New M6500 Discussion Thread

The 3800 plays MW2 and Borderlands at everything maxed out at 1920x1200. Dirt2 should be similar.

 

Anyone heard anything yet re USB 3.0? Has Dell decided they want to sell some units?

yeah, impatient...have the right to be

 

From what I've heard it is supposed to be the first week in May.

 

I couldn't wait that long so I'll upgrade to USB 3.0 later.

 

hehe....that warrants a phone call to DELL as my rep told me first week of March....lol...is that also when m2500 and m4500 are due to be released? (psss...I won't wait for DELL if your dates are accurate) haha

 

Hi theZoid,

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

​

I Hope this helps

 

Thanks Manny....that's what was my indication also...hope so!

 

Our Dell rep emailed me Friday and said USB3 would be available in two weeks.

 

It may be worth pointing out that this option may be a terrible idea for certain configurations at least, and I am not convinced it buys you much in any case. People should realize that 64GB for a system drive is really, really restrictive. If you have a fully loaded machine memory-wise (meaning 16GB of RAM), then of these 64 gigs more than 32 are already gone, and used for paging and hibernation files. So that leaves about 30 gigs for the OS, C:\Users, C:\ProgramData, and C:\Program Files*. You can very easily bump into that limit even if you install all your third-party programs on a different partition, at which point you'd be stuck with a machine that you cannot install any more software on. I would call that a somewhat undesirable situation.

On the plus side, I question how much that SSD card really buys you in performance. My M6400 (dual-500GB drives in RAID0/RAID1) boots to the Welcome Screen in about 35 seconds (OS boot only, without BIOS POST), and that machine is loaded with software. So yeah, the SSD might boot the same system in 10 seconds less, but so what? It's not like I constantly reboot my machine. Once booted, you will see next to no difference in speed, since all your programs are on a conventional hard drive just like mine. As a matter of fact, I have a hunch that if you used a part of that SSD as a ReadyBoost cache, which, remember, in Win7 is also used during the boot phase, you may get almost all of the boot-time and performance benefits without the above, serious, drawbacks.

P.S.: How would you do a RAID5 setup, by the way? You need at least three identical drives for that... 3x64 gigs? I hope not; what in the world would be the point of doing that?

 

If I take my 256 MB SSD Boot Drive and take a small portion and make a 8gb partition, can I use that partition for readyboost? Would it do anything with regard to performance?

Edit:

I just put in a 8GB SD Card to try ready boost. When trying to set it up, I get this message:

"This device cannot be used for ReadyBoost.

ReadyBoost, is not enabled on this computer because the system disk's performance is high, as measured by the Windows Experience Index Disk score. This computer would not benefit from ReadyBoost."

Mike