New M6500 Discussion Thread

I'm happy you're talking about that. I read in another post (in french sorry, but the pictures are obvious), that AlienWare M15x has the same processor, motherboard and RAM than his M6500 but the CPU score is a lot better on the Alienware! I have no idea there the problem comes from, perhaps bios optimisations? Are the cooling systems equivalent on both laptops?

This user made also a very good review of M6500. (again in french but with a lot of pictures) If you need me to translate something, just ask.

 

Just uploaded my Passmark results with the stock Dell drivers.

Passmark Rating - 1268.3
CPU Mark - 4248.7
2D Graphics Mark - 194.1
3D Graphics Mark - 1199.3
Memory Mark - 775.8
Disk Mark - 1241.9
CD Mark - 196.0

 

Bokeh brought up a good point, lowering the initial resolution may help the benchmark score higher and is probably the culprit for the discrepancy in the scores. I thought about this when I while running the benchmark but was too lazy to lower it to something more reasonable like 1280x1024.

 

Looking at another M6500's score with the ATI card, the resolution was 1440x900, so I don't think it will has as much of an impact as I thought.

I think this particular test just favors the ATI card.

This may change with new drivers or updated versions of this software. Lots of variables to consider.

Looking at a number of M6500 computers, it looks like there is 1 M6500 with a 3800M with results much lower than the others. It could also be that this machine is pulling down the rankings. Maybe they ran the test on battery power? With power settings wrong? How do 3 people get scores between 1071 and 1199 and 2 others get a 900 and 819? I have no idea.

I am going to quit worrying about it. I had very specific reasons to buy the 3800M. I am sure others will have their own reasons to make their own choices.

 

I make my order on 02/08/2010 (France). It was supposed to be deliver the 03/05/2010 and it's coming tomorow by UPS.
I ordered the WLED WUXGA.

 

Ran the same benchmark Out of the dock

Passmark Rating - 1267.7
CPU Mark - 4252.3
2D Graphics Mark - 209.1
3D Graphics Mark - 916.5
Memory Mark - 732.2
Disk Mark - 1228.8
CD Mark - 182

In the Dock with Dual Monitor

Passmark Rating - 1229.71
CPU Mark - 4201
2D Graphics Mark - 225
3D Graphics Mark - 880
Memory Mark - 672
Disk Mark - 846
CD Mark - 255

Makes no sense what so ever, and I have high doubts the disk benchmarks are optimized for SSD drives.
The only difference between my system and Bokeh's are display driver version.

I will update mine and try again.

 

they've got some kind of supply issue...I've noticed that Joco.

 

Same here tom....the Covet was cheaper than any way I could configure the non covet with the ATI card because of my 1200 buck off deal.

 

While waiting for my M6500 .. question for any photographers out there.

While professionally, I am a .net Developer, and looking forward to the i7-920XM and Raid-0 128GB SSD setup for compile speeds, project loading, etc., I am also a "really serious" amateur photographer, as the term is used on Adobe's Photoshop description pages (recently was approved and became a contributor on iStockPhoto).

I was reading over the NVIDIA site regarding CUDA abilities and extra features for panning, zooming, etc., that are automatically enabled in Photoshop CS4 when it detects a Quadro card, which I think is a very nice touch, but I have a question regarding RAM.

As far as I know (correct me if I am wrong), previous versions of Photoshop have been liimited to using a maximum of 3.5 GB of RAM. Anyone have firsthand experience that you can assign Photoshop (I imagine the 64bit version) to use 16GM of RAM, or is it still limited to a smaller number?

I ordered my Covet with 8GB (2 x 4GB 1333mhz) but want to order an additional 8GB from Newegg, would it be used by CS4, either version? Through perusing Adobe's site and some googling have not found adequate answers to these questions.

Any other ideas or comments on this topic, welcome... I have not seen much in this thread regarding photographers since the first 30 pages

 

CS4 installs two version of photoshop a version of 64bit and 32bit. In 64bit it detects my 8GB of memory however, I think the issue is that it is not optimized for it like CS5 will be thats more or less the issue you will read about.

Frustratingly, I have to use the 32bit version of photoshop CS4 because almost none of my plug-ins work in the 64bit version.

I also use the 2 SSD drive in non-raid and use the 2nd drive as the scratch disk, I don't think the RAID would be much of a help namely when you lose TRIM support enabling RAID on SSDs.

The GPU enabled scaling and other features are nice, does it make or break your work flow? No really.