M6600 and M4600 are coming in Feb.

Yes. I am pissed enough by this that I have decided not to order a new M6600, and wait if they come to their senses next year (re: a 16:10 display), when Ivy Bridge comes out. If not, and I won't hold my breath, I'll have to see if some other manufacturer (other than Apple, of course) will offer a16:10 display on this kind of a machine. If they do, then that will be the end of a long and happy relationship with Dell for me.

 

Considering production of 16:10 screens has been halted you probably won't see other companies than Apple offering 17" 1920x1200 screens.
And Apple will eventually run out of supplies and will be forced to move to 1920x1080 sooner or later anyway...

 

"1. Is using 2 external monitors simultaneously with the internal panel only possible with the AMD card? "

Thanks Pirx, for both your answers. However, would you care to elaborate on how it's accomplished with the Quadro cards? From the marketing blah-blah, I only am clear that the AMD eyefinity technology is used; does it also support nVidia cards (which I doubt for obvious reasons), or is nVidia's own nView is used with the Quadro cards?

The latter would seem to be a natural answer, but somehow I never saw it in the new Precisions' specs...

Also, in any case, are there any limitations regarding the 2 (in my case) external monitors' resolution? Do they need to be the same?

TIA,

Piotr

 

Why oh why does Dell only offer IPS on the M4600?

Pirx, I doubt Dell will reintroduce 16:10 to the 17" considering the latest reincarnation of Elitebook goes to 17.3" and 16:9, and Lenovo has killed off the W7x0 series (completely disappearing off the ThinkPad roadmap).

You'd be better off sticking with a M6500 or 8740W.

 

Yes, you can use nView for that.

Yeah, I know, I've really lost hope by now. Heck, it's even getting hard finding external monitors at 1920x1200. I am running on an M6400 for my day-to-day work now, and that's going strong and is perfectly fine for what it needs to do right now. Given the work it takes for me to configure a brand new machine, I may even wait for Win8 to come out before I go down that route. Not sure really when that might be, but it could even be two years from now.

 

This is not correct. Both the M4600 and M6600 use MXM for their GFX cards.

 

The AMD GFX cards do not have a form of power management. Only the NVIDIA GFX cards do via Optimus.

 

Optimus can be disabled, turned on and off, in the BIOS.

 

Was the rep I communicated with incorrect or does it mean that while the Dell systems are MXM equipped, Dell has elected to lock the graphics card in place for some reason? If it's the latter, what is the benefit of doing this? Other than wanting to keep customers coming back every two or three years to buy a full system when they might only need a new graphics card, I can't think of a reason.

I guess one thing that had me confused is that it seems that, AFAIK, the only laptops that have upgradeable graphics cards are MXM systems, but MXM offers system builders other benefits, so they may or may not retain the ability to change the GFX card in any given system.

 

You are not alone. We've decided to suspend upgrades for another year. Given Intel's Ivy Bridge development timing, that might cause us to defer purchases until Q4 of 2012.

Strategically, we may stop trying to use laptops as workstations:

> The built-in displays don't have the necessary aspect ratio.

> The device drivers and utilities are unstable and add far too many programs and background services, many of which don't play well together. When your laptop ships from the factory running MS SQL server for a hardware feature which is not installed, or when there are three programs installed, running, and competing to configure your WiFi, someone should be asking why. Less bloat means more stable. Less bloat means simplified support.

> Providing support for these bloated boxes is expensive. Compounding the problem, it takes hours if not days of coaxing and pleading to get effective warranty support.

> Reliable laptop equipment is too expensive.

It is a sad state of affairs for laptops.

There used to be a time when marketing ascertained what the customer wanted. These days, their function seems to be to tell us what we want.