Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

I would like to see the performance numbers for both the AMD® FirePro® M6000 and NVIDIA® Quadro® K3000M.

I would be surprised if they are notably better than the i7 Intel HD 4000.

I just built out 2 - i7/Z77 machines. One with and one without discrete graphics cards. I had to skip entry and mid level cards and go a ways into the high level cards to get any notable increase in performance over the onboard HD 4000.

Multi-head connections might be the issue. The HD 4000 appears to only support 2560x1600 + 1920x1200, not 2X 2560x1600.

 

The M6000 is pretty much on par with a consumer HD7870 which is clearly a notch above the HD4000, it will make a pretty notable difference in anything that requires hardware acceleration, not to mention the GDDR5 instead of using system memory. For driving one external display, sure it won't make much difference, but a HD4000 doesn't stand a chance against any of the GPUs offered in the M6700 in terms of performance.

The nVidia GPU versions also come with optimus meaning that you'Re running off the HD4000 in light workloads. You still pay for the GPU though. Also, it is important to note that the HD4000 can't drive the IPS display which means optimus is disabled too though.

 

Well HD4000 doesn't do CUDA and their OPENCL/GL performance is kind of meh. It really depends on usage and how one define "entry/mid" level cards.

 

Notebookcheck has some numbers on the K3000m: NVIDIA Quadro K3000M - Notebookcheck.net Tech. Once i get my M6700 i can always run some benchmarks on the M6000 if you want. KCTech1 probably has some numbers on those GPUs too, maybe she posted them over in the HP forums.

Some numbers for the HD4000: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-4000.69168.0.html. I'll look if i can find benchmarks for CS6 or something similar. IT's easy to find 3Dmark numbers, but the rest is a tad harder to find.

EDIT: Notebookcheck has some pretty decent numbers on the M4000 and K2000m GPUs though: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Precision-M4700-Mobile-Workstation.81505.0.html. The K3000m and M6000 will obviously perform better.

 

tijo
thanks!

 

Look back in a couple of weeks, you'll either see me being happy because Dell tech support was right or i'll be flipping table because the heatsinks are different.

I'm betting they're right though.

 

I pretty much know my desired stuffing options (except for the grahpics card which is holding up the order).

My laptop is in a docking station most of the time driving 2 - 30" 2560x1600 monitors via DisplayPort. The only time I use the laptop's display is on travel. Since the M6700 only has 16x9 versus 16x10, my interest in it's display is less than my previous PMWS's.

I use Win7(Office) and VmWare/Fedora(Engineering). Win7 is fast enough, so I focus on speeding up VmWare/Fedora. I am planning on 2 Intel 520 SATA3 series SSDs and either 16GB 1866 or 32GB 1600 depending on if I can effectively utilize the extra memory in VMWare.

My virtual machines are too big for a RAMDISK, so I am leaning towards the 1866 unless I can find a win for the extra 16GBs. I will experiment creating a mounted client partition on a RAMDISK to see if it helps speed up VMWare/Fedora compiles. Could also try turning the mSATA drive as mounted client partition. The last time I tried something like this, Win7 screwed up the partition when it saw a ext3/4 partition.

 

I posted some M6000 3DMark11 benchamrks a while ago (haven't had the time for more varied and in-depth testing)
It's pretty much a desktop Radeon HD7770 when overclocked.

 

Yeah, i saw after posting, thanks to the working search function.

Nice to see those benchmarks. I'll probably try to slap a 7970m in my M6700 at some point if AMD doesn't roll out a firepro equivalent (and again if budget or enough TA work permits).

Oh, by the way, i saw a post in this thread about the driver disc mess, well the website isn't that much better. Anyone compiled a list of essential drivers, the file names are rather obscure.

 

I installed this update this evening. Too early to declare it stable for me — will wait a few days — but, I wanted to note that Windows and Office required reactivation after this update was applied.