E6420 Owner's Thread

Hello Sapphire,

Any news? I am willing to get the 2860 QM, currently have the 2630qm and wondering if the difference is very high in performance to deserve the pay. Also am wondering to put a headpipe designed for NVIDIA gpu although I have only the HD3000...


Thanks!

 

Has anyone had issues with the rubbering around the wrist area (and really all around the keyboard) turning kind of tacky/sticky? Just got a pair of these for work laptops and unfortunately one came with a seemingly tacky rest area around the trackpad that no one wants.

 

E6420s come with 1600x900 resolution, but is there an option to get 1440x900 resolution on the 6420?

 

Has anyone tried a 2TB SSD on the E6420? Any issues?
I am trying to wait for the Samsung 840 EVO drive to drop in price but not sure I can live with the existing space much longer. (I am still on Windows 7)

 

My mistake... I meant the Samsung SSD 850 EVO 2TB drive...

It might seem overkill at current prices, but this is a well-specced E6420 with Quad core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM. I may be wrong, but I think cpu and RAM speeds have not been increasing that fast in recent years. A replacement machine would more likely to have scored in being more economical on the battery and lighter in weight rather than much faster. Also I have a docking station to use it with my U3011 monitor so the current screen resolution is not a major issue, I have an Express card giving USB3.0 ports for when I really need them, and I have set the machine up the way I want it... so I judged it worth the additional investment and I went ahead and got the SSD for £570.

I will try and post more details later, but initial experience is:
1. Disk cloning software didn't work as well as I would like. Windows Update History was not preserved. It took about 3.5 hours (using eSATA port) for 650GB or so. Windows Search has been erroring. Later, when I ran March Windows Updates after the first batch (which for some reason left Excel 2010 update unchecked) I got a problem with the service no longer running (preventing further updates).
2. No disk errors. The SSD does seem fast. Things like a MRT scan now seem limited by CPU temperature (100 degC) and cause cpu to be throttled.

Samsung Magician Benchmarking is showing me:
Sequential Read 3468 MB/s
Sequential Write 2886 MB/s
Random Read 48770 IOPS
Random Write 78952 IOPS

Windows Experience score for Primary Hard Disk increased from 5.9 to 7.9 (which the panel is telling me is the maximum possible WE score). The weak point remains the Aero Graphics score at 5.1 (I run with Aero disabled anyway).

I plan to switch back to the old HDD and benchmark that and retry to clone the disk to the new SSD (perhaps using Acronis).

 

I assume that you have RAPID Mode enabled. The limit of the SATA interface is 600MB/s so the maximum benchmark speed is around 550MB/s. That assumes your notebook supports SATA 3. SATA 2 is half the speed. Effectively, RAPID Mode uses some RAM as a cache, which may help in real life workloads if you are repeatedly reading the same data. Nonetheless, any SSD, even if connected to SATA 2, is noticeably faster than a HDD. Much of the benefit comes from the near-zero access times.

Next time you have the bottom off the computer you should also clean out the cooling system and repaste the CPU. I don't like the 100C + throttling. Undervolting might be an option. Either using the method described here or the more recent Throttlestop.

John

 

Well spotted. Indeed I enabled RAPID mode. After reading up on it some more I turned it off. It has a big impact on some benchmarks but I haven't noticed a slowdown in real world use. The E6420 is SATA 3.
For the record the new
Samsung Magician Benchmarking is showing me:
Sequential Read 557 MB/s
Sequential Write 535 MB/s
Random Read 63910 IOPS
Random Write 60379 IOPS
The Windows Experience HD score remains at 7.9
(My cpu is the i7-2760QM @ 2.40GHz and I have the NVIDIA graphics)

A full MRT scan remains about 4 hours (at the sequential read speed it might take 20 mins to read all the data on disk so this probably remains mainly bound by cpu)

I do clean the cooling system from time to time... as I am now cpu bound I will get extra speed.... as the weather gets warmer it will also become more important. I will look into undervolting... thanks for the tip.

One thing I noted is that Samsung Magician warned:
"AHCI Mode - Deactivated (IDE or RAID)"
"AHCI Mode is required for the best SSD performance"
My BIOS was set to RAID, likely the default, and I understood that included AHCI capabilities and perhaps had some minor advantage even on non-RAID systems.
I changed the BIOS to AHCI early on but I am not sure if this is really required.

