Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Upgraded to the A06 BIOS, everything fine and dandy except that it no longer mirrors the bootup, POST, etc to an external display

Also, I'm an idiot and just when I needed to burn something, discovered that the tray-load drive is a DVD-ROM unit! Might as well plunge to a BR Drive... any idea which ones work?

EDIT: nevermind, found in the topic that the one I was looking at (P/M UJ-252A) is the one that works

 

Morning all,

I'm now the proud owner of the Dell M6700. I'm still getting to grips with a system with this much potential at the moment having always has Sony Vaio laptops before this.

I'm hoping to use the laptop with a dual boot of Windows 7 and Ubuntu with each OS on separate hard drives. Can anyone tell me if once I have installed another hard drive I will be able to choose which hard drive to boot from first, or will I need to play with the MBR on my main hard drive in order to offer me a choice upon powering on the device.

Many thanks all!

Rob

 

You can pick which hard drive to boot from from the BIOS, or by pressing the F12 key during bootup to access the boot menu. If you go this way, each OS will use its own bootloader, and I'd recommend making sure that only one drive is available when you install each of them so that they don't accidentally mess with the other OS's bootloader.

If you install Windows first and Ubuntu second, if Ubuntu notices the Windows install it will add an entry for it in GRUB and install GRUB as the default bootloader. So you'd be given a menu at boot time and wouldn't have to mess with the BIOS or F12 boot menu.

There are plenty of tutorials out there for setting up a Windows/Ubuntu dual-boot, it's not too big a deal to get working.

 

Hi

I have a Dell M6700 with a i7-3940XM processor. The may have a problem though as in the BIOS it reports a maximum clock speed of 3.2GHz and when running the processor never rises above this. It was my understanding that the maximum turbo speed for a i7-3940XM is 3.9GHz or 3.7GHz on 4 cores.

Could someone else with a M6700 and i7-3940XM processor look to see what their BIOS reports and also what speed it is normally running at ?

My machine arrived with A03 bios. I have upgraded this to A06 but it has not changed this.

Thanks

 

I don't have the 3940XM but I'll say that that sounds wrong for sure. My 3820 has spent many hours running at up around 3.5 GHz with all cores active.

 

Hi,

I have attached also a screenshot of CPU-Z while running 8*superpi. Here it reports only 2892Mhz. I disabled intel Speedstep in BIOS to see if this helps but Turbo is still enabled.

I normally run linux where it reports 3.2 in /proc/cpuinfo but more detailed state viewers seem to corrispond with what CPUz is showing here.

Thanks for your reply. It certainly looks like somthings wrong. Its hard to understand what that could be though or how this escaped QA. I'm not looking forward to dealing with Dell but perhaps they will suprise me.

It would be good to gather a little more information first about what the BIOS normally reports on such a system and what people normally see in CPUz.

 

I can confirm that my M6700 has been shipped today (Oct 31st) with UPS, I should be receiving it on Friday November 2nd.


I haven't posted it before, these are the details of the order:


W08M6712 Quantity: 1

Components
1 Precision M6700 : Standard Silver Base
1 Base Option : Smartcard Reader Base
1 Processor : 3rd gen Intel Core i7-3840QM Processor (2.80GHz Turbo, 8MB, Upgradable to Intel vPro technology)
1 Display : 44cm (17.3") UltraSharp FHD(1920x1080) IPS RGB Anti-Glare LED-backlit Premium Panel Guarantee
1 Palmrest : FIPS Fingerprint Reader and Smart Card Reader (Contact and Contactless) Palmrest
1 Camera : Software for Integrated Camera (Only for standard Base )
1 Camera : Integrated 1.0 Mega Pixel Camera with Microphone for RGB LCD
1 Memory : 16GB (4x4GB) 1866MHz DDR3
1 Hard Drive : 750GB 2.5inch Serial ATA (7.200 Rpm) Hard Drive
1 Optical Drive : 2X Blu-Ray Writer
1 Power Supply + Power Cord : 240W AC Adapter with Euro Power Cord
1 Battery : Primary 9-cell 97W/HR
1 Graphics Card : NVIDIA Quadro K5000M with 4GB GDDR5
1 Wireless : Dell Wireless 380 Bluetooth Card
1 Wireless : EMEA Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (802.11 a/b/g/n 3X3) Half Mini Card
1 Keyboard : Internal US/International QWERTY Backlit Keyboard
1 Additional Software : Dell Applications for Windows 7

