E6410 Owner's Thread

Are all the machines you've got specced the same or do you happen to have one without discrete GPU as well? I'd love to know whether heat/noise is better with models that only use the Intel HD graphics.

 

Thanks a lot for the info. I'm about to buy one of these babies here in italy. I'm undecided on integrate vs discrete graphics, tho. Do you know if the discrete supports optimus? In which case I could do away with the discrete and 6 cell battery... Thanks!

 

no optimus but the nvs3100 is a new low end 40nm part and shouldn't consume much more than intels crappy integrated stuff (3-4 watts tops)

after working with X4500 i'm never going to touch any intel graphics products again because it's such a pain in the to get it set up for video acceleratuin and display options are lacking at best...

the new graphics core in i5 series might be improved but it's still inferior to the dicrete chip in so many ways

 

a minor question:

What are the specs of the SD lot? Standard SD, SDHC? SDXC?

 

The NVS 3100M is a 14W part that is in addition to the Intel graphics being part of the CPU's 35W power rating. Because of the turbo mode feature, GPU performance will depend on whether the CPU is under load.

For many business users where graphics performance is not critical then the cooler running Intel graphics will be fine. It's still twice as fast as the E6400's graphics and not so far behind the E6400's dedicated GPU option.

Good question. Dell says 6 in 1. Which 6? My guess: SD, SDHC, mini SD (with adaptor), micro SD (with adaptor), MMC and ???

It will definitely support SD / SDHC since the E6400 can handle those cards.

John

 

Well, I'll mostly be using PS, Illustrator and Lightroom. Games? I have an X360 for that It seems to me that 14w more is a significant battery sucker... so, I'll go with the integrated. Too bad that Dell Italy won't let me order a backlit keyboard, I guess I'll have to talk to a sales rep and see if she can do anything about that.

Other than that minor gripe, it seems that the E6410 is the perfect machine for me... I also considered the Vostro 3300 but lack of a decent video out (VGA only on the 13) and poor 4-cell battery was a show-stopper for me. Plus, the Latitude should have greater build quality, if I'm not mistaken...

 

Remember that your Quadro doesn't consume 14W ALL the time. it's 14W MAX under heavy load. Idle it's much lower. Based on battery life information provided by users, it's idle speed seams to be the same as the Quadro NVS160M which I had ~9 hours of battery life with the 9-cell. And in comparison to the Intel solution, it's was about a little over 9 hours. So there SHOULD not have any large difference.

If you do photopshop at a professional level, the Quadro should be a welcomes addition with Photoshop in not only providing accurate color pixel by pixel thanks to it's error correction system set at several area of the GPU including it's memory, but also performance thanks to CUDA.

I would wait for Benchmarks on this GPU under photoshop and exact battery life between the 2 graphic chip before purchasing.

 

14W is the worst case TDP; the desktop counterpart consumes 7W MAX under 2D so it's safe to assume that it's going to consume under 5W; add in that the intel IGP is disabled which should save 1-2W and you're looking at around 3-5W of extra power draw in 2D

additionally PS supports graphics acceleration on ati + nvidia cards and the quadro is able to accelerate some apps (even though it has only 16SPs you might see some improvements over cpu only)

backlit keyboards are only available over a premium channel reseller or dell reps so far

 

Uh, it seems I made the right choice when I asked in this formum. Full of nice ppl ready to help... OK, so maybe I'll spend those 80 euros more for the Nvidia chip and .... sheesh, another 70 euros for the 9 cell

 

i went for the nvidia without the 9-cell

if you have absolutely no use for proper video acceleration (with deinterlace settings and so on) and application acceleration the intel HD graphics might be the better choice but the additional power draw of the low end nvidia chip is very low (as a matter of fact nvidia used almost the same core on a higher process node in its integrated graphics parts without dedicated ram)