M6600 Owners Thread

2. With the exception of the benchmarks, I haven't noticed a difference with the 1600 over the 1333 even under heavy use but your usage may be different. Due to dell's markup for memory the most economical thing to do is usually getting the cheapest RAM you can from dell & replacing / supplementing it with aftermarket RAM.

3. For gaming I don't think you will find much argument that the 8900 is the way to go. I have a 3000M and it works very well with large files in Photoshop & Premier Pro. I can't speak to it's gaming capabilities however. I find optimus to be a big plus for battery life if you spend a good chunk of your day doing non gpu / cpu intensive tasks. I am currently getting 6.5-7.5 hours of non cpu / gpu intensive use per charge with the backlight around 40%. When the 3000M is on I get roughly 2 hours per charge.

4. Bang for the buck I would go with the 2860QM and put the extra cash towards a Quadro 5010M if your spending much time using cuda enabled apps. If you don't need cuda support the money would be better spent on a larger or additional SSD in my opinion, but again it all depends on how you use the machine.

I can confirm that 1600 32GB (8gb x 4) operate at 1600 without issue.

I think (and I can be completely wrong here) that the Ntrig calibration calibrates the touchscreen to its environment. Determining where the screen bezel is touching ect & calibrating the touchscreen to ignore these areas. The windows input calibration is orienting the touchscreen to the display.

It should be a standard size screw for any 2.5" drive as the SSD is the threaded component. 3.5" drives use a larger screw. I found that as the m6600 bracket is a bit thinner than others and / or my particular drive was threaded a little shallow, I needed slightly shorter screws than normal or you could use a washer to fill the gap.

 

@dafunk60 - thanks for the info. Since i will go for RGB IPS so i believe optimus will not work for me, correct me if i am wrong.

also as you said to go for 5010m instead of xm cpu, i am interested to know how much performance gain does 5010m has over 4000m and 8900 in terms of cad and gaming.

also how much performance gain is there in between xm cpu and next best quad core offereed by dell?


does having 4gb video ram makes difference ?

 

I think your correct regarding no Optimus with the RGB IPS display but I cannot say for sure. Check PassMark - CPU Benchmarks - List of Benchmarked CPUs for a basic comparison of CPU's. I only recommended the 5010M as something to throw your money at. If you need cuda support the 4000m is probably the best bang for the buck. Will the extra 2GB of vRAM make any difference? It really depends upon what your doing. If gaming is your priority go with the 8900. If CAD / Photoshop is your priority go with a Quadro.

 

Does anybody manage to replace the optical SATA with a normal SATA HDD/SSD? Would it be recognized by the RAID controller to be the 3rd HDD?

I am thinking of RAID 5 but do not want to use the mSATA option as it's just too expensive.......

Another thing is the replicator. Can M6600 work with both PR02X & PR03x?

What about power supply? M6600 can only be powered by 210W/240W AC Adapter?

 

I've got 3 disks with one in the optical bay - 2sec I'll reboot and check it for you.

brb

 

confirmed. It supports RAID5 using the drive in the optical bay.

However remember that the optical bay only supports SATA2 where the main two bays support SATA3.

Cheers

 

i have decided to go for xm cpu and 4000m , i game and use solidworks etc as well. i think its best balanace of cad and game as i read in this forum many times.

and 1600mhz 8gb ram


also ssd wise , i believe a raid with trim is not supported right now?

is msata ssd slower then 2.5 sata ssd and by how much, both ssd;s being supplied by dell

 

Quadro 4000m and AMD 8900 are very close to each other. The 5010m running stock clocks is faster than an overclocked 4000m. Overall the 5010m is 25-35% faster depending on the application.

Also, you can enable or disable the ECC ram on the 5010m.

There is no power penalty between the 4000m and 5010m. They both seem to have the same battery life in their lower powered modes.

The decision will come down to a couple of things:

1 - Do you need ECC ram?

2 - Are you running an application where rendering in 2 hours instead of 3 hours matters? In an 8 hour day you can complete 4 renderings vs 2 (3 if you stay late).

3 - Do you like to play modern games with all of the details maxed out and running at 1920x1080?

Some of the decisions are judgement calls. Some of them will pay will increase productivity and pay for the card many times over.

 

That is correct — If you have the IPS display, you cannot use Optimus.

It is supported with the latest Intel disk controller drivers installed. (Actually might still be beta?)

 

Thanks a lot!!!! SATA 2 is good enough as the RAID controller onboard may not be able to handle SATA3 at all. A SATA3 HDD is still so much slower than a SATA2 SSD

I will be getting 3x240GB or 480GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe. The RAID controller can easily be saturated.... seems like SSD is going to cost more than the M6600 itself....

Or maybe a pair of SATA3 Mushkin SSD on RAID 0 with one of the stock HDD as backup...