E6420 Owner's Thread

I´ll be waiting for those tests to see how much it helps:.

Please, can you take pictures while your at it?

 

Just to follow up on this, running one thread of "Small FFT" torture test on Prime95 is more than enough to keep the CPU/power idle screeching noise away, though it's using ~12% of my 2720QM (ie: it's using half of a core).

Might be worth finding some alternative like SETI than wasting cycles on a torture test...

 

Do you know who the manufacturer in yours is? Mine is a Samsung and honestly, it's horse . Granted, I'm pretty anal about screens but the LG aftermarket panel I replaced it with literally blows it out of the water.

 

That's the lcd I got, the 1600x900.

45% color gamut and 200nit.

ROFL. Worse screen, ever.

 

So, in the course of using the machine I've noticed a few things, not big deals but still:

Love being able to hit ctrl+d to turn off the display. I can even do it on the lockscreen, something one cant do with add ons

Hate the multitouch trackpad: I quickly disabled gestures as the two-finger scrolling leaves a lot to be desired-it'll end up jumping my cursor across the screen 90% of the time.


I sense a bit of tiny lag occasionally (frozen mouse during high disk activity (i got disconnected and reconnected to my home network just now...guess what was frozen.., click a close button in chrome and it doesn't close the tab right away) Unnerving for a Core i5 laptop.

Any advice there?

That I don't know, if you can let me know how you found out who made your panel, I'd be more than happy to check.

 

Hello everyone,

Got some issue with this notebook. Operating system Windows XP SP3. Whenever I try to connect a projector via D-Sub cable and try the fn+f8 combination I get message Presentation Mode is disabled. To be precise I got this problem on multiple Dell’s M4400 and E6410. Those with NVidia graphic cards. When the resolution of notebook is greater than 1024x768 I need to manually set the extended monitors option in NVidia settings and change resolution to suitable 1024x768. But this problematic for most of my users. The best thing is that when I connect E6400 (Intel graphic card) to projector with resolution 1400x1050 it displays picture without any problem. Tried to change drivers for these machines but it didn’t helped. In my E6420 I got Windows 7 and there’s no problem with projectors. Just on XP.

Have goggled this but the answers weren’t fully answering my problem. If anybody has a advice for me I would be more than happy.

 

Ok, TIM replacement info is in, and it looks great.

Stock Dell TIM during World of Tanks playing:
CPU: 86C
Chipset: 44C

I replaced the CPU TIM, and noticed that the thermal pad on the chipset was off a litte bit, so 1-2 mm of chipset chip was not covered (and thus cooled). I moved the pad, added a little Arctic Silver 5, and reapplied the AS 5 to the CPU.

The results?

Arctic Silver 5 TIM during World of Tanks playing:
CPU: 84C
Chipset: 41C

 

NEW E6420 BIOS A07 OUT

I downloaded it and checked if the turbo boost problem is still there. Here are my findings under Linux (I am a "pure Linux user" so I cannot test in windows):

1. Apparently (I check using the i7z utility) the CPU stays at full throtthle (2.2Ghz) even when idle, but a check to the power consumed and to core temperatures seem to suggest that the CPU actually is running at minimal speed. My conclusion is that this is what happens and there is some issue with the tool I used to show the current CPU speed.

2. The performance of the intel GPU is much improved (glxgears goes from 2100 fps to 3100). This is nice.

3. Under load, the same i7z utility reports that turbo mode is not enabled and the CPU runs at 2.2Ghz at most. I was wondering if this was also just a problem with the reported speed, not the actual one. Well, this is not the case. I run a pure CPU benchmark and it runs much slower on A07 than on A05, where turbo mode works.

Now I would ask to the windows users if the same behavior happens in Windows 7, with the latest Intel drivers.

If this is the case then the problem must be with the BIOS, not the Linux kernel. Which means there are few chances it will be fixed anytime soon :-(

Bye

 

Is this turbo boost issue only occurring on i7? Or does it affect i5 units as well?

 

To the best of my knowledge, it only affects quad core cpus, so I5 should not be affected. There are messages in the three threads about e6520, e6420 and precision m4600 (basically three very similar machines) of people with the I5 that did not had the problem.