Software
1 Windows Live
1 Optical Software : Blu-Ray PowerDVD Software for Vista Home Premium and Ultimate, WIN7 Home Premium, Pro or Ultimate
1 Optical Media : Power DVD Media
1 Resource DVD : Mobile Precision M6700 Recovery DVD
1 Operating System : Windows 7 Professional (64Bit) English
1 OS Media : MUI Windows 7 SP1 Professional (64Bit OS) Resource DVD
1 System Management : Intel vPro Technology Enabled

Service
1 Base Warranty
1 3Yr Basic Warranty - Next Business Day - Minimum Warranty
1 5Yr ProSupport and Next Business Day On-Site Service
1 INFO 3Yr ProSupport and Next Business Day On-Site Service
1 5Yr Data Protection - Keep Your Hard Drive
1 Declined Accidental Damage offer (OS)

 

Hi,

I seem to have largely resolved my problem now. What I did was load default settings in the BIOS and then put back the settings I needed. The BIOS still reports Minimum Speed: 1.2, Maximum Speed 3.2 and actual speed 3.0Ghz but now I see the clock speeds behaving as I would expect with CPUz showing it hitting 3.7Ghz with 8*super running. My linux tool now shows:

Socket [0] - [physical cores=4, logical cores=8, max online cores ever=4]
TURBO ENABLED on 4 Cores, Hyper Threading ON
True Frequency 3288.66 MHz (99.66 x [33])
Max TURBO Multiplier (if Enabled) with 1/2/3/4 Cores is 39x/38x/37x/37x
Current Frequency 3732.33 MHz [99.66 x 37.45] (Max of below)
Core [core-id] :Actual Freq (Mult.) C0% Halt(C1)% C3 % C6 % C7 % Temp
Core 1 [0]: 3056.06 (30.67x) 5.03 2.85 1 0 91.3 48
Core 2 [1]: 3732.33 (37.45x) 1.89 0 1 1 97.1 48
Core 3 [2]: 3598.79 (36.11x) 1.12 1.22 1 0 96.5 48
Core 4 [3]: 3637.79 (36.50x) 1 0.2 0 0 99.2 48

while idle and while doing make -j 10 of the kernel

Socket [0] - [physical cores=4, logical cores=8, max online cores ever=4]
TURBO ENABLED on 4 Cores, Hyper Threading ON
True Frequency 3288.66 MHz (99.66 x [33])
Max TURBO Multiplier (if Enabled) with 1/2/3/4 Cores is 39x/38x/37x/37x
Current Frequency 3687.29 MHz [99.66 x 37.00] (Max of below)
Core [core-id] :Actual Freq (Mult.) C0% Halt(C1)% C3 % C6 % C7 % Temp
Core 1 [0]: 3687.29 (37.00x) 99.9 0 0 0 0 77
Core 2 [1]: 3687.28 (37.00x) 100 0 0 0 0 83
Core 3 [2]: 3687.28 (37.00x) 99.9 0 0 0 0 82
Core 4 [3]: 3687.29 (37.00x) 99.7 0 0 0 0 76

which is much more what I would expect. Before it would show 2800Mhz across the processors regardless of CPU load and it said TURBO DISABLED where it now says TURBO ENABLED even though the turbo box was checked in the BIOS. Also I now hear the fans spin up high on full CPU load which did not occur before and it feels much snappier now.

I don't understand why it says True Frequency 3288.66 MHz though or why it still shows Min 1.2Ghz Max 3.2Ghz in the BIOS but at least it is working properly now.

 

I'll check the BIOS next time I reboot...

 

Well, I finally received my m6700 yesterday and............






So far so good

I have just started putting it through its paces and so far I am impressed. I must say that the IPS display is absolutely spectacular. I was a little apprehensive about losing Optimus support, but after seeing the display, I definitely think that it was an equitable trade off (and considering that it was a free upgrade for me, it was a no-brainer ). Despite the problems and delays I have to say that my Dell reps were very helpful and gave me some nice upgrades for my troubles.

So now begins the long and arduous process of getting everything set up just so.