Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

And that import tax can be quite high depending on the value of the laptop, on a 400$ laptop that I imported to Canada, the shipping was around 60$ USD because of import fees (better pay them with the shipping though than be hit by those fees afterwards).

 

Dear Precision friends,
I hope somebody can help me with my "little fan problem".
I noticed that the CPU fan is running for a long time, after some work, even with 0% cpu usage and temps around 40°C (HWinfo). It doesn't matter if the power profile is set to power saver, balanced or high performance. The same applies to the gpu fan, just watching a small res movie and the fan is running all the time, even with the gpu temps at 40°C.

Is this a normal behaviour? I'm used to a very quiet W520 with the fans just going bezerk when the cpu or gpu is working and the M6700 is my main workstation now.

PS: My signature is not showing, it's a M6700 with a 3920XM, K5000M, RGB IPS, 32GB, Windows 7x64

 

Once the load is removed the fan stops just a moment later.

Not for me. But my tests prove that surface material can alter temperature significantly and thus fan speed/frequency greatly.

Exactly what I'm getting. Except when under load, my Precisions is as quiet as a church mouse.

I have my machine on my Cool Master when at home. And its set to high performance.

 

Sometimes I have this problem, too. Not sure what triggers it exactly, but I wish there was some way of controlling the fans (like the engineer screen on M6400 for example).

 

Thanks Krane, I wish this would happen here as well. I just noticed that it took 30 minutes after 100% cpu rendering to turn of the fans. The M6700 is dead cold then, no hot and not even a warm spot and the air coming out of the rear is just cold.
It helps to restart the system, then the fans will stay quiet until I put some work on the cpu and then it's the same again.

I raised the back already by 3 cm so there is good airflow underneath, the same on my W520 and W510 workstations.
Not sure if it matters, but I did a clean install, just the drivers and the Premier Color application.
I really like the M6700, especially the IPS screen and I wish there would be a way to make mine as quiet as a church mouse too.

 

Unless you know something I don't, I can't see how that matters in this case.

Hmm, this is an interesting quandary. Have you considered HDDs as the possible culprit? Do they differ significantly between your machines?

 

Just noticed this updated firmware from Monday. For some reason it didn't come to me through RSS.

New BIOS, A10.

Driver Details | Dell US

Enhancements
- Enhanced POST logo functionality.
- Enhanced Secure boot functionality.
- Enhanced HDD password functionality.
- Improved system password functionality.
- Improved DDPA functionality.
- Improved USB functionality at Pre-boot environment.
- Supported DIMM isolation.
- Update Intel Management Engine firmware to 8.1.30.1350.
- Improved system fan noise.

I'm in a position where I can't risk the upgrade for a few days. Anyone want to try and see if the fan behavior is different now?

[Edit]
Nevermind, A10 is a version that was already released, back on June 25 (I posted about it). Not sure why the date has been changed to Sep 2 2013 on the driver/support site. The original release notes didn't mention the last bullet point about the fan noise.

 

Yeah, I don't think it used to mention the fan noise as I was waiting for such an update. The MD5 hash seems to be the same as well as the digital signature so I guess it's the same thing.

 

Re: the BIOS update, I did notice the display screen is different - some other things mentioned. Maybe something other than the BIOS itself was updated? See picture:

 

It's always done that (for all of the BIOS updates)... not sure why more stuff is mentioned in the bottom section than the top section.