E6420 Owner's Thread

Thanks for the info Bokeh... sitting here with an aged M1330 wondering whether to upgrade or not. Difficult decision!

 

The 1366x768 touch screen on the E6420 is not bad. Resolution is ok - but can get just a little grainy in photoshop when you are right up on the screen. It is bright as well.

Only downside is that the touch screen has a piece of glass in front of it that adds to the weight. The 9 cell battery also adds to the weight.

The quad core and Quadro video card give you a lot of options in a chassis this small. The quad core may even be overkill. Watching 720p video in a window the processor is sitting between 800 and 900 mhz and 49C while pulling between 4.9 and 5.2 watts of power. The Quadro video card is off.

If I throw in Prime95 running 4 threads (half load) while the video is playing, it goes up to 2966mhz (overclocking 2 cores) and draws 41 watts of power. Temps go up to around 78C. If I run 8 threads and fully load the CPU, it runs at 2400mhz on all 4 cores (remember 2,200 is stock speed). The CPU is pulling 41.8 watts and the temp is 82C after a few minutes, but stays at that temp.

You end up with a machine that works in different situations. Surf the web, watch video, do the normal office stuff and it will stay relatively cool. Encode video or do cpu intensive tasks off your lap and you are fine.

In "heavy" normal use which includes a lot of Adobe CS5 applications across 2 monitors I am seeing temps top out around 60C in Ultra Performance mode. Usually it just stays in the 50s. To get the temps to go any higher I have to either use a "synthetic" program like Prime or encode long hi-def video.

I am interested in seeing what kinds of temps are being seen with the Dual Core processors.

One other thing - SSD drives make a huge difference in these machines. I ran it with an Intel 80gb SSD and the 7200rpm Hitachi 320gb drive that it came with and noticed a large difference in the overall speed.

 

Anyone have pics of the 9 cell battery on and off the E6420?

 

Hi Bokeh,
let me see if I understood correctly. If I disable optimus in bios to run linux, not only I will not be able to access the nvidia card (which is not bad for my profile of usage) but the nvidia card will be fully off and it will not dissipate any (unrequired) energy. Is this right? Are you sure (I read something different in other forums).

If this is the case I will be happy. I will go to pay 80$ for a card I will never use (and do not need) but at least I will not drain my battery from a piece of unrequired hardware (the performance of the intel card is more than fine with me).

Thanks
G.

 

rossim80: If you disable Optimus in the BIOS:
Intel integrated 3000 HD = OFF
NVS 4200M = ON

Currently you can't choose Intel only....

 

Do you tried Linux on this machine? Anyone tried linux? Is your claim a result of testing under windows (with the nvidia drivers) or linux?

Indeed, this is the first time I hear of an optimus implementation that allows to use the nvidia card alone (disabling the intel card).

Thanks again
G.

 

Correct. Disabling Optimus permanently enables the quadro. Even down to the post screen. Windows 7 will no longer see any trace of the Intel Graphics. If you right click on the desktop the Intel options will not appear in the right click menu.

Even with the oringinal Alienware 17x you could enable/disable/choose the card in the bios optimus settings.

The big difference is that that the new Optimus is much smoother in transitioning between modes.

 

Tomorrow = pictures to help explain it

Going to try Ubuntu at some point. Just busy times.

 

Mine arrives Thurs, and will be dual-booting Windows/Linux. I will try both settings and report back.

 

As you noticed I am VERY interested in knowing about any experience with this machine and linux. Depending on these experiences I will choose if buying it or wait.

In particular, I imagine/hope it will be possible to use the intel card leaving optimus ON in the BIOS and not installing the nvidia drivers in Linux but only the i915 ones. In this case, it could be that the nvidia card will be consuming energy even if not used, unless we find a way to disable it (see Linux Hybrid Graphics for some preliminary tools to do this on various machines). Another, less interesting (for me), way to go could be to leverage the bios option to disable optimus reported by Bokeh (thanks) and use the nvidia card. I prefer the former option to minimize power consumption.

In any case, please report your experience here, I will be very grateful.
G.