M6600 Owners Thread

Oh, absolutely, but if you have a SSD as your main drive and a HDD as your "storage" drive (which you don't access often at all) then power consumption vs. not having the HDD and just having the SSD will be higher, but not egregiously so.

 

i've fondled several M6600s, some new, some refurb. IMO, the external build of our M6300 is better than the M6600. The plastics are of a higher quality and the M6300 shows wear a lot less than the M6600. The lid is like a bank vault door on a M6300. The M6600 shows wear a lot faster, things like paint wear on the corners.The lid on one of the new M6600 we received was not aligned correctly, the center was too tightly locked which bowed up the sides. All in all, not too impressed with the external quality on the M6600. The way the M6300 lid latches is much more robust compared to the M6600
I think with the M6300 the thinking was it would travel a fair amount, so the design was like a business class Latitude, with high quality plastics, whereas the M6600 was more thought of as a desktop replacement first, a traveling laptop second. Just my opinion.

 

I tried, but nothing can be done it seems

BIOS needs to be unblocked.

 

I still have an M90 and M6300. I agree with you about the M6300 not showing scratches as much. I think the reason is that the M6600 went to an all anodized metal while the M6300 had more plastic and one sheet of brushed metal on the cover. That anodizing is very tough until something like metal or grit scratches it. I only have one scratch between the two M6600s I use and it was put there by airport security. Imho, the Latitude E6x00 and E6x10 were the worst about scratches - especially the red and blue ones.

Both the M90 and M6300 show much more wear on the palm rest and the silver on the multimedia controls has worn off.

The hinges are much looser on the M90 and M6300 than the M6500 or M6600.

The lid clamp on the M90 and M6300 is more functional, while the M6600 is more clever.

Keyboard and touchpad are vast improvements in the M6600.

System cooling and access to internals are on a whole other level in the M6600. Plus, you get an mSata plus 2 2.5" drives. I like being able to clean the fans without having to tear down the whole machine. I also like that for whatever reason, the fans in the newer Precisions don't clog up like the older ones.

I think the biggest progress came from the Precision line not having to share a platform with the Inspiron line. The M90 was the Inspiron 9300. The M6300 was the Inspiron 1705. I know the internals were different to allow the use of docking stations and Quadro cards, but the chassis and lid were the same with different colored plastics.

By progress, I don't mean casework. I respect your views about the M6300 case design. What I mean is a redesign based on performance.

The M6300 had to get rid of 35watts of heat from the processor and between 50 and 70 watts from the GPU. The M90 - that shared the same basic chassis - only had to deal with 45 watts from the GPU. The mobile quad cores were coming and produced 45 watt of heat. The Quadro GPUs were marching towards 75 and 100 watts of heat. In just a few years you went from a system using and needing to cool 80-105 watts to 145. Now its 155 watts. Dell could have stayed with 105 watts as the max for the system and just throttled the CPU or GPU to stay within that envelope. Instead the M6400-M6600 went through a complete redesign with very robust cooling so that the machines don't throttle. They also upped the power adapter from 130 to 210/240 watts.

I don't want to sound like I am complaining about the older machines. The M90 and M6300 I personally have had for around 5 years still work fine. They just don't come close to the performance of the new Quad core processors and GPUs. What I used to have to do with 3 machines, I can now do with 1.

 

I thought I'd chime in on this thread as Dell replaced my trusty M6500 with an M6600....need to change sig yet.....hello Bokeh, how goes it )

 

Hey Zoid! Let me know which panel you have now. Hate to hear you knocked out your M6500. Mine is still running fine with 224 days left in the warranty. Will go back though your posts and see what went wrong with it.

 

Oh sure, I'm not even comparing hardware performance, or cooling because there is no point. The performance advances are stellar since the M6300 came out. I'm just looking at externals, the tactile feel. The M6600 is a more elegant design, but I'm not a fan of the latching. You can see the difference here in this pic of the latches on the M6300 compared to the M6600. Pretty thin metal loops compared to more substantial metal hooks. Our M6300 lid is heavier, flexes less, and closes like a door on a Mercedes. I think one of the reasons wear shows faster on our M6600 is things like the plastic trim on the edge of the lid is painted plastic, or appears to be, so the external color comes off when worn. I think the M6300 has a molded color plastic trim, so it shows less obvious wear. I'm looking at these things pretty close.

 

I have the FHD panel 1920x1080, not touchscreen, on the m6600....and quadro 4000....everything was an upgrade except ram. My m6500 kept crashing with no blue screen...new motherboard didn't help, so they sent me a new machine (Prosupport, if that matters). It's nice and smooth running again now. PS: have a color profile?

 

I just recieved my Dell M6600 and i have not even yet booted in windows as i am planning to sell it immidiately but in comaprision to Dell M6500 and my old trusty Dell M4400 i can say i am impressed build quality,panel gaps, feel wise.

Yes i completely agree that there is a problem with the design- when the laptop lid is closed there is visible gap between the lid and bottom so much so that it looks unsightly for a premium machine, if you press on the lid there will be some give ,while m 6500 used to shut perfectly with no visible gaps. The gap is uniform though.

Also just my two cents i like the placement and design of DELL logo on M6500 better, or if they had to put it in center they could have given it some glow like Apple or even Dells own M2010.
Otherwise i feel keyboard is better , area around the keyboard is classier. laptop looks better built and panel gaps are less. SPeakers grills looks superb. The new colour of laptop is unique as well. i also quite liked the placement of power connector point and shifting of some ports at the back.

 

The screen latches are metal, they don't show any ware after 6 months of use...


Unlike the corners of the lid...