Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Noticed that it's only happened to me when the machine is docked, so it might be related to the dock or something attached to the dock as well. In any case, never happened before A12, will try it on A11 for a while to see if it's that or some other recent change.

 

I will only get to try it docked on monday, but I will indeed try

 

Hi,

I'll try that on monday, too.

Cheers,
Alex

EDIT: Tried it a few times with the (USB3-)dock (internal monitor + external monitor) and it did go to sleep and wake up fine (although it seems that ist takes a little longer than before when going into standby).

 

Hi guys

my IPS rgb panel is the

LG Philips LP173WF3

(info took fromm hwinfo64)

I bought the x-rite colormunki photo. I would like to calibrate it. And so I'd like to know the technical information about this panel, like luminosity etc etc...

thanks

 

For specific details, see this (Dreamcolor = Premiercolor = LG's RGB IPS): Review HP EliteBook 8770w DreamColor Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

But you should not need this info to calibrate your screen.

 

Heya guys.
I got myself one of these beauties and I have to say I love almost every little thing about it.
There's two exceptions to that:

1. Battery life is worse with optimus enabled than with it disabled - I see optimus never completely shuts down the 670MX dGPU. Any user of the machine with a non-quadro nvidia card have any advice regarding installation? I tried to uninstall nvidia and intel drivers, installed the dell intel drivers then installed a modded nvidia .inf driver that could recognize and accept the card. But battery life is horrible with optimus enabled, less than 3 hours. Optimus disabled gives me 4-5 hours battery life.

2. CPU fan rattles at high speed. I don't mind the sound of moving air even at high speed, this machine is very silent overall, but my CPU fan appears to rattle like washing machine when the CPU gets hot (and by hot I mean no higher than 80C... which is pretty cool imo).

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could get these two issues fixed? I could even tolerate the fan, but I want those 8-9 hours of optimus battery life...

Also, anyone have a suggestion regarding where to get a 3G/4G WWAN card for this machine?

 

Look at the Optimus test tool (runs in the system tray) and see if it will show you what app is keeping the NVIDIA GPU enabled. The tool will show you whether the NVIDIA GPU is on or off, and if it is on, what is using it. In my experience, you have to stay on top of it if you want to make sure that the discrete GPU shuts off when needed. Some apps fire up the dGPU even if you have it explicitly set to use the integrated GPU in the NVIDIA control panel (looking at you, XWin) and you might have to find options within the app to keep it from using hardware acceleration.

The Optimus test tool is sort of hard to come by so I'm uploading a copy here.

[Edit]
Happened to pass over your message again and noticed you were hoping for 8-9 hours battery life with Optimus. While this is achievable it pretty much requires that you keep the machine in a low power state and don't do a lot with it. I think 5 or 6 hours is a pretty achievable goal for regular productivity. Without trying too hard, I get about 4-5 hours with Optimus and 2.5-3.5 without it (this is with display at max brightness).

 

The fan behavior isn't normal, the fans will be screaming at higher temps, Dell was conservative about keeping the machine cooled for extended periods of use (I ran the sucker non stop for at least 24 hours and temps never approached throttling thresholds with the CPU running at full turbo constantly), but the fans shouldn't rattle.

EDIT: Sleeping fine when docked on Windows 8. I'm guessing your problem may have been an external device preventing sleep Aaron.

 

Thanks for the linked tools, I tried to use something hosted on laptopvideo2go but they didn't report properly... I hope these will, when I get home.
Yea, the CPU fan rattles. It seems to be properly screwed in, I'll try opening it up and giving it a bit of elbow grease, but I'd like to be sure whether the behavior is normal, or I should replace the fan.
I'm very very satisfied with the cooling performance of the machine, overall though.

Regarding optimus, like I said, I get 4-5 hours with optimus disabled with my normal usage pattern, so I would be expecting quite a bit extra. I'd heard that there's an issue where optimus displays that it's enabled properly and no app running on the dGPU, but never completely shuts down the card, and performs a continuous idle/off cycle that really drains the battery. I'd heard it's related to monitoring software, but I have a hard time finding anything, and it's getting quite frustrating.

 

Congrats! Wonder what you'll change that 670MX for...

As for the fan(s), it should be loud but not rattling. Unfortunately I've had this experience before with a brand new Dell - same gen as the M6700, in fact (an E6230). It was silent while moving slowly and annoyingly rattly on high speed. The only solution (after taking the fan apart and re-oiling it) was to change it altogether.