D630 Owners Thread

I've never seen any throttling on any Dx30 machines, but your CPU temps do seem to be high. If you haven't looked inside the machine yet, you could just have a lot of dust in there or poor contact between the heatsink and the CPU.

The northbridge in the D630 does have a thermal pad. The gap between said chip and the heatsink is definitely wide enough such that you'd need a shim, etc, if you wanted to replace the pad.

 

We have a couple of D630 that are still used in the company here. They do tend to get quite warm on the underside, but CPU temperature at 100% system load hovers around 80°C.

If you see significantly higher temperatures and throttling, my first bet would be dirt and gunk in heat-sink/fan assembly. This has happened here quite a bit. Usually, just blowing through the assembly from the rear (heat sink, hot air outlet) and the bottom (fan, air inlet) with a can of compressed air solves the problem. If not, you may either want to call Dell (if there is still a warranty on the system) or dig into the machine to isolate the problem (bad fit of the thermal pads, age-related breakdown of the thermal pads).

 

Hello, i was wondering if anyone has any experiance with changing the top cover? Specifically if an ATG cover would be swappable with the regular d630 and if so if the red keyboard lights would have somewhere to be plugged in and work. I got a d630 off craigslist cheap with great specs but the original cover is all scarred, and i like to have my electronics looking like new if at all possible .

If not compatible, ill just get a painted cover off ebay

thanks for any replys

 

You'll need more than just a back cover if you want it to work. The LEDs are connected to the inverter, so you'll also need that. In addition, the ATG uses a different bezel (because of the LEDs), so you'll also need that. Furthermore, the ATG back cover is thicker and the hinges are larger, so you'll also need a new hinge cover. As you can see, it's going to be quite a bit of work and money, so most likely, it won't be worth the trouble...

If you just want something fancier, get a Precision M2300 LCD cover (DP/N TN178).

 

awsome, thanks for the informative reply

 

This isn't true. My SSD pulls 220mb/sec on a D830 with standard firmware.

Not possible without SATA-2 support.

 

AFAIK, there's no meaningful BIOS hacks out there (aside from ones intended solely for piracy). All functionality available from the D630/D830 hardware is enabled.

In some cases, you would want to use drivers from the E6400/E6500, for things like the touchpad for Windows 7.

No limitation with a 64-bit operating system or a 32-bit operating system with PAE.

 

A18 BIOS link is finally working, just updated my D630 to it.

Drivers and Downloads | Dell [United States]

 

Got a great deal for a second hand Dell Latitude D630 Laptop today - purchased for £160.00p and comes with the following tech specs plus a new 9 Cell 84W Battery (only a couple of cycles of usage) and it still has warranty coverage (NBD) for another 160 odd days...sweet as a nut!

WXGA+ Screen
Intel C2D T9500
4GB DDR2 Memory (Getting 2x4GB DIMMs from a mate to replace them with)
160GB 7200RPM HDD (Just off to switch out for a 500GB 7200RPM plus looking into ordering a 2nd HDD caddy)
DVD-RW Drive

Only slight snag is is comes with a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 135M Graphics Card but it was built in the end of June 2009, so it should be alright (fingers crossed!).

Just off to update to the latest BIOS release as per Robin24k's post.

 

You've got an amazing deal. Enjoy it.