Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Can you post a link to that info?

It is 300 nits and 600:1. There was a time when the Dell site listed that very incorrect information and I guess it is still out there. The IPS screen has always been 300 nits on the M6600 and M6700.

 

Got my 6700 yesterday, slowing adding stuff to it to match my 6600. So much good info here I'll add what is new:
1. Did a copy of a large folder ~35 GB from server to laptop, on 6600 it runs around 20MB/sec - 24MB/sec. On 6700 it is 28MBs-32MBs. That's just to start. 5 minutes later on 6700 it is around 50MBs, I did not keep running it on the 6600.
2. I got an SSD. If you do too, don't forget to turn off the nightly DeFrag in Windows tasks, no need to do that and wear out the SSD!
3. I set it to the High Performance Power plan. There is a "Ultra Performance (max fan levels)", I seem to remember you should not run this all the time. Is that true?
4. Windows Experience Index is 7.7, 7.9, 7.7, 7.7, 7.9. I have the Win 7 x64 Ultimate, 3920XM CPU, 16GB 1866MHz RAM, the 17.3" FHD IPS RGB display, K5000M graphics card, 512GB SSD. I plan to run a couple long-running real word apps later, to compare the two laptops. My favorite will tax memory and disk speed, it's a SQLServer local database update/processing app.

Only issue so far, and it's not a workstation app. I was copying folders from the 6600 to the 6700, and I ran into the Win 7 (and Vista,...) slowness issue - I got around 10MB/s transfer speed. Tons of complaints about this on forums, no singular solution. That's disgraceful of MS not to have fixed that by now. That was on hard wire too.

More later as I discover more...

 

I'm quite impressed with the Quadro K5000M.

I ran 3DMark11 on the stock Windows 7 install that came on the machine.

I have the 3820QM CPU.

Optimus ENABLED

P5038
Graphics: 4899
Physics: 7668
Combined: 3992

Optimus DISABLED

P4989
Graphics: 4744
Physics: 8970
Combined: 3906

The overall scores are similar enough to ignore the difference. However, I'm surprised that the physics score is so much higher with Optimus off. I know it uses DirectCompute to run some of the computations on the graphics card, but, seems like Optimus would make less of a difference with this than with actual graphics rendering.

Bokeh (with a 3920XM and no Optimus) got...
Score: P6048 3DMarks
Graphics Score: 5846
Physics Score: 9369
Combined Score: 4753

... So, looks like that 3920XM sure helps out (with 3DMark anyway).

As has been mentioned before, the Quadro K5000M is new and we'll probably see performance improvements over the next several months with driver updates from NVIDIA.

I'm not a mega gamer but I do a bit of it in my free time. I do enjoy StarCraft II quite a bit, so I fired it up with Optimus on and maxed out the graphics settings. It runs at 60 fps without breaking a sweat. (Not the most GPU-intensive game out there, I know, but it's what I play. )

The keyboard and trackpoint look the same to me. The touchpad seems decent. I can't really compare it against any other machine (I always use a regular mouse).

 

How do you enable and disable Optimus?

 

There's an option in the BIOS setup utility to turn it on and off.
(Optimus is of course only available if you have an NVIDIA card and you do NOT have the IPS screen. If it's not available I believe the option is hidden entirely.)

 

Hi all, I just installed Windows 8 release preview on the M6700.

Windows 8 notes

A WDDM 1.2 driver is included for the Intel HD 4000 GPU. Brightness controls on the keyboard work without Dell's driver.

Other drivers included out-of-the-box:
Bluetooth
Audio (though there doesn't seem to be a way to switch the input port to "Line In" instead of "Microphone")
Intel LAN
Intel WiFi (6300)
SD card reader
USB 3.0
Webcam
Smartcard reader

I'm inclined to leave these devices alone since they work. Except maybe the audio because I would like to have the ability to use the input for "Line In."

For the rest of the stuff, let's see how well the Windows 7 drivers work.

Drivers from Dell website that I installed:

Touchpad — Of course the touchpad worked, but this enables more control, gestures, and the ability to turn it on and off with Fn+F5. At first glance, the touchpad control panel thing seems to work fine.

NVIDIA Quadro K5000M — Remember, I have Optimus enabled. Opening the "Manage 3D Settings" part of the NVIDIA control panel (where you set which apps run on which GPU) resulted in a BSOD. Afterwards, my system booted to a flickering blue screen followed by another BSOD. I turned off Optimus which seemed to solve the problem (though the screen went blank for about a minute after boot while it installed the driver again). Guess I'll leave Optimus off until this gets worked out — at least until NVIDIA releases Win8 drivers for the K5000M.

Freefall sensor — Installer complained that the OS is not supported. Re-ran with Windows 7 compatibility mode applied, and it complained that .NET Framework 3.5 was not installed. Installed that from the control panel and the driver installed. After reboot, still shows an error in device manager. "Windows cannot load the drivers for this device."

Fingerprint reader — Driver installed fine, haven't tried to use it yet though.
[Edit] — Doesn't work. Gives an error when you go to enroll your fingerprints. "BrcmFMA.exe - The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect."

Audio — Works fine, including Line In / Mic toggle.

Intel Rapid Storage — Actually need to install this to take advantage of advanced features of the disk controller, but it works fine without it. No problem here, though. Looks like it might also require .NET Framework 3.5 to be installed.

There is one unknown device left. "PCI Simple Communications Controller." I'm not sure what it is. Ideas?
[Edit] – Found it. I had to install the "Intel Management Engine Components" and it went away. Device manager is now happy except for the freefall sensor.

Other notes.

The start of the process to the desktop was about 20 minutes, installing off of the DVD.

Nowhere did it ask me for the time zone, just defaulted to Pacific time. (Nothing to do with the M6700 specifically, but, ... *grumble*)

Booting with UEFI works fine. Switch to UEFI before you start the setup process.

The system-wide text scaling was set to 125% by default on the FHD screen.

If you try the release preview, be sure to run Windows Update early. There's a hard-lock bug affecting systems with Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs. (It didn't hit me but one of the updates fixes it.)

I'll have a Windows 8 RTM image on Wednesday and at that point I will be switching to the M6700 as my main PC. I'll post an update but I expect the hardware support situation to be pretty much just like this.

 

Sounds about right.

Anyone know if/when Dell (and its partners) will release updated drivers for Win8?

 

Mano said in the Google+ hangout a couple weeks back that updated drivers will be released when Dell starts shipping Windows 8 on the M6700 — so, probably no sooner than general availability in October.

Btw if anyone skipped my long post above. I have a "PCI Simple Communications Controller" left and I don't know what it is.
I'd love any guesses.
[Edit] – Found it (see above).

Best I can tell, at this point everything works in Windows 8 except...
- Optimus
- Freefall sensor
- Fingerprint reader

None of those are blocking issues to me so I'm going to go ahead with Win8 on Wednesday.

 

I don`t know how Bokeh got his K5000M to score 5800 with 3DMark11 since it sounds extremely little plausible if he is running on stock clocks (non overclocked)

Why?
GTX 680M score 60xx graphic score in 3DMark11. It have these clocks: 720/1800
K5000M have these clocks: 600/1500

Your score sounds just about correct considering these clocks.
600/720 = 0.83
6000 x 0.83 = 4980 in GPU score

BTW: Have you monitored the GPU temperature when running 3DMark 11? What temps do you get? Does it get hot?

 

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