E6540 Owners Thread

Did you try to set the power plan to Ultra Performance (max fan speed)? I ran prime95 on all 8 cores and the unigine valley benchmark on the 8790m for half an hour, and the lowest CPU speed I saw was just below 2GHz. Also I played Diablo III for a few hours and did not notice any throttling (although Diablo III of course is not the heaviest of game titles). Also were you on battery or plugged in? My tests are all plugged in.

 

Yes I tried Ultra Performance. To be honest, I got better results with slower modes : they give enough power to play and seem to heat less, so I could play a bit longer.
I also tried plugged in. I even tried without battery, since sometimes the battery itself can produce too much heat.

Once I have time I'll do the exact same tests that you did and install diablo3 to see how well my computer copes.
Anyway thanks very much for your comment, it gives me hope. If there's some e6540, somewhere, without heat problems, it's just a question of time before I get mine fixed/replaced by Dell

 

A screenshot of speeds and temperatures after the half hour torture test with prime95 and unigine valley can be found here.
You can see the CPU speed in hwinfo64 just below 2GHz, the load on the 8790m in AMD system monitor between 60 and 100%. Also you can see CPU package power between 27-49 Watts which indicates there is enough thermal headroom for the CPU to use at least 27 Watts even when the load on the 8790m is 60-100%. CPU temps (courtesy of CoreTemp) are between 80 and 95 degrees Celsius for the duration of the test.
My settings in Unigine Valley: 1366x768, ultra quality, 8x AA

 

I'm thinking about buying the new Latitude E6540 and I have some questions:

On the Dell Spain website, the only possible configuration is with 9-cell battery and 130W AC. Are really necessary the 9-cell battery and 130W AC?

Anyone knows if would it be possible to work with 6 cell battery and 90W AC, in therms of power consumption?

On the other hand, what are your impressions about the FHD display?

Thank you!

 

Based on the review here the E6540 consumes max 90 Watts, so a 90 Watts adapter should be sufficient, but on full load the adapter would not be able to charge the battery. The 6 cell battery would work of course, but battery runtimes will be around a third shorter than with the standard 9 cell battery. Here and in this thread you can read some user experiences about the FHD display. My opinion is that it is not earth shattering good but certainly does the job. I especially like the brightness.

 

Thank you TheByteBoy!

I would like to ask you all another question:

Notebookcheck review warns of some construction fails (imprecise gaps, a slight offset of the display cover...) .Your units also have these failures?

Thank you all!

 

My E6540 also has the imprecise gap between the lcd and the bezel, although not as bad as the pictures in the review. The plastic border surrounding the keyboard does not click properly in place in the bottom right corner below the numeric keypad on my sample. That's about it. Overall it looks and feels very sturdy and build quality is miles better than most consumer notebooks imho.

 

As mentioned on Review Dell Latitude E6540 (i7-4800MQ/HD 8790M) Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews Latitude E6540 has AU Optronics B156HW02, which is also one of the OEM panels that come with Precision M4700.

So does it mean that any replacement panel for M4700 is going to be direct fit for E6540 as well, for example the excellent AU Optronics B156HW01 V4/V7 panels ?

 

Some of the drivers provided on my Dell resource DVD have recently been superseded. Below are the updated drivers I'm downloading for my own system.

Drivers & Downloads | Dell US

Realtek High-Definition Audio Driver - 6.0.1.5974, A03

O2 Micro OZ777xxx/OZ621XX Memory Card Reader Driver 3.0.08.18, A01

Dell Multi-Touch Touchpad Driver - 8.1200.101.131, A02

Intel HD, HD 4200/4400/4600/5000/5100/5200 Win7/8 64-bit Driver - 9.18.10.3204, A04

 

When I bought my E6540 (8/14/2013) I too was frustrated with the lack of configurable options. So, I called Dell and got a sales rep. She explained to me that the reason they don't allow choices in memory and hard drive is that they pre-build and pre-load the machines with those basic parts so they can do immediate ship. Some other machines can be configured more completely but they have a much longer time from order to ship.