E6540 Owners Thread

Most of the HP laptops went to fan on profiles because any of them with the Nvidia card were being cooked and killing the boards. Dell has had some issues with that as well, but no where near as bad as HP.

 

My thoughts exactly.. Plus, the release notes don't me too anything about adjust fan tables or profiles. I imagine if they were really addressing cooling concerns with it they'd mention it.. I'll try it just to verify that my results are unaltered though

We got some people looking though, this thread gain 5-600 views since last night

 

I've just done the A07 update myself, no changes.

I highly doubt Dell will do something to fix this in terms of hardware, I don't think they will bring out a new HSF revision or a new base with proper ventilation. An upgrade to a M4800 would probably be out of the question altogether.

Given that this is now the 5th generation of E series Latitudes I am going to guess that this generation was designed to reuse as much of the 4th generation and 3rd generation design as much as possible (if you compare the E6520 and E6540 the overall layout is basically the same) in order to save development efforts for the 'F' series of Latitudes that will be released this year.

 

Here's my reasoning. If I can't use this machine to the advertised specification performance, then Dell is guilty of false advertisement. They should have included a clause at the bottom of the specification page that said "Due to thermal limitations, the processor will only perform at about 1.7Ghz and the AMD GPU can't be used for anything intensive, so you might as well keep it turned off."

 

Good point. If you've contacted Dell before and have a case number use this to get it escalated quickly:

https://support.dell.com/support/to...anding_issues?c=us&l=en&s=gen&DoNotRedirect=y

If everyone tried this with their case it might accelerate the issue.

 

They didn't really do much for the overheating XPS users right away either, but in the end I think a good amount of them were able to do a system swap for the new model. We just have to show that there is an ongoing issue now in order to be taken seriously when we want them to replace/swap our machines down the line.

@DellCares wants me to clean my vents and run some diagnostic on the MyDell program they're having me download. I'll keep you guys updated. Be sure to tweet them or re-tweet my tweets! Forward this thread (starting around my big post) along if you have contact info for any of the higher ups at Dell.

 

[email protected]
[email protected]

[email protected] (COO)

[email protected] (Chief Marketing Officer)

Anyone else from Dell? Send one email CC'ed to senior people, it's highly likely you'll get a response.

 

I emailed a US Team Lead I was in contact with previously, hoping to hear from him Monday/Tuesday. I'm not going to share his email address unless he says it's ok.

@DellCares got back to me and requested that I message them my Service Tag. I messaged them a bit of info so we'll see what they say. Hopefully they'll actually read this thread because it sounds so far like they've ignored it even though I've pointed them to it at least twice. Anyone affected should tweet them and reference this thread.. Squeaky wheel gets the grease.

 

They've responded to me and wanted my service tag. They also wanted me to update to A07 (which I told them I've been running since it was released last week). I really hope we are taken good care of. When I get to the point where I start making phone calls or send emails, I'm going to stress that I was previously a 15+ year Apple customer and this was my first PC in a very long time! I was encouraged by a friend (who loves his E6530s) to try out the Dell business line. My experience has me questioning my decision to jump off the Apple bandwagon

 

Who knows, you might get a more Appley experience if they offer to swap you to an XPS 15 or M3800. Similar specs and design to MBP... That could be down the line though, I'm open to whatever tests they want me to perform.