Mini Review of my Dell Inspiron 6400 / E1505

Intro:

I ordered a new Dell Inspiron 6400 from Dell.ca on March 2nd, mainly because I was just about to sell my Toshiba Satellite M40. Furthermore I wanted to be able to play a few newer games as the Toshiba only had an integrated video card (GMA900) and be able to do some video editing, hence I needed more ram and a faster processor. I was first looking at the HP DV6000 series since I really like the design but after finding out that none of them are available in Canada with dedicated graphics; the DV6000 was out of the question. The total for my 6400 (specs below) including 6% GST and free shipping came to $1297 CDN ($1106 USD). The laptop was supposed to ship by March 19th, but instead arrived at my door March 9th.
Since I don’t have time right now to write a full review I just thought I should share a few of my impressions on this notebook and Vista with you.

First Impressions:

After taking this laptop out of the box I noticed how heavy it was in comparison to my old Toshiba. However since it will stay on my desk 99% of the time, this doesn’t matter to me. After opening the lid, I was totally blown away by how sturdy the whole chassis felt. It was way better than my 1.5 year-old Toshiba but also considerably heavier. Even my father was very positively surprised by the build-quality and he has been working with Thinkpads for the last 10 years. I guess that the heavy weight is probably the trade-of for awesome build quality. The keyboard is also very comfortable and didn’t take a lot of getting used. The tru-life screen is comparable to my old notebook’s and I was happy that the white stripes are not as ugly IMO as I thought they would be but I’m sure they would be much nicer looking in black for instance.

Specs:

Intel® Core™ Duo T5600 (1.83 GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 667MHz FSB)
Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium
15.4 inch Wide Screen XGA Display with TrueLife™
2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHZ, 2 DIMM
Free 160GB Hard Drive - $140 Value
8X CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability
256MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400 HyperMemory™
53 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
Intel Next-Gen Wireless-N
1 Year Return to Depot Service and Technical Support

Vista-related impressions:

Positive aspects:
I was initially somewhat worried since Vista is a pretty major memory hog. However even with all the eye-candy and Vista sidebar turned on, everything works much snappier than Windows XP was on my old notebook which used a PM 740 and 1GB of ram. Office applications and the like open instantly. I must say that Vista looks much better than I expected. There were no Vista drivers available for my printer or for my MP3 player but I was glad since their respective Win XP drivers seem to work well even in Vista.

Negative aspects:
I tried running Need for Speed Carbon which didn’t work at all probably because of some X1400 driver related issues. Also NHL 2007 would only run @ 640x480 res even though it should run much better. Also I might mention that Vista is a real memory hog (using about 600MB ram at startup) However this doesn't really matter if you have a decent amount of ram.

Benchmarks (note: all benchmarks except PCMark 05 and 3DMark 03 were run using Windows Classic theme):

3DMark 01: 7547
3DMark 03: 3156
3DMark 05: 1911

SuperPi to 2 million digits: 1 minute 12 seconds

PCMark 05: 3921
HDtune: Average performance: 32MB/s

Gaming:

Call of Duty 2 ran very well in DX7 mode (1280x800) with 4xAA and details on medium/high. It only got slightly choppy when a lot of smoke was involved. Other than that I've only played Age of Empires 3 so far which ran very well too on 1280x800 res and settings on low-medium.

Conclusion:

After using this notebook for two days, I am extremely impressed by how much I got for my money. This notebook performs really well, it is very sturdily built and has a comfortable keyboard. The one downside would be its weight if someone was planning on lugging this notebook around frequently. There was also a lot of bloatware installed which I easily got rid of by uninstalling and running CCcleaner afterwards.

Thanks for reading!

 

is it that heavy? they say that It weights 6.2lbs. My old macbook pro was 5.6 and I found that kinda light...

thank god I lift weights! lol

 

I just compared it to my old Toshiba Satellite which (on paper) weighs the same but is noticably lighter. It's not *that* heavy though.

 

I have the exact same dell with same config as yours, I bought it on Feb 25th for about the same price. The only difference between mine and your laptop is the wireless card , I have the standard dell mini wireless not the draft n.

Does the draft n perform much faster...???

BTW you can downloaded the updated ATI X1400 driver from the dell support website which apparently doesn't come preinstalled on the computer (although the release date for this driver was Jan 2007). This should help improve the game performance...

Oh and by the way, I couldnt help but notice that in my ATI X1400 properties, it says that the dedicated video memory is 128mb which is expected but for the shared memory it says its taking up 763mb giving a total of 891mb of available graphics memory????? I thought that the video card takes up only 128 from ram but mine seems to be takin up 763mb ...... weird

 

About the wireless, I have the new, finalized AGN Intel wireless card, not draft n. However I don't know how it performs since I don't have a wireless n router yet. I just wanted the laptop to be future proof.

I have already installed the most recent release for the x1400 driver however it still doesn't really work with NFS:C and NHL 07. Oh well, otherwise this card works really well even in Vista. COD 2, even though it's in DX7 mode looks pretty nice and performs extremely well. Frame rates go down very slightly during smoky scenes with a lot of action though it still runs practically smooth.

I also noticed that the x1400 seems to be using 763MB ram though I highly doubt this is true. When I check the task manager during games, they're never taking more than 400-500MB of ram. Other than that I think this card has 256MB ram dedicated and up to 256MB shared memory. Not sure though... I wonder where I can find out the actual #'s for amount of dedicated ram & shared ram.

 

CeeNote - Are you using Vista? Its seems to give more memory to gfx cards.

 

I didn't know that the wireless n technology has been finalized yet. I was under the impression that it won't be finalized until the second half of 2008. I thought that buying a wireless n card at the moment is excessive, especially that the technology hasn't been finalized and that all universities, schools, homes etc still use wireless g and I doubt they'll buy new routers before the end of next year.....

As for the video card, X1400 has a 256mb video memory with 128mb dedicated and the other 128 is shared. For this reason I was surprised to find out that my x1400 is taking up over 700mb of my ram just for the graphics.
http://ati.de/products/mobilityradeonx1400/specs.html

Try installing ATI CCC for the mobility cards from their website, it gives you more control over the video card settings and it has other power saving features.

Just curious, what's windows experience index on your laptop? Although I didn't run any games to check the performance of my ATI yet, I noticed that the windoes experience index for my vid card went down to 3.4 after installing the new ati driver from the website, but I was able to pull it back up by changing some of the settings for my vid card. Again, this is a very rough measure of the performance of the video card and I read in other forums that the experience index is highly dependent on the drivers on your system.

 

I think I have the finalized wireless n card since it is made by Intel and didn't mention anything about being draft n. It's also the same card that will be included in the upcoming Santa Rosa platform. This is the complete name of my wireless card: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN

I'm pretty sure the x1400 is not using over 700MB of ram though I don't know how they got this number.

It's weird because I got a windows experience index of 3.7 for the same card. In the end I guess we'll just have to wait for better drivers to show up.

 

I managed to pull up the experience index to 3.7 after changing some of the settings, but 3.7 is still not too high considering the fact that the laptop is brand new. Anyway this is the best vid card that sells with the I6400 so I am happy with it, besides it waaay better than crappy integrated vid cards that sell on other laptops like the ones I've seen in stores.

Anyway as for the wireless card, am sure that this is the best one available now, although I still doubt that they have finalized the wireless technology yet coz it says on the website that the card is a/b/g/draft n capable and not the final wireless n, I think they're still working on it but am sure they'll release drivers for this card that would support the final wireless n after its released..

here's the wireless card website

http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/products/wireless/wireless_n/overview.htm

 

Thanks for pointing out that this wireless card is still in the draft stage. I doubt however that they'll be making any major changes to the wireless n specifications now that even Intel has released their card.

