M6600 Owners Thread

Model is PA-9E.

 

All my three precisions are hitting over 85c in 15 seconds with prime 95. the fan kicks in alright, but I am suspecting that there is no good contact. Perhaps the generic dell paste does a horrible job with conducting heat.

I am going to repaste my cpus. Did any of you guys experience much lower temp with repasting?

 

If anyone with access to an IPS display based M6600 feels brave enough to look inside, I would be deeply grateful if you can get the part number of the cable used to feed the LP173WF3 display panel. I suspect it wouldbe a 50-pin cable that plugs in to the eDP port just behind the standard LVDS port on the system board.

Thanks,
Scott

 

Well, I've repasted my XPS 17 with 'Arctic Silver 5' and the temps dropped like 5C right off the back. I'll let it cure for another two weeks or so and we'll see how that goes. As for the original pastes from Dell; it looked like dried cake icing smeared off to the sides with nothing on the surface, so yeah if I were you I'd change it asap!

 

I have three idiot question:
Changing thermal paste in CPU and GPU avoid warranty?
Is it possible to change a normal keyboard to a backlit keyboard?
Is it possible to upgrading a LED display to a RGBLED?

 

1) That is one of the most gray area. Technically, yes. But I mean you know...
2) Yes. Just get the parts. easy to swap
3) I guess yes, if you just swap the whole screen + lid. Though I am not sure if the ips or touchscreen ones come with different connectors. But I know that there is only one kind of motherboard, so I think it should work. Someone needs to verify this though.

 

I think the touch screen is a bit different, because it is thicker than the others. I will upgrade for a RGBLED, because the image is greater and I already use a Intuous 4 medium to draw (and it is more precise than the screen, and reads pen inclination and rotation too).

Thank you for your help, I think I am the only one in Brazil that has this mobile workstation, it is hard to get some info even from Dell. This forum is a must for me

 

Glad to hear that it worked out well. I've tried ReadyBoost with an SD card and my results were mixed; however, the card I used doesn't have particularly good specs in terms of R/W performance.

I still believe that using ReadyBoost on the mSATA drive will help out more than using it for the swap file (for most but not all workloads). Of course, the best solution would be to just use the mSATA drive as the system drive; then you don't need to worry about where your page file is and you can kill ReadyBoost as well. If the mSATA drive is not quite big enough, maybe you can find some stuff to move to or install on a different drive (infrequently used programs? Outlook data file? large documents, videos, etc?).

Anyway, you should be able to move your OS to the mSATA drive with little difficulty, if the mSATA drive is large enough to hold the stuff you have on your system drive. The steps would be something like...

* Install mSATA SSD. Make sure that you enable mSATA in the BIOS. You may want to boot up Windows with the mSATA drive installed and make sure that it is recognized.
* Use your favorite disk imaging/copying software to copy your system drive over to the SSD. (You should make sure it's something new enough to properly align the partitions on the SSD. I use Acronis TrueImage for this sort of stuff, always booting from the recovery media instead of using it from within Windows.)
* Remove your old system drive. (I've had cases where Windows got confused with drive letters if your old drive was present when booting off a fresh copy to a new one.)
* Set the BIOS to boot from the mSATA drive. (Warning - I've heard people complain that you have to check to make sure the mSATA is still the boot drive after you add/remove any other drives. The BIOS likes to move it off the top of the list.)
* Boot up and see if everything works.
* After the first boot you can install your old system drive again. Maybe keep it around until you're sure everything is working right, then format it and use it for something else.

 

- Rule of thumb is "no - as long as you do not damage anything in the process".

- Yes, the M6600 shares the same backlit keyboard as the E6520 and it is a 5 minute swap.

- Yes, but you need the longer 50-pin LCD cable since the standard 40-pin will not work. I am still looking for the correct part number.

Scott

 

I just did a repaste. The cpu temp dropped 10c if not more for other cores. Wow the dell stock paste is ridiculous...

the whole thing took an hour... there are three screws, two on one side and one on the other. this imbalance creates a huge discrepancy between core 0 and core 3. im seeing 8 degrees difference. Anyone else having the same issue?

and i noticed that with the gpu oced at 760mhz and cpu at 100%, i see throttling in gpu. major throttling. This is definitely bios issue.