E6410 Owner's Thread

Well I have a 3 year next day next day warranty on the laptop as does everyone, but I generally buy in quantities of 5 to 10 and always top spec laptops. Our laptop orders can easily be £15,000+ so I do expect when it comes to my own laptop they jump through some hoops to at least provide the product purchased.

One a side note and I know its nothing to do with this thread, but anyone actually seen a Vostro V13 in the flesh?? I might try one of them as my run around laptop.

 

SD Card Reader???

There is an SD card slot in the front of the chassis, but it doesn't appear to be working. Do I need to add additional hardware/software to use it to read photo SD cards?

Thanks,

 

RICOH driver, I believe, is the drier you need for the SD card reader

 

So apparently Dell are in the works of deciding to replace my M1530, so with this in mind I went about trying to spec a replacement to the purchase price of my original machine. I really like the E6410 since I don't play games and it doesn't have a 16:9 monitor. I've decided on an i5 540M, Intel graphics, 4gb RAM, 1440x900 screen, 250gb 7200rpm HDD and backlit keyboard.

My questions are (apologies if these have already been answered):

1) Heat - what's the heat like with an i5 and Intel graphics? I want to be able to run this machine 24/7 without a cooling pad.

2) Which Intel graphics chip is it? X4500HD? Google seems to be giving me conflicting results. Does it play HD video acceptably?

3) 9 cell battery - worth it? I'd like equivalent battery life to what I have now, which is about 3ish hours (nearly 4 if I stretch it) on my current machine with 9 cell battery. Anything over that is a bonus, but I'd like to ditch the 9 cell if I can in favour of the 6 cell since it won't be as bulky (I'm not a road warrior by any means, but I'd like it to be as compact as possible). I've read here that it's about 6 hours with Intel graphics on the 6 cell - has this been confirmed?

Thanks!

 

I don't think you will need an cooling pad. On normal usage the cpu temp reaches about 50-55 degree celsius and you will only notice a very moderate heat on the palm rest (it gets a little warm, but far from inconvenient when you use it on your lap). In idle the temperature is in the lower 30s. Under heavy usage you will hear that the fan will kick on and it gets a little uncomfortable on your lap, but it is'nt that bad. So it's mostly the bottom side which gets a little hot.

AFAIR, it is the x4500hd and i plays 1080p videos easily. Playing a 1080p on youtube increases the cpu usage only to 30-35%.

I've made a test with BatteryEater and i got about 3h30mins at 50% brightness and 100% cpu usage all the time on a nine cell battery. So the watt consumption was always by about 35Watts per hour for the cpu. On normal usage (office work/programming) and wifi on i get about 7-8 hours with 25% brightness. So you can except about 2/3 with a 6 cell. Furthermore you can disable Intels Turboboost and SpeedStep in the BIOS Setting when you don't need it. It will give you some extra minutes when you need it.

Oh, and i have an e6410 with an i5-520m and the integrated graphic solution. But there shouldn't be some much difference to a i5-540m.

 

You will be able to run the system 24/7 without a cooling pad. However, expect the fan to kick-in as when you are plug-in, all component goes faster, consume more energy, which naturally produces more heat. If the fan is the the E6400 which I have, it's not loud.

The GPU is the X4500HD mobile version. The original X4500HD was included in the northbridge processor of the motherboard which lead to throttling problems as soon as you use the GPU in any way. Now, Intel moved this GPU with the CPU together (but separate component), and are crossing their fingers that no problem arises. Additional advantage of doing this, is that the Intel graphic card turns out to be faster, as it can have closer and direct communication between your RAM (it doesn't have it's own memory), and your CPU (as this is not a dedicated GPU, it uses your part of CPU for graphic rendering... something that CPU's are not designed for and therefore sucks at it. A dedicated graphic won't benefit from that.)

The Intel X4500HD can play 1080p video's fine, and do basic 3D like Google Earth, and old 2D and very old 3D games. It's performance is similar to a Geforce 7400M GT (released in 2006).

With the 9-cell battery (assuming the battery is new, as it will degrade over time) you should expect about 8 hours and half to 9 hours, with minimum brightness (which is actually really bright thanks to the LED backlit and matte/anti-reflective screen), wireless ON, bluetooth, optical drive, firewire, backlit-keyboard all OFF (yes you can cut the power of these devices with this laptop via Windows power management), system set to power saver mode, running Win7 64-bit, system idle (light web surf without Flash or HTML5 multimedia content or typing notes with OneNote or using Word), no music/audio playing, no USB devices attached.

 

That's certainly alot cooler than my M1530 (on which the fan is stupidly loud thanks to the silly nVidia GPU cycling issue they've tried to overcome).

And all I'll really do on battery is use MS Office, all of my heavy lifting (occasional 2D AutoCAD, writing code, administrating my server, PCB design with Altium, watching videos etc) will be done when I'm plugged into power and at a desk, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks for your reply also. I reckon I'm sold on this one then, if Dell come to the party with the replacement options.

 

I don't know if there is a delay on the E6410 atm, or if its just my combination of spec.. But Dell told me they had placed an order for a replacment yesterday and today they called me saying that I was going to get a refund instead. I'm very confused, but I think they must be having a few issues their end....

That said, if you're an XPS 15XX fan you'll like the E6410, its nice middle point between the sizes of the 1330 and the 1530. The screen is just as bright and the battery is slightly better I think.

Looks like everyone in the office gets to keep their new E6410's and little old me keeps my trusty old M1330

 

We just got 26 E6410 in, the brushed slate LCD cover is very nice and professional looking.

BIOS has a few new wizzbang features, some sort of new way to configure your boot order, and an option to turn the lattitude on off.

Took a full month to deliver them, and for some reason they shipped all the accessories seperate.

We can't image them, but thats not Dell's fault. The foot draggers in the Desktop Provisioning team have not provided drivers for the PXE server yet or updated out USB sticks for them yet.

 

I currently have a D630 from work and am thinking about an E6410 or Lenovo T410 for personal use. One of my biggest dislikes about the D630 is that it only has one speaker. The E6410 appears to have two from the pictures (one on either side of the keyboard). Is my assumption of two speakers correct? And if so, how is the sound? I don't expect it to be great but some commentary on it would be useful.