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Dell 810/M70 questions - dock, sound card, graphics

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First post, by OldCat

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A while ago I bought Dell Precision M70 with the purpose of making it offline XP gamestation. You know, early 2000 games, but on a fairly portable and powerful rig. Some time later I stumbled across this post here on VOGONS: Decent retro gaming laptops

StickByDos wrote:

Dell Precision M70
Pentium M 760 Dothan 2GHz, 2GB RAM and Nvidia Quadro Go 1400 256MB, can be softmoded to GeForce Go 6800, or replaced with a GeForce Go 7800GTX 256MB
Its docking station add 1 PCI slot, put an X-Fi inside and you get a good DX9 era portable rig.

Colour me interested! I asked in that thread for some clarification on these statements, I also sent a private message to that user - but to no avail in both cases. I did my homework, but still have some questions.

What I have established so far:

  • The docking station aka the dock with PCI slot - I checked and the only one compatible I found was Dell PD01x, which has a PCI slot. I haven't found any other model.
  • The "softmod" that the author refers to is probably using RivaTuner to change the video card id, so that software sees it as GeForce Go 6800.

However, I still have these questions:

  • Could anyone confirm that indeed the "softmod" is that trick with RivaTuner? Also, why is that important? Most information I found on the internet was a reverse case, namely people changing their 6800 to be seen as Quadro for use with CAD.
  • There is a lot of different Sound blaster X-Fi models, including some on USB (?). Does anyone know which one makes sense in this setup? Low-profile one, best one, what are your recommendations?
  • Has anyone seen GeForce Go 7800GTX 256MB out in the wild? It seems to me that this is a very elusive and therefore expensive card. Would the additional processing power gain be worth the price of admission and inevitable heating problems?
  • Just out of curiosity, would it be possible to put in another graphics card in that PCI slot in the dock?

Also, if anyone is using these machines (D810/M70) for gaming, please share any additional information you think could be relevant.

EDIT: minor typos

Reply 2 of 5, by ph4nt0m

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Dell Precision M70 and Latitude D810 are essentially the same, though there is one important point. D810 could be configured with either Radeon Mobility X600 128Mb 128-bit, which is a Radeon 9600 class discrete video card in a Dell proprietary layout, or Radeon Mobility X300 64Mb 64-bit, which is soldered to the mainboard.

M70 came with Quadro FX Go 1400 256Mb 256-bit, 12 pixel pipelines and 5 vertex pipelines. It's basically a GeForce 6800. However it's NV41 based, not NV40. So, there are no extra pipelines to unlock.

There are not so many upgrade options. Dell Quadro FX 1500M and 2500M are G71 based, but they make use of a different proprietary layout. Dell Radeon X1800 256Mb 256-bit is compatible. This card was sold with most XPS M2010 portable desktops. They overheated routinely and most of them are dead or artifacting by now.

I think these notebooks can make very nice Windows 98SE gaming machines. Neither Quadro 1400 nor Radeon X600 support 8-bit palletised textures and fog table emulation for some old DX5 titles, otherwise they are great. You want something more powerful for Windows XP gaming such as Precision M90, M6400 or XPS M1710, M1730.

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Reply 4 of 5, by galland101

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I used to have a Dell XPS M170 gaming laptop. It had the option for a GeForce 7800 GTX Go GPU so that was a laptop that was confirmed to have it.

I’m not aware of an external USB X-Fi sound card but I did own both a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 NX USB sound card as well as an Audigy 2 ZS CardBus sound card. They seemed to be OK but they don’t work with the laptop’s built in speakers so you’ll need headphones or external speakers if you want to use them. Those are possible options for you for that laptop.

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