M6600 Owners Thread

Funny, I was watching the same auction. That computer is like mine, well, my son's. He took mine over and now I need another. I love the M6600.

 

$1250 !!!! wow..

 

Our last M6600 is equiped exactly like that, and we paid 1100.00 total from the Dell outlet, and we got a free refurb color laser printer with it. It does take some effort to beat the script robots who lurk in the outlet.

 

Man... I was mad the price spiked like $250 in the last minute...but it was cool. I used Auction Sniper: eBay Sniper and eBay Bidding snipe, bid sniping for eBay

to make sure that I get the auctions I really want. It placed my bid with like 12 sec. left so nobody else really had a chance to react to my $1400 max.

 

That's an awesome deal. I watched the outlet for a few days but I wasn't happy because it didn't seem to give enough detail on the computers listed (either that or the ones I was watching just didn't seem to come with the specs I wanted). no camera/backlit keyboard,etc.

I think I'll be really happy with this one for a while.

But anyways, what about the repasting thing? Is that something you think I should be done on these systems fresh out the box?

 

This is something that some people are more concerned about than others. By repasting, you might get the temperature of your CPU down a bit, or get a more even temperature between the four cores. This might help with performance by allowing the CPU to stay in "Turbo Boost" mode longer (since the CPU will automatically scale back the operating frequency if it gets too hot). However, the general consensus is that the cooling solution in the M6600 is pretty darn nice, and many people report that the CPU is able to stay in "Turbo Boost" all the time (when your workload demands it). I'm personally not sure if this is something that needs to be bothered with. Even if your CPU is running a few degrees hotter than what it could be if you repasted it, it's not going to burn itself out.

 

1) Is there a way to get game apps to take advanage of 16gb or 32 gb)memory? My general understanding is that few apps (outside of VMs. and pro apps) take advantage of anything outsude of 4 - 8gb ram.

2) Is there a reason that the machine can only see 16gb of 1600mhz ram and yet see 32 gb of 1333mhz ram?

3) Given latency differences any point in buying 1600mhz ram?

4) Whats the recommended color calibrator for the IPS screen? How often should you use it to recalibrate the screen?

 

HTML:

1) If an app doesn't use that much memory, then that's that. However, having more memory than yours apps need to use can still be beneficial. Your OS will cache content from the hard drive in memory so that subsequent requests for the same data won't require an I/O request to the hard drive (much slower than reading from memory). You can see this in action in the task manager. If your machine is on for a long time and you don't have much fluctuation in how much memory your apps are using, you should see the "cached" value use up all of your remaining memory and the "free" value be very low. (If an app suddenly needs more memory, the "cached" memory will be released of course.)



So, the more memory you have, the more stuff from disk you can cache, which means potentially less hard drive activity. Maybe the files for the game you played yesterday are still cached in memory when you sit down to play the game today (if you didn't reboot or hibernate your machine in the meantime), which means it will launch much faster.

2) This is a limitation of the memory controller in the Sandy Bridge CPUs.

 

Why 2920XM doesn't go beyond 3192Mhz?
Never seen it on 3.5Ghz

 

Nice one, that is a flaming relief after all the hassle of switching from default RAID to AHCI, that means I can just Trueimage clone my current drive to the SSD. I think I will uninstall the programs that do not benefit from the SSD and reinstall them to the fastest HDD. I think with 16GB Ram I can probably afford to lose the 8GB 95M/bps SD readyboost. I will also reduce the pagefile to 4GB and keep an eye on it with the Process Explorer. If I also put a 8GB on the HDD that should compensate for any excess.