Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Had the PC running when the Nvidia card was invisible to Windows. Rebooted it, and it became visible*. Went into the BIOS and the card was visible in the system info, but still the Optimus menu option wasn't there (see below - both images taken when card was visible and working).

*When it's visible and working, the BIOS password prompt appears on the built in display. When it's not working, the built in display stays blank (regardless of whether or not an external display is also connected). In that situation, the only way to boot the PC is to plug in an external display, which will then show the BIOS password prompt.

Thanks for the help!

 

Hello. I'm asking for input on USB data transfer speeds. When using various kinds of external drives, I've always had very slow USB transfer speeds, ranging from 10 to 60 Mbps. I gave up trying to diagnose/fix this years ago. However, I am thinking of buying a new Samsung 860 Evo or Pro (1tb) SSD while the prices are low and cloning my main SSD (an older 860 Evo 1tb) via USB before swapping them. Any suggestions what I could do to fix/improve my slow USB transfer speeds? Sorry for asking such a naive, basic question. Any help would be much appreciated - either on the USB speed and/or the cloning. Be well...

 

I don't think those are out of the ordinary I don't get much more than 30Mbps over a usb3 cable from an external hard drive when copying files and of course lower with usb2 ports. Maybe there is firmware etc update somewhere that could improve it but I doubt it. Dell has a little update program that will go through your system and update it or check the m6700 support page for manual downloads.

 

Is that right? No better than 10-60 Mbps from the two USB 3.0 ports on the right side? I always assumed I was too stupid to get them to work or that my hardware was bad. Could others please confirm or clarify?

 

Well a lot has to do with what you are connecting, the pc world article below makes the point that a lot of usb stuff is capped at much lower than usb3 max speeds. I'm on an m4600 but has the same usb3's on the side and my old m6700 had the same thing obviously. Transferring a few gb's of data this morning at a glance was only at 32MBps but I didn't watch it the whole time for an average.

edit: this was a wd 4TB external hdd usb3 to m4600 usb3

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2360306/usb-3-0-speed-real-and-imagined.html

 

Is it possible to completely disable a dedicated graphics card (from BIOS/Devices) and switch to an intergrated graphics in a Precision M6700 (to extend battery life when on the road, to improve heat management for CPU intensive tasks)?Thanks

 

No. You can do the reverse (disable integrated graphics). The NVIDIA GPU will be powered off when not in use and you can choose which apps to use it for in the NVIDIA control panel. It won't make much difference for CPU thermal management because the CPU and GPU have separate heatsinks in this system. You can physically remove the dGPU to run with integrated graphics only, but then you will only be able to use VGA for external display output.

 

Aaron44126, thanks for this information. The same goes for a M4700? I'm choosing now between M6700 and M4700, and my only criteria is CPU heat management as the laptop will be used for CPU intensive tasks only, no graphics, VGA is fine. So I've done some analysis on the CPU cooling systems of these two devices, and from what I found M6700 CPU fan slightly surpasses in airflow efficiency - 13 CFM (M6700, P/N 26PND) vs 12.5 CFM (M4700, P/N 1G40N), my Latitude has only 2.5 CFM fan. An elongated CPU heatsink covers all 5 VRM MOSFETs on both laptops, it clearly indicates a higher end approach to a motherboard cooling design. With this powerful thermal management arsenal it's oddly enough that reviews and users across the forum often report about overheating and throttling. The reason I'm asking about disabling the dGPU is a M6700's CPU cooling design. It differs from the M4700 design where the CPU fan cools down exclusively the processor. Despite being slightly more powerful, in M6700 the CPU cooling fan is intrusted with the double mission of cooling down the CPU and partially the dGPU, the third copper pipe of a dGPU heatsink (P/N 8V829/9MFH6) can be seen from the attached images (YouTube screenshots are courtesy of techs2support). For those owners who are willing to pull out all of the processing power, a physical removal of the dGPU and its heatsink (??) seems like an optimal solution.

 

M6700 looks sort of like the left fan is cooling both the CPU and dGPU. The heatsinks are completely separate, though (you can remove them separately and see that there are two independent sets of fin stacks on the left side). And I've done measurements that find that the left/CPU fan barely makes a dent in the GPU temperature if it is running by itself. I do not think that you need to worry about the dGPU impacting CPU performance, especially if it is running mostly idle.

Note that there are two different CPU heatsinks available; the dual-pipe version (pictured above) and a single-pipe version. That could make a difference in cooling performance. I believe that this is also the case for the M4700. Typically Dell only installed the two-pipe heatsink in systems that shipped with the top-end "extreme" XM CPU, but they can be sourced independently.

A lot of users complain about throttling but it's normal for mobile CPUs to "throttle" if by that you mean not maintain the top turbo speed indefinitely. The whole point of turbo is to give you burst performance that pushes the CPU above its normal sustained operation limits. M6700 can maintain high turbo speeds pretty consistently (exactly what frequency depends on the specific workload).

 

I actually had a gpu burnout lately and took out the dgpu, system was fine without it since optimus was turned on anyways. I had the xm heatsink version so I put on the dgpu heatsink, to store it there.