New M6500 Discussion Thread

Hi YBcold,


Glad to help...

 

Morning all, just thought I would post quickly to say I am typing this on my new M6500 that was delivered yesterday

My first impressions are mixed if I'm honest. For one Dell shipped it with 4x 2GB sticks taking up all four slots instead of the 2x 4GB slots which I asked for allowing me to upgrade it to 16GB in a few months time..... not happy but I'm in the process of talking to them about that so hopefully it will get sorted.

Secondly it is not an aluminium shell.... I thought both the silver and covet had the aluminium shell, but apparently not. Its not a big issue, just a disapointment. On this note the build quality is, ok. Its not terrible and it is certainly better than other Dells I have had, however its not as good as the Alienware M17x and nowhere near as good as my MacBookPro17.
My primary concern is the lid, which doesn't appear to sit flush when locked shut and has a gap of a few mm on the front left when closed.

The touchpad driver is shockingly poor. I don't know how they can even think it is beta quality let alone release quality. It feels like an early alpha and hasn't lasted more than about 2minutes on any clean boot yet.... It just crashes and then is effectively useless until reboot.

The "nipple" mouse in the keyboard doesn't seem to work properly. Moving right requires only the smallest touch, but moving left is almost impossible no matter how hard you push it. I think its a hardware fault tbh

The Controlpoint software seems to have had its UI designed by a summer student. I'm hoping the underlying code looks a little better, although I suspect not as it keeps crashing. You also can't open any of the related system tray icons as they fail with a RunDLL error "The specified module could not be found". As a former software engineer I would be ashamed if my product looked as bad as this.

The screen.... I can see why people are complaining about this. The screen is quite poor. I am yet to play with calibration so if anyone has any tips then please let me know. The whites are almost indistuinghable at the moment. On the plus side the antiglare finish is nice.

As a technical customer, I would consider the windows configuration it was delivered with as unacceptable. There was ofc the standard "crapware" installed but even after removing them it was still running poorly. The trackpad driver crashed immediately, it wouldn't see any wireless networks and the controlpoint software appeared broken.
If I was a non-technical customer and didn't know any better then I would probably assume this was how my new Windows laptop was meant to run? Fortunately a quick format and rebuild with latest drivers and firmwares installed off the Dell site and its running like greased lightning and immediately connects to my wireless networks (albeit the trackpad/controlpoint driver issues remain).

There was also a high pitched noise coming from the laptop, I think it was coming from the memory although couldn't pin it down. Although since rebuilding it the noise appears to have stopped...

In terms of gaming graphics, it is fantastic. I got the ATI7740 card and every game I have tried so far runs noticably better than it did on my M17x with dual 280M GTX SLI.
World of Warcraft (1920x1200 with everyting on max) runs better than I have ever seen it across all my previous laptops. I get 80fps in Dalaran and doing ICC last night I don't think it dropped below 60fps once, avg 70-80fps
Supreme Commander 2 (1920x1200 with everything on max) - It just loves this game Even on absolute max settings and high rez it is "silky smooth" without even a tiny hint of lag.
Left for Dead 2 (1920x1200 with everything on max) - Silky smooth
Starcraft2 Beta (1920x1200 with everything on max) - Silky smooth
All in all - gaming is perfect. I stand by my decision to avoid SLI now. A single card is the way forward, SLI is more trouble than its worth and the setup on this laptop works better!

The fan noise from the laptop is excellent. The M17x was known on Teamspeak as the "jet engine" and the MacBookPro wasn't exactly quiet. This makes less noise than either of them and I'm very pleased.

I know I've had a little bit of a moan here, but I think I quite like it tbh. I'm hoping the driver issues can be resolved and I can do something with the screen calibration. Its definately a laptop that requires a technical user to setup and get right, but hopefully once its sorted it will be awsome.

Am waiting on a call from dell this afternoon regarding a couple of the issues.

Cheers.

 

I'm sorry to hear about the problems you have. It probably only confirms your issues with quality control if I say that all the deficiencies you identified are absent on my M6500 and so aren't inherent in the design. My only negatives so far after a few weeks, now that the screen calibration issue is solved by the updated ATI driver, are limited control over hyperthreading and susceptibilty to colour shift with varying viewing angles (particularly vertical); although the latter issue was expected and I anticipate the first will be solved in a later BIOS update. I suppose I could like the keyboard more if I was being picky. Performance meets or exceeds expectations in other areas and I expect this laptop to last me 4 or 5 years like my previous Dell, which is why I keep coming back - and although I self-build for home, I use Dell for work desktops as well as laptops; the purchase configurability and subsequent reliability at reasonable price are the clinchers for me. The question mark over USB 3.0 is an irritation at worst - I'll probably never miss it if it turns out I can't have it, and the 2MP/3MP webcam is just a non issue.

