Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

No, you didn't, see your other thread. The Q9300 is the desktop CPU.

 

Congrats Toaddodger!!!
I know youve been patient.
Hopefully now you are just happy.

 

"Definitely worth the price (after using a 25% off coupon and negotiating a $200 credit for the delay)"

25% off coupon?! Where did you find that?

Regards,
Simon

 

Hi Toad. Can you check two things? If you are a gamer can you check how the sound is with headphones on? To me the soundcard is a piece of absolute rubbish, compared to the card on my M1730. It sounds muffled and drops half the channels by the sounds of it. I'll speak to tech support tomorrow to see how many channels it is.

Also, can you go into sound, voice record, test hardware and see if your digital mic works. Mine works if I select digital mic, but when I go back in digital mic is no longer selected.

Cheers!

 

Is anyone else having issues with the sound skipping like a cd in Vista? It happens quite a bit, especially when i'm doing other things (drafting in Civil 3D). I've read that this is a fairly common issue in vista, and a driver is usually suspect. Just wondering if anyone has found which driver is causing the problem?

 

The sound issues are being mentioned in the other Precision (model) threads.

 

Hmmm. Are these IDT audio cards too then? Never had this problem before with Sigmatel cards (Actually, I'm not sure if the cards have just been rebranded). Regardless, my beef is not the stuttering so much as the poor quality sound.

 

I get skipping sound on my M90 under Vista; sound was perfectly fine under XP. Sound driver hasn't been updated since March or so (they had to come out with a driver update at that time since the old driver was not compatible with SP1). Oh well...

It's a Sigmatel sound module in the M90.

 

I definately have an audio issue like this. I notice when Im playing long videos from the internet (streaming) esp seems to be moreso when I play said video full screen. Also, when Ive had dvds in, the audio and also the video has little hiccups. I havent relaly had time to look into it yet but so far on all 3 dvds Ive had and audio Ive played.


I have an issue where when I reboot, it doesnt log on to the wireless server near me. It seems to log on for a second, then disconnect right after booting. I have to then manually long on to a selected wireless.
This has been since I got it. I have the updated drivers.

I have set to log on when it sees the network. I will have to call Dell I think

 

I had skipping audio on my login screen, and initially blamed the fingerprint driver. But it wasn't the fingerprint driver - it went away the instant I uninstalled Dell ControlPoint Connection Manager. I haven't had skipping since but I'm not doing things that would usually result in skipping in Vista... Not playing mp3s while I work yet and haven't stuck a DVD in either. Streaming video plays fine off of youtube but I haven't played videos over a few minutes.

On my HP 8710 (Vista 64) sound would skip when I was doing an intensive task and had an MP3 playing. For example doing work in Maya would cause sound stutters on the mp3. Kind of ridiculous for that problem to be back after finally eliminating it with Windows 98 in, like, 1997, right?

Vista's sound handling mechanism is to blame I think. There was an issue with Vista (which has been solved I believe) where if you had sound playing from any application, and were connected with a fast network connection like Gigabit, you would notice your network throughput limited to something like 150 to 200 megabit. (vs. 1000.) That's because Vista handles audio in real time with minimal buffering, so it can do its per-application mixer settings trick. Doing that requires the processor to handle interrupts and pay attention to the sound stream far more often than normal. (Used to be once or twice a second - remember when your game would crash and the last half-second of sound would loop? That was the half-second audio buffer not getting refreshed and not getting turned off, because the app had crashed.)

I have played Bioshock and thought the sound came through great, no stuttering vs. stuttering with more than a few simultaneous sounds on the 8710. But I only played for half an hour on a new game.

Bioshock played really freaking fast on full settings BTW, at 1280x960.


EDIT: Sound quality -

I've only played Bioshock and my character's voice for lip sync so far, but I DID notice that mouse events tend to come through on the built-in speakers.

For people with muffled or strange audio, if you have a microphone built in to your screen, check and make sure it's muted. Maybe your computer is making sound, which is picked up by the microphone and mixed back in to the sound the computer is making?