I have had some problems since cloning the old disk - most of which I have now resolved. They may not all be related to the change.. The most worrying are perhaps "Kernel-General 6, An I/O operation initiated by the Registry failed unrecoverably.The Registry could not flush hive (file):..." and I have only seen one of those since turning off RAPID mode and disabling write buffer cache flushing (as recommended by Samsung Magician).
Other errors included Windows search indexing errors (Again Samsung Magician seems to think I should disable Windows search indexing - though I am not sure i want to do that as I use it a lot... the errors in any case may now be resolved by rebuilding search indexes and disabling indexing of offline files.
March Windows Update was also failing untiI I installed the updates one-by-one, and I still had one error and had to delete the C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\ folder to get Windows Update working again. Anyway - this seems to be working well now.

I plan to revert to the old disk and clone again once I am satisfied I know how to handle all the potential issues, and this time I may try cloning with Acronis software. Overall the system is performing very well at the moment and I am very happy with the upgrade... but I am just trying to resolve any unusual event log errors to make sure I have long term stability.

 

I looked into undervolting but Throttlestop doesn't seem to enable that control and the help file states "Software adjustable core voltage is no longer available on the newer Core i7/i5/i3 processors." so I guess that is a no-go.

 

Hi Gents,

Being a owner of a dell e6420 (non Nvidia GPU) with a core i5-2520M, I have decided to upgrade the cpu to a 2720QM, since I ran some FE analysis with this laptop and the extra juice is recommended. All went fine and the new CPU is working.

As expected the overall temperature of the CPU increased quite a bit, compared with the i5-2520M. So has anyone purchased the dual pipe heatsink TYP01 and tried to fit it in the dell e6420 model without the nvidia GPU (only intel hd3000)?

I have read, on this forum, about some users that have purchased the heatsink... but they never shared if were successful fitting the heatsink.

Thanks

 

Continuation of my experiences with the 2TB SSD drive.
The system cratered after about one week. It crashed and rebooted into recovery mode. Attempting to restore the system from any of the last three restore points are failing.
I wasn't very surprised because although it seemed to be working well and was very responsive, the event log was showing some worrying errors from time to time. As far as I can tell the main problem is to do with VSS - probably running out of storage despite there being plenty of disk space and memory. Over the week I ran the system I was getting errors like:

Search 3079
"Insufficient quota to complete the requested service. (HRESULT : 0x800705ad) (0x800705ad)"

ESENT 482
"taskhost (5016) WebCacheLocal: An attempt to write to the file "C:\Users\myname\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache\WebCacheV01.dat" at offset 23429120 (0x0000000001658000) for 32768 (0x00008000) bytes failed after 0 seconds with system error 1453 (0x000005ad): "Insufficient quota to complete the requested service. ". The write operation will fail with error -1011 (0xfffffc0d). If this error persists then the file may be damaged and may need to be restored from a previous backup."

Kernel-General 6
"An I/O operation initiated by the Registry failed unrecoverably.The Registry could not flush hive (file): '\SystemRoot\System32\Config\DEFAULT'."

I have reverted to the old HDD and will clone it again (I am not sure if the problem was in the cloning to SSD or the settings I am using).

I think the problem can be resolved by turning off Samsung RAPID mode. Other options are to obey all the Samsung recommendations (I had System restore On while they suggest disabling it).

One other thought which is worrying me a little is power consumption. I don't doubt that SSDs use less energy than spinning disks... however, if you look at the current ratings on the bare disks you see a very good correlation with disk size (irrespective of whether you are looking at a spinning HDD or SSD). It seems that SSDs can draw quite a high current (albeit it for a very short amount of time).
i.e. this Samsung 840 EVO SSD 2TB is marked with "1.95A" (at 5V)
This is almost double the next most power hungry drive I have in my collection (A 1TB Toshiba and the power draw includes the enclosure with USB host adapter).
The Samsung 840EVO 160GB is 0.86A, and my original Seagate 750GB drive is 0.7A

Now the E6420 has four USB ports - at 500mA each you could draw 2A by plugging in four power hungry USB devices... so the system should be able to support the 2TB SSD under normal circumstances... but I wonder what happens with the new SSD if it is used in parallel with 4 USB devices, memory upgrade, perhaps the DVD writer running, and Express card, SDCard, etc. Isn't this a potential issue for many laptop upgrades? Any way to detect if a system is having trouble providing sufficient power?