Dell Precision M6600 as Mobile OS X Workstation
Yes, you read that correctly. After running OS X on this machine for just over six months, I’m finally doing a write up. (A proper write up, sharing my personal experience, as well as troubleshooting and the wealth of knowledge I’ve come across with this machine. If you’re simply looking for a guide, you can follow my initial development guide over on TonyMac.)
So, a bit of background. I first purchased my main Precision M6600 off eBay back in January of this year for $280 + $25 shipping. It was a bit of a mixed bag as far as laptop purchases go. The machine was essentially barebones - missing both hard drive caddies, no battery or charger, no drives, no RAM. What the machine DID come with, however, was a full 1080p HD display (matte display, of course, none of that Mac glossy crap over here), a discrete MXM Quadro 3000M video card, a quad core Sandy Bridge i7-2620QM @ 2.2GHz, and a rather dent-free chassis, fully functional. Now, this might not sound like that great of a deal to you. I mean, the laptop doesn’t even work out of the box, but when you’ve been collecting spare parts for as long as I have, it’s not that much of a problem. Prior to the laptop being delivered, I had purchased two SSDs, one mSATA and one SATA, plus a 750GB WD Scorpio Black 2.5″ drive for mass storage. As you might have guessed, one SSD is for OS X, the other for Windows. I grabbed 16GB of RAM (and had another 8GB lying around), plus I bought a 240W charger and a 97Whr battery for less than $100. An added bonus - I had a FirePro M8900 (ironically, removed as dead from another M6600 that I would acquire a few months down the line) that I was able to revive with an oven bake.
So let’s break this down. For just under $500 and some spare parts, we now have a 17.3 inch workstation grade laptop with a full 1080p display, discrete video card, quad core i7 CPU, and all the trimmings. This equates (in layman’s terms) to about a 10,000+ Geekbench score, topping out at 32GB of RAM, 30+ FPS in Fallout 4 in 1080p high settings, and more drive capacity than you know what to do with. Sure, it’s big, sure it’s heavy, but this thing is designed to substitute your desktop on the go, so enough of your complaining.
Alright, time for the OS X bit. If you didn’t glance over my installation guide, now might be the time to do so. We’ll get into some technical aspects of what I did to this machine, but not nearly as in depth as the guide goes. Now, be warned, this isn’t for the feint of heart. Laptops are always a bugger to deal with, let alone to run OS X on, especially with an undocumented, unrecommended discrete GPU. So let’s get started.
Now, despite its workstation-class FirePro branding, the M8900 is actually just an AMD Radeon 6970M with FirePro VBIOS flashed into it for better CAD performance. Personally, I’d prefer the gaming performance a bit more, so I took some time to flash the M8900 over to said 6970M using the standard DOS boot and atiflash utility. Also, Apple released a 27 inch iMac in 2011 that used a 6970M, so the framebuffer is already built into the drivers in OS X - we just need to load it. I use Clover as my bootloader for better NVRAM emulation and on-the-fly kext patching. To load into the installer, we can select the “Cattail” framebuffer to allow OS X to utilize the 6970M. The Precision M6600 boasts a full size DisplayPort connector as well as a rear HDMI connection which can all be run off of the 6970M in OS X. See the guide for framebuffer patches to allow for the internal display to be detected as LVDS and to enable the HDMI port on the rear of the laptop.
What’s also worth noting is that since this is a workstation laptop, it’s compatible with Dell’s docking stations. Using my supplied framebuffer patches, a triple monitor setup can be utilized in OS X by using two external DisplayPort monitor and the internal LCD. Simply use your Dell Dock (I own a PR02X) and connect one DisplayPort monitor to the leftmost DP connector on the dock and then the 2nd to the DP connector on the right of the M6600. This can also be used in dual external display mode if you close your laptop lid, a favourite of mine. We also use OS X 10.10.5 Yosemite, as 10.11+ has a sleep issue with Radeon GPUs. Upgrading beyond Yosemite is not recommended at this point. The OpenCL performance on Radeon cards makes something like this ideal for Final Cut rendering and other Apple based applications.
Now, remember that Quadro 3000M that shipped with the laptop? It’s not unusable, but it might as well be. I’m using the MacBook Pro 8,3 SMBIOS on this machine. The Quadro 3000M has graphics acceleration in OS X, but the AppleGraphicsDevicePolicy.kext needs to be patched in order to enable the Q3000M on MBP8,3 SMBIOS. This can be achieved by adding:
<key>Mac-94245A3940C91C80</key>
<string>none</string>
To the appropriate Info.plist file in the kext, then re-installing the entire GraphicsControl kext. NOTE: This is still under development. Though the internal LCD works, sleep does not function and external displays are very hit or miss.
Note the ACPI patches as well as the standard Power Management post-install objects in the guide. With the help of RehabMan’s excellent documentation, battery readings are enabled with a simple patch (I’ll probably get around to uploading this into RehabMan’s repo sometime soon, but for now, just do it manually) and the normal DSDT mask fixes we would select in Clover can just be baked into our patched DSDT. PikeRAlpha’s ssdtPRGen script gives us proper power management for our Sandy Bridge i7 (also, thanks RehabMan for adding the MCFG table drop into his default config.plist for Sandy Bridge laptops - it’s helped a lot with my installs.)
We also need to drop ALL OEM SSDTs on this machine. It will boot up and run fine without it, but I’ve found that CPU intensive tasks like streaming cause the machine to crash without the tables being dropped.
Personalization & My Usage
Now, 6 months in, I can almost say this is a perfect machine. My two gripes with it are very small. Firstly, Clover has some issues with the BIOS/UEFI on this machine. UEFI installations of Clover often lose the boot device after minimal changes to config.plists or Windows installations. While UEFI installations are possible and do work (I’ve tried it, they DO work) I prefer to use the legacy option, even though it’s slower. This still gets thrown all out of whack when large changes are made to Clover, but it’s a bit more recoverable. Often, the boot priority simply gets changed around and needs to be corrected once or twice. I keep OS X on the “Minicard SSD” so that I know which device I want at the top of the boot device list. I used to keep it on an “Internal HDD” but since I have two of these, it gets confusing and you have to view the identifier, and it’s a big mess.
Secondly, OS X is buggy with the ExFAT driver. If a system is not shut down properly, (yes, A system, either OS X OR Windows) then OS X loses vision of the ExFAT drive. It can take a few minutes to recover the drive and often needs a good restart afterwards for things to work 100% again. Now, obviously, the solution here is “Don’t use an ExFAT drive.” I use ExFAT as a shared, symlinked Storage drive for my Documents, Downloads, Pictures, Videos, Music, etc. between Windows 10 and OS X. I could use an NTFS driver for OS X or an HFS+ driver for Windows, but this frequently ends in compatibility issues for loading games or saving large files, so we’re just gonna deal with it. Apart from those issues, the machine is great and runs next to flawlessly. If you don’t mind carrying around an enormous laptop, it’s got plenty of power for streaming, video editing and mobile gaming for around the $500 price point. Keep in mind, this is a 5+ year old machine we’re using here, but it keeps up just fine. The MXM GPU is upgradable as well, and from what I’ve seen, MacVidCards has succeeded in installing an MXM GTX 980M into his Xserve and had it up and running in OS X. Now, I don’t have that kind of cash to drop on this laptop (I just spent it all on a GTX 1080 for my X99 tower) but that seems promising if you can deal with being stuck with a Sandy Bridge CPU. Yeah, Ivy Bridge won’t work in this machine. It’s pin compatible, but the instruction set isn’t in the BIOS. I even tried that, too.
