Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

Everything I said about the M4400 still stands, it is still my favorite laptop to this day (being beat out only by the unibody mbp design wise). I truly am sad how excited was about this computer too, and it blinded me from the major obvious flaw that this system has. It's not just about games, anytime you heavily process graphics with this system it's bound the throttle eventually. I do not believe I am "unlucky", I've stopped lying to myself when I realized all three systems as well as a bunch of other people who buy it experience the same thing. After owning each system for a month the quality of the cooling seems to get worse and worse, regardless of how much I clean the fan or my BIOS revision (A02). Regardless of how much more valuable my desktop will be, I know I won't feel the same sense of pride I first did when I had this system. The M4400 is too good to be true, they put a graphics card in here that beats the 9600M GT, only to bring it to it's knees with poor cooling. I was just about to apply AS5 paste to replace the default one, but decided it wouldn't be worth the hassle anymore. For people not doing GPU processing (e.g. gaming, folding, GPU-based 3D rendering), this is by far one of the best laptops you will get. It just sucks that I can't max out a 2007 game simply because of poor cooling design. Good luck and god help anyone who buys this for 2009 games. I used to run L4D on high, all three of my systems' cooling systems seems to deteriorate over time, forcing me to run L4D on medium quality textures to run between 50-60FPS and lets not even mention how much it jumps.

I know this isn't a gaming machine, but for me that's not a good enough excuse for the overheating.

 

people who dint buy this for the GPU would buy the E6500

they're pretty much the same except for the GPU

 

Well it's too bad all of you who did buy this for the GPU won't get the full power of the card you paid for because of the terrible cooling these are built with.

 

what kind of temps were you getting before downclocking?

if mine went up to 99*c without any downclocking.....i find it kind of weird

after i got the mobo changed and cleaned out the vent i now get mid 80's at the highest

idle temps mid 50's

 

First of all 99C is ridiculous, I promise you have nothing to party about. In the desktop world, that's near self-destruction, I can't imagine any laptops actually living through that in 247 use. 920 OC's to 4GHz when overvolting VCORE while reaching 85-95C, borderlining eventual chip failure. A graphics unit reaching those temperatures is one that's guaranteed a shorter life. But I assume you've only reached 99C once or twice, so you should be fine. My temps reach about 87-90C before throttling, without overclocking. This happens with every system, and you have to run the correct high-quality games to see the throttling happen.

BTW: 99C = 210.2F, Boiling point of water = 212F.

 

yea the 99*c was my fault. i dint realise my blanket was touching the intake at the bottom.....

i've seen the throttling happen, but after rolling back to A03 it dint happen anymore. im gonna give bioshock a shot and see if it works.

do they still make laptop chips a higher temp rating than desktop equivalents? i remember back in the pentium 4 days the P4m had a higher critical temp than the P4 desktop version

 

For what point? If you think you have a good system than leave it at that. Don't do what I did, I pushed it until I found that was a faulty, and I felt extremely crappy about what I paid for. Don't do it just to do it...

 

to find out if it is indeed a design flaw, or faulty units. i dont have time to game much at the moment, but i definitely intend to do quite a bit of gaming on it. thats one of the reasons i got the M4400 instead of the latitude.

also i can decide if i should sell it like you or not. the faster i find out, the faster i can decide

with IT, depreciation is a pain!

should be getting my brand new system soon, i can sell it unopened....

 

Think about it though, all these systems with our configurations have identical designs, what is the definition of a "faulty unit"? In this case, they are all faulty. Regardless of how well your card performs now, a year down the line these graphic chips lose efficiency at a high rate. Don't you remember Nyceis and Sydalesis already went through this, without any resolution in the end?

 

i thought dell shipped them a replacement and it was fine? cant remember now and too lazy to look lol...