E6410 Owner's Thread

I am having issues with the laptop hanging on blackscreen and lit keyboard coming out of sleep when on battery!!! Really annoying and looks like the only solution so far is to disable speedstep.

Anyone know anything else?

 

I've had problems with the displayport since I got this machine a year ago running win 7. To get the audio to work on my TV very regularly I would have to change the screen resolution to jump it out of playing through the laptop to playing on the TV. I've also had some wireless connectivity issues off and on.
For a while I've wondered what this machine would be like with xp on it, so today I did a fresh install of xp. The wireless is more stable than it was, and I've got all the drivers installed.

Now my problem is that I can't get audio to my TV through the displayport. In sound playback my only option is the IDT driver. My machine has the Intel video drivers. I'm wondering do these video drivers not support audio or can anyone give me any direction here on how to solve this?

 

Yes I did. I just cannot understand why it works in the ultrabay SATA port, but not in the internal SATA port. Aren't they identical? What is the difference between these ports? It is just weird, and does not make any sense.

 

Hi all,

Thinking about putting some Arctic Silver 5 on my machine, as I've noticed it's started running a bit hotter and noisier than it used to (it is 18 months old, after all) - particularly when docked, I think thats nVidia's drivers though. Can I put AS5 on the GPU as well or does it have it's own special pad?

Cheers.

 

Arctic Silver 5 is fine for the CPU, but you cannot only use grease for the GPU. You need to use a thermal pad, but the stock pad is decent so I wouldn't touch it. I have my E6410 docked most of the time, and heat is not an issue (fan off most of the time, all temps between 120-140F). OEM thermal grease is pretty terrible, so I would definately recommend replacing it.

It makes sense that the BIOS treats the SATA ports differently, one is for the HDD and the other for the module bay. There is probably different monitoring for the HDD port, which is not needed for the module bay (and that's why it works fine there). Incompatibility problems are never simple...

 

That's about what I'm getting for the CPU. The GPU runs fairly hot but I've noticed that this seems to be a trend and it's not really that much hotter than new (and I think nVidia's PowerMizer doesn't work right, I've tweaked it and it seems to be a bit better. There's no reason for it to be running at full tilt just because the machine is docked with a second monitor, locking it to a lower performance setting works just fine and shaves a good 10*C off the temperatures. It's Linux afterall, I don't need 3D. :S). I'm wondering if the excess fan noise is due to the hotter weather we've had down here recently...

 

If you reduce the temperature of the CPU, it'll also help the GPU because they're on the same heat pipe. When you re-grease the CPU, check the condition of the thermal pad on the GPU and see if it looks OK.

What are your temperatures right now? It's winter here right now, so ambient temperatures are around 60F. However, I wonder if it's Linux that's causing the system to run hot...

 

Temps are around the same if I boot Windows.

Currently running docked with an external monitor running as well, and I'm seeing idle temps of about 65*C for the GPU. CPU idles quite low, 50 or so. The fan is running but it's very quiet. Under a bit of load though the GPU can hit 80*C with the fan running constantly on a higher setting. When I'm not docked it seems to run a bit cooler.

Before I tweaked Powermizer to not run the GPU flat out when it's docked, it'd get quite hot, up into the 80's easily. It's always run fairly warm, so I'm not really too concerened it'd just be nicer if it was a bit quieter that's all.

 

I haven't touched any settings, but when mine has similar temperatures, the fan is usually off. Maybe you need to replace the heatsink (there's no way to replace the thermal pads seperately, if reps tell you otherwise, they are going to send the wrong part) and apply Arctic Silver 5.

Then again, your ambient temperature is not helping...

 

Well, I finally got annoyed enough with it to open the machine up. There was not really any dust in there which didn't surprise me. I pulled the heatsink off to find that when the Dell technician last paid me a visit (that would've been April or May this year), he put so much paste on it was like a mountain. He'd obviously not cleaned the old paste off and just put more on top. No wonder it's been getting progressively worse. I really wish I had a working camera at the moment because it was truly disgusting what the tech had done.

I clean the top of the chip and the heatsink itself, and replaced the paste with some silver paste (it's not Arctic Silver as I couldn't get it locally). I've noticed that the temps are much better, and the machine is much quieter. It idles about 8 degrees cooler, and under light load it's about 5 degrees cooler and the fan is off most of the time (which makes a nice change). Hopefully as the paste runs in I might get even more improvement.