E6420 Owner's Thread

For people who have the dual pipe heatsink, does it make a difference over the single pipe heatsink? I have a 2630qm in my Latitude

 

You seem to get no advantages from higher queue depths, I have no experience with SDD's in the E6420 but something is fishy.

Which SATA mode is the laptop set to?
This looks like ATA to me, AHCI or RAID should significantly increase your speed with high queue depths.

 

Update to that:
- Had the last straw with that Samsung 830 after it crashed three times in two weeks a few months ago. Finally bit the bullet and changed it out for a Crucial M550 1TB. No issues for the last month or two. Never going to be trusting Samsung again for storage (I have a Samsung phone and a Dell tablet both with Samsung eMMC storage and both had similar weird performance issues where they would seize or lock up... can't say I really trust Samsung flash as much anymore).
- Had to downgrade the Intel and nVidia drivers to the original version to get Optimus to work. The new, revised ones on the Dell site did not work correctly (brightness was stuck at max).
- Was having intermittent problems with the second DisplayPort output on the dock, but might've been related to the drivers since it would come back after a simple restart.
- Lost one of the rubber legs. Apparently the internet says you need to order the whole bottom plate to get a rubber leg. *annoyed*

Yes, because disabling Optimus disables the Intel iGPU, not the nVidia dGPU. The only problem is that the nVidia dGPU can only drive two displays max by itself (trying to enable more than two will result in one of the other ones being disabled). Triple-display requires cooperation from the Intel iGPU. Had been running limited to two displays until I put the older Intel and nVidia drivers back.

IIRC the dual pipe was required for quad core and if you had the dGPU, though was the 2630QM ever officially supported on this model?

 

Its currenty on ATA. Sorry, I didnt see a reply, im new to the site. I think you have to have one of those cache ssd's in order for raid to work and I only have one drive which is the ssd. I think I will switch to AHCI.

 

If you're not planning on reinstalling your OS, then you have to make some registry changes before performing the change.
Otherwise you will get a Bluescreen upon boot, because the AHCI driver can't be loaded.

RAID has all the features from AHCI and some more.
However some performance issues were reporting in certain setups due to increased polling.
Also some issues with DriveEncryption exist with RAID mode (fixed with new Bios versions most of the time)
So AHCI is the way to go

 

I switched to AHCI, and my performance is much better Im still suffering from latency issues which are shown in this pic.

 

is the samsung pm830 a known bad drive? I've got a bunch spare ones that we need to reimage and send out to far satellite location. If lots of people are having issues with them I'll forgo this and maybe use the liteons. Thanks

 

Your dxgkrnl.sys interrupts are way too frequent, you don't seem to be running any games/videos.
Latest video drivers installed? From Dell or Intel/Nvidia?

 

I think I may have solved it, but Im not sure. I redid the thermal paste and tightened it very hard and then used a copper shim with the paste to cool the intel chipset. That chipset part is where the acpi.sys(THM/biod) is running and I have since not been throttling much. Whats odd is that while is may be cooler, I am getting similar results back when the thermal pad was on.

I ran the test when I was running a video game with latest driver and before I redid the paste. I really dont get how chipset cooling works because I have left it uncooled and over cooled and it will still throttle, and that throttle is largely responsible for apci.sys from what I have learned. Seems more about cpu die pressure, but even with high pressure and low cpu temps it would still throttle. That was back when I was using NTH1. Now im using ICD with alot of pressure, and while im not throttling as much, my temps are around 91C under load.

Oh god this is confusing...

 

So I recently got a deal on this laptop and am just getting used to all the specs and wanted to confirm/summarize some things

-It sounds like the best CPU upgrade would be remaining in the Sandy Bridge family (so no Ivy Bridge as of this point). Would the fastest CPU in the Sandy bridge family then be: Core i7-2960XM ?

As listed from: CPU-Upgrade: Intel Core i5-2520M (PGA) CPU

-Can we use a 3rd or 4th gen i7 processor? Or are we only restricted to anything in the 2nd gen Sandy Bridge?

-Lastly with a CPU upgrade, do we need to worry about upgrading heatsink or anything like that? Or would it be a straight forward plug and play with the new CPU?

Thanks in advance