[SOLVED] Upgrading a GPU in Dell Precision M6600

[PaulieVideos]

Hello,

I know Precision M6600 can have a dedicated GPU and I was wondering, I found one in a used market with only Intel HD graphics, meaning the GPU slot will be empty. Obviously I can buy a gpu a put it in the gpu slot but is there the heatsink for the GPU or does the variaton with intel HD graphic lack a gpu heatsink.



Additionally, I was wondering what would be the best value for money gpu for the laptop. I was browsing some other forums seeing people putting in gpus like GTX 680m, 960m, HD 7970M, HD 8970M. I would like to avoid Nvidia quadro if possible.

 

[alceryes]

I doubt all of those GPUs are available for this laptop. A quick look at the spec sheet only lists 3 different Quadros and one FirePro available for that model.
Also, this is a very old laptop. Even if you were able to find a GPU, at a decent price, you'll still have the task of installing it. There may very well be additional heatsinks/fans or a completely different CPU/GPU thermal solution that needs to be installed.

You will spend less money, and get a faster/better performing laptop by spending $400-500 on a cheap, new laptop, or even $300-400 on a 1-2 year old used one.

 

[PaulieVideos]

I doubt all of those GPUs are available for this laptop. A quick look at the spec sheet only lists 3 different Quadros and one FirePro available for that model.
Also, this is a very old laptop. Even if you were able to find a GPU, at a decent price, you'll still have the task of installing it. There may very well be additional heatsinks/fans or a completely different CPU/GPU thermal solution that needs to be installed.

You will spend less money, and get a faster/better performing laptop by spending $400-500 on a cheap, new laptop, or even $300-400 on a 1-2 year old used one.

I'm not spending less money on buying faster/better laptop, here the at least decent laptops start at $1200. And most of the used laptops here are underpowered and overpriced overheating garbages.

I got this M6600 for $270, got 32 gigs of ram for $72 and a GTX 680m for $45. That makes a total of arround $387. For this price all I can get is a new chromebook with Intel Celeron N400, yeah that doesn't sound appealing at all. As for the used ones, all there is are few ancient thinkpads and HP G2s with that all lack what this M6600 is good at.

 

[alceryes]

Yeah, I guess price/performance depends a lot on where you are. I recently picked up a brand new HP Notebook 14-dq1039wm (off eBay) with i5-1035G7, 8GBs RAM, Iris graphics, 256GB M.2 SSD, and paid about $15 less than your $387. Putting in 32GBs would be cheap and trivial, but I'm in the US. I also consider laptops, and components, that are almost a decade old, to be a risk in and of themselves.
Good luck with the GPU upgrade. Make sure you download the latest BIOS available to support all the possible hardware options. I would also install the GPU more sooner than later to make sure that it's functional before your return window (if there is one) expires.