Quadro DeskMini Upgrade: Possible? | Level One Techs

Poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/15271095

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://level1techs.com/video/quadro-deskmini-upgrade-possible

Hi there!

I am the Geeqi_Tech that Wendell threw the shoutout to!

A few things that we discovered that Wendell glossed over that I think are somewhat important to know if you’re trying this yourself:

  • For the “FUCK NVIDIA” crowd: Wendell and I were communicating back-and-forth on this LONG before Nvidia announced their GPP program. I have no reason to believe that AMD FirePro boards will not work, I just happened to have the M2000M on hand, and the K3100 was more easily obtained than an equivalent AMD FirePro board.

  • HP is weird. I mean, you all probably knew that, but the M2000M’s BIOS was completely empty. Turns out that for HP, they store the VBIOS on the system board, alongside the system BIOS. If you get a board sourced from, or made for an HP laptop, you WILL need to flash it with a suitable VBIOS.

  • The reports of the death of MXM are greatly exaggerated! But you may very likely see a lot less of them in the future. There’s an article I saw a ways back that opined that Nvidia was killing the MXM standard: Not true! The MXM standard will continue to exist as long as notebook manufacturers continue to find value in being able to have one system board, with an MXM slot to plug whatever different GPU you order on it.

  • However: What NVidia is not doing any longer is providing reference layouts for MXM boards for their products, and indeed, some of the effects of this can be seen. For example, the most recent line of mobile Quadro chips, I have found, all at the low end, such as the M1200 (Yes, they started over their numbering, it’s dumb) are soldered onto the board, thus making it impossible for Wendell and I to source an up-to-date Quadro MXM board to test. One can probably expect the thin-and-light workstation laptops to move towards BGA solutions, while the beefier, desktop-replacement style workstation laptops to continue to use MXM boards. (Sadly, I do not have the wherewithal to drop $1,200 on a LAPTOP workstation GPU on a lark where we weren’t entirely sure if this entire experiment would work, let alone a desktop one!)

  • Tangentially: I have already seen some of this happen in the case of my Dell 7577 that I’m using while I wait for GPU/RAM prices to unfuck themselves. My 1060 6GB is a BGA, soldered right onto the mainboard. I have no easy upgrade paths off this, much to my disappointment. (eGPU still remains an option, though I’m down on that based on TB3’s lack of bandwidth… but that’s too far a tangent here!)

  • If you’re interested in a Quadro-powered Deskmini, VOTE IN THE POLL! Despite having provided the hardware and some research material to Wendell, and basically being set to do this all on my own, I would still go with a warranty-supported solution as well, since these replacements are going to a work environment, not my own personal use.

There will be another video in a few months . In what I’m sure is entirely unrelated news did yall see the rumor about ASrock entering the gpu pcb market will the non reference designs? Heuheuheuheuheu

I did. ASRock have always been the kinds of mad scientists of computer hardware. Like, I’m sure that if anyone in the world has an mITX board layout for Threadripper or something kicking around, it would be ASRock and they just haven’t come out with it yet, because they haven’t solved the problem of looking too hard at the wire paths making your vision swim a little bit and causing you to hear the beginnings of whispers of eldritch things not meant to be seen. =P

(ASRock, I love you guys, I really do!)

GPUs are just a natural extension for them.

edit: Wait, are you going to hold onto my M2000M and K3100 for few more months? XD

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