New M6500 Discussion Thread

RAID 0 it is then it arrives tomorrow I'm actually excited, which generally doesn't happen with this type of stuff.

Curious, does the Dell 1510 WLAN card have 3 antennae?

 

I just finished reading all 300+ pages of this thread and all I can say is that I am tired It "only" took 3 evenings
I feel I should buy this laptop just for all the time spent reading this thread

I am looking for a high end laptop that can do 16GB RAM. I will be using the laptop for development work (Visual Studio and SQL databases) and if I decide to go back to WoW I guess some light gaming as well.
So I am trying to summarize the cons I read about (since we all know the pros):

1) RGB LED calibration. Since I do not care about color fidelity (and after reading all the posts about that subject I don't think I ever want to know anything about it) would I be OK just buying the WLED for my purposes? Not sure if anyone here owns a WLED to comment. And would I be missing a lot by getting the WLED assuming that sooner or later there will be some kind of fix for the RGB calibration issue (one hopes)?
2) Various driver issues (USB 3 and sound). Sound seems to have a fix and as for USB 3 whether it works or not now I am not that concerned about it.
3) Sharp angles that may impair typing. I did not see that many people complaining about this so is this really much of an issue? My Thinkpad has rounded edges so I can see how a 90 degree angle may hurt.
4) The automatic color calibration based on ambient lighting. That subject seemed to have died so is this a "feature" or an isolated incident?

Other than that nothing else? No overheating? No sudden death? Are people happy with the Samsung SSDs that come with the laptop?

Aside from that, considering I will not be doing any visual work, am I OK getting the ATI card and save some money there?
As for the processor do you think it is worth $700 extra to get the i7-920XM versus i7-720QM?
On the wireless card is Intel WIFI card better than the dell wireless ones?

P.S. And a stupid question: what is Windows 7 with XP mode?
P.S.2. Just did a quick build of what I want and the laptop is about $6k via online config. Are there any coupons or discounts available?

 

It's a gorgeous screen.....I haven't tried to do any calibration yet....

did someone post an icc profile for the LG screen/Nvidia drivers?

 

I'm using my USB 2.0 external drive right now from my USB 3.0 port. So, sure.

 

Thanks, the E-Port dock wasn't in my mind.

 

Very nearly all of us would say it's an excellent choice. Were I buying now, I'd be looking very closely at the HP, but that's only for the IPS screen (which you probably don't want, reading below); I think the Dell outscores it in most other places.

I think so, yes.

It's already fixed IMO and wouldn't have been relevant to the WLED anyway. The behaviour of the RGBLED colour space control is now as intended I believe (at least with the ATI card).

It's an accident of the design, and may be limited to the Samsung RGBLED panel. It's not a problem except in direct sunlight, but TBH you can't really see a laptop screen properly in direct sunlight, so it may not be such an issue.

The speed deficit was overstated, but is real, particularly for the 64 GB part. OTOH it's quicker than a conventional HDD and represents reasonable value.

I did, and I'm pretty sure for your purposes the cost of the Nvidia can't be justified.

Much better if range and signal strength will ever be an issue for you - and sooner or later they probably will be. This is a few dollars that are worth spending.

I'm one of the few here who went for the 720 for that reason. It is noticeably slower than my desktop quadcore of about 12 months vintage, but it's still quick. You can do the maths on CPU speed for your chosen application, but here's a real world comparison from skypx - only you can say how much that 25% extra speed is worth to you. The laptop feels quick for me, but if I measure speed in processor intensive situations, I find similar results. For the most part it's not relevant to me - if you're currently sitting waiting 2 minutes for your PC to finish fiendishly complicated database operations, you probably need the 920 because those seconds will add up, but for your average code build these days, I don't see a problem with the 720. I wouldn't be without quadcore now myself (although the dualcore CPUs are now available too and worth considering). Here's the 720 vs 920 speed comparison:

 

simply the tool said that it could not find any device connect to the USB 3.0 hub (such as HD or anything else) in order to perform the test. (of course something was connected, an external HD).
Then after a sec a pop up appeared with a clear message: test failed.

Looks like, even with these drivers, that my card is recognized, got power, but can't start or mount any devices connected to.

So basically I'm start thinking that is not a drivers related. More likely a hardware failure.

How about the other person here that got the same problem (sorry I don't remember your nickname). Any progress?

 

My m90 video just died so I am looking to upgrade. Like many other trying to decide between this and 8740w.

Does any one have a good comparison between the RGBLCD in the dell and the ips in the HP?

Has anyone done hard disk (not ssd) raid0 performance tests with the dell. Care to share the results?

Has anyone successfully hooked up a high performance (if they even exist yet) USB3 raid box to the dell. Performance data anyone? Am I dreaming hoping for uncompressed HD?

Anyone have feedback on battery life doing moderate 3d. I'm looking at the 2800 (not 3800)?

Cheers
Mike

 

Hey Mike. I run a pair of seagate 500gb/7200rpm/16mbcache drives in mine. I posted results earlier in the thread. Will find them and edit this post with that info when I get to work.

My estimate on moderate 3d work while on battery would be 1.5 hours. That could increase or decrease by 30 minutes depending on your usage and power settings. I run the 920 processor, 3800m video card, and a pair of raid 0 hard drives so my power usage should be pretty high. I can still get over 2 hours of mixed use out of the battery and around 3 hours if I am conservative.

 

XP mode is basically Microsoft Virtual PC.

Virtual PC allowed you to install windows XP (and other OS's) in a virtual machine and run it in a window within your normal windows desktop, whether that was XP or Vista.

XP mode is a customed Virtual PC. It works in exactly the same way, but rather than showing you all the virtual desktop its just pushes a link to the application so that when you run the link on the desktop it boots the virtual machine but only shows you the app, making it look like its just running perfectly on 7.

My 2 cents.. VMWARE does it better but at a cost