my m6400 Precision to a 3800m ?

The electric interface of M6500 and M6400 is identical.

The M6600 and newer use a different interface. So a K5000M will not fit. It is completely different.

The 5000M is the fastest you will get for your M6400. I have also tried AMD firePro cards, but they are not quite as fast for gaming. And they do not work 100% in M6400 (no more BIOS screen).

Reto.

So, it seems that 3000, 4000 and 5000 will suit for M6400 - now I need to find the card ;) with heatsink.

At the moment I have FirePro 7740, it work but no drivers available - laptop is still power full and pretty fast. New gpu will give him another life. 

Can I contact you (via dell forum) if I buy new card ?

The driver for the 7740 can be found here :

www.dell.com/.../DriversDetails

The 7820 is way faster than the 7740, but requires a different driver. It still is 30% slower than the Quadro 5000M

Finding a 5000M is very difficult. The last one I bought I spent more than one year to get one on E-Bay. Sometimes they are sold for 900$ or more.

So good luck in findig one.....

Of course you can contact me.

Hi there - I know this is an old thread, but it seems to get very close to the nub of my query....

I have a Precision M6400 that does just about everything that I require of it...

EXCEPT that while running VMware, 3d games won't launch... I have found that this is an issue with desktops too... it seems any system running a Quadro graphics chipset won't work... so I'm wondering what card I could put into my M6400 to allow it to run VMware successfully... I tried a test on a Precision M6700 with an AMD Firepro card, and found the same issue... so I presume that I need a Geforce or similar card? your suggestions would be much appreciated :)

Your problem has nothing to do with Quadro or Gforce or AMD.

Because I am using VMWARE V11 and I do not have any troubles to start any 3D Game at the same time, like Raise of the Tomb Raider.  And I have a Quadro 5000.

I guess your M6400 has not enough RAM to run both VMWARE and a 3D Game at the same time.

You will need 64-Bit Windows and 16 GB of RAM, then your problem is gone. VMWARE takes about 2-4GB as a minimum. And a modern 3D Game takes another 4GB Ram. Windows itself takes another 3GB. So 10 GB ist the mimimum you need to run those 2 hogs at the same time. Under 32 Bit Windows you can forget that anyway.

Hi. Surely you can find up some mod of gf for this machine:)

In my case I was looking for dedicated drivers availabilities so, I stay with quadro for design purposes.

I have no 3d experience. I'm ok with @robotreto opinion.

Hi there robotero - thank you for responding... however, I beg to differ... I also have a Precision T3500 with a hex core Xeon & 12 GB RAM in it... it too suffered exactly the same 'silent crashes' of the game client while running a Quadro NVS card... as soon as I swapped it out for a (now outdated) Geforce GT-730, everything started working just fine...

for reference, this is not a modern game in any way... it was written in 2002 (Earth & Beyond) designed to run on Win2K & XP... when running virtual machines, I run WinXP instances in VMware 12.5 on the T3500 machine with 12 GB ram very nicely (the same amount of RAM as I have in this M6400)

admittedly, the Core 2 Quad in the laptop doesn't have the poke of the Hex core Xeon machine, but RAM isn't the issue & having resolved the issue in the workstation by changing the graphics chip-set, I'm surmising that the same line of inquiry would work for the laptop...

I look forward to hearing any further suggestions

PS i seem to remember reading above that the Quadro 5000 card had considerably better compatibility with DirectX... OpenGL or something similar - Presumably this is approaching the nub of the issue?

- the game runs fine outside of VMware, but I presume that VMware uses more advanced ***SOMETHING*** to virtualise several clients at once...

I look forward to hearing any further suggestions  & thanks again :)

OK, the NVS is really very basic of a card, with very little Video-RAM. The Gforce has at least double VRAM, so I guess V-RAM is not enough for both VMWARE and your game.

You can use a tool like "GPU Monitor gadget" to monitor the usage of your V-RAM.

A quadro FX1600M has only 265MB, which is probabely too small.

If I fire up VMWARE with 3 running VM's, it uses about 100MB V-RAM. That is about half what your card has. That could explain why your games wont run anymore while VMWARE is running.

My Quadro 5000M has 2048MB, which is plenty for VMWARE and games.

Which exact card do you have  in your M6400 right now ?

Hi - thanks for helping... I currently have in my M6400 a Quadro FX 3700M with 1GB dedicated RAM...

The game will run locally, at the same time as having an XP VM up & running,,, just not within the VM...

The laptop OS is Win 7 PRO x64, system RAM 12GB & chip core 2 Quad...

for reference, I can remember running this game originally on a Geforce 2 Ti with 64Meg dedicated RAM (back in 2002)... or was it 32meg? I forget...

hopefully the above is enough info for you?

all the best & thanks again

OK, that is a completely different story. You are trying to run a 3D Game WITHIN a VM. Not in paralell.

Well, VMWARE is not designed to run 3D Games, it's 3D performance is very low at best, and it's 3D accelerator is usually disabled by default. You should see if the checbox "Accelerate 3D graphics" is enabled on your VM. But even it is, it won't help you much. And anyway, why should you want to run 3D games from within a VM ? That is not a good idea. Most games run properly only when run natively. Even old games can be run on W7-x64, sometimes it needs tweaks, but google has most answers for that.

What you are looking for is "GPU passthrough" and I'm afraid you're out of luck there with VMWare. Microsoft, Nvidia and Autodesk are in an unholy alliance with Citrix. Xendesktop is the only virtual machine at this point which offers full GPU pass-through which is what you need for high performance 3D graphics.

Microsoft handed Citrix that market with Windows 2012 when they crippled RemoteFX HyperV. It only does virtual GPU. VMWare is the same story and so is Parralels. If you want to run Windows in a VM and see the full GPU Citrix is your only provider.

This was set up specifically so Autodesk could own the enterprise 3D graphics market for offices running 3DS Max, AutoCAD, Revit etc on large scale Virtual servers using Xenserver & Nvidia GRID cards. You don't need a 5000$ GPU for it to work, but it does need to have a WDDM 1.3 driver & Directx 11 minimum.

Googling GPU Passthrough for running games returns lots of results for people running Linux. But that's not in my wheelhouse.

Hi... Thanks for the response... Reason for running a game client within a VM is to be able to transmit macro type commands to several different clients simultaneously over the 'network' without having to run multiple physical machines... It works well with the desktop... But id like to be able to refine my code at times when I don't have access to the big machine... I'm not expecting it to perform well while running on the laptop, but without being able to open a client in a vm, I may as well be coding in the dark, with a pencil and paper!!!

So... Back to my original query... A graphics chipset that might work, AND fit under the keyboard

All suggestions gratefully accepted!!

Burt

Hello. I have the Quadro 5000m, I wanted to know if anyone is experiencing no dell logo upon bootup and if anyone else with this video card in the Precision m6400 has issues with outputing video through DisplayPort or VGA

I have a M6400 with the 5000M, I also see no Dell Logo upon bootup. This is probably because the Bios of the M6400 does not know the 5000M.

I did not try the VGA or Displayport on my M6400. I also have a M6500 with the 5000M, and there are no problems with VGA or DP under Windows. When in Bios, those will not work.. So I guess you are having a Windows problem or driver Problem when the DP or VGA deos not work.