New M6500 Discussion Thread

Hi keithsnell,

Thank You.

Keithsnell, Have you kept a log of what worked for you with ColorMunki, and did you take before and after pictures of your Display calibration?

 

I wonder if the same poor performance will be observed with the 64GB miniPCI drive that will be available soon.

 

Thanks, I possibly might have done that on my own machine. This was bought however with budgets I control at work, and I set a total budget in advance of £2,000 including 15% sales tax (which as a university we have to pay) for a reliable machine with the following minimum spec: quadcore, RGBLED, 4GB, at least some SSD, a dock and a bag. The spec was maximised within the budget (so I have for instance bluetooth & webcam but no UWB) and although I do sometimes subsidise work with my own money (in fact I did for the displayport-dual link DVI adapter) that's as far as I'm going this time. In any case, significant additional money, if available, would have gone first on RAM, then on processor, before any marginal performance improvements, such as the ones you suggest, were addressed. I'm not interested in specmanship - it's a tool first, toy second.

Yes, agreed, that was the judgement I made when I spec'd the machine.

 

It depends on what you use it for but in terms of general experience on the machine I'd go for the lower CPU and a decent SSD over the top end CPU and a rubbish SSD or mechanical HDD.

If you spend your time encoding or rendering and you feel boot times, app opening times and general responsiveness are not important then you made the right choice.

This is a seriously top end machine and as such HDD bottleneck is very noticable

 

Yes.

This is one of those situations where Dell should be thinking about the ramifications of offering that option. There is a serious potential that customer perceptions will go from FAST!! (which is the reaction of everyone that has a decent speced SSD) to s-l-0-w, which is the perception of everyone that ordered a 64GB SSD with the expectation that it will make their system FAST!

If I were Dell, I'd seriously reconsider offering the 64GB SSD option. Make it a "special order" option and train the sales reps to help customers make a smart buying decision. Customers should understand that for less than 5% of the price of the overall system (upgrading from 64 GB SSD to 128 GB SSD) they can transform their system from s-l-o-w to FAST!!

Yes, this all boils down to "consumer education." A good company provides good products. An outstanding company provides outstanding products, and recognizes that educating their clients has a significant impact on their overall success as a company.

(Read between the lines: The obscurity with respect to the specifications of the system components on the "marketing" side of the Dell experience is a detriment. The "help me decide" function is useful, but seems to be a forgotten step child with respect to the specificity and accuracy of the information provided. Several notable examples are the SSD options, the "dependencies" of the 1600MHZ ram on the 920 processor, and the potential ramifications of using a wide gamut monitor in a non-color managed workflow, etc. Several of those examples will have a VERY serious impact on the customer's perception of the system, and Dell doesn't do enough to "manage" those expectations, or help their clients make good decisions.)

 

I didn't realise it was that bad - in fact I had no idea at all (in early December) even that the 64GB was significantly slower than the larger ones. I take it when you say that some HDDs are quicker, you're not talking the likes of the 500GB 7,200 rpm free-fall one that Dell supplied. And I also guess that means I shouldn't be throwing out the striped WD raptors on my home machine's boot volume just yet?

 

I am waiting to see this as well. An interesting example are the OCZ cards. You have some listed on Newegg with 45mb/s reads and 35mb/s writes. You have others that seem to be a new generation listed as being up to 110mb/s. Remember what "up to" means. STEC is claiming 90mb/s reads and 25mb/s writes with 2 watts of power. Remember a Seagate 500gb 7200rpm HDD will exceed those speeds at 5 watts of power.

I expect these devices to mature in speed and capacity over the coming year. I also expect prices to come down.

PCI Express Mini Cards interfaces should be capable of 250mb/s transfer rates if they are PCI x1 spec. If these have more than 1 lane available and are PCI express 2.0 compatible, this number would go up to 500mb/s.

PCI Express Mini Cards also have a path for USB 2.0 connections, but I seriously doubt Dell would limit the performance of their SSD drives to 45 mb/s.

 

Hi Bokeh,

Is dell going to use 2.5 65GB SSD, or the Samsung mini-PCIe SSD.
What do you think?

 

I was pleasantly surprised with the performance of the Hitachi 500GB 7200 rpm 2.5" HDs I ordered from Newegg. Sequential read/write performance on these HDs was up to 105MB/s, which is significantly better than the (write) performance of the 64GB SSD.

Don't throw out the striped raptors until you can replace them with one of the previous options I mentioned, or the Gen 3 Intel SSD which should be coming out soon. As Bokeh mentioned, performance and price will improve dramatically for SSDs in the coming year. The bottom line is that your "budget" SSDs (less than 120 GB capacity) all make performance tradeoffs.

 

My 80 GB Intel Gen 2 SSD reads at over 200MB/s and writes around 90MB/s so not all smaller cheaper SSD's are equal