About to REVIEW the Dell Precision M6400...NEED A LOT OF HELP

I bet some of these have been covered, but I'm sure to have missed some things skimming through so bear with me:

The Quad Core processor, according to specs, runs at 45 watts vs. the normal 35. That's about 30% more heat production. Can you do something like a lengthy 3D render, that uses all 4 cores, and watch the following:
max temps under full load.
Fan noise under full load.
Fan behavior under light load. (Does it stay on at all times?)
Fan noise under light load.

Several people report other laptops being unable to dissipate the heat of that processor. Their CPUs are going into automatic safety downclock mode, where they get maybe 50% to 25% or less speed. (These are NOT M6400 users, they have other, thinner laptops. They report it when playing Crysis.)

I personally would not bother benchmarking the hard drives, unless you bought the Dell SSD drive. Dell has so many choices of hard drive, and many people will not pay $400 for a 320-gig drive ($120 on newegg!). Chances are nobody will have the same drive as you. If you got the SSD drive though, there are huge quality differences between different manufacturers and different technologies and I've been curious if Dell is charging $660 for a $600 drive, or $660 for a $200 drive.

If you happened to get TWO SSD drives, definitely benchmark the RAID-0 function. SSD drives being so fast, by testing Raid-0 you would find out if there are any speed limit problems with the raid system. (i.e. slow connecting bus, slow controller handling the striping, etc.)


Most people want to know how nice the speakers are before buying a laptop but it isn't a major selling point.

Find out if there are any of those annoying capacitive buttons, and where they are. You know, the buttons that trigger just when your finger is above them, with no pressing. i.e., I had the HP 8710, and I swear every time I hit a number key with my index finger, it would trigger some function and kick me out of the program I was in. ("No, HP Info Center, I was pressing the number 4!")

Make note of any ergonomic issues. While I had the 8710, I noticed that if I typed in my normal way, the tips of my fingers would actually go underneath the edges of the keys above those I was pressing. Sometimes the corners of my fingers would snag and pop on the corners of, say the I key when I was hitting J. Also on the 8710 the USB cords reached right into the mouse area. (on the m6400 they are on the back instead of front.) On the 8710, my palm would constantly trigger the fingerprint sensor when I used the numpad. Stuff like that is great in reviews.

Check the screen and see how far to the sides or the top you can move before the color changes too much.

Everybody is curious how long the laptop can stay open, just running windows, before it is out of battery.

Can the power profiles be easily adjusted, to put you in a low power mode?

Is there a way to change the clock speed of the Extreme processor, without going to too much effort, or do you need new bios? (Not necessarily for overclocking! I want to decrease it to lower the power consumption in certain situations.)

 

Excellent suggestions.

 

Just in case you have not figured this out yet, you could do any of the following:

Remove the drives for (re)imaging, attach them to your mac, and use 'dd' or 'ddrescue' to copy the contents. (ddrescue in my experience is much faster than dd, unless you get the settings just right, which I haven't managed yet. But I believe dd is present by default in OS X. Use a block size of 4096 and it shouldn't be too bad. This is done in a terminal - type 'man dd' for a user manual.)

Leave the drives in your laptop, and use a live linux boot cd like Kubuntu. When the CD finishes loading, install ddrescue and drivers for hfs+ (sudo apt-get install hflplus ddrescue), mount the mac drive, and use ddrescue to image back and forth.

But, I'm guessing you probably have figured this out already... I just can't read 6 pages of thread to find out whether I should suggest this or not.

 

yes, but before you add those tests to your review, post the first version
I curious to see the results you can edit the additional test!
Hopefully you give us something to read and watch (photos of the screen..)!!

 

Yes, the internet is nearly devoid of M6400 photos, especially of the Covet.

I'll be posting pics of my Covet of course if it ever arrives.

 

The written review is completed...the videos have been recorded (awful quality but hey its still something.) i didnt speak in the video cos my voice really sux on the mic ... did a couple of jog shuttle control demos but the quality is awful) the only thing keeping me from releasing the review is my site which i was also working on. It has been coded and laid out but i just have to upload some content 2moro and i will let u know the link. Fingers crossed...it will go live 2moro/2day evening/night(depending on ur geographical location).

Its been tough guys...really tough cos am still very new to xhtml/css and everything had to be done within only 2weeks. let me know wat u think once i paste the link..i appreciate any criticism.

 

lol! yes i have...i went with backing up on an NTFS drive and that worked well with acronistrueimage

I will post my first draft and update it with some of the suggestions u mentioned that i didnt touch in the review.

 

yay!! Can't wait adoniteking!! If I have time I should try to do the same with my Lenovo W700 once it arrives (similar specs as yours). As for the videos, youtube has a high quality setting now and if you link to them you can always save on bandwidth!

 

Ok!!!!! GUYS!!! ITS FINALLY UP!

The site is still a bit buggy and i just updated the contents so it might take a little while for the server to adjust and remove the old content...The about page is also slightly buggy on firefox as u would need to click on a different page and go back to the contact page for the javascript to run properly.

Check this out(lol)

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=h-D3upZ-BSI&fmt=18

The link to the review is

http://www.adoniteink.com/reviews.html

 

Yepppieeehhhh
but were did you put those HD pics?
Nevertheless, thank you for the link... now we need some better pics of the covet!