New M6500 Discussion Thread

Yes, it's the ATI.

 

No heat issues here, I've played games (Half Life 2 series), and encoded video (HD) without any heat issues. In fact while I played HL2, I had realtemp 3.58 beta monitoring temps. Less than a minute after playing temps were back to normal.

Do not get Crucial's C300 or the Vertex LE. The C300 has a warm boot issue (restart) with the M6500, after a restart I would get an “internal error” message stating no boot drive was detected, but if I shut down, I could boot into W7 without any issues. I called Crucial's tech support and their official answer is "we have test hundreds of M6500, and have not encountered this issue". Are there hundreds of M6500s in the wild? The Vertex LE died after 1 day of use. Both drives were returned to Newegg.

 

So far I've been pretty happy with the Vertex LE, however, now OCZ is saying you have to disable any processor power saving features to get full performance out of it. I'm waiting to see what pans out, but if that's the case, obviously using it in a laptop would be a bad idea, although it is still extremely fast.

 

Do you mean a) you think it's the system that's used actively to balance the colour channels internally and not intended to respond to ambient light, and that the ambient light leaks through with unintended consequences, or b) that it's a deliberate (but badly controlled) response to changing ambient conditions with too strong a change provoked by the particularly extreme nature of direct sunlight? If it's an effect that is mostly unobservable except in direct sunlight, it might be argued that the screen is fairly difficult to see properly at all in direct sunlight (certainly no good for critical colour evaluation whatever its colour accuracy) so it's not such a grievous failing. OTOH, when I saw the colour it went, I suspect I went the same colour myself.

You mentioned you'd seen smaller changes in reponse to other lighting. What had you seen? I'd like to try to replicate that too and take some spot colour readings to quantify the scale of the impact on colour workflow under the conditions I am likely ever to use.

Paul.

 

I have the Crucial CT128M and haven't had any issues with it thus far

 

Disabling the power saving features to get the full benefit from SSDs (1st and 2nd generation) is normal, I read a whitepaper stating why it's necessary a while ago but I can't remember where I read it.

The issue I had presented itself when I logged off to allow GC to do its thing (overnight). After logging on W7 started to reinstall chipset drivers, which I thought was odd. Once it was finished I was presented with the restart now or later message, after restarting the drive was as dead as a door nail. Tony from OCZ forums mentioned in one of his posts that the issue was easy to fix, but I had to send it in (RMA) to get it fixed.

For various reasons I was unwilling to do this, so I returned it for a refund. I have to agree though, it was the fastest SSD I've ever used.

 

I truly believe the issue I experienced was limited to the C300. I've been running two 256GB Vertex without any issues. And I forgot to mention the issue with the C300 would only present itself in IDE or AHCI mode. All was well in RAID mode.

 

a) it's the system that's used actively to balance the colour channels internally and not intended to respond to ambient light, and that the ambient light leaks through with unintended consequences.

I've seen a discernible shift in color with several different ambient light sources. It seems to be both an "intensity" and color temperature issue. Lower levels of ambient light won't affect the color (or affect it very little), and I suspect this is due to relatively little ambient light "leaking" through to the internal sensor and affecting its reading.

It also depends on the brightness level of your display. Apparently when the brightness level of your screen is set to a lower intensity (as we would normally do when trying to match screen to print), the percentage of light generated by the screen vs ambient will be lower, and ambient will have more affect on the "readings" of the internal sensor. When the brightness level of your display is turned up, the ambient light will be a lower percentage of the overall light (and thus have less effect on the color temperature) read by the internal sensor, and thus ambient will affect the colors less.

It also appears that enabling the ambient light sensor would serve to "mask" this effect, since it would automatically increase the screen brightness in brighter ambient light, thus tipping the percentage of light generated by the screen vs ambient in favor of the screen. Of course this option doesn't work for those of us trying to work with a "calibrated" brightness level on the display.

We'll just have to be more diligent about using the system under "controlled" lighting conditions.

Keith

 

What about a piece of electrical tape over the sensor until things are figured out?

 

Keith,

You may have mentioned it before, but what's your brightness level? Since you're using an ATI card, and I'm using Nvidia, could you post the level of brightness setting in the BIOS? I'm going to try to reproduce your results.