Dell Latitude E6410 i7 720QM Works!

Great thanks for input, I will try this coming week, and let you know. It is still a nice little laptop. Just put in 8gigs of ram now upgrading the cpu and next the HD. Any suggestions on a new hard drive

Also take a look at the new 17" MSI laptop with a 3k display it's a gorgeous gaming laptop

 

DO NOT PUT IN THE XM VERSION INSIDE.

Firstly, the laptop can BARELY handle the heat for 720qm or 820qm. If you run it on 100% stress testing, the 720qm/820qm will very very likely to throttle within short amount of time. It just CANNOT handle the heat. Period. I tried with multiple motherboards, heatsinks, even fans, with different thermal pastes.No No No. Period.

With that being said, you will experience even more SEVERE throttling with the XM version. The kind of throttling that throttles clock down to 1500MHz or even 800Mhz. So if you have had a cooler chip like 720qm in, within decent load, it could be running at its full speed without throttling (1.6GHz+ turbo). Therefore, the XM chip might give you even less performance at the end of the day due to its even more frequent throttling. Surprise! Not to mention that the Nvidia chip runs extremely hot as well and the heatsink is not capable of dissipating heat away from the graphics. With 820QM and Nvidia, I saw my laptop idle/light performance in between 55 and 70 degrees Celsius for both chips. It was guaranteed throttling within at least 3 mins with Prime 95. And when gaming, I suffered FPS drops all the time with cpu throttling down due to heat from the Nvidia chip.

Again, just DO NOT put that XM inside a E6410. The heatsink is too bare to handle any kind of heat produced. Not even adequate for 720QM. If anyone wants to argue against me regarding the heat/throttling problem that will occur, let me know. And if you decide to snap one in, you might as well be making the most irrational decision. I would approve (thought not FULLY recommend) the 720QM chip for its performance/heat if you are geared more for multi-tasking media work that is not gaming. I experienced better gaming with 580M because that chip would not throttle with Nvidia chip producing max heat. Surprise!

 

Thank you for your input, I can tell you have spent many hours with the 6410 and I appreciate your answers. I will mostly be playing FFXI which is very cpu dependent as the game is coming on 11 years old at this point. Do you think the 720qm and nvidia would have issues with heat? What kind of gaming were you doing? My plan was to get a 720qm, ssd and 8 gigs of ram for my 6410 and be pretty set for a while.

 

720QM and Nvidia is a combo that will "work." Work as in, the extra processing power will likely be utilized over say i7 640M. (And noticeable more often than not).

Just know that if you are 1) fully stressing the gpu and the 2) cpu is at 50%+ use, you will likely experience CPU throttling. I would say cpu over 75% use over time may be a danger for throttling.
(But all this may change if you happen to be very lucky with both gpu and cpu and have the best batch. It was just my experience.)

I was running Bad Company 2 and the FPS drops were severe enough that I uninstalled the game. You get the idea.

If you do have a fast dual core installed already, like a 2.66Ghz, I would say save the extra for your next laptop. But if you really want to go with quad core route, you will take advantage of it when you are running heavily multi threaded app that does not really stress the gpu. But the resale value will be higher with upgrade to salvage most of the cost.

Also at idle, the quad core will eat about extra 3-4whr power over i5. Make sure you do copper mod for your Nvidia. Extremely recommended regardless.

SSD and 8GB ram is highly recommended if you use this as a primary machine. Buy a SATA III SSD however, so you can snap into a future machine.

I sold my E6410 ATG while back. I bought XPS 13 ultrabook, but sold that as well as I did not like it. Note that I bought a E4310 that is not scalable to the quad core cpu due to lack of dedicated graphics. I was choosing between E6410 again or E4310, But my logic was that I won't be upgrading to a quad core again with E6410 anyways, so I took advantage of the smaller form factor.

 

Okay, thank you again for your input. I have been googling around and cant find any links or pages to the Copper Nvidia mod, do you have any info or a link to a page that has it?

I wont be doing much gaming other than ffxi and some kids stuff for the little ones. I think I will hang on the the i5 and install it if I run into any issues with the i7.

Are there any heat sink mods out there for the 6410, I have been unsuccessful at locating any?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...-e6400-similar-performance-cooling-guide.html

I used 0.6MM ones with charm. remember that too thick copper will worsen performance.

 

Thank you, for all the help, it is much appreciated

 

np man good luck with it. The machine still has 2-3 years worth of juice with 8gb and SSD and good care of course.

 

Found copper sheets the have .025 inches which is slightly larger than .6mm roughly converts to .023" but I ordered 2 of them so I should be fine

 

Use just one of them. Do not put two. It will ruin your temp. I tried with multiple versions!