E6540 Owners Thread

This has been an example of an E6500.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-latitude-vostro-precision/365879-quiet-cool-thermal-paste-replaced-38-idle-73-load-2.html#post4677828

 

E6500 most likely works though. My E6540 has been through 5 heatsinks and still idles at over 70c at times.

Still no luck about moving to the precision line - both people I spoke with said that should have never happened for Forge as they can only stay within the same line they were purchased from.

 

Hi I came upon this thread. I flashed my BIOS with A08 and then experienced a problem with wireless - it kept dropping. After trying a few things and failing, I finally tried to flash the A02 again to see whether the wireless issue will go away. Since then the laptop wouldn't start up. It just show a black screen and the hard drive light keeps staying on (even after removing hard drive). Is there anybody that can help or do I need to send it to Dell ?

 

Hi All,

I recently purchased an outlet E6540. I've been using an old M4400 for day to day usage, but a desktop for heavy computation. I started noticing the benchmarks of the i7-48X0 and i7-49X0 getting pretty close to those of my desktop, so I picked up the E6540 to get back to using one machine for everything, even using the old docking station. It's got the i7-4800 and the 8790M video.

Unfortunately I missed the part on the NotebookCheck review about throttling.

My initial experience with the E6540 was pretty good, it has a lot of little advantages, the packaging a nice cross between my old Precision and a MacBook, it's still fairly easy to work on and expandable, the SD card reader finally runs full speed. The 16x9 FHD screen and white LED were disappointing but not deal breakers, and I failed to notice the expresscard was linked to getting a FP reader. Also the bay battery connector is unpopulated.

However when I started some intensive work, I noticed the heat. It's as hot as my old M4400 under full load. That's when realized the single fan just wouldn't cut it. It's the E6500 / M4400 throttling issues all over again. The good news is the newer i7s have many more steps so it's not all or nothing but still throttling.

I updated all the drivers and bios to the latest edition and decided to recreate NotebookCheck's stress test. Furmark to fully load the GPU and Prime95 to fully load the CPU, monitored by HWinfox64 and Intel's power gadget.



The results were shocking. The new drivers and bios were worse than the review. While running both Prime and Furmark I saw a momentary spike of 3.X GHz and then a steady decline over ~10min to 800 MHz, all the while the CPU temps are backing off. The GPU on the other hand was slowly stabilizing to ~88C after ~15min. At 15-20min the system became very slow to respond. At which point I stopped Furmark and waited for the CPU to throttle back up. This took another 10min during which time the fan decided to slow down before spinning back up. Finally the CPU stabilized at 3.2GHz.

So basically it means that the system cannot utilize the GPU to its full capability for more than 10min without slowing the CPU to an unuseable level, ugh. It's not as important to me, but most future gaming is totally out.

Not content to blame anyone yet or call this a design flaw yet, I decided to compare it to a benchmark. Maybe the odd results were just a consequence of stuffing a 47W CPU and videocard into a smallish machine. I borrowed an older MacBook retina with a discrete GPU, and repeated the test. Same prime95 and furