Dell Inspiron 9400 With Intel Duo Core Available (specs)

"I also find that checking off the box that says keep fan on all the time and even overclocked heavily my temps only reach 68C full load and 62 idle"

Now that is very comforting

 

Also suggests more and more that the gpu was underclocked for either battery life reasons (that one still doesn't wash with me, and could have easily been resolved in the Dell drivers by having a performance present and a battery saving preset), as I think is more likely, marketing reasons because it's looking more and more like if they hadn't of underclocked it, it's performance would be a closer to the xps then I think Dell would have liked...

 

A few more notes/tests:

I hooked up the 9400 to 4 (woohoo) monitors. Unfortunately, you can only use 2 at a time. You can use any combination of DVI, VGA, Svideo or Internal LCD.

Another sad note, the Nvidia card will not output a 1920x1080i signal for my HDTV. It's native resolution is 1280x720, but will accept and downconvert a higher signal. The Nvidia card will only output the higher resolution using the TV's native mode, hence giving you a panning screen (everything cut off the side/bottom). Maybe there is a way with all the advanced timings, but 4 hours of fiddling hasn't solved it yet.

I also tried the WMV-HD files again, and am happy to report they all play silky-smooth with no dropped frames and no loss in audio sync.

NFS: Most Wanted plays very nicely in 1440x900 native resolution. I couldn't really test 1920x1080, as it cuts off the side/bottom of the screen (see above), including the menu, but it did load properly (maybe if I can remember the key combinations for navigating the menu, I'll try again)

I think in the future, I will need to get a 1920x1080p HDTV

 

Does anyone know the best way to take advantage of Dell Coupons?


This site always has links to 650 off coupons, but they usually don't work when you try them because Dell is offering some 200 buck coupon and doesn't allow you to use 2 of them or something..


I've never been able to get an outside coupon to reduce the purchase price when I configure the system to what I want...

 

Nevermind I figured it out. You just have to remove one coupon to use the other if they are in conflict.


Does anyone have any thoughts on the windows media center vs windows Professional?

I currently use WP, but don't know if I want to pay the extra 100 for in on this computer. I'd hate to buy a better computer only to find out the operating system is much junker.

 

Hi Guys,

Thanks for everyone's comments about gaming expectations on the laptop, especially your's Redstar. I think you are all right, I needed a reality check. As it is the laptop is posting 3dmark05 scores that are more then twice as fast as my desktop (5376 with just the optimal overclocking versus 2660 on my desktop xp2800 with AIW 9800Pro).

I guess I had my hopes up a little more reading about the card at Nvidia's website and then reality sunk in that it was seriously underclocked. I don't like to have to overclock at all but feel that I have to at least go with the optimal overclocking settings using the non dell driver.

About the Extreme G drivers. I thought I heard that the 81.97 drivers were the ones to use so I've been using them. I first tried the 83.20 drivers and experienced blue screens complaining about the nav_disp.dll driver being in a loop.

Last night I went over to a buddy's house and played games for 6 hours. BF2, COD2 and Fear.

BF2 I had to turn the settings to Medium with view distance set to high and textures set to high at 1024 x 768 to get decent, acceptable performance with no lags. If I put it higher it would lag big time, didn't matter which map. laptop didn't crash at all.

Call of Duty 2 I played pretty much maxed at 1280 x 1024 and it looked great and ran pretty good but kept getting "blue screens of death" and I would see glitches occasionally while playing. I had figured out how to go higher then the optimal settings and had gone up to 373/902 so I thought I had pushed it too much so went back to the optimal settings and tried again. 10 minutes later, same thing crashed to blue screen memory dump complaining about the display driver nav_disp.dll (or something). Yikes. I stopped playing that and went to Fear.

Fear played fine actually, very smooth with reasonable settings. This is a game I knew not to expect to play maxed. No problems with crashes or anything. (very fun).

Has anyone else had any blue screens complaining about the nav_disp.dll driver? Anyone? If yes what drivers were you using and what game were you playing (COD2???)?

What drivers are we sure will work with this laptop and will allow just the optimal overclocking?

Are these extreme drivers the only ones I can use besides the crappy dell ones or can I use a certified driver from Nvidia? Does Nvidia provide drivers for this card too or just the laptop manufacturers and if Nvidia does have a driver does it allow similar overclocking or is that just the extreme drivers that allow that?

Sorry for the long post...I'm prepared to give this laptop another go but obviously, can't accept blue screens like that. I still have not formatted and reinstalled xp so I wonder if that could be part of the problem. I did use the driver cleaner program first.

Can everyone post what drivers they are using, overclocking speeds if any and what games they are playing with them?

I've tried now both the 81.97 and 83.20 drivers and both have caused the above mentioned blue screen

Thank you

 

Just don't go with the Home edition - it sucks bad. XP Pro is the best IMHO

 

I swear by Media Centre, as it's the same as XP Pro (need a tweak to connect to a domain, tho), yet cheaper, plus includes the nice gui interface for media, and the TV Guide. It also includes all the newer windows updates as it is a 2005 edition, compared to Pro or Home. It also has a nicer theme to the taskbar/windows (I got tired of the flat blue of Home/Pro). Just looks and feels nicer to me.

FFF: I play NFS: Most Wanted, Flight Sim 2004, AOEIII, Civ IV, Thief: Deadly Shadows, etc. I've only installed a few of them, but all work fine. I did have some BSOD's, but that was due to ZoneAlarm. I use the 81.97 drivers.

 

Have you overclocked your GPU? Have you done a fresh install of windows or just uninstalled bloat?

 

I uninstalled the bloat (which was good enough for me, and plus the jury's still out on whether formatting will render MediaDirect inoperable).

I am overclocking the GPU at the mo. It's at 360/870 right now (but I normally have it at 320/800), and find the temperature is always the same, just the fan comes on a bit more to keep it constant.

I tried the 83.20 drivers, but they were slower. I tried the 83.40 desktop drivers (someone said they got it installed as the GTX), but the 7800go wasn't recognized.

 

What about these official Nvidia drivers 81.94:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_mobile_81.94.html

says GeForce Go 7800 GTX though. Anyone try these? Are there other official Nvidia drivers available for our GPU? I couldn't see any.

 

Just tried those drivers. Same deal: "Couldn't find any drivers that support your hardware". Oh well...

 

I've been sitting here for an hour trying to figure out what to do. I get the bloody blue screens in COD2 with both the 81.97 and 83.20 drivers. I see there is an 82.65 driver but I don't know if I should even bother with that one.

Somebody out there with a 9400 must play COD2 what are you using for drivers?

The only thing I can think of is something went awry when i removed the bloat and dell nvidia drivers and that I need to rebuild the os.

 

I use the 81.97 driver and play COD2 without any problems what so ever, everything works perfectly. No reformat here, i have just uninstalled the stuff i didn't want. No overclocking at the moment either.

EDIT

Took a peek at the BIOS settings earlier. There was a screen where you could set the harddrive to be 'fast', 'quiet' or to 'auto setting'(default). Does anyone know if setting it to 'fast'(or 'performance' or what it said, don't quite remember) makes any difference speedwise? Didn't try it myself.

 

Those are the official drivers; however, when you take a look it says that basically if dell didnt make drivers for the 7800go, you could use thoses.

 

Well I'm going to go for a rebuild then and try the 81.97 drivers again.

So as for formatting and reinstalling xp:

1. Are all the drivers available at Dell? I thought someone had a hard time finding the sound card driver?

2. What about Media Direct, is this just software available from the dell site with the drivers?

I figured I would leave the "hidden" Fat32 partitions just in case I need something from there and if all works well I will just delete these partitions on a future rebuild.

 

Would anyone be willing to go through this list of downloads for the 9400 at dell and tell me what do I have to download for my fresh install. Bare minimums only no bloat crap:

http://support.dell.com/support/dow...s=dhs&SystemID=INS_PNT_P4_9400&os=WW1&osl=EN#

As far as I can tell I ONLY NEED:

Audio Drivers
Chipset (both)
Communications Driver (i'll never use the modem so do i need this)
Display Devices (don't know if i need this or if i do what model i have how do i figure that out?)
Input Device Drivers
Network Drivers (the intel one for me)

Not sure about the system and configuration utilities - if you follow the link it sounds important but what is it and do you really need to install this?

I'll of course skip the Dell video drivers.

Am i missing / over looking anything here?

 

Here's the ones I think you need at a minimum. I suggest downloading everything else anyways, tho, just in case.

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b294/kbahrbarrie/dellsw.jpg

 

Does anyone know if the car power adaptor for the 9300 will work with the 9400?

 

It should work. The i9400 and i9300 use the 90watt PA-10 Adapter.

 

Tried the hd settings in bios today(performance/quiet) and got the exact same score in PCMark05 with both, and i couldn't see any difference in noise, so i guess it doesn't really do anything.

 

So let me get this straight, nobody who has reformatted their hard drive and reinstalled xp has been able to get MediaDirect to work? If I leave the hidden partitions does MediaDirect work or will the repair program see it in the hidden partition?

If I didn't have a big MediaDirect button on the laptop I just wouldn't care, it wasn't a selling point for me but seeings how it is there I would prefer to have it at least work.

 

Thanks for the info on Linux. I posted a Linux question a few days back but got nothing but silence. My 9400 arrives on Monday. Woot!
__________________
(Ordered) Dell i9400/T2600/WUXGA/2GB@667Mhz/256MB Nvidia 7800/100GB@7200/Intel 3945/Bluetooth

Re:- Linux

Your spec is the exact same as mine LOL

Default ubuntu install automatically configures the display at full res, detects sound card etc, everything spot on, (even the touchpad).

BUT, if you install the default 686 SMP Kernel the keyboard hangs as soon as the login window appears, it also has severe problems because there is no cardbus pcmcia on the 9400.

I built a custom kernel disabling pcmcia and a few other bits and pieces and it runs like a dream although we will have to wait Q1 2006 for Intel to come up with a driver for the wireless on Linux.

If you need any help just PM me,

Cheers,

Dougie
posting from XP Cause I'm playing poker LOL

p.s.

As for media direct I got the app on my Eurotools CD2, installs fine but it wastes my grub bootloader for Ubuntu, have to go through a small procedure to reinstall grub after flattening your machine, install XP, Ubuntu etc.

 

Does the 9400 have the obnoxious little high pitched whine that everyone says is from the fans every 5 seconds?

 

That kinda sounds like it could be a bad bearing in the fans. I would call Dell and ask about it. It could also be the fan rubbing on the outer rim of the fan.

 

Well, i don't have any problems with the fans. I haven't had a laptop before, so i just havve my desktop and compared to that, this is like...well...real quiet I am sooo satisfied with this machine.

 

I grabbed a 9400 on Feb 2nd. I don't have any whining fans, and everything is pretty smooth so far. Windows crashes with a memory error whenever I shut it down, but it hasn't caused any problems while doing work or playing games. My 3DMark05 score is 3984 using 83.20 Forceware drivers. I am going to play around with the drivers a bit, but for now everything is rockin'. I only play CS:Source, True Combat: Elite, and Battle for Middle Earth. Everything runs awesome.


2Ghz, 1024MB 667MhZ, 80GB 5400RPM, 17" 1920x1200 display...

 

--UPDATE--

FYI

I just OC'd my card to 361/877 and it now scores a 5467 on 3DMark 05.

 

That shouldn't happen. Have you uninstalled all the bloat or (preferably) reinstalled XP from scratch yet ?

Dougie.

 

Hey Everyone,

Well I can't believe how quiet my 9400 is. Honestly, I can't hear it at all unless I spin up a cd or dvd. My old HP pavilion laptop sounds like a rocketship when the fans go on and my desktop is sooooo loud. Awesome!

I hope to reinstall windows this weekend and hope then that COD2 will run without blue screening on me everytime (81.97 drivers or 83.20 drivers)

 

I gotta say...tried to install SoF2 and the system hung up on the second disk.
Tried it again..and it installed no problem.

Not exactly a comforting sign.

(still using dell drivers)

Also at max settings but only 1024 res...the game actually locked up hard.

I suppose this just confirms the dell drivers more than just under clock the thing grr

 

Re: Want NEC DVD not Sony based on great helpful comments here. Yes I've read all 69 pages and taken lots of notes!!

But when you order they don't tell you the manufactuer.

