Dell Precision M4700 and M6700 - Preliminary Info

I was in the G+ hangout today and asked a bunch of questions. Today is also my anniversary, so I have been unable to post until now. Most of Mano's answers have already been posted above, so I will just add a few facts and highlight some others.

Mano said that the display specs basically are the same for both the M4700 and M6700. In both models, the base display covers 60% aRGB, the FHD 72%, and the IPS 100%. The FHD and IPS provide 300 nits, while the M6700 3D display provides 400 nits. The M6700 touchscreen panel uses a Wacom technology.

Mano confirmed that the mSATA, eSATA, and optical bay are all SATA II. This is true for both the M4700 and M6700. If you want more than one SATA III port, buy the M6700.

Battery life for non-IPS with Optimus was claimed up to 10 hours with the 9-cell battery. With IPS, max battery life drops to 4-5 hours. The slice battery doubles battery life, give or take a little.

The Covet is so expensive because its base configuration is higher. It's actually priced around the same as a similarly configured non-Covet model. The edge-to-edge glass on the Covet is not optional.

The fact that Dell reps post on the forums here and answer questions directly on G+ hangouts is fantastic. I don't see the other big manufacturers working this hard to communicate with customers. Personally, I'm much more likely to buy a Precision after the hangout. I think I will wait for the K3000M and K4000M to become available, though.

 

Mano said it would be 4-5 hours.

It's a little above mediocre, with above-average brightness. Maybe it's good enough if you don't do graphics work.

Both the 60% and 72% figures were given, IIRC. As I understood it, the 60% gamut is only on the base displays, and the FHDs are 72%. Did I get this wrong?

 

That's what I wrote down but I had a lot going on right at the start so it's quite possible that I missed something. I do remember him saying that the specs were pretty much the same and pointing out the 72% color gamut some more later on. You're probably right.

 

Thanks for all the great info! I have been reading the thread, but I am confused about one thing - do I need to color calibrate the 6700 with the FHD IPS RGB display when I receive it? I realize color calibration can never hurt, just wondering how far the color may be off - significant only for someone requiring very exact color representation, or worse?

Thanks

 

I will post screen captures later in my ongoing review to back this up, but the M6700 IPS screen is very good right out of the box. White balance is dead on at 6500K. Gamma is 2.2. The color correction curves are very small.

I am waiting for the system to be a month old before really putting it through a lot of calibrations at differing brightness levels. I don't know if screens "settle in" or not, but I will find out when I do the second set of measurements.

The bottom line is that you will probably see a better screen and better colors that you have seen on a mobile computer before whether you calibrate it or not. Accuracy uncalibrated is very good. Calibrated results are better than my U2410s.

 

Hi,
I'm seriously thinking of buying an m6700 ips but i still have some questions :
- what are the differences between the 128gb 2.5 inch Serial ata drive and the 128gb full mini card ?? Which one is the best as a boot drive associated with a 750 gb hdd as 2nd drive ?
- With the i7 3820qm what is the best : 16gb of 1600MHz ram or 16gb of 1866MHz ? I'm assuming the 1866Mhz are better but i want to be sure...
- is there a possibility to do an hardware calibration of the ips screen ?

Thanks for your answers

 

For the SSD... You are choosing between a SATA-3 standard 2.5" drive, or a SATA-2 mSATA mini-card drive. Choosing the mSATA will leave an extra standard 2.5" bay open for a larger hard drive or for future expansion. It might be a little slower though if the drive you get is capable of SATA-3 performance. (It will still run circles around a traditional disk, even a SATA-3 one, in non-contiguous I/O performance.)

 

Ha! I saw it in the email notification. Sorry for the lack of available seats. I had a choice to go with 2 versions of the hangout setup- one with a YouTube simulcast and one with just the 10 seat Google+ feed. I made the decision to go with the 10 seat version based on not a lot of comments about it when I posted here. I honestly thought there was not enough interest. I was afraid of having more Dell people there than customers right up to launch time. Going forward, I'll choose the simulcast option next time we run one off the main Dell G+ page. I underestimated how much traffic they could bring in. Stupid on my part, really.

If you guys want to do another one for NBR customers only, I'm sure Mano is game. Just let me know, and I'll string it together. We'll only promote it here, and run it off Mano's, Kevin's or my G+ page.

Upgrading components does not void your warranty. Only thing new hardware means is we don't support it in that system, and we don't support it at all if we didn't sell it. In a real world scenario, if you are reporting a problem to tech support, they may request you get the system back to factory stock hardware before they troubleshoot or dispatch any parts. It all depends on the issue and the experience level of the tech, which is generally not an issue in Precision support, I'm guessing.

 

Hi Dell-Bill_B,

I thought I asked this but can't find the post. We tried the fingerprint scanner on the M6600 but its driver had a conflict with some Korean security software that we have on all machines. They checked with a Dell Engineer on that but in the end had to disable that device.

The M6700 seems to have a different scanner. Wondering if the drivers are different and if we would have more luck with the FP scanner on the M6700?

 

My guess is it would not conflict. I only guess that because I find it hard to imagine the same software having compatibility issues with 2 different scanners. The Law of Averages guess, if you will. I guess to be sure, you could order one unit to test before committing to a full purchase. They should honor a return if you are doing so due to compatibility issues. If you are ordering from a large account, you might also ask your account rep to have the software tested by Dell before ordering. I work in CSMB product marketing, so I have no idea if that's even an option, but you could always ask.