M6500, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This does not make sense at all, you're telling me if I hook up a 16:10 external monitor it will not work? Pshh I bet I can force that resolution.
Edit: Where did you get this information from, because it sounds like a load of?

 

Well, I should probably have been more specific. More appropriately, Intel Sandy Bridge will not be supporting greater than 1080p for hardware acceleration for HD video. So while you could hook up a 1920x1200 external monitor, you would lose all hardware acceleration features from the Sandy Bridge IGP. This doesn't mean, of course, that you can't have a discrete card that would drive a higher resolution monitor, but it's yet another "excuse" for manufacturers to switch over.

 

Is that so? The trend is "deeper" than I thought! My qualification "crazy" still holds.

 

Interesting but a bit misleading. If you using a 1920x1200 with a 1920x1080 source video you are ONLY processing 1920x1080 of video footage regardless of monitor resolution being higher then 1920x1200.
This is totally acceptable considering I haven't seen any HD movies that have the video source@ higher then 1920x1080, apart from certain documentaries shown in certain "UltraHD" ready theaters, that is if you can even get that footage since the DVD/Bluray versions will be downscaled, and the bitrates on @ that resolution would be monstrous to house in a hard drive (think 200GB files or maybe even terabytes for getting close to lossless).
Actually, now that I think about it I don't think many GPU's support hardware acceleration for video source footage in resolutions higher then 1080P.

 

Well, I know for sure that it's hardware acceleration is only supported for HD video of 1080p or less, but I've also heard (with less attributable sources) that it's no hardware acceleration at all for anything over 1080p. If it's the latter case, that's a lot more serious than just the former.

 

It's definitely the former. The latter would be suicide for Intel.

 

Well that's easy to test if you find someone with a SB platform:
Create a video with 1920x1200 pixels (just stretch a 1080p video in your favourite video edition suite - image quality doesn't really count here) and try to watch it only using the IGP.

 

Yep.


Also announced today, the Dell Precision M6600 and M4600 mobile workstations are designed for users who need raw horsepower, superior design and usability, world-class scalable performance and certified-operation. More details on Dell's mobile workstations will be available in the coming months.

 

The M6500 isn't a perfect laptop, but then again, no laptop is. Despite the occasional issues, the M6500 is one laptop. It has handled everything i've thrown at it without breaking a sweat, and it's still one of the most powerful laptops you can buy. Buying one through the Dell outlet can save you a ton of cash too!