 

Why do you think it would be better to disable hyperthreading?
As far as I have read, Win7 handles HT quite well.

 

I'm absolutely not an expert on hyperthreading, but as I understand it, yes Win 7 does handle it well, but there are single or double threaded applications which do not and there can be circumstances where disabling it will make applications run faster, or so I am told. Someone who knows will be along in a minute to explain; my particular issue was with Matlab - it's currently multi-threaded in parts only.

 

Based on the comments of folks that were not observing this anomaly with BIOS A02 and ATI driver A01, I updated BIOS and video drivers on my system yesterday.

As and aside, I have one more big CAUTION to add to this discussion. If you have the ATI card and updated Catalyst Control Center, do NOT try the option for 10-bit color. I tried that option (out of curiosity after updating the video driver), and it resulted in a BSOD which was "unrecoverable." I had to roll back to an earlier restore point in order to recover. (Took me several hours to work my way out of the mess caused by that bad driver.)

But back to the reason for this post. It didn't seem logical; however, I was hopeful that the software updates would remedy the situation where the "undocumented" sensor changed the white point of the display when it was influenced by ambient light sources. No such luck.

With the new BIOS, video driver, and a freshly calibrated screen, the display colors still change when this "undocumented" sensor is influenced by the incandescent lighting in my kitchen.

I REALLY wanted to like this system for color-critical work when I'm on the road; however, based on what I am seeing, I now conclude that I can only trust the display colors (no matter how good the calibration) when I am in controlled lighting conditions. This puts severe limits on effectively using the system "on the road" for image or video editing work.

Time to start shopping for an LCD hood, as I think that will at least alleviate some of the color shift caused by ambient light.

Keith
www.SpiritofPhotography.com

 

OK, I have now replicated identically the symptoms you described. I had previously tried with various other lights of similar intensity (with different colour temperatures) with no discernable effect at all, not even a slight effect; very strange because direct sunlight did it for me just as you showed in your video. Could there dependence beyond just intensity and colour temperature perhaps - polaristion seems unlikely? Just now was my first opportunity to test with direct sunlight since your initial report (did I mention that I live in England?). Remarkable, and disappointing. When I get some time I might try with studio lights and some gels, but that's just for curiosity. I would be delighted if this 'feature' could be disabled, or (better) controlled, but I fear it may be a very low level artefact beyond the reach of drivers, firmware and bioses; lets hope not. It is presumably deliberate, although the implementation seems very clumsy to say the least. I would really like to know what Samsung say about this behaviour; are you the first to describe it for any display? If I'd seen your video before buying, it might have put me off, but there's a lot going for this laptop and that particular situation won't arise often for me.

Paul.

 

Hello Paul,

Do you have the ATI video card? Thanks.

 

Hi Paul,

Thank you for the update.

I think both intensity and color temperature of ambient light play a part. Direct sunlight is probably the "extreme" and will cause the worst shift. However, now that I am aware of the color shift, I can discern it (even if just slightly) in other types of light as well.

I suspect a similar implementation (hopefully better controlled) is present in almost every RGB LED panel on the market (in order to dynamically balance the color channels with changes in power level/brightness).

Yes, it is still a great system. I use the laptop for teaching photography and image editing at different "field" locations, and so was looking for something that would be useable in those conditions. Knowing that the display colors shift with moderate to strong ambient light sources will make using it for teaching (in uncontrolled lighting environments) much more difficult.

When the students say in disbelief, "Are you sure that green tint is in my file? It doesn't look that way on my computer." I won't be able to answer so definitively.

Keith

 

Hoping to get some insight from current owners and hoping some of you are running SolidWorks on these machines. Basically I am trying to spec out two machines, one that is maxed out (within reason) and another that will be used for much lighter duty, manly parts and small assemblies nothing particularly complex.

For the maxed out machine I was looking at going with an i7-920XM but not sure if it is worth the premium over the i7-620M. From what I have found so far both will run similar clock speeds for single/dual core operation but not sure if the extra cache will help and not sure if this machine can dissapate teh extra heat. As a side note our SW vendor said that SW doesn't use quad cores for many processes, so this makes me wonder even more about the value. I was going to go with 16GB RAM but stick with the 1066, any real benefit to going higher? Video card will be the FX3800M...any heat issues with this bad boy? Also going to run two SSD's in RAID 0 for a little extra speed on writing/reading the larger assemblies. Any other recommendations?

For the average machine I was going to run an i7-620M, 8GB 1066 RAM, FirePro M7740 GPU and a single SSD. Again any recommendations on components?

We would also like to get a docking station, is there a preferred unit? I had originally picked the middle of the road E port since the ports seemed adequate for our use.

Thoughts and suggestions would be much appreciated.