Dell Precision M6700 Owner's Review

Lol, are talking about glowing heads there?
Regarding your AW comments, I seriously hope you don't expect to see a huge difference in build quality when coming from M18x. I have briefly owned a few Precisions/Elitebooks/ThinkPad-Ws in the past 2 years, they can't beat the AW in QC. My M6600 came with wrong components, improperly seated keyboard and a bunch of other issues. My first Elitebook with IPS DreamColor had 25 dead pixels and would boot 1/5 times on average, lol. None of my 3 AW laptops had any issues other than human (me) induced, such as messing with unsupported drivers and blaming Dell for poor performance, lol.

The point is - it's not black and white. If you have a bad experience with a laptop, doesn't mean that changing a vendor or model will solve all your problems. No one is perfect.

Looks like I might be back to the AW team after all. I need a decent CPU power with adequate cooling for heavy rendering and virtualization and the fact that the M6700 is locked in terms of CPU, is a bummer. I don't buy an extreme cpu and pay 1000$ extra for 100mhz speed bump, when I can get a 3740QM for 150$ (M18xr2) and have it 100% stable @ 4ghz on all cores (unlocked BIOS). As for the PRO vs GAMING debate, I don't care about the xmas lights or glowing heads. I turn those off anyway. But the extra features like 5 hard drives, WirelessHD, macro keys, 2 headphone jacks, etc, as well as 2x GPU and up to 40% CPU performance increase, paired with high quality speakers and low latency, - make it a very solid business choice for me. I'm still on the fence though and the longer it takes Dell to start offering the IPS+FirePro support, the closer I am to getting a M18xR2.

 

It's tough, but one has to look beyond his/her own experiences. It's just not enough data to really say one way or the other. There are all sorts of contradictory examples when you look at these individual cases.

For instance, I have a coworker who hates his AW. He has had five mobo and GPU replacements, and the thing still isn't completely right.

OTOH, in ~25 years of computing, I have never had a laptop component fail, had a hard drive fail, or had a virus infection. I've never run anti-virus software, either. Sooner or later something will go wrong, I know.

I think that once you get to the high end, there's pretty much an equal chance of something breaking with whatever machine you buy.

 

Yeah, I think so too. Problem is, sometimes the features we want are scattered across several models and the choice is tough. What if you don't want to compromise on the performance but also need the IPS RGBLED Matte, AMD graphics, good quality speakers, low latency, etc. And features like PureVIdeoHD, when a 680MSLI config can decode HD movies many times faster than any mobile workstation out there and will be roughly 2x faster than the M6700 with the K5000M.

 

Dongle? Are we having a dongle issue?

Deleted: On account of a rule thing

 

Let me share my experience more in detail.


Well, Alienware m18x is a very powerful system, so if you are looking for an overclock-able cpu, you will get it.

When i was ordering my m6700 I talked to Dell tech support and even after 2 hours of talking they could not answer my question. Maybe you guys know.
Does the M6000 gpu have gpu switching technology like the nvidia optimus?
Thanks

 

It doesn't, i have the M6000 and it is the only available GPU in the device manager

 

Yeah it has been mentioned that it will be released for Windows 8. I don't think anyone has said it will be available right at Windows 8 general availability. Could come before or after. Still, late October is a good bet.

No free voucher. You have to pay $15 but you get Windows 8 Pro + Media Center.

 

Overclockable = more futureproof and more rendering power, if paired with adequate cooling.

No, the M6000 doesn't have switching in the M6700. Dell is going in favor of the greens again, losing more and more potential clients. I will never pay 3x for the GPU of similar performance regardless of how hard they try to convince me

 

I found this searching google in notebook check reviews. What do you guys think? Here it clearly states that M6000 supports GPU switching technology.

The AMD FirePro M6000 is an upper middle-class mobile workstation graphics card with DirectX 11 support. It is based on the same Cape-Verde-chip found in the Radeon HD 7700M / 7800M series.

Compared to the Radeon consumer line, the FirePro offers certified drivers for professional 3D applications. Due to optimizations and some unlocked features, the performance when using professional applications is more efficient with the FirePro M6000.

The integrated 640 Stream processors of the FirePro M6000 are based on the new GCN-architecture.

The gaming performance should be somewhere between the Radeon HD 7850M and the 7870M. Therefore, the card is able to run modern games (2012) in high details and HD resolution fluently.

The FirePro M6000 also supports automatic graphics switching between the integrated GPU and discrete GPU. Called Enduro, the technology supersedes AMD's Dynamic Switchable Graphics and is similar to Nvidia's Optimus. Furthermore, the card can directly support up to 6 connected monitors using Eyefinity Technology if Enduro is disabled.

 

Could you please post some test results on the M6000 here (like 3dmark11 and vanatage). I would like to know the performance ratio to my M8900. Thank you.