Love WUXGA, DIY E6500/M4400 mix and questions about HDD/SSD

My question:
1. Does 7k500 500GB HDD run very hot? It seems much hotter than my old Seagate 500GB 7200.4, but quieter though. Anybody has the same feeling?
2. I never use a SSD. I frequently copy VMWare machines between hard dirves (about 20GB for each copy). Is it a good idea to use SSD drive? Will SSD die soon under this kind of operation? Is SSD much coolor?


Then I am posting my experience of DIY a laptop for those who like WUXGA screens.

I had a T61 for many years, it’s time to buy a new laptop. However I could not find any laptop from Dell/HP/Lenovo comes with 16:10 screen, everybody is making 16:9 (1920*1080), why?
I am a developer, vertical resolution is very important for me to read/write codes. The other feature I want from a laptop is: able to install 2 hard drives. I use a lot VMWares (XP, XP SP2, XP SP3, Vista, Vista SP, Win 7 etc) to test software. 2 HDDs will run faster, you just put VM machines on different HDDs.
My friend is using a E6500, which seems a pretty nice laptop for MEN. 15.4" 1920*1200 screen, 2 HDD spaces, perfect for me. And he told me E6500 is very easy to dissemble. So eventually I decide to make an E6500 by myself. I like M4400 too, but I don’t need those powerful GPUs, and they run very hot.
I ordered the following stuff from eBay:
Used E6500, P9600 CPU/8GB Ram/Nividia/Bluetooth/WXGA
A Fingerprint Touch sensor
A set of new laptop shell (Palmrest, base cover, base, bezel etc)
M4400 LED cover
M4400 RGB-LED screen
2x 7K500 500GB hdd

After I finish, it’s looks like a brand-new laptop. I have to say, this is my dream laptop. It's WUXGA, 15.4", quiet, not heavy, runs fast, and can smoothly run 4-6 VM machines together in the same time. The only issue is 7K500 seems run very hot.

RGB-LED screen seems much brighter than dual-CCFL, please check out my attachments. The color of RGB-LED is more vivid, but my camera can’t show a lot difference. For lower price, dell’s dual-CCFL screen is nice too, but the brightness is very low when start or resume from sleep. All comparison pictures are taken at 100% brightness and 10 minutes after LCD turned on (wait CCFL to warm up).
Dual-CCFL is on the left and RGBLED is on the right:

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Is it possible to add more photos to a post? I cannot figure out, I just added more pictures on this post:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...-mix-questions-about-hdd-ssd.html#post6865259

 

The Tom's Hardware charts suggest that the 7K500 and 7200.4 have similar power consumption (and heat generation). In fact, the Hitachi has lower power for some tests, such as streaming read.

The charts here show that most SSDs have lower power consumption than 7200rpm HDDs under the same operating conditions. I would expect an SSD to provide a visible performance boost if you are running several VMs each with their competing I/O requirements.

John

 

@WUXGA - if you are using a lot of VMs like me, you can use a solid state drive for your primary drive and get a hard drive housing for the media bay to run your VMs off of. I don't think there is an official Dell one, but it's not hard to find off of eBay.

Worst case, you could use an external running off of eSATA. It's just as fast but I don't like carrying an additional drive if I don't have to.

 

Good job man! More pictures would be appreciated.

 

Great conversion job! Never knew the RGB-LED fit the e6500
There's a thread about adding a 2nd HDD using a caddy for the mediabay here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-ssd-hdd-storage-using-optical-bay-caddy.html
There's a caddy complete with latch mechanism and everything that fits the E6500 and other models perfectly.

How much was the laptop + new parts total? And yeah, more pics would be great

 

Thanks Everybody! Here are more pictures...

Under daylights my camera shows more different of colors between 2CCFL and RGB-LED.

Most parts of E6500 and M4400 are interchangeable. That's how I figured out I can upgrade the screen to RGB-LED. I do noticed one thing: There are two different LCD Covers for RGB-LED screen. The only difference is the color of LCD connector cable. One is kind of blue-ish, the other is kind of yellow-brown-ish. The LCD screen is much brighter with the yellow-brown-ish cable.

Now my E6500 looks more like M4400 when closed. I do like the finish of E6500's LCD cover. I believe If I replace the LCD cable of E6500, I can use a E6500 LCD cover.

I am currently using a 2nd caddy from newmodeus. It's the best caddy I ever used. LPTP-LVR, do you have the link for caddy complete with latch mechanism?

Two 500GB HDDs make 1TB space, it's necessory to save different copies of VM Machines. I am considering using Corsair P256 + Scopin Blue 750GB to replace my 7K500 500GBs. How do you think, jason1214?

I also upgrade the wifi to intel 6300N. I don't know if it's because of the new wifi card, or new bios. My new E6500's wifi light will blink when data transfering. I like this feature a lot since I started using Lenovo T61. But my friend's E6500 comes with 5300 card. His light won't blink.

One more thing, I removed the thermal grease pad from the headsink and applied Silver 5. Don't know if it's because Silver 5 is more efficient than the thermal grease, now the bottom of the laptop is much hotter. I just ordered Dell's original thermal grease pad to see if it will bring my cool laptop back.

About the cost, I bought too many parts from different ebay sellers. I estimate my E6500 costs about $1200. Much cheaper than the new laptop I wanted to buy, HP 8740W, which could also be too heavy for me.

I hope this laptop would last 5-6 years. P9600 + 8GB memory, should be possible. Don't know if 15.4" WUXGA laptop will be back then.

I like the auto-dim feature of Dell, have been envying this feature on Mac for a long while

 

That is pretty cool. I would have loved to have a 16:10 screen but didn't really know about the interchangeability of parts on these laptops.

Good job man.

 

The most simple way is get an used E6500 from ebay, and also the following parts:

P351D (RGB-LED WUXGA back cover)
TR217 (RGB-LED WUXGA Screen)
X938R (Screen Bezel)

If you cannot find these parts, you can call dell, dell sells parts too, but more expesive than ebay.

These 3 parts are very easy to install, can be assembled and installed in 5 minutes. Then you just upgrade other parts in the laptop to whatever you like.

To find a specified parts you need, you can search "Dell E6500 Tag" or "Dell M4400 Tag" to collect a lot of system tags. And enter these tags into the following page:
Dell - System Information

Then you search on the parts you need, you will find the part number. That's how I got those parts numbers.

 

Sweet info. Thanks, but I just recently bought an E6510 from Dell.

 

Well yeah, it's in the first post of the thread i posted