m6600 processor selection

As stated in the owners thread, I placed an order for a m6600 with a 2860QM. Now before the last release, the 2920XM took the 2.5GHz spot.

So besides the XM rating, overclockability and the TDP, is there really a different between the 2920XM and the 2860QM?

Also, does the m6600 even allow you to overlclock the CPU?

 

No.. The Intel XTU doesn't work with this model.

And there is no option of BIOS overclock, meaning that an XM processor is not worth it.

 

I figured as much - thank you for clarifying

 

No problem, I'd go with the 2820QM..

 

It is not quite that simple. The XM chips are allowed to pull 55 watts all the time vs the 45 in the 2860qm. Dell does not talk about it, but the M6600 will allow the XM chips to pull over 60 watts (I think 67.5) until the chip heats up to around 85C. The end result is that the XM chip will run in an almost constant state of turbo mode. The 2.5ghz 2920XM never goes below 2.8ghz in my machine even when I try to slow it down with artificial loads like Prime95. When encoding video where the load spikes to 100% and drops to 60% in cycles it will stay over 3ghz for over 90 minutes across all 4 cores.

Its not as easy as just comparing clock rates.

 

Bokeh is right. For the most part however, the turbo boost 2.0 gave a multiplier or two higher clock for all of the lines when in 100% load. It is not just with the xm processor in my experience, but with other quads and even duos that experience actually higher clock then its stock when running in 100% load.

I guess when intel said 2.5 or 2.3 or whatever the speed, it was being very very humble, given that its turbo boost 2.0 is working very effciently.

 

So if you had a choice between the 2860QM and the 2920XM for the same price - I assume that you would go with the 2920XM.

 

For the same price - yes.

I have access to a 2720qm and 2920xm. Planning to actually do some testing.

 

In the M4600 thread, a couple of us have 2820QM processor. So far, our lowest sustained speed/multiplier is about 2.6 ghz or 26X. I used cinebench 64 bit to test my cpu. I paid attention to task manager, it's 100% cpu utilization throughout the benchmark process. It spiked up to 30 or 3X multiplier in some cores then drops down after a while but never goes below 26 multiplier or about 2.6 Ghz.

We speculate as long as the cooling system can keep the cpu core temperature in an acceptable range, turbo boost 2.0 will let the cpu go higher than spec (which is 2.3 Ghz for all 4 cores on our 2820 QM processor but we're all getting at least 2.6 Ghz or higher so far.)

 

Well, I cancelled my order for the 2860 and I placed an order (outlet) for the 2920XM.

Thank you all for the help