E6520 Owner's Thread

Just wanted to report that I decided to purchase one of these puppies (i7-2720QM, 1920 x 1080 display, backlit keyboard, 256 Gig SSD, 64-bit Windows 7 Professional, fingerprint reader) refurbished on eBay and everything has worked out really wonderful.

Did the prescribed 'wipe and re-install' routine, and dealt with all of the drivers in the order that was listed then proceeded to add Ubuntu 11.04 for a dual-boot configuration. (thanks to all of those who took the time to post their tips for all of the invaluable information)

Installed a second SSD in the removable bay with the newmodeus caddy and added a docking station and stand I found very cheap on eBay.

This machine now screams through most tasks, and haven't encountered any issues using most of the peripheral ports, including connecting the Firewire IE1394 port to a multichannel audio interface, no glitches or any weirdness. So far, very pleased with it overall.

Just posted this in hopes that prospective buyers can find the positive reports rather than just about the problems I am sorry to read certain peeps are having with their own machines.

On a side note, I was also extremely impressed with 'Unity', the slick new windows manager on Ubuntu 11.04, and this is the first time that just about everything was recognized out of the box, very smooth and pleasant experience there as well.

I'd easily give this machine a 8.75 out of 10, maybe higher.

 

Hey all,

I'm about to receive a E6520 for work, where I have to have various work products installed on the computer. Anyway, I'm wondering if it is worth replacing the NVS 4200 drivers with 520 drivers for...away from the office gaming? Is it more pain than it is worth and can you simply overclock with the NVS 4200 drivers up to the recommended on the Nvidia spec sheet? Thanks!

 

I wouldn't do anything with the 4200 driver as I have found the stock setup to work fine with most "common" office games with Optimus kicking in when needed. Windows 7 64bit gives the stock card a 6.4 on the WEI, which shows it will handle most main stream applications. Test it first and see for yourself. You may be suprised how solid the GPU is.

Back to Angry Birds Rio-
Scott

 

Sounds good. I will give it a test run when it arrives. I'm only looking to play MMO type games. Rift, upcoming SWTOR...I will probably start with Rift and see how it runs though. Someone said they were running WoW on a 520, which this card is based on without any issues, so it should be good.

I ordered it through work and didn't think too much of it at the time, but just got the 720p display. In hindsight and after reading, I should have upgraded it, but oh well, it is mainly a work machine as I still have my desktop at home.

 

Found some great things!

E6520 with 2720qm can support ddr3-1866 memory. I modified my samsung memory (4G*2 @ 1333MHz cl=9) to 1866MHz cl=11 with thaiphoon burner. Cpu-z shows the memory running at 1866MHz.


And winsat gives higher score than ddr3-1600 memory (about 20000MB/s for ddr3-1600).


Of course, WEI memory score reaches 7.9 (7.8 for ddr3-1600 and 7.6 for ddr3-1333).

 

I'd be curious as well - I've been trying to get speedfan to work - (see my thread here: Speedfan control but it doesn't. I've also tried to access the thermal control panel following dtdione's suggestions (see aforementioned link), but that doesn't work for the E6x20 series...

I'd love to get speedfan to work as I don't like the thermal profile that Dell put in - I don't mind the fan running and keeping things a little cooler, but at this point I don't seem to have any control over it.

 

Hey all, tried scrolling back through the pages, and even did searches for "SSD" but I can't seem to determine if anyone has successfully been able to boot from that internal flash-SATA port near the wireless port.

The hope was to put a 32GB or so SSD in there and use that as the boot drive with the normal SATA hard drive as secondary.

Just wanted to see if anyone had any success - I know people were trying, but have been out of the loop for a few months...

R

 

Nice! Now you make me feel like putting my memory at risk and flashing it to 1866 when it arrives (I bought 8GB of 1600mhz gskill)

Out of curiosity have you tried CAS 10 or 2000mhz? Should be fairly safe to try if you flash 1 stick at a time and test the sticks individually. If it doesn't work then you just plug the other stick in to force the slower speed. Please don't blame me if you kill your memory if you try this!

I'd love to run at 2000mhz, but that probably has a pretty high failure risk and the benefits are tiny.

 

2000mHZ is not JEDEC standard, but 2133 is. I have seen someone reports that sandy bridge mobile cpu can use memory run at 2133MHz, but there is no obvious improvement compared to 1866. I do not want to try frequency higher than 1866, because I already got 7.9 for WEI memory score .

 

1600MHz is the default frequency of 2720qm integrated memory controller (IMC), but IMC can be automatically overclocked when using 1866 or 2133 memory.