M6600 Owners Thread

Can someone with a recent Chi Mei panel please look at your order invoice and let us know what the part number is? Not on a refurb, but on a new M6600. This way we will know if this panel is the same one sent out a year ago.

 

Just be careful. This seller is OK, but he does not guarantee no dead/stuck pixels unless you pay his higher $190+ price.

Scott-

 

I am about to purchase a Dell Precision M6600 laptop. I had purchased a M4600, but Dell gave me misinformation - so I purchased in error. After a long, drawn out battle, they finally agreed to take it back. As such, I am particularly reticent to order until I feel totally informed.

I was told by a Dell sales advisor, in response to my question about the IPS RGB (1920x1080) screen that "We do not do the RGB option now as it has been stopped due to technical errors." Clearly, the IPS RGB is still available, but is there any truth about the technical errors?

I chatted again to another Dell representative online, and he said "…we have not come across any issue as you mention on this IPS RGB screen" and “yes there are no technical errors with the IPS RGB". I asked him why one of his colleagues would say such a thing - he politely refused to answer. He also said the original sales advisor I had spoken to no longer worked for Dell.

Can anybody shed any light or offer any help please? I’ve been without a computer for a long while now and am extremely keen to place the order.

I do a lot of graphic design work (Adobe Illustrator/Adobe Photoshop) and as such believe this IPS RGB might be best suited to my needs, but had steered away previously on the basis of these alleged technical issues. Are there any technical issues? Is the second sales advisor just trying to make the sale, by denying the technical issues?

I live in the UNITED KINGDOM if it makes any difference to the specifications available (I suspect not)

Thank you.
Andy Leese

 

Not aware of any issues with the IPS screen on the M6600. Everyone who has it seems to love it.

There are a few things to note if you get an NVIDIA GPU. You can't use the integrated Intel GPU if you get the IPS screen, so you're stuck without Optimus and you can only use one external display. If you get the AMD/ATi GPU, it can't use Optimus to begin with and I believe you can still use up to four external displays (with a dock).

 

I'm the owner of a M6600 since July 2011 and I've been very happy so far. But for a few weeks, I'm facing a weird issue with DPC Latency.

I noticed this problem while gaming the first time, facing a huge FPS drop in the middle of a game (regular FPS is 60 and it dropped to 1), the CPU went crazy and according to process explorer, "Hardware Interrupts and DPCs" were eating CPU resources. So I went ahead and installed DPC Latency Checker and LatencyMon and tried to reproduce the problem (happens kinda randomly but is sort of easy to reproduce while gaming, watching videos or a stream) and this is what I get when the problem occurs:



So this is not a random spike, what I'm talking about is a real DPC Latency storm that takes several minutes and it makes my system unusable.

Just in case, I'll mention that LatencyMon is reporting ndis.sys has being the driver consuming the most time.

I'm not sure it really suggests that the problem could be networking related but, when the problem occurs, disabling the WiFi card driver gives me something less stormy (disabled driver at -39) but still unacceptable:



And after re-enabling it, well, the mega red bars are back.



From there, I just have to wait (some minutes, it's random) or to reboot to get back to normal...

What bugs me here is that things have been working fine in the past and I didn't change anything on my system, I have nothing fancy installed, I'm just doing the same things I was doing some months ago without any problem.

Still, I started to wonder if the WiFi card could be the problem so I went ahead and did a test using a wired connection with the Wifi driver disabled. Same problem happened. I also tested with WiFi only (NIC card driver disabled) same problem. I tried to disable Bluetooth related stuff, Audio card driver, and so on. Same problem.

But as I said, I didn't change anything on my system which was working fine. Why would I suddenly have a misbehaving driver...

Still, I did update some drivers (using those from Dell), the BIOS (using A09 now) just in case but, as expected, it didn't change anything and I'm really starting to wonder if this could be an hardware issue.

This is not a good news for me, I already had DPC Latency nightmares with another machine and was really happy with my M6600... so far. I really have no idea what to do/how to deal with this problem.

Do you have any idea or suggestion? Any recommendation on how to deal with the support about this?


In case it matters, I also noticed that my system is heating more than previously (it's not silent anymore even when doing non resource hungry tasks). According to HWiNFO64, my GPU (FirePro M8900) is constantly around 80°C (even when simply browsing, with 0% GPU utilization) and the GPU fan is constantly running fast. I'm very far from the numbers I can see in this this post. This is also something I'd like to solve, no idea if it can be related but it definitely doesn't sound OK.

EDIT: Actually, most noise comes from the left side of the machine so it seems that it is the CPU fan that is *never* going idle, even when doing non CPU intensive tasks. Still, 80°C for the GPU doesn't seem normal and I wonder if this could affect the behavior of the CPU fan.

Thanks in advance for your valuable inputs.

EDIT: I opened my machine to do some cleanup and removed some dust. Temperatures are back to normal, fans are running normally, the machine is silent again and... I didn't face any DPC Lantency storm yet!

 

I think the technical problem they may be referring to is the slight high pitch sounds that happens when you are on battery and the screen is at full brightness. It happens to mine, I either lower the brightness a little or plug in and it goes away.

 

need some technical help^^
i cant instal bluetooth.
according to dell site it must be placed as on pic (collored pins upper side)


but it didnt want to connect this way
if i connect it by other side its connecting but it agains dell site and sysytem cant see card as well((

help!!!
plz

*upd as i understand now. thera is a foll proof.. and only one way to attache it.. but system cant see it what can be wrong?

 

New to this forum

Dell Precision M6600
Intel i7-2640m processor
4gb DDR3 memory
Backlit keyboard
Quadro 4000M 2gb videocard
Samsung 256gb mobility solid state drive
17.3 Full HD LED display
Win7 Pro OS
8x DVD-RW
Intel wifi card
320gb 7200 RPM secondary hard drive
9-cell battery

 

Go into services and disable the 3 Intel Pro Set services if you don't use them. Especially the Intel Pro Set Event Log and Registry Access. I also have Intel's Zero Config disabled.

 

Only one way to connect is available.
"Upside down" does not fit...
In any case, after installing the Bluetooth adapter in the BIOS should appear: "bluetooth device - installed." Or something like that...
In the BIOS there is such string?

With best regards,
Alex.