Precision M4600 Battery Life with FirePro

I'd just like to add that I'm getting the IPS screen with a 2000M. Since Optimus doesn't work (as of now, maybe never), if the battery life is really this pathetic the machine is getting shipped back and I'll order up a W520. If the battery was bad but had a slice option on the M4600 I might live with it, but with no slice and terrible battery life (and no Optimus) I think Lenovo might have won this round.

 

Lenovo's Thinkpad power management app was really nice, without that the battery live got nowhere near the advertised runtime.

 

i dont have deep technical knowledge about this, but would this be able to be implemented in an update? or would there be additional hardware required?

AMD PowerXPress 4.0 aka BACON vs. Nvidia Optimus - Notebookcheck.net Reviews

 

No this can not be added later. The motherboard is specifically designed to one spec or the other.

 

So how about Optimus and the RGB IPS screen?

 

Why doesn't optimus work with the ips screen?

 

That's the million dollar question. I've been reading the forums daily to try and find out.

Dell_Mano_G, can you tell us anything else about optimus and the IPS display? Is there a technical limitation standing in the way (related to color depth or something else)? Is there just a special bios configuration that needs to be created (hope for the current 4600 IPS Nvidia owners)? Any information you could give us would be great because this is a very important issue for most of us.

Dell_Mano_G, thanks again for all your help! I've saved for over 6 months to buy this laptop and the information you have posted has been great! Regardless I plan on getting a precision but I am debating between the Nvidia or Ati cards.

 

From his previous post, it seemed like it might be possible in the future, but I'd definitely like to hear some more conclusive statements on the IPS and nVidia Quadro issue.

 

As Boken stated in an earlier thread the issue is that the IPS panel is a true 10-bit panel and Optimus would require that the Intel GPU also support 10-bit throughput. The Intel GPU does not, it only supports 8-bit. Currently there is no way to get the Intel CPU to support the 10-bit IPS panel. It has a lot to do with available room on the motherboard for multiple mux'es of the video signal and such. We are still looking at it but at this time there is no Optimus support for the IPS RGB panel.

 

Sigh. We can never have it all can we. LOL