New M6500 Discussion Thread

I received the caddy, interposer and screws for a second drive with my system as well. That made me very happy when it came time to install a second hard drive.

Kudos for Dell for providing these when it is standard practice to have to purchase these separately for other systems these days. Plus one in the good customer service column for Dell.

I installed a Hitachi 500GB drive in the second slot and was surprised how well it performed. I'm getting 105MB/s sequential read and write speeds on the drive. Of course I understand this will slow down as the drive gets full, but still, those are pretty good speeds for a 7200rpm notebook drive. (I get about 60MB/s read and 50MB/s sequential write on the 7200rpm Seagate drive in my D820 by comparison. (Yes, it needs to be defragged. )

Now when I go back to my previous 2 1/2 year old "top of the line" business laptop, it seems ancient by comparison.

 

I prefer new technologies than cars but sometimes when I go on racing circuit it is easy to compare a Fiat against a Ferrari (same Holding but not the same performances/prices)...

I choose the M6500 because Dell convinced me. Their marketing was excellent end of last year (Autodesk University in Las Vegas) and the system seemed very sexy...

I am not a "Dell engineer" but only a poor architect/engineer (these days I need to justify myself), an end user, a businessman who need to take decisions with the information that I have...

Can someone from Dell explain me this table (cf. picture)? If they pretend to have the "crème de la crème" of laptops today or the "the world’s most powerful mobile workstation" (if they play with words, as with "engineer", they will say with dishonesty that a mobile workstation is not a normal laptop) can they prove it on that forum?

I need to recover my faith in Dell. I need acts and no more buzz (for not saying Bullsh****)

With a simple Benchmark (PerformanceTest) we can see that even with the same CPU, the Alienware M15x or the Sager np8690 seem a bit faster than the M6500 (cf. picture).
Even with the WEI (not perfect but enough to make comparisons), the "crème de la crème" graphic card has a "poor" 5.9 score.

Why to pay the most expensive system for less performance? for the certified drivers? for the non updated BIOS? for the non problematic screen? for the Covet version? for the Dell image? for the latest NVIDIA buzz? for a beta version system? for the fast supply chain and delivery?for the ProSupport and second to none services?...

I would like to see evidences from Dell. If there are no answer, if they keep silent, it will prove that I am right: their M6500, the "Dell's flagship notebook workstation", is not successfully completed...

Too premature? The Toyota syndrome?

Thanks in advance.

 

giannini, you are absolutelly right! I am also an engineer (mechanical) trying to convince myself why should I dispose such a huge amount of money on M6500 and don't get what I am supposed to. I hope that Dell will finally find its pace on this, otherwise I will also consider HP's Elitebook 8740w which is on its way.

 

Somehow my sales rep is totally unaware of the updates and can't do anything about it. Another manager said they could ship me a trial version of the motherboard with usb 3.0 like right now. I have no idea if they have any idea of what they're talking about.

So mitchellboy, they promise you they'll replace our motherboard for free?

I don't think i want to wait more so i won't cancel my order and we'll see Dell's solution.

 

Hi melantye,

I have never heard of a Trial version of a motherboard, Interesting.
Did they say When the real USB 3.0 motherboard is coming out.

 

Nobody promised me to replace motherboard for free. As I know the new motherboard with USB 3.0 will come in the end of Feb.
I mean you cant get the best laptop forever, technology changes everyday. Intel 6 series chipset to come in Q1 2011 with 32nm processor, SATA 3.0 and USB 3.0. After this is OLED screen...(I am still waiting for nvidia fermi )
So if you like the machine and need to use it right now, just choose it.

 

Hi All,

Dell is updating its Precision M6500 laptop System with Intel’s Core i5, USB
3.0, and a few other new options, that will be available by the end of February 2010.





Source: Tom’s Hardware and Electronista gadget for geeks.

1) New 5GB/S USB 3.0 ports.​

2) New dual-core i5​

3) New 3.2 Megapixel Webcam​

4) And 64 GB SSD mini card for your Operating System (OS), and
you can setup your system in a RAID 5
​

 

In typical obsessive behavior of someone that wants a "perfect" display, I've continued to tweak my display calibration. I found that I could adjust the diplay brightness in finer increments by using the "advanced power settings" which allows adjustments in 1% increments (instead of the 6.6% increments of the button controls). This allowed me to get closer to the target brightness in my calibration software, which in turn resulted in a profile that produced noticeably more even brightness/colors across the screen.

If you are struggling to get the best profile possible, try setting the screen brightness through the advanced power settings in order to better match the target brightness in your calibration software. Doing so noticeably improved my results.

 

Great find!

 

Since it's so close, I've emailed them to hold my frakking order for the changes...I work off a tethered VM so I guess I could use usb 3.0....don't give a hoot about the webcam....lol