New M6500 Discussion Thread

Just an FYI. The 191.87 quadro desktop drivers from Feb 9th, should probably not be used on the M6500. The drivers do natively support the 3600M, and work fine overall with the 3800M after an INF mod. Unfortunately the brightness adjustment with the keyboard shortcut keys does not work.

I had loaded them because they had expanded support for 10bit color output.

 

Good morning all. New to thread. Just wondering if anyone's noticed that periodically, such as now, the M6500 "customize" option on Dell.com including pricing and ability to purchase disappears for a few hours?

Anyone know if this means they might be changing something (such as adding USB 3.0 options) or is it just a case of "what does this button do" accidentally omitting the option from a build?

My M6500 is on order but if they are adding these options and I can see them, then I will cancel and re-order. Or if they are lowering the prices Otherwise I can't wait to get my Covet.

 

Take into account that IIRC, Windows 7 has HyperThreading support, and it will schedule threads to the physical cores when they won't work correctly in a logical thread. So problems with hyperthreading should not be as bad as they were in other Windows versions.

 

I looked at the Sager but if you think the M6500 is big the Sager is huge.
The only advantage I see if the SLI video cards.

Also the power brick is larger than life. The design is not bad but really is a straight copy of the XPS/Studio Dell laptops.

It's really more of a gaming PC if you ask me. And at 18.4" that good luck finding anything that will fit that thing except a gym bag.

 

So whats the alternative? I am still running 188.43 but want 10bit color output.

 

I think they maybe loading some changes today or tomorrow as my premiere page is not allowing proper configuration of the M6500 without errors right now.

 

I have come to appreciate the care with which Dell chooses the nVidia drivers they offer, and I'm now sticking with the stock Dell drivers. In my experience, the 19x nVidia drivers are all more or less badly broken, and the 188 series is the last one that works alright. Plus, I have never seen any significant performance benfits from the newer nVidia drivers, even after upgrading one of my machines from a 15x-series driver to a 19x-series one. YMMV, of course.

 

I believed theres no other laptop (yet) comparable to M6500 in terms of scalability. I believed this is what we paid for.

 

Go to the Nvidia control panel. See if you have the "Deep Color" option for 3D applications. This would be 10 bit.

Still doesn't help that Photoshop is limited to displaying 8bits even when working with 16bit images. Adobe explains this limitation in the CS4 version in their forums.

The upside is that Windows 7 fully supports it, so 10bit will slowly become more of a standard as time goes on.

If you use the Dell driver, remember that they have the Digital Vibrance cranked up by 79% in the default install. Make sure to disable it.

I am still using 196.34 and not having any major issues. I will occasionally not have the screen fire up when coming out of sleep mode, but closing and re-opening the lid solves it. Its rare though, maybe once a week.

 

Hmm, as far as I know, standard LCDs typically support only about 6-bit color, with the more expensive full-gamut ones being able to actually represent close to 8-bit. Given that situation, what's the point of asking for 10 bits? Unless you are a graphical artist working with a high-quality CRT monitor, that is...