Dell Precision M6700 Owner's Review

The same was true on mine. I also found the USB 2.0 ports and HDMI port to be very tight. They loosen up a bit with use but at least you know nothing is getting disconnected by accident, I guess.

 

Yes, the jacks are super tight, they loosen to manageable levels quickly though.

The funny thing is that even though i usually plug the pass through of my keyboard in the jacks at work, i mostly use my DAC to plug my headphones.

EDIT: Got my mSATA drive in the mail today, gonna install it today and finally put a bunch of games on my M6700. Now, all i'll need to find is a decently priced 256GB+ Samsung 840 Pro in Canada to fill the second drive bay and dual boot Windows 7 and Windows 8, each on their own SSD with the mSATA holding data that will be used between both OSes.

Oh and for those with the firepro, be wary of programs using GPU acceleration, it will eat away your battery life if left enabled.

For the heck of it and bragging rights, here's a WLAN to WLAN file transfer using the Intel 6300 in my M6700 to an Intel 6200:



For anyone on the fence, get that 6300. With a good router, streaming 1080p content will be a breeze as long as it's not completely uncompressed. Gotta do a LAN to WLAN test one of these days, i'm betting on at least a good 25MB/s with my setup.

 

Hi all

Would be nice to have some input on this:


I need the notebook for picture-processing while travelling in a caravan in Europe.

I don't want to use a power-transformer from 12 to 220 Volt because this means a) that the transformer will need additional energy, and b) there is loss of energy for transforming it first up to 220 and then down to what the notebook needs.

So the choice would be a car-adapter with a cigarette-box plug. But the strongest ones provide only 130 or 150 Watts, and the M6700 might need more than that at times.

One of the reasons why I wanted such a fast NB is because I regularly need to open 60 large JPEGs at one time. Another one is that I don't want to wait for Photoshop for example cropping a picture etc.

A technician at Dell's told me that it would do no harm to the NB or to the adapter, but that the NB would slow down because it doesn't get the power that it might need. He advised me to deactivate the option of charging the battery during use, in bios.

A different technician told me that the moment the NB doesn't get the power that it needs from the adapter, it will simply take the rest from the battery, with no slowing down whatsoever.

If anyone has an idea about wether the above mentioned purposes really need more than 130 Watts, and which of the technicians is right, pls let me know.

I'd also cherish some input about noise-levels in normal office-mode.


many greetings,


Aki

 

The M6700 will not draw power from a power adapter and the battery at the same time, so that tech was wrong.

My experience is that if you use the machine with a power adapter that supplies less than 210 watts, it will work but it is unreasonably slow. It runs faster on battery than it does with a low-powered adapter (even though it can only pull 100 watts from the battery). I'm not sure why this is, it seems like it should be able to work better, but using an under-powered adapter seems to force the notebook into a low-performance mode. Maybe others have had a different experience?

I think that if this mobile scenario is important to you, you should find a laptop that can run at full power in the car. Alternatively, maybe you can get away with using the battery in the car — you can get quite a few hours out of it under light load especially if you have Optimus — and putting the machine to sleep and using the car charger to charge it while you do not actively need to use it. There is also a battery slice available that will double the battery capacity.

As for noise, my experience is that under light work the fans kick up from time to time, and I'd call the noise level noticeable but not distracting.

 

This might explain why the M6700 is slower on a <210 watt adapter compared to just running it on the battery: I've tried booting up my M6700 with the 180 watt adapter attached, and Bios gave a warning that a 65 watt adapter was connected, and will reduce performance. (Somehow the computer only allows 65 watt to be drawn from a 180 watt adapter?)

Could this "simply" be done to adapt to car/plane charger power levels, so it doesn't draw too much power?
By "simply" I mean, as in a simple mechanism for detecting a specific adapter type: either low or high powered compared to the computer's power requirements.

 

use throttlestop and the cpu throttling should go away.

 

If it will only pull 65 watts then that would explain it pretty well.

As for throttlestop, I don't think that will help in this case, if the machine will only pull 65 watts it doesn't have the power to run the CPU at high speed.

 

It feel slow because the instant I plug in a 130w, multiplier will be locked at 8.

 

Did some testing here in the office. Tried several 90 watt adapters and a 130 watt adapter. Running BIOS A06.

If you boot the machine with a 90 or 130 watt adapter, you will get the 65w adapter warning. Hit the F1 key to continue. The machine will pull up to 99 watts from the wall with either one. Clock speeds on the 3920XM are fixed at 2.8ghz across all 4 cores. You can run Prime95 to fully load the CPU and they will stay at 2.8ghz and the power will setting to around 95 watts from the wall. The machine is treating the 90w adapter like a 90w adapter.

If you are running on battery and plug in a 90 or 130 watt adapter, everything if different. The clock speed is now set to 900MHz. Run Prime95 and the machine will pull between 62 and 66 watts from the wall. The clocks stay low. The machine is treating the 90w adapter like a 65w adapter.

SO. Until a BIOS update fixes this, ALWAYS BOOT with the 90w adapter PLUGGED IN. If you have been running around on battery power and need to plug in, REBOOT with the adapter PLUGGED IN if you want the faster speed.

The speed on a 90w adapter is really not that bad as long as it was plugged in before you booted.

 

Is it generally like this with notebooks?

too much occupation with battery-status in this case ... if it doesn't work with an adapter, I'd rather switch to a power-transformer;