M6600 Owners Thread

i jsut came to know about IVY Bridge processors . I need to know fast when are they going to be in m6600 and how what are there advantages disadvantages over i7 2960xm?

will it allow by any chance running of IPS panel directly via integrated graphics?
I hope Bokeh and others answer soon enough as after placing the order this news has arrested my thoughts.

 

Well after a couple of months having spirious errors with my 4*4GB of Corsair memory I came to the conclusion I had a controller fault on my m/b. So I called Dell and they sent out an engineer to replace it. Lo and behold it has fixed the problem. The only thing now is that I have incurred another one. When the engineer finished I tested the machine and it was fine. I signed off his work OK. Then after an hour or so I realised that the back panel was depressed and a gap shows. The fact that I have paid so much for this machine and I am unfortunately meticulous about my equipment it is irritating me and I am certain it was level before as when I bought it I replaced the keyboard for a backlit one. It looks like something may have trapped under something else to cause this to pull down. Any ideas? Has anyone else had this issue or are your panels straight.

 

With details about the M6700 beginning to surface, I'd say that it's unlikely that we'll see Ivy Bridge CPUs in the M6600.

No one knows yet when the M6700 will be released. Not all of the Ivy Bridge CPUs will be released until early June so I don't think we'll see it before then. Also, the Precision tends to be one of the last machines refreshed with the new generation of CPU technology so it'll probably be a while after that.

I have not seen any indication that the integrated graphics in the Ivy Bridge CPUs will be able to drive a 10-bit display. So, no IPS off the integrated GPU.

 

They are all like that to some degree. The problem is most likely the palm rest and not the keyboard trim. Towards the back it can be difficult to tuck in all the cables just the right way to get the palm rest as flat as possible. Personally I blame the speaker enclosures.

 

There are a couple of reviews out on the IVY Bridge processors ( Intel puts Ivy Bridge on the map: first 22nm product, decent official benchmarks, desktop quad-cores from $174 -- Engadget ). It looks like Sandy and Ivy Bridge processors will have about the same CPU speed at the same clock rate. Comparisons between the 2860QM and 3820QM show a small bump in processing power for the 3820QM, but it also runs at a higher clock rate. There were some very specific areas where the Ivy Bridge was faster like media transcoding.

The big bump in speed comes for the built in GPU on the chip. Around 50% increases. If you are running Optimus, great. If you are running on the discreet graphics card, it won't matter. Intel does not say anything about the GPU's support for 10bit color. In fact they go to greater lengths to say it will be backwards compatible. To me this says 8bit color.

The other side of Ivy Bridge is power savings. The new processors can run at full speed and only use 80% of the power that the Sandy Bridge chips use.

Putting it all together, I think Ivy Bridge is mainly aimed at the users of smaller all-in-one notebooks. Much better integrated graphics with Direct X 11 support. Lower power usage. Integrated USB 3 support. I am anxiously waiting to see how Dell uses all of these tiny advances in the new Precisions. The thing is, most of it is already there in the current machines.

You will have to make your own decision about when to buy a Precision. Prices and availability will be much better on the M6600. If you do a lot of heavy video work, maybe you wait for the Ivy Bridge version. If we do indeed find out that Ivy Bridge will work in the current machines, buy now and upgrade the chip later if you want/need to.

 

it looks like to me that ivy bridge offers no tangible performance upgrade for people using descrete graphics. Except may be slight more battery life. As Bokeh has rightly said all of other features are already present in m6600 like usb 3.0 etc coupled that with long time for m6700 launch i will go ahead with m6600 offer.

 

The problem of current implementation of usb 3.0 in M4600 and M6600 is that it's not natively supported by the chipset so one can't boot from an external hd in usb 3.0. Personally I have an external hd with ubuntu installed and usb 3.0 in current machines is pretty useless to me because the ports won't be ready until the S.O and drivers are charged.

 

That is a very good (and specialized) reason to wait. Right now you would be limited to using the USB 2.0 or eSata ports. At least with eSata you get 300MB/s which is about 2/3rds of USB 3.0 speed. Of course you also might be able to use a USB 3.0 external drive without an extra power supply plugged into the wall.

 

Has anyone crammed a 12.5mm HDD into a m6600?

 

With all this 7970m news, does anyone think that the M6600 will be able to support it? That card is the only upgrade that I can think of that I'll want for the next year or two.