D830 Owner's Lounge

Okay, let's get a home thread up for all of us with the new Santa Rosa Latitude D830's.

Let's start with what configurations you got, initial impressions from the first few days of use, and so on.

 

Okay, I ordered the following configuration:

Dell Latitude D830
C2D 2.2/800
2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM
15.4 WUXGA
nVidia Quadro NVS140m (256MB)
120GB 5400rpm
------------------------------------

First questions:

1. Why would Dell ship a unit with such poor graphics drivers? My initial WEI was 3.2 (because of the gaming graphics) and my 3DMark06 score was under 1000. Not to mention the frequent driver crashes, causing the blackouts and screen resets. I've since updated the drivers from Dell's support page, and will post my new scores to 3DMark06 and PCMark05 within the week.

2. Are any of you having problems with DVD playback in either Media Player or Media Center? I tried a few region-free DVD-videos and it refused to play past the opening FBI warnings. However, when I popped in my original R1 Almost Famous (Director's But Bootleg Edition) and a few others, they worked, but with a quite few stutters. In other words, the video playback - and, actually, the entire Media Center experience - was choppy and un-entertaining.

3. Speakers. Is it just me, or are the volume levels in these speakers ridiculously low? For some Windows alerts, it's fine - at least the error messages don't get loud enough to be annoying. But, again, I tried the DVD-videos and the audio is so low, it's all but incomprehensible. I had to hook up external speakers to get a decent experience out of it.

4. Also, how is your overall system performance? I was disappointed with the speed (or lack thereof) but attributed it overall to Vista and immature drivers. Then I remembered a ZDNet blog post by Ed Bott and his experience with Vista on the stock Dell C521 was incredible.

Why aren't I seeing the same performance in my Latitude?

Any other comments?

 

Just ordered mine, got a university deal which I couldn't refuse, allready sold my good old e1505.

-T7500 2,2Ghz proc
-2 gig ram
-NVS140
-Bluetooth
-WUXGA screen
-D-bay battery to replace the standard DVD and a 9 cell battery
-D-dock
-120gig 7200 rpm HD
-3 years of on-site waranty, accidental cover and theft cover
-And vista basic which i'll probably replace with XP and a 5 button mouse

Paid 1450 euro's for this, which is about 1997 dollars at current exchange rates..., sold my e1505 allready for 500 euros. Ahhh, HD screen and 10 hours of battery life, I await you!

 

Do you know if the NVS140 250mb on die or is it 128 turbocached to 256?

 

Ordered July 1st, received it July 9th.

- T7300 2.0Ghz
- 2GB RAM
- NVS140
- WUXGA
- 9 Cell Primary
- 6 Cell Auxilary
- 80GB 7200RPM HDD
- Complete Care
- 8x DVD/RW
- Vista Business

My first impression?

It's a beast! My m500 is quite tame compared to this thing. Kinda like with a nice car you can feel the power behind that keyboard.

I do have to agree the stock driver is poor. Vista would do these tiny lags under the default driver. Aero score was 3.2. 3DMark05 was 984. Upgrading to the ForceWare drivers raised the Aero and 3DMark05 scores to 3.4 and 3063, respectively, though I'm having some other minor issues probably due to the drivers.

Battery life was a bit over 3 hours with Dell's default power settings. I simply left the machine on with WMP playing some MP3's at a low volume. Not too bad I have to say, but I did expect a bit more, especially after reading some reviews for older D620/820's. I haven't tried to test the battery life with the media bay battery installed.

Sound is really amazing compared to the last two laptops I've owned. My ears start ringing before the sound quality goes up and I can pretty much hear the thing clearly throughout my house. It's really something.

Am going to be installing a fresh copy of XP today. Hopefully that'll get rid of my remaining display bugs. Will try to bench it again with stock and ForceWare drivers.

EDIT: In response to the above post, I'm pretty sure the NVS140 is turbocached to 256.

EDIT2: >>> Freefisheater: Concerning 1,2 and 4 it's probably because you're using Dell's stock drivers. Try the ForceWare drivers if you can. I just popped in a DVD and the playback in the default DVD player was fine. WMP hasn't given me any complaints either. Concerning the regionality issues you may just want to use a different player. Get MPC or something.

 

If I remember right, it's 256MB on-board and the rest of the system RAM is available for Turbocaching.

 

Tiny lags? EXACTLY! Especially when using Flip3D. Or when using Dreamscene (it would get garbled or unexpectedly shut down), as I posted in another thread.

Is there a way to increase the volume through some third-party software? Maybe a hack to remove the decibel limits on the sound driver or speakers? I'm really disliking my weak audio here.

I'll try to follow your updated ForceWare drivers method from that other thread and see where that takes me. How is your issue with resuming from sleep going, though?

Finally, I saw your post over on another thread asking for a dedicated D830 thread... so here we are.

 

Can you tell me more about keyboard, heat and noise?

 

For those who don't want to click-through to Ed Bott's article, here's what he did and had to say about it:

 

@ryusrain

I was able to investigate a D830 because they allready have it at the university notebook service center. I did not have an impression that it specifically noisy or hot.