Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

I just put a cooling pad underneath E6400 when I do autocad or play game

 

you can enable or disable the powermizer functionality, it is basically just a flag that you can set. the temperature and what you are using the gpu for (e.g., game, hd movie, etc.) are monitored, and if you have powermizer enabled, it will downclock when it is not necessary, or if the heat goes too high. (i am fairly confident that disabling powermizer still will force a downclock if the gpu really reaches too high anyway, although i am not certain of this). note -- you can have powermizer enabled or disabled for both battery and AC power.

and it looks like my gpu is getting a bit warmer after the machine has been on much longer, it is now in the range that GB reported.

 

PowerMizer technology is part of the video card drivers (and hardware, as not all Nvidia graphic card has it.. for example the 7400 Go does not). It's flag to turn on/off is in the registry. Once changed you need to restart your computer to apply it.

Disabling PowerMizer will reduce system battery life significantly. However, will give you a the ability to play games when running on the battery (however, don't expect much hours of game play using the 9-cell battery.... maybe ~3hours.,.. depending on how the game is demanding)

 

And where is that flag on the registry? I just want to check whether it is on.

Is there any way to tell whether it's on?

 

I know the E6400's gpu wasn't exactly made for gaming (which is fine with me because I should be CADing more anyway lol) but what games have y'all been able to run well? What would y'all recommend?
I'm not a serious gamer and just want something to do when I'm bored. I like FPS and Strategy games (no WoW).

Also, does anyone know any good uses for the PC-port? In retrospect I probably should have gotten a model with an Express slot, but it really wasn't high on things I was looking for (I got mine refurbished). From what I've seen the PC port can add more USB ports, add a network card and that's about it. Is anyone using their PC-port in a cool/interesting way?
I just hate to see a port go to waste

 

Well, I can help you out game wise. I'm mainly gaming around the Source engine right now, with games like HL2, CSS, TF2, and L4D. With the exception of L4D, the E6400 can run the rest of those games are pretty much medium-high settings getting anywhere from 40-80 fps (more if you overclock). L4D runs pretty badly actually, I can only get anywhere from 20-50 fps (even overclocked) on low settings at 1280x768. I guess you could go down one more resolution to play at a higher FPS. Though, even with TF2, the 160M card cannot run the game at all high setting (even overclocked).

Also, I've tested other games such as Empire: Total War, Rome: Total War, Crysis, and GTA4. Rome: Total War obviously plays really well even at mostly high settings. Empire: Total War on the other hand is a totally different matter...your going to have to be running this game on all low settings which honestly ruins the game experience since it frankly looks like crap. And even then, you'll still lag a bit on the campaign screen. Not a great game to play on this laptop. Crysis will run at low-medium settings, I'm sure you could tweak it a bit more, but it'll run decently. I didn't clock the FPS, but it's definitely not above 25 probably. But considering it runs, and is playable is interesting. Finally, GTA4 barely plays at all on this laptop. I tried running it, and I couldn't get it to have more than like 10 FPS period. GoodBytes had better luck running the game at basically all low settings at 800x600 resolution getting somewhat playable settings.

So obviously, this machine isn't really meant for real gaming. However, anything a year old or more should definitely play really well.

 

Thanks. I'll probably pick up The Orange Box. One of my friends is all about Portal.
I figured that games a few years old would be my best bet.

 

The E6400's seem to be on sale now. These are the brand new units and not from outlet. Lowest price is $769, and that includes the P8600 processor and the 3 year warranty. This is an excellent price, and Dell Business prices the options very reasonably, IMO. Like WXGA+ for $49, BT for $20, Intel 5100 for $20, etc.

This actually works out much cheaper than almost any other laptop in the market if you want a P8600 and the Intel 4500MHD graphics, not to mention the 3 year warranty. Yes, they only give you Home Basic, but Windows 7 is a very good choice on this laptop. The default HD is only 80GB, but drives are so cheap now. So is memory.

 

Well my "ticking" fan has now been replaced. Dell guy came out and whipped out the fan with the copper heatsink and replaced that whole item. I did notice that the cpu had thermal paste on it and the gpu did have what looked like a bit of double sided tape on it, although I highly doubt it is that.

Other then that, I was VERY surprised how quickley they came out. The call to Dell was made Friday late afternoon, I got a call this morning to organise a time and he did arrive a bit later then that time, but he did have a couple of jobs ahead of me and as I work in IT I understand that some jobs just take a bit longer than others.

But all in all it took all of 30secs to get the back off and yank the fan plug out and remove the screws holding the heatsink in and pop it off and whack in the new one.

Just FYI yes my E6400 lives 90% of it's life docked.

Was a bit concerned when we first booted it up, the fan didnt seem to come on, even when we stressed the cpu to generate some heat, cpu got quite hot before I decided to shut it off. The Dell guy rechecked all the plugs and screws and the like, and we turned it back and and the fan seemed to behave itself after that, sitting on slow until we stressed it and then the fan kicked into high.

But now it is great, nice and quiet again, compared to the "tick tick tick tick tick" noise it made on slow and the "tickticktickticktick" noise it made when it was on high.

 

Thank you so much "GoodBytes" and everyone for your time and effort to answer my questions. These info I got from you guys help me a lot.

One more doubt.

Now I am interested in "cool slide" which is a plate stick at the bottom of Latitude and Precision's notebook. I'd to ask you who has the coolslide about how much temperature that coolslide could reduce?

Thank you