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

Very nice work adoniteking!! The video is so funny XD hahaha!! Congrats!

 

Good balanced review. Nice work!

No mention of fan noise so I assume this is not an issue.

Under cons you may want to add no coolslice available.

 

Thank you very much...i will try to get the other vids this weekend. i have 2 other projects am also working on at the moment... this year sux 4 me

 

Can't be going too badly if you have that high-end M6400

 

Just bought one with 16GB RAM, Q9300 quad-core, quadro 3700m GPU (same specs as Covet, but I wanted the the grey lid as orange is kinda... orange).

It rocks. If you're using anything that takes advantage of multiple cores, intene graphics, or lots of memory, you notice it very quickly.

I'm running 2008 server, with 3 Hyper-V VMs running comfortably, and while the VMs are running I can pretty much max-out Far Cry 2 and it runs like a dream. Had to hack the bluetooth inf files to get bluetooth working, and still haven't got the 5530 NIC or the FIPS fingerprint reader working, but I'm sure they'll update the drivers for Vista x64 soon (which usually works for 2008 server x64).

SQL server runs magnificently, as does Hyper-V. So too, does 3ds Max 2009 and Maya. you really start to notice crap apps which haven't coded for multi-threading; they're the ones that aren't significantly faster.

I fully recommend it if you're doing anything full-on (e.g. SQL or VMs for business apps, or Autodesk / CAD for design work). Otherwise, it's probably a bit of overkill; it certainly shouldn't be considered a games machine, as pretty much no games (yet) have been written to take advantage of what it can offer.

P.S. the non-covet version looks very functional. Everything inside the case is black; almost IBM-Thinkpad-ish. It's a very powerful machine, but no-one will know. Don't get it for prestige status. Get it to do something amazing by yourself.

 

P.S. It does get fairly hot (especially if you leave it turned on in your backpack, because you didn't shut it down properly, and 2008 with Hyper-V disables sleep and hibernate). But it's no hotter than my old XPS M1710.

As for the fans, with 3 Hyper-V VMs running and Far Cry 2 maxed out, they hardly ever turned on. )

 

That's exactly what I was thinking about, when I ordered my M6400. I even wanted the E2E display but not that orange-gamer-notebook-style case. So I had to wait but finally ordered my "Silver Covet"

 

Nice work adoniteking
One suggestion: You might want to go edit your first post to include the links to the review as this will just get 'lost' among the other posts in this thread.

 

jhd: Which screen did you get and if it's the RGB LED can you confirm that it's matte? thanks.

 

The RGB LED is available in two versions. A normal matte version and a Edge-to-Edge Version with a glass cover (glossy). The M6400 RGB LED panel itself has always a matte screen, it's just the glass cover of the E2E version that makes it glossy.