E6520 Owner's Thread

I have the i7 2620m.

 

I have since reverted back to the AO5 bios and the turboboost multipliers are working again. Processor sits at 800 mhz idle and ramps to 3.2 ghz under load. If anyone else upgrades to the AO6, check to see if your Turboboost is working.

 

Mine is 2720qm, after upgrading A06. Turbo boost does not work, I reverted to A05 again.

 

I think this laptop is going to have to go back.. I got a new E6520 with the nVidia NVS4100 gfx, instead of the integrated intel HD 3000.

Anyway, under device manager both the intel and Nvidia are showing. There's no option in the BIOS to disable the onboard intel, and making matters worse, the intel integrated is still sapping all the memory resources, as it does, being integrated.

Also I have a vanilla E6520 with only the Intel HD 3000 onboard, and an E6520 with a nVidia NVS, and the WEI scores are practically the same. 5.8 & 6.3, apart from the memory which is much lower on the nVidia NVS machine, since its resources are being used for the onboard that isn't needed.

Can anyone tell me what's going on with Dell at the moment ?

 

Uncheck enable optimus to disable the integrated card.
As for wei, it isn't able to show the score of two cards, and gives you info on only the integrated.... So don't worry about that. Run a gpu bench mark if you care to know the actual numbers.

 

Thanks, do you know why they'd have this on by default? It just seems to confuse the laptop, with having both running ? Am I missing something here?

 

With Optimus turned off the Desktop Performance drops significantly, but increases memory resources significantly. With it on, the gfx operations seem a mismash of what's running what. Being able to select what hardware runs what?

Can't say I'm impressed with this laptop thus far.

 

you're definitely missing something, mate. the whole point is to use the integrated card (which takes significantly less power) for non-GPU intensive tasks, and only to engage the power-hungry nvidia card when necessary.

it works really well, actually...

 

Perhaps I need to familiar myself more then. So what's better for say something like media player or VLC ? Would you be better to leave that on the nVidia or Intel ? Would those media players, fall under under the graphics or gaming graphics banner?

 

If you're getting hardware acceleration for decoding (ex: CoreAVC using CUDA), you'll see a slight decrease in CPU use, though having a 2nd Gen i7 quad core probably makes that difference moot anyway since most stuff can't even saturate this thing anyway. Otherwise, Intel works just fine and saves batteries. In the short time that I was running with Optimus disabled and without the proper drivers loaded, battery runtime was noticeably reduced (though it could be that the power saving functions couldn't turn out without them).

Don't really count on the Quadro to do much gaming. It's not really intended for that. I recently installed Mass Effect just for kicks and I need to run at 640x480 with all the settings off to get some measure of fluidity (still playable at higher res, just not to my taste and not for an fps).