E6420 Owner's Thread

hi,

Anyone running Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 on the e6420 with nVidia? Is it possible to use the mercury engine with the Quadro in it? Would be very thankful if someone has tried it out or even try the trial version out. In case you want a good comparison with other laptops, head over to: PPBM5 Benchmark

and check out the benchmark results filtering out only results for laptops.

 

The E6420's NVS-4200M GPU is not a Quadro solution like the FX series so it doesn't offer Adobe Mercury Engine support. However, the 4200M does offer 48 CUDA cores and enhances the CS5 experiences compared to a generic GPU, but my FX-4000M in my Precision M6600 screams with CS5 and the Mercury Engine doing its magic. That card has 320 CUDA cores active and costs A LOT more than these more casual and battery saving NVS solutions.

The 4200M specs are here: Tech Specs

Scott

 

I am going to ask the question...that others don't appear to be asking. Why do you think this is a hardware issue, that needs to be put in the E6420 Owners thread? Even if it is a Hardware issue(Flaky RAM, Bad sector on drive), it isn't a E6420 specific issue. Most likely, it is a software issue, and in no way related to the E6420 Hardware...

 

LoklWolf I have the same configuration (regarding software only) on another PC and the problem has never occurred.Though I am not sure it is really a hardware problem of the e6420 laptop I think it is unusual

 

Too many variables. Could be a plug-in on your browser, something else running on your machine, Excel add-in, someone posting something stupid on Facebook hanging up your browser, etc etc.

If it froze up all the time I would say hardware, but I would bet anything it's software related. I would have asked the question Loki asked had I come here more often.

 

Things to look at:
- Was the system running hot when that happened? (thermal throttling?)
- Did it blue-screen? (check your Event Viewer to see if there was anything, might be a driver, see if there's a minidump.dmp file)
- Did it unfreeze itself? (implies not a critical system failure, probably a mishaving/badly coded piece of software)
- Did you have to force it to power down? (if so, how long did you wait?)

I've had situations where misbehaving programs consume all the processor and make it slow to a crawl, or if you have a lot of programs/tabs running in the background (particularly in Chrome). Haven't particularly had any hardware issues, though.

If it is software, tracking it down can be difficult. You'll want to keep a minimized Task Manager to the system tray until the next time it happens and watch the meter and open it when it happens to see what program is the cause.

 

Good News: My E6420 came yesterday with all the options as configured. This is a replacement order from 3 weeks ago which was missing the backlit keyboard.

Bad News: Screen is bad. Pictures are pixelated; looking at the Windows 7 background is giving me a headache. Output to an external monitor looks fine. Called Dell CS, and they want me to send it in for repair. By the time I get it back, it would be another 2 weeks at the earliest. This was my first time ordering from Dell Outlet, and I'm beginning to regret the decision. Should I demand next day service?

 

Ask if they can just ship you another system with those specs. There's at least 3 different manufacturers of the high resolution panel and a few of them are bunk when it comes to quality. Sadly I don't know where each maker falls off the top of my head.

 

I got off the phone with Executive Customer Support who assured me they'll send another unit with the similar specs. It should be here sometime next week.

 

Not hot, no blue screen (never seen one on windows 7),freezed and turnd off completly after about 40 sec.

Anyway could be my fault because I usually have many programs running and do a restart every 2-3 days