Latitude E6400 Owner's Lounge

I am now an owner of the E6400 (upgraded from D830)

P9500, 4gb ram 160gb hard drive. other goodies added in.

so far, it seems to be a nice upgrade from the 830. though i like the chasis of the D series better.

using this forum i figured out the crappy audio fix woot!

using RMclock and dell fan utility. i have the CPU undervolted and the temps usually hover around 43-46c idle fan off and 51-53c both cores maxed out fan on.

 

Welcome.

What is your maximum CPU voltage and are those max temperature with the fan on slow or fast?

john

 

If someone wants to give a go at getting rid of the constant HD LED blinking in Vista they can try this guide:

Beginners Guides: Stopping Vista From Thrashing Hard Disks to Death

Also it's likely that E6400 "suffer" from another "new" increased hd light activity introduced with SATA DVD drives. On some laptops/computers the HD LED actually just shows activity on the SATA controller, and because the DVD-Drive in E6400 is SATA, it's constant polling for disc/autorun could also be reflected in the HD LED, that is if the HD led just reflects general SATA activity.

A discussion on SATA dvd/cd/blueray drives causing HD LED activity

So if you really want to try and see if you can get rid of hd blinking you could temporarily unplug the dvd-drive (then you're sure this isn't causing HD LED activity) and follow the guide in the first link. (If you don't want to remove the DVD drive you can also disable "module bay" in bios).

Update:
Alternatively instead of removing/disabling the optical drive you can try turn off autorun (which should stop the polling).

Disabling autorun - Which is basicly setting the registry value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom\AutoRun to 0 instead of 1. (Don't know if it requires a reboot afterwards to take effect).

 

Removing the DVD drive significantly reduces the amount of blinking the HDD light does.

Thanks for that, though the light never bothered me, since the drive wasn't doing anything.

Greg

 

max cpu voltage with multiplier 9x is 1.0625v
max cpu voltage with multiplier 6x is 1.0125v
i had the 9x voltage down to 1.050 but it failed stress test after a few hours.

fan is off at idle which i have the cpu throttle to 12.5% and 6x multiplier. temp is ~40-41c

fan is slow at full load, which i have the cpu not throttled and 9x multi. temp is ~51-52c

for the fan to hit high, the cpu has to go over 56c which i haven't seen yet.

 

Hey!

Just to let you know that the the guy responsible of technical escalations has got my problem fixed. I now have the right E-travel light module. It's quite slimmer than the one I originaly got that was too big for the bay.

Anyway for the E6400 you should look at this:
Dell part number 0M011C.

 

How much weight does it save?

 

I've had my E6400 for about a month, and the fan is driving me a little nuts. When it's off the docking station it's perfectly fine (fan is off when idle, then bumps up to slow under a normal workload) but on the dock the fan runs on high almost constantly.

It seems that the combination of running dual monitors on the dock and the Intel video card causes too much heat.

When idle, according to I8kfanGUI my processor temps are around 38-41, HD temp is 35-37, and GPU/Memory/Chipset temps are 47-50. With everything else constant, the fan goes from off to slow when the GPU temp hits 45 or so, then up to high around 49-50. The fan doesn't seem to actually cool it down much, so once the fan goes to high speed it often doesn't come back down until I turn off the laptop.

I've tried moving the dock around (helped a little), upgrading the BIOS (didn't help), removing some programs like Windows Desktop Search to keep idle processor/memory usage down (helped a little), undervolting (didn't help), and a few other things that didn't help much either.

Anyone have any advice? Would I have the same problem with the NVIDIA chipset?

 

I'd say yep...because I have an E6400 with the NVIDIA chipset running on an E/Port Plus with multiple monitors and I'm experiencing almost identical symptoms as you are. When it's undocked it's great but when I'm docked that fan runs nonstop. I'm going back and forth with tech support now on a few issues and this is one of them.

I've got a really slow POST (towards the end of the Dell splash it really sits for a good minute) and then a really slow preboot authentication (another 1-2 minutes before it allows me to authenticate) and then the boot speed is actually great from there to Vista x64 w/SP1. I have an unknown device but it's not driving me nuts at this point (Hardware ID USB\VID_413C&PID_8149
in case anyone has an idea.)

I did fix the DVD burner issue by loading the Intel Matrix software application (not just the driver...I had to load the APP as well to be able to burn with no errors and now it works great using NERO 7.)

I'll keep posting solutions if I come across them. I did order 8GB RAM to hopefully mitigate the physical RAM issue (it's a company laptop so thankfully it's not out-of-pocket expense.)

Good luck and let me know if you come up with ideas for the fan. Oh I should add I'm using 2 EVGA DisplayLink USB to DVI adapters plugged into my E/Port Plus on my desk to be able to use 4 screens total (3 Acer 2216's and the laptop...one into the E/Port Plus and the other 2 on the adapters.) Everything works great except every time I reboot I have to enable and reconfigure the two displays running off the USB ports. It's odd...when I login it builds my last (and the right) display setup but then something loads and it goes back to mirror mode instead of extend mode. I guess I'll be talking to DisplayLink or EVGA next.

 

I found this buyer's guide for the E6400. I find it has many useful recommendations, though some are relavant only to the Penn university services. I particularly found the ordering notes very useful.

http://www.upenn.edu/computing/provider/docs/hardware/rlatitudee6400.html

I followed the advice and ordered my E6400 with the p8400, 4 GB RAM, NVidia graphics, 9 cell battery and the LED backlight display.

Maybe somebody else might find it useful too.