E4310 Owner's Lounge

I prefer to travel with the 65W AC/auto/air adaptor. I don't normally need to try to recharge the battery quickly and I think the express charge should be avoided as much as possible because the higher charge rate = more heat = shorter battery life.

John

 

I opened up one of the E4310 boxes we have. Here are some pictures next to the standard 90watt travel supply for the E6400/E6410. You can see the lack of dell branding. On the last ones of these there was a Lite On logo where the dell serial info is now on it.

The E4300 travel charger is like the 90 watt just much shorter, but just as flat. Not sure why they changed the 13 inch series travel charger.

The 65watt auto/air/travel charger has been superseeded somewhat, as there is a super portable auto/air only 90watt charger now. The 65 watt was a little skimpy on the power for the E64XX and E65XX anyway. But I see that dell still offers the 65watt tri charger.

 

That's a nice small charger. If only it included AC as well.

John

 

The one on the left is a 65 watt AC charger that now comes with the E4310

The new 90 watt AUTO/AIR adapter looks like this.
DELL 90-Watt Auto-Air DC Adapter for Select Dell Inspiron / Latitude / Studio / Vostro / XPS Laptop / Precision Mobile WorkStation : Laptop Accessories: Webcams, Keyboards, Mouse & More | Dell

 

That's strange...the new auto/air adapter looks like it will only put out 12V to the laptop...

 

My guess is that the 12v plug looks a bit more beefier then it normally should be, I am guessing the managed to fit the DC voltage change circuitry into,

Unlike wall AC, which always needs bulky step down transformers, DC to DC is all solid state voltage manipulation, which can be shrunk as technology advances.

I always shake my head at people using wasteful inverters to run their AC laptop adapters mobile. When you can use a sleek and more efficient DC to DC adapter

 

Hello all,

Maybe this has been covered but I do not have time to read the entire thread and people continue to buy this model so I assume they are happy to pay the extortionate price for a machine that cannot deliver. So I write in the hope that this will be useful.

I have recently acquired a E4310 because that was offered by my organisation. I am involved in scientific research and while I use HPC platforms day to day, I thought a small high powered laptop would be ideal if I needed to take some work with me.

I have the Core i5 M540 capable of up to 3GHz, by far the fastest machine I have ever owned. However, the heat generation and dissipation is so poor that you will not achieve even the standard clock speed of 2.5GHz for more than a couple of minutes of sustained usage. Once heated, the CPU does not cool and you will have 1.2GHz clock speed max. I have jerry rigged two cooling fans to this machine and have managed to achieve a sustainable 3GHz for a single threaded application. I cannot get more than 2.2GHz for multithreaded apps.

I used this while docked most of the time and this exacerbates the dissipation problem, particularly if the screen is closed (yes this makes a significant difference). I guess laptops generally suffer from heat issues but I never thought it would be this bad. If this chip could not down scale it would fry itself within the first hour of usage.

I was amazed at the (high) price of this machine and I am baffled as what the point of shipping this machine with such a high powered processor when the design clearly precludes it functioning anywhere near its potential.

If you are seriously considering this machine, DO NOT buy anything but the slowest most efficient processor because any more will simply not usable. (Note also that the screen viewing angle is very poor.)

It has plus points (robust, "smart looking" if that counts for anything, lightweight) but overall very disappointed. I am just glad I did not part with my own money.

 

Since i almost never use the DVD for anything (aside from reinstalling Win7), I am considering removing it & putting a hard drive caddy into the unit.

I think it would save power (not much but hey) & I was curious if it would save any weight?

Or is it possible to put a battery in that slot instead?

Thanks,
Rich

 

The 1.8inch HD in the dell secondary storage caddy is very light.



However, if you did not need the storage, Another option is the caddy stickeyed at the top of the forum. Just don't put a HD in it and use it as a blank.

 

What is the adaptor model / part number? I'd like to look for one of these.

This comes as no surprise to me. The i5 540M in my E6410 also runs quite hot when under load and performance per watt is worse than my previous P8600. I've got an E4300 with the SP9400 CPU and, after undervolting to 1.05V, it will run all day under full load without heating problems. Intel could have done better but would prefer us to upgrade to Sandybridge.

Docking does make the situation worse. I've occasionally seen my E6410 throttle when docked. However, it is unclear to me whether that is directly a result of worse heat dissipation or the BIOS will throttle more aggressively when docked.

Few forum members pay full price for their Latitudes. They shop at Dell Outlet.

The battery option is not possible (no battery contacts in the bay) but a HDD caddy, without the HDD, will be slightly lighter than an optical drive. Or you may be able to find a weight saver module (not necessarily Dell) that replaces a 9.5mm thick optical drive.

John