Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Be sure to get the latest from Dell since there have been updates, also if you plan to RAID, the installation od the Intel RST drivers will be slightly different, I set the bios on AHCI in mine prior to clean installing. Also read rob's guide for the M6600 and you can also look at the reimage guide provided by Dell. No matte how you do it, Rob and I both recommend you go with a checklist for your drivers, so you're sure not to miss anything.

Speaking of which, I really need to make an index of the various owner's threads/reviews and other useful resources in this part of the forum and then sticky it. I'll find the time for that this week I guess since I'm on vacation.

 

Form without function is useless; and I hate chicklet keyboards.

Personally, I wished more manufacturers would spend less resources on glitz and stick to what's broken. Apparently the reviewer never noticed how much Mac has been keeping things the same. Their whole line looks the same.

Sure they switched to an all aluminum chassis, but you'd be hard pressed to tell when and where. From the outside, you can recognized any Macbook from across the room because they're all the same. Not to mention everything is sealed inside their box.

 

HP's straight lines design and the color choices suit my taste more, not it's keyboard (the arrows especially seem rather inconvenient). I'd prefer if the Dell M6700 was all-black on the inside like the M6400/M6500 are rather than this two-color style reminiscent of the HP 8740W. But, I still bought the M6700 (supposedly much better cooling, cheaper refurbished deals and being very satisfied with my M6400)..

 

When I first saw HPs new chassis I thought it was very sleek (save the Batman signal badge which serves no purpose whatsoever). Especially when compared to its spare parts bin previous generation design.

That new chassis design however became a non issue once I became aware of Dells performance advantage, which was much more important to me. If anyone wants glitz from Dell, he can always look to Alienware. BTW, I wonder what the reviewer thinks about Apple's box? The folks over there don't seem to care about such things.

 

hi and sorry, I haven't read the whole thread (lack of time)

I am looking for fast internal 2,5" HDDs (not SSDs) for virtual machines (virtual server) with max IOs, which fits into the M6700.
The startdisk is a 128GB SSD MiniCard.

Are there anybody who has running Windows 2012 Server on M6700?

Thanks

Regards Thomas

 

Any 9.5mm thick HDD will fit, 7mm drives will also fit. A thicker drive won't fir in the main bay, but I don't know whether you could fit one in the secondary bay or not.

 

My M6700 was delivered today (just in time for 2012 taxes). Dell's Website indicated it was in "Production" with an ETA of 2013/01/07. Dell updated it to "Shipped" after I received it.

Just finished upgrading and installing software. The Graphics WEI went from 6.8 to 7.3 after the software updates.

Just ordered a Samsung 840 PRO 512GB and a 256GB SSD, Crucial M4 256GB mSATA and 16(2x8)GB of Corsair 1866, CAS 10.

Hope I didn't make a mistake choosing the Samsung 840 PROs over the Intel 520 SSDs.

I opened the back and see I will have to replace the memory from the top =(. The SSD and mSATA drives appear easily accessible from the bottom.

Last upgrade will be the BluRay.

I see Dell has rounded the edges of the palm-pad over that of the M6400 which is a bit more comfortable. The corners of the palm-pad are still a little sharp.

 

If you're only installing 2x8GB and you don't have any plans to go up to 32GB, you don't need to Install the RAM from the top, just replace whatever Dell put in it. Otherwise, aside from removing the keyboard trim which is a bit delicate, putting RAM below the keyboard is quite easy.

 

Dell put 4GB (2+2) of 1600 memory on top. Need to remove that so it won't conflict with the 1866 memory. On my M6400, the memory was installed in top/bottom pairs. I have 12GB (4+4) and (2+2). To get it to work, (4+2) were on top and (4+2) were on the bottom. I thought that was strange, but it was the only way it would work. There was even a blurb in the manual about it.

I will max out from 16GB to 32GB once I can find a use for it with VMWare.

 

Ah, I see. when I ordered mine with a 2GB stick, it was installed uneder the access panel instead of the keyboard. Well, it's a good opportunity to install your new RAM under the keyboard, that way the upgrade to 32GB will be easy.