Dell e5440 vs e6440

Hello All,

Which laptop is better overall? I know the e6440 is the 37 watt CPU vs. the e5440 is the 15 watt haswell.

From a build quality, weight, battery life, SSD options perspective, which one is better?

thanks!

 

The 5540 is newer.

Its a real toss-up as to which is 'better'. The e6440 supports 2-screw removal of the hard drive, which makes life easier in an enterprise IT environment. The HDD removal process for the E5540 is somewhat more elaborate. Replaceable CPU in the E6440, so you could bump up to an i7 a couple years down the road. No such option with the E5540 which is soldered. Also, the 5540 uses M.2 for its WiFi which probably will give you more options than miniPCI-E which seems to be in the process of phase-out.

Both are either out of production, or soon will be out of production (Mine was built March 17/2016).

I believe with the E5540, you are *guaranteed* an eDP interface. So you can always fit a 1080p panel (or perhaps even a 1440p panel, although nobody has verified AFAIK) to replace the stock one in the future. While some E6440s are LVDS, while others (ie: the latest 1080p models) are eDP.

I can't say that I've had both of them (I haven't), but I'd rather a newer E5540, than a first-run, almost 3-years-old E6440 with 1st gen Haswell CPU. And definitely not an E6440 with a discrete GPU (ie: AMD Radeon). I ended up going with the E6440 because a) I got a deal so good I could hardly refuse, b) I have a miniPCI-E 4G LTE WWAN card I wanted to re-use, c) I swap HDDs often and wanted the ability to do so easier, and d) I was assured of getting the latest revision eDP 1080p model.

 

BTW, some of the E5440 reviews are truly horrible online:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E5440-4668-Notebook.116181.0.html

Meanwhile, the E6440 is a refined 3rd generation product.

Again, see my tagline for an indication of where my personal biases took me. But cheap was a big factor!

 

The build quality on the E5440 and earlier generations of the E5xxx series is best avoided, IMO. The first of them worth buying, under any circumstances, was the E5450, and the E6440 or E74x0 will still be a much more solid machine. Personally, if I were looking to buy a dual-core machine, I'd lean quite strongly to one of the newer E74x0 machines (probably the E7450 as the E7470 is quite pricy on Outlet still.)

The actual weight between the two will be very close, although the published starting weight of the E5440 is lower because it has a 4-cell battery option available whereas the base battery on the E6440 is a 6-cell.

 

5440 and 6440 are from the same generation.

 

I have had both. The build quality on the 6440 is definitely better plus the processor is faster (may or not matter to you). 5440 is a bit thinner but I didn't feel like there was much difference in weight between the two. Also battery life seemed pretty similar. None have great battery life.

SSD options are the same from what I remember. Both have one traditional 2.5" hard drive bay, and one WWAN slot which doubles as mSata. I used a small mSata SSD with both to play around with Linux. You can also remove the optical bay and buy a hard drive caddy on ebay and stick a regular 2.5" drive in there if you want more storage. And it's Sata 3 so you can have get the full Sata 3 SSD speeds from it.

 

Not really. If you were familiar with both products, you'd understand that the E5440 is a considerably newer design.

 

Yes really.

E6540: June 2013
E6440: September 2013
E5440/E5540: October 2013
E7240/E7440: July 2013
E3440/E3540: August 2013

 

The E6440 is a re-hash and derivative of the E6430/E6420. The E5540 is a new design altogether. If you've seen both "under the hood", you'd understand this. Don't think that dates alone have anything to do with when the product was designed.

Even your own chronology corroborates the E5540 being coming out subsequent to the E6440.

For instance, the big change in the E5540 "generation" was going to M.2 slots. While the E6440 retained the miniPCI-E slots of previous. The E6xxx series has been phased out. The E5xxx's continue. The E5440 clearly has significantly newer design content throughout, for better or worse (often worse, as clearly more effort went into cost optimization to meet a reduced budget point!).

 

They came out at the same time so they are the same generation. They look different but they are still in the same generation. They even use CPUs from the same generation.

I don't know about 5540 but the 5440 doesn't have M.2.