E6410 Owner's Thread

Excellent comment!

 

I have the Intel GPU. There is absolutely no stutter for Aero or other visual effects, in fact there never even was with the previous GMA4500. The new 5700 from the Core-i series is even faster and clocked higher. I think the Intel graphics is better than most people/tests are saying, I never had any problems with it and it just saves a lot of battery.
Of course it's nothing for hardcore gamers. I use my E6410 for Office, Surfing, Indesign, Photoshop, Coding, Flash-Games/normal games and watching a lot of videos, even 1080p via the displayport runs without problems. You wouldn't even notice a difference when doing such things, only if you want to play a really demanding game. I never had any driver or compatibility problems with the Intel GPU, and the Nvidia card Dell offers for this machine is not really that much faster according to notebookcheck. Save your money if you don't plan to play Crysis 2 or similar on this machine.
By the way, here's my WEI. It's in german but I'm sure you'll figure out the important parts I only have 2 GB of RAM so far, if you wonder why the rating is so low. CPU = i5 520m

 

Allright, thanks for the helpful answers. Gonna order tomorrow.

 

And, I would add, having the GPU as part of the CPU module also fixes the problem of needing to provide a heatsink for the northbridge.

Also, with the new HD graphics being essentially the old 4500MHD, there's no new driver required.

John

 

I don't know if anyone answered this already, but judging from the contents of the touchpad drivers download from Dell's website, this is an Alps trackpad.

I sincerely hope it's better than the incredibly crappy Alps trackpad that was in my D600 six years ago. I just bought an E6410 tonight thanks to a 30% off coupon code I found on Techbargains...so we'll see.

 

Don't worry, it's a very good touchpad. Nice feel to it. However, I have disabled all 2-finger-functions from the start, because I never use those and they often lead to unexpected behaviour. When I want to zoom or rotate something, I use the keyboard shortcuts. I had an APLS on my previous 11z and it was just awful, this one on the other side is great to use.

 

I was worried about whether the E6400 throttling issue had been resolved, or if it would also plague the E6410. So I tested CPU throttling with the following:
1. Prime95 (Torture test - select 4 threads).
2. Monitored and logged with CoreTest, ThrottleStop (thanks UncleWebb!) and GPU-Z.
3. Tested with just the battery as well as hooked up to the power adapter.

My configuration was: - i7-620M, 4.0GB, DDR3-1066MHz SDRAM, 2 DIMMS, 9-cell (90Wh) Lithium Ion Battery, 90W Adapter, 512MB NVIDIA NVS 3100M with ExpressCard.

Results - CPU Throttling. Power settings: Balanced/ Dell (identical!)
A. Battery only:
When Prime95 started running, the CPU load went up to 100%.
The multiplier went up from around 9-11 to 20-21 for both cores (132.98MHz * 9-11 = 1197MHz - 1462.78MHz)
(132.98MHz * 20-21 = 2660MHz - 2792.58MHz)
At first the fan was quiet. Then as the temperature progressively went up from 30+degC to around 80degC, the fan started blowing loudly and hot air came out from the vent on the left. It took about maybe a minute or two to reach 80degC from 30+degC.

I left the E6410 for about 10 mins in this mode. What was interesting was, for the entire 10min duration, the multiplier remained 20-21 and the highest temperature reached was 86-87degC, but not higher. The temperature did not look like it would go higher; it seemed pretty stable.

B. With AC adapter
I turned off Prime95, hooked up the Power Adapter, checked that the Power Settings were as before: Balanced/ Dell. Then I started Prime95 again, TortureTest with 4 threads and left it for about 10-11mins. The results were pretty much the same as before - 1 min to reach 80+degC, max temperature of 86-87degC but not higher. In addition, the battery seemed to be recharged slowly (the percentage seemed to go up but took maybe half a minute to go from 30% to 31% - I didn't exactly measure this).

Conclusion:
Based on the 10min tests, E6410 did not seem to suffer from the same throttling issues which I had been reading about for previous Dell laptops.
Cavaet: I was *not* able to act on UncleWebb's suggestion - using Kill a Watt to measure actual power drawn from the wall to ensure my power adapter was not drawing more than 90W and overheating!

GPU-Throttling:
In addition, I tested the E6410 with Furmark, but didn't dare to go beyond a few minutes because Furmark utilizes the whole screen and I couldn't see if the GPU was smoking so didn't want to push it too far

Here, I found that the core multiplier was 24-25 (132.98MHz * 24-25 = 3192MHz - 3325MHz) for those few minutes.

I hope this information is useful to potential buyers; previously I hadn't been able to find anything on throttling and E6410.

 

Thanks. I've become partial to the AR5B91 card because it works with Linux without needing any additional drivers installed. It's worked on every distro I've thrown at it out of the box (including Arch, my main).

I am ordering mine with Vista basic because I'm just going to throw my Arch Linux 640GB hdd in it when it arrives.

 

I have some questions about the optional 9 cell extended life battery with 3 year warranty (81 Wh).

Did anyone buy it?

First, if I understand well it does not support express charge, right?

How heavy it is? Is it heavier than the standard 9 cell battery?

 

my E6410 arrived today:

Core i7 620m
4gb 1066mhz DDR3
NVS 3100m
Intel 6300
Latitude on Reader
1440x900 wled display
160gb 5400rpm hdd
6cell 60whr battery
backlit keyboard

Price: 1030€ excl. VAT incl. shipping
delivery time: 3 days from shanghai
production time: 5 days
time from order - delivery: 8 days

Hardware notes:

My system came with preinstalled WWAN antennas so ordering without the latitude on system seems to be the right choice if you want to have the possibility to add a wwan module later on!

The display is very bright and contrast seems to be ok (same as my old 6715b which reached arount 150-200:1); however i have no means to calibrate it right now.

Keyboard action is pretty good and on par to my 2006 Macbookpro and 2008 HP 6715b (there is some slight flex on the right half)

The touchpad is below average as normal input is OK but multitouch gestures aren't working as they should (even 2 finger scroll is a PITA compare to regular scrolling)

Weight is very low compared to my older systems and a big + for me; the power brick is small on very portable (new 90W slim model)

Speakers are a big improvement over the MBP ones and better than the 6715b ones (louder and less tinny); definetly enough to watch some youtube videos or for presentations in bigger rooms!

On to the non-hardware stuff!

Software:

Bundled software (basic system):

OEM win7 64bit (installable on every system; no recovery stuff)
Driver DVD - great driver installer dvd; better than any other i've seen so far
Power DVD
Roxio CD Creater
NO antivirus (= less bloatware)

There seems to be no real bloatware installed; the dell control center takes up almost no resources and is a great app

Battery lifetime:

real capacity on my unit is 63 whe
Power consumption in energy saver mode with wlan on; bluetooth on (bluetooth mouse); display at 50% next lower setting appears to 25% is around 8.9 (writing on tis forum)-13W (listening to mmusic on youtube) according to battery bar and total lifetime while surfing is just over 5 hours which is very impressive considering the 6-cell battery and dedicated graphics card!

Disabling WLAN and bluetooth lets it drop to 8-12W so the intel 6300 card seems to be very power efficient; receiving quality is 1 level higher than on the 6715b broadcom card and 2 level higher than on the MBP (i have a wireless G 54mbit network)

So far i'm very pleased with this Notebook and i'll report back if i find anything new