For the i9400 is the "8x CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability" the NEC or do you have to do some special order to be sure you get the NEC?

Thanks
Dave in Phoenix, soon to be ordering i9400

 

Well I installed Half Life 2 Counterstrike Source today and low and behold it auto detected to the highest possible settings at 1600 x 900 except for anti-aliasing was off. It looked incredible. I did the video stress test that it provides and besides looking awesome, said the FPS was 130 with my settings!!!!!

Still scared to run COD2 again though cause I'm sure it will still crash but one of these days i'll have time to reinstall xp and hope that will fix that game.

 

do they have an adapter to hook up to a car plug in?

 

Can anybody tell me what happens when you delete the 5 GB FAT32 unknown partition? Does it kill the MediaDirect?

 

Hi there, I ordered a Dell Inspirion 9400 with a 2.16 Duo CPU, obviously complete with the 7800 go. The ETA on delivery (I'm in the UK) was 12 days the sales person said (in India), though the published date online was the end of Feb!!

Anyway, the laptop was showing at the very 1st stage of about 6 stages (for the build and despatch process) online and all of a sudden, after about the 3rd working day, it went from the 1st stage to despatched! I had it ordered, configured and delivered within a week. This one has pretty much everything, BT, 2GB, 9 cell batt, 100gb 7200RPM, WUXGA (not sure if that was an option or not) and a carbon fibre snap-on as well, so it's not like it was a standard build!

I was really shocked at how quick it was!

Anyway, it's quick, well built and (although wow isn't too taxing for modern graphics cards) is excellent in World of Warcraft.

I am a little disappointed on one score, I was hoping to use my 30" Cinema display on it, although despite it and its' resolutio being correctly detected, i couldn't get it to work.

I'm aware that the graphics card needs to be a dual head card to support uch displays so I can only assume that this card isn't such!

Another thing which suprises me, is how quiet it is. It's very quiet even with both of it's fans going. It gets quite warm sometimes, if say, it's being used on your lap. If it's in a desk stand, it's fine and the fans rarely come on.

I've been experimenting with an option in the BIOS to speed up the gard disk. I think it is labelled Hard Disk Acoustic mode. this was set to Quiet as oposed to Performance. The description given for each says that queit, may be slower than performance and of course, Performance may be faster but will be noisier.

I've done speed tests with it switched on and off with caried results, though the HD definatley does get noisier in Performance mode. I prefer the Quiet mode myself and there is very little difference in the speed test results.

The bench mark testes (using Performance Test from http://www.passmark.com/ ) gave me 579.08 the first time and then with the disk set to fast / performance I got 574.58 - which indicated that in fact, the machine was faster with the disk set to default / quiet!!??

I re-tried the tests and was later getting more predictable results but I'm stil leaving the option as Quiet!

Does anyone know if it would be possible to drive a display @ 2560x1600? I'd be very pleased on hearing!!

Cheers, TJ

 

TJET. Same thing here, ordered it on thursday, shipped on sunday, delivered to my door on thursday(i live in Sweden, the lappie was put together in Ireland). The ETA was two weeks later, so i was extremely satisfied that i got it earlier.
As far as the hd settings in bios i tried them out earlier this week and i didn't find any differences in either performance or noise, so i've set it to the default setting.

EDIT

For my desktop computer i got a program that sets the mic-in to speaker out, so yuo can use a 4-channel speaker configuration, or 6 channels if you use the line in as speaker out aswell. Is this possible to do on my 9400 also?
Maybe should mention that my desktop computer has a Realtek built-in soundcard.

 

Hi folks,

Would you kind chaps with an i9400 plug all the USB bus-powered hard-drives, memory sticks and card readers in that you have to hand and tell me what you get - try all the ports if you would.

Dell state that all 6 USB ports are unpowered but it offers an external floppy drive so there must be a reasonable amount of juice to use.

I would appreciate some comments on the keyboard too. My old i7000 had a brilliant keyboard which was as good as an IBM thinkpad KB. The KB on the i8500 I bought as a replacement was (keeping it clean) awful! Also, the 2 USB ports wouldn't drive my 2.5" enclosure which my i7000 had powered with ease.

