M6600 Owners Thread

Photoshop does not currently take advantage of the GPU as much as other software does. Yes, it is used enough to make a difference, but not as much as rendering software. This may have changed in PS 6. Going for the 2960xm and having plenty of RAM will help you more than anything else in Photoshop. The IPS panel is amazing for working with camera RAW files.

The mSata decision will depend on the upgrade cost where you live. It is limited to Sata2 so you are looking at 300mb/s as the top speed. The 2.5" drives will double this. I used to say the mSata drive was an automatic option to buy, but the new Intel 330 series SSD drives offer a ton of performance for the money.

The platter drive continues to be the slow point in the M6600 I use. I mainly use a 750gb 7200rpm drive to store media files that are backed up to a raid0 eSata external drive. Using Canon RAW format files from the 5dmk2, I see some slowness on imports into Lightroom from the platter drive. I see more slowness when I am exporting large batches of files to jpeg. The slowness goes away when I work with the files on an SSD. Keep in mind that "slow" is ambiguous and relative. What is slow for me may be perfectly acceptable for others.

The 2960xm is very close or exactly the same in power use compared to the other quad cores on battery. The IPS panel is capable of pulling more power at full 300+ nit brightness and is normal at 180 nits where you would likely be editing. The 4000m is between 7-10 watts. Overall expect to pull around 30 watts of power. This should get you around 3 hours. Maybe 3.5.

The flip side is that the 2960xm is allowed to pull more power than the other quad cores when needed. I know the specs show the processor speeds being close on the quad cores, but the extra 10 watts on the XM chip means it stays in higher turbo clocks all the time. Much more of a performance bump than you would expect.

Video overclocking is up to you. Some people run mild overclocks for years and others run into issues. The M6600 has the cooling power to keep temps down, but you are pushing the hardware past what it was spec'd to do. I know that there are tolerances for all of the chips, so there is some room there, but we don't know what they are. I never saw the need to overclock the 4000m or 5010m. The 3000m would have made me consider it.

Only available in "Federal Grey" as far as I know.

No remote out of the box.

Compared to Alienware M17x, lighter weight, less bulk, brighter screen (no smoked glass), quieter, the M6600 can use a dock.

 

hi guys, for those who replaced HDD at the optical bay, do you use a common 9.5mm caddy or a specific model?

 

Yeah, I see your point.

When I work with simulation, filedumps are larger than 100mb, outside of memory cache and doubling data throughput on work drive would greatly improve performance.

Best regards

 

I just picked a 9.5 caddy off ebay. I made sure to get one that had a black flat exterior plastic bit so it didn't look too rubbish.

Ah - they have more. This is what I bought. It fits perfectly.

eBay - The UK's Online Marketplace

 

Thanks for insightful reply.
if i get three hours of battey life with 50% brightness its good enough for me. I will not overclock graphics card as well, but since processor is xm i want to overclock it .

Is the 2.5 SSD supplied by dell with m6600 is sata 3 and is of which model, brand?

also i believe these rg ips are only available as non reflective ones , is it true as i felt that rgb display of m6500 could have been sharper if it was refelctive one and colours might have been richer as well.

Can you or someone solve the dilemma mentioned in my last post regarding ssd, hdd, etc etc raid nonraid combinations?


photography is my hobby, you seems to know a lot about it, how do you calibrate the screen and which software you use for raw to jpeg conversion optimazation. i just use photoshop for it but was nto able to calibrate rgb screen of m6500 to perfection even with repeated attempts.


also does going for energy star 5.0/ epeat gold in config. causes any changes in laptop, or its performance,components, power consumption etc? even dell rep was not aware about it.

 

so it means raid o with 128gb dell ssd's one msata one sata 3 will be faster then sata 3 ssd?

 

Hey Guys, New Here..

Getting ready to order my first Dell and want to go for the M6600 with the following options:

2960XM CPU
Quadro 5010m GPU
IPS RGB Display
16GB DDR3 1600 RAM
2 x 750GB 7200 RPM HDD - Raid1 Configuration

I know the 750 HDDs are a bottleneck but I am going to wait for the cost of SSDs to drop and increase in capacity, then change to those in the future.

2 questions..
Any potential thermal issues using the 2960XM CPU ???
RAID1 as I really want the security of having an alternate drive ready to go in case of hardware failure on one of the HDDs. I had one hard drive crash in the past and even though I had everything backed up it was a pain in the neck to reinstall everything and I was down for 24 hours. - Anything I should know about RAID1, is it a good idea or bad idea, is it really reliable ???

Thanks in advance for your assistance..

 

About the ALPS touchpad.
If someone is not happy with his work in detail here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...place-hdd-etc-will-updated-4.html#post8459547

Best Regards, Alex.

 

Save some money and buy your memory some where else...these seem to work well in these machines..
Newegg.com - Kingston HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 HyperX Plug n Play Laptop Memory Model KHX1600C9S3P1K2/8G

What kind of programs are you going to run? The 2960XM and Quadro 5010m may be overkill, you can save a ton and just get the 2760QM and Firepro 8900. Then you could get your SSDs.

 

Of course it depends whether he can afford it. I do wish I had bought the 5010M but fully enjoy the 4000M. Bokeh recently said the 5010M has a 10-15% performance increase depending on what you are doing. That is quite impressive.

Any good RAM works well with the M6600. I have the Kingston HyperX and am very, very impressed by their customer service. Definitely recommend it.