E6430 Owners Thread

Most likely it is defective. The keyboards are interchangeable.

 

Ordered a Latitude E6430 from the Dell Outlet, so I'll be a new owner next week.

I thought this would be a good choice for eGPU, which I will be doing this summer, and the PCIe slot would be perfect for a CF card reader. I bring it to a lot of games as a photographer and needed something rugged too, from what I read this is the next best thing to a thinkpad. I'll post some pics and give some initial impressions next week. Here is the spec I walked away with:

1600x900 Screen
i7-3720qm
8GB RAM
256GB SSD
NVS5200m graphics

$1200 - For that price... you just can't beat it!

 

Dell offers the display from the E6530 "with Premium Panel".

Is there any or a huge difference to the HD+ (1600*900) from the E6430?

Are there any reviews out there with a E6430 and 1600*900?

 

Rec'd the replacement keyboard and all works fine, thanks for taking the time to reply

Bud

 

As a sports photographer on the other side of the pond, I'm thinking of using the E6430 for exactly the same purpose . I'm not very IT savvy, so am interested in the PCle slot being used for a CF card reader. Do you think it will be quicker to ingest images than a USB 3.0 reader? If so, I'll have to Google more about the slot and how to get a CF reader sorted in it.

 

Can someone tell me what the battery life is like on the E6430 i7-3520M, nv 5200 with a 9 or 6 cell batt?

 

I'm thinking about buying an E6430. I had an E6420, but I got rid of it because the build quality I found to be very lacking. Specifically, the bottom cover would have a several milimeter gap between the bottom cover and the palm rest, creating a "creaking" noise whenever I put my palms on it, and I would notice that the palmrest would get "wavy" (the palmrest would rise above the chassis in several areas) over time. Were these issues addressed in the E6430?

If any of you upgraded from the E6420, I'm curious what your opinion of this machine is over the E6420. I know not much has changed, but I'm just hoping overall the smaller issues with the build were addressed at least.

 

Having owned a E6400, E6410, E6420 and E6430....I think the E6420 was plagued with issues at the beginning. The build quality was craptacular at first. It got better and the E6430 has been fantastic. I have a lot of E6430s in the field and have no issues with the quality. They stepped up their game from the E6420.

 

I bought a refurbished E6430 last week from the Dell outlet and received it yesterday. I had a few hardware issues out of the box, including a couple of bad pixels and a warped chassis around the trackpad area, so Dell is sending out a box to send in for repair. Other than that, the build quality is great and it's a snappy machine, but I have a concern about the general quality of the LCD panel. I got the 1600x900 variant after seeing reviews that the viewing angles were decent enough and the brightness was great (along with the higher pixel density of course); after playing around with it yesterday, I found the verticals viewing angle to be absolutely atrocious, even compared with my old, crappy D830 screen as well as the colors being a bit washed out (not a huge deal). There is no sweet spot! Is there a chance that the replacement panel will have better viewing angles? What is your experience with that particular panel?

 

I recieved my .. well, work paid for it, but i managed to spec it up; E6430 yesterday
spec is:-
i7 3720m
nvidia5200m graphics
1600x900 screen with camera and microphone
128GB mini card solid state drive
wifi / bluetooth
1x 8GB ram module (going to buy a matched pair of 8s to get 16GB myself than pay dell's extortionate fees for memory and put the spare module in another laptop)
backlit microbial keyboard

so far i've blown the factory image away on the drive and installed the work standard win7 enterprise image and setup a 2nd partition for a personal win7pro install using the COA key on the bottom of the machine.

things that have struck me so far. screen seems fine, but i can't help but notice you can see the grid layout of the pixels. it's like looking through superfine chicken wire. plus i would like to agree on the viewing angle. horizonal it seems fine, but vertical is a bit tighter on the angle.
The screen seems 'over bright' in an attempt to compensate, colours seem a little washed out but i'm still playing and i was out for a drink or two last night, so the eyes and head maybe a little over sensative to light at the moment.

performance seems fine so far. i've been impressed with the wifes i5 powered E6220, so don't see any problems there. will wait till i've installed some games to see how it really performs.

i do have one annoyance.
if you order the machine (as i did) with the minicard solid state drive. The drive itself comes in a hard drive caddy that plugs in the hard disk slot.
great. so it works. but, it negates the whole point of a minicard drive in the first place. - being mounted directly on the board and leaving the hard disk bay free.
the minicard standard should support both PCIe and SATA on a single slot.
there are three minicard slots in the laptop, two half slots, one occupied by the Wifi card, and i guess, the other half slot would be occupied by the broadband card.
this leaves the third, a full length minicard slot, which is the right size for the minicard drive. it even has the screw holes in the right place.

Dell support don't seem to know what a minicard drive is, or what the minicard slots are for.

i don't know what irritates me more. the fact that i've paid for something that i asked for and ... to be honest got, but not in the way i expected, or that Dell are actually conforming to industry standards at the hardware level, but not implementing them at the software level? or that Dell support didn't seem to know or want to understand what i was talking about. "if it came in the hard disk bay, that is where it goes." which, again, annoyingly, i can see their point.

anyway, had i known all this, i would have ordered it with a much bigger SSD, instead i have pair of microscopic 55GB partitions for the two win7 installs.

anyway, in the coming week or so, i'll be compairing it to my aging Asus G1
Core2Duo 2Ghz
Nvidia Go7700 graphics
4GB ram (2.87GB usable - damn 32bit bios)
500GB momentus drive
1680x1050 glossy screen (very nice)

i'll be adding comments on things i feel worth mentioning over time