Is the KB on the i9400 back to the quality of old - as a current reference I find the HP7000/8000 series (the big 17" one with the NUM pad) to be excellent.

Cheers,
Tony.

 

yoo, mine was ordered on the 31-1 and went yesterday in production. I have also a question about the battery, is there some ritual for the first startup? do you have to recharge the batt for 16 hours without using your lappy for the first time, so you have a maximum battery capacity?
grtz

 

omgawsh... none of the current computer solutions support HDCP:

"High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection and is an Intel-initiated program that was developed with Silicon Image. This content protection system is mandatory for high-definition playback of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs. If you want to watch movies at 1980x1080, your system will need to support HDCP
"

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_nvidia_hdcp_support/

According to the firingsquad peeps we have all been misled!

Well, i guess we stll have our work and our games

 

As far as i know Dell hasn't said that 9400 supports HDCP, not here in Sweden anyway. So i can't really say that i've been misled.

 

actually it doesn't sound as bad as it first did. Other people have said vista will only require you to have hdcp support for hdcp content. That's not as bad as the article says...vista would require HDCP support. period.

I don't need hi def on the computer

 

This isn't such a big deal.

1) I can't think of any HDCP content for the computer yet
2) There are no computers with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD yet
3) By the time I need HDCP support, I'll be ready for a new PC/TV anyways
4) I'm quite happy playing my games, WMV-HD (up to 1920x1080), etc from my i9400 on my non-HDCP HDTV

P.S. Just doing some battery tests - Part 1: MediaDirect, playing DVD, no USB devices, brightness 3 from max, headphones plugged in at reasonable volume = 1h:54m on the 9-cell (and MediaDirect refuses to play divx )

 

some good news on that USB battery sucking problem

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=2693&p=8

there is a temp fix that mostly works...

and it is not a core duo problem...it is a problem with any device that goes lower than an C3 state.


Edit two:
Another interesting conclusion from the article ...

unplug your usb mouse when you are not using it...because the continual polling will prevent the cpu's from going into c3 or c4 states --not a bug
and thus i think the reg edit they suggest will not effect the mouse polling keeping the cpu too active when not required.

edit 3: and pay close attention to this paragraph

"The problem is that the fix isn't exactly perfect yet. The biggest problem we've seen thus far is that while applying the fix gives you back the vast majority of your lost battery life, it won't remain active coming out of suspend. Once you apply the fix, you are set for as long as that key remains in your registry. However, if you put your notebook into stand-by, when it comes out of stand-by the fix will no longer be active. The only solution at this point is to reboot your system, which causes the registry to be re-read, and the fix will continue to work normally.

"

edit 4: oh oh ..i have to read all the fine print:

"Interestingly enough, the E1705 doesn't actually gain all that much battery life from the fix. We're still working on finding out why this is the case; for what it's worth, the E1705 has an integrated USB 2.0 hub that, like the ASUS systems and their integrated camera, complicates the issue. A lot of this problem may be up to the aggressiveness of the power management designed in by the notebook maker, but we'll be working with Dell on our final review of the E1705 to figure out exactly what's going on here"

 

Thanks for the link Redstar I am sure it will be greatly appreciated by everyone here!

 

Now i've come across a quite annoying thing. When i sit at my desk and type on the lappie my arms cover the speakers, so the sound gets kinda "muffled" and it doesn't sound very good

 

Anyone know of a divx encoder that is dual-core enabled? I notice there isn't really any improvement on speed on Dr Divx vs my old celeron at 3ghz. I think the new Divx Converter 6.1.1 is supported, but doesn't pass-through AC3. Hmmm, I wonder how much software out there can actually benefit from dual-cores (I haven't seen any yet).

P.S. The gateway laptop is out - looks like a direct competitor (same spec), but that 1680x1050 screen should be a nice middle ground between the two dell options (not that I hate my i9400

http://www.gateway.com/products/gconfig/prodhmseries.asp?seg=hm&gcseries=nx860&clv=LNav

 

On the USB front I found a thread over on Dell's forums where the user had successfully used his 2.5 HD that had failed to work on his Inspiron 8600.

That made me very happy

So convinced was I that it was a design flaw with the 8500/8600 that I had already placed my order for a 9400 by the time I found that thread.

Tony.