E6420 Owner's Thread

Picked up a e6420 from the outlet cheap. Arrived yesterday and I must say this is a nice system for under 500 dollars. Solid build quality and good battery life.

Only thing is the pointer sticker is a waste. nothing like what my thinkpad model was.

 

Your impression was exactly how I felt when the system came on Friday. This thing feels niiicccee. Very premium look and feel IMO. The modular optical drive sounds a bit cheap when you push on it but overall a nice upgrade.

As far as performance out of the box goes, I'm still seeing what all the dell software does...its a lot more comprehensive than Dell QuickSet was on the D630. I think I'll end up keeping 90% of it because I havent found anything that wasnt truly useful and it saves me the trouble of installing some utilities that i did in the past, for example, you can turn off the display and leave the computer running via FN+D iirc....i have to download a utility to do that on the d630.

I'm a bit wary of doing a clean install even though I have to-my machine has 4 gb of ram yet is running 32 bit w7....because apparently this gen's pretty picky about the order in which one installs drivers. For example, you have to remember to install the intel graphics driver first THEN the nvidia one. so on and so forth. Good news is, I have 2 free days to get it done.

Webcam is amazing, great upgrade from my netbook's awful one.

I wish there was a more visible indicator of which GPU is in use other than the icon you can hover over in the notification area...even a popup like the volume control except for Optimus would be nice.

Overall, those are my impressions from only playing with it for a few hours on Friday...cant wait to be able to use it again: had to go traveling and I just couldnt bear to bring my new baby with me haha.

 

Hello to all the friends who kindly help me out or will they too have the same problem, with the IDT audio driver with any version of latitude e6420 installed you have the advanced options of the audio control panel, it happens to you? Tested with Windows 7, Windows XP, 32 and 64 bits, you have nothing to do with solutions and hello

 

Is there more than one 1600x900 panel? Pretty disappointed in mine. I'm probably going to swap it out for an LG panel that I used on my XPS 14. Hopefully it works.

 

I have the advanced options (if you click the volume control and click the speaker icon, switch to the playback tab, right click the speaker and choose properies) in there. usual suspects like bass boost etc.

i dont see any advanced options in the idt panel, but dell usually gimps the sound controller specific control panel....i only assume out of cheapness.

no disappointments from me, wish it even higher resolution though

 

check more about this and 'the symptom also on e6520

reported here:

E6520 w/ XP - IDT Audio Control Panel - Laptop Audio Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

thanks bye

 

Has anyone noticed their power jack surround (the white circle inside the jack) being very loose? It seems to recognize the adaptor fine but I'm a bit concerned as this machine literally has sat on my desk all weekend directly from the box it came in.

 

Mine doesn't seem as super tight as it could be, but there is only a tiny hint of movement in my power jack.

I was surprised at how capable the integrated graphics are. My fiance is a big time Morrowwind player, and she was so happy when I told her I installed Oblivion for her (she couldn't play it on her old laptop)! Of course I had to do my own testing while she was away all day yesterday, and the laptop was able to handle World of Tanks at 1366x768 and low settings. That game is very addicting though, so another E6420 with a dedicated GPU might some how arrive at my front door this holiday season.

 

Hey Guys,

I Had a question and a few details about the E6420.

N°1- A fix for a Latency issue with my E6420 was disabling the SD CARD driver. That made my latency drop to ~150.

N°2- I am very worried about the temperature that my CPU gets to. When its ide it goes from 45 ~ 58°C. Now, when i get into any kind of game that clocks up the CPU and uses some CPU LOAD, the temperature goes to 76~84°C.

Is that temperature normal for some heavy load?

I changed my Latitude E6320 for an E6420 thinking that it had to do with temperature and not enough room for heat dicipation.

Thanks in advanced!!

PD: The specs of the notebook are:
- Core i5 2520M, 4Gb Ram DDR3, Intel HD 3000 Video Card.

 

First off, interesting find about the SD card drive causing latency issues. What sorts of latency was a problem that disabling the driver fixed?

As for the temps, they are a little high; so just make sure the surface you are on isn't blocking the bottom intake, or the left side exhaust ports. If you want to be thorough, then replace the stock Thermal paste on the CPU with an appropriate amount of good quality thermal paste like Arctic Silver 5. Apple is famous for doing this; they added many many times too much, and rather then act as a transfer media, it acted as a bit of an insulator, causing the CPU/GPU to get quite toasty.

Though to be honest, your temps aren't that bad, that is around the norms I have been getting (stock E6420 no mods). Tonight I'll see about doing some temperature measurements while gaming, then crack open the E6420 to put on a proper Arctic Silver 5 application and then see how the performance is.