New M4500 Discussion Thread

Thanks for clarifying that.

 

The dimensions are the same. As has been already stated the second HDD is a minicard. The cooling solution may well be different but that's understandable since M4500 can be configured with more powerful GPUs and CPUs.

Quality is the same.

 

The M4500 weighs a 0.5 lbs more than the E6510, probably for cooling. Have yet to see if they have revised their optical bay caddy (M4400's could only support 1.8" which is pretty useless), but optical drives are of standard lengths and thickness, so you don't need an "official" caddy. There are many solutions, for example: NewModeUS.

 

Well I ordered one. I've been waiting for a while and it was between this and the w510. The loss of USB 3.0 was painful but lenovo is also short on stock on some different options (including full HD).

Can someone explain to me what a "display port" is?

Specs:
i7-820
nVidia 1800M
8 gig (2 dimms)
250 gig drive
DVD RW

 

Displayport is meant to replace VGA and DVI. It's consumer equivalent is HDMI (meant to replace S-video and component video). Also, implementation of DP is free, while HDMI incurs royalties.

 

Ah thanks! So the m4500 still has a VGA port so i guess if I wanted to use DVI I'd have to find a display port to DVI adapter.

Another question, tech specs show an RJ-45 but you don't select a NIC anywhere. I assume it comes with an ethernet card and it is 10/100 (or is it gigabit?)

 

Comes with it and is gigabit.

 

Thanks very much guys, you're all very helpful.

I hope Dell doesn't release too many new options in the next couple of weeks that will upset me but I was ready to go

 

They don't appear to have their 1.8" opt drive bay HDD this time, you would have thought they would have just contracted newmodeUS to do what they weren't capable of, it's pretty well made.
The only option for secondary storage seems to be if you choose the 64gB pc card SSD as primary and use the main HDD drive as secondary, which is a lot more limiting than the former if they had enabled RAID so that you could have a 1 TB partition with a couple of 500/640GB drives or proper redundancy with raid1.

Seems strange the mid resolution is going to get the RGB option considering you would think the biggest market for it would be photographers and the large number of pixels they work with.

 

It's really a little outrageous what Dell is charging for RAM for this thing: $160 for a single 2GB stick of DDR3-1066??? Newegg and others have these for $50. I guess if you are a business and don't want to mess with installing your own RAM it might make sense.


Does anyone think I would be better off picking up a refurbished M4400 with the P8700 over a new one with the i5?

Cheers.