E6540 Owners Thread

I want to order this laptop for work, but also it would be really nice if it's suitable for some gaming. Looks like the 8790M is a newer graphics card on the market, so there are not a lot of reviews about it. It would be a nice gaming card as far as Google tells me. I own a MSI gaming laptop with a nVidia 670M card, Could the 8790M match with it?

Also, this laptop is only shipped with Windows 7, but I use Windows 8.1, as I can download it via the MSDN subscription. So if it could not be shipped with 8.1, I wan't to install it myself. Can not really found anyting usefull about it, only there are some issues with installing the graphics drivers.

Does anyone know if 8.1 could be a problem? Or should it work without any problem? On systems I installed 8.1 on, I did not have any issues so far...

 

I have been using my E6540 since July with Windows 8 and since October 18th with 8.1 without issues. Most of the drivers on the Dell support site for the E6540 are also supported on Windows 8. So I guess it is more of a marketing thing not to ship the E6540 with Windows 8/8.1.

As for the graphics card 8790M, it is roughly comparable to an Nvidia 650m/750m. Benchmarks can be found in this E6540 review. The Dell Latitude 15 3000 series can be equipped with an AMD 8850M which should be more or less equal with the Nvidia 670m.

 

The quality of this panel is probably the worst I have ever experienced on a notebook. EVER.

It has refresh problems, fast motions and hard edges result in pixel tearing (see my post and video a few pages back). I'm thinking about just ordering a generic IPS panel and installing it myself.

 

Vbman, i am not sure what panel you have in that machine. Full HD panel or?
That problem is clearly visible and annoying, why don't you ask for new machine?

 

I have the 1920x1080 Full HD display. It was the only option at the time I purchased mine. A couple reasons why I haven't done anything about it 1) Others have reported similar symptoms 2) I don't have the time atm to arrange an on-site service.

 

vbman123, do let us know if you find a nice IPS or even quality TN panel that works with the E6540.

 

Just got a new E6540 with the i7-4800MQ. BIOS A05. With the computer sitting at idle (Dell factory installed image of Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit), I am seeing one core run at about 58% and another core running at about 86% usage. CPU temp is in 64C - 66C range. Fan seems to run more than it should. When I check task manager, I don't see any processes using that much CPU. The top 2 processes are System Interrupts (9-10%) and System (8-9%). Any ideas why there's two cores with such a high usage with computer sitting idle?

Edit: Disregard. Brought the machine home from the office, started it up and all cores are idle with near 0% CPU consumption. CPU temp approx 32 - 35 C.

 

I've just installed one of these...

New 9 5mm SATA 2nd HDD SSD Hard Drive Caddy for Dell Latitude E6540 UJ8B2 GU60N | eBay

But you do have to take the face-plate and ejector from your DVD drive and slot it onto the caddy.

 

Received the E6540 today, first thing I did was get rid of the Windows 7 installation and installed Windows 8.1.
I can download specific 8.1 drivers from the Dell website, but the AMD driver is not there. The AMD driver site is saying it has no switchable video driverssupport for certain notebooks.
Which driver can I use for this to make this work?

/edit
Download the AMD graphic drives from the Dell website. There was not really a Windows 8 driver, so I downloaded the Windows 7 driver. After installing the screen began to flicker, and all I could do is use system restore to go back to previous settings...
Do I need a special driver for this?

/edit2
With this link I managed to download "modded" drivers, which seems by now they are working! http://leekms.blogspot.nl

 

I have the e6540 for a while now and it's nice in a way although I wouldn't recommend running Ubuntu or any other Linux on it due to AMD driver issues.

Anyway, does anyone know what the max. supported resolution on an external monitor is? is it able to drive resolutions above 1920x1200 so I can buy a nice 27" panel?