About the video card, imo it only matters how it behaves in real life. Like always, benchmarks don't tell the whole story. So far I must say the x1400 hasn't disappointed me. Switching from an Intel GMA900 to the X1400 has made a world of difference.

 

Yeah, I'm using Vista Home Premium. I just checked how much ram COD 2 needs exactly and it was about 340MB.

 

Considering the fact that its a laptop, I dont think the x1400 is that bad.

I've been thinking of buying the extended warranty for my laptop from the dell website but I am think paying $150 for a 2 year warranty seems excessive but this seems to be the only option on their website.... I wonder if there are any coupons that one can use to get a discount on the extended warranty... Any suggestions?

 

See my sig. Did u buy the laptop with a CC ?

 

Yeah I did. and yes my cc duplicates the dell warranty for 1 year which sums up to 2 years.

But I was thinking that I need more than just 2. Especially that the dell laptops are flimsy and run into harddrive problems 2 - 3 years down the road. If I buy a 2 year warranty on top of the one year I have, it could sum up to a total of 4 years (3 from dell and 1 from my cc) which would be awesome, but I can't find a good deal on the extended warranty from dell or any coupons that would work for warranty either.

 

Hi guys,
I am thinking about a 1505 but worry about its LCD quality.

Do you have any comment or observation on your new machines?

Specifically,

1. what kind of LCD do you have?
LG, Samsung, AU or Quanta?
At what resolution?

2. How bright is your LCD?
Sony FE is usually the brightest, Toshiba A135 is also very bright,
HP dv6000 is a bit dim, but the Dell 1505 in the kios I checked out
was the lowest of all.

3.when the background is black, do you see light leakage at the
lower part of the screen? ( a bit brighter than the rest of the screen?)

4.when the background is white, do you find the brightness is even
all over the screen?

5. when you move your eye up and down, do you notice any darken
area occurs on the upper or lower part of the screen?

5. In Vista, if you open the document window. Do you find those faint vertical lines disappear as they goes toward the lower part of the screen?

I guess I am too picky, but your information would be of great help...

BTW, anyone has the experience with 1440x900 or 1680x1200 screen on Dell e1505?

Thanks,

 

First of all, I must say that I especially like the build-quality and keyboard a lot in comparison to my old Toshiba Satellite M40. The screen I think kind of similar though it seems even brighter.

1. I don't know which brand of screen I have but I have the 15.4 inch Wide Screen XGA Display with TrueLife™

2. IMO it's very bright, I had used the Toshiba Satellite M40 before this and I think the Dell's even brighter.

3. Yeah, there is some light leakage on the bottom of the screen when it's black. It doesn't however bother me at all.

4. It seems like it.

5. Not really.

6. I'm not really sure what you mean.

 

Thanks for you info, CeeNote.

1. You can find out your LCD manuf by:
In Device Manager, double-click Plug and Play Monitor, go to Details tab, select Hardware Ids.

LPL0000 = LG Phillips

I heard LG is better than Samsung

there are other threads on this site talking about the LCD IDs...

2. LCD loses its brightness over time, so when we say it is brighter than the old machine, do you mean brighter than when it was new or brighter than
what it is now, which is 2-3 years old.

3. In vista, click the window ball in the lower left corner ( =start in XP)
and then click Documents on the right pane, a window displaying list of documents will appear. Maximize this window, you will see vertical lines separating Name, Date Modifidied, Type, Size and other attributes of each file in the list. These vertical lines are very faint in color and in some LCDs, you can't see these lines clearly near the bottom of the screen, while in most cases you can see them on the upper half of the screen.

I guess this is a very good way to check out the vertical viewing angle of a LCD. According to my experience, if lower half of the screen is washout, my eyes get tired easily...

Appreciate your time and info,,,

 

Concerning the display of the 1505, I saw a friend's new 1505 the other day and I was quite impressed with the screen.

As far as display manufacturers go, I've read posts which applaud LG and criticize it. I think SEC had some problems last fall, but they seem to have cleared things up (no pun intended ). My HP display is a Samsung and it seems quite good to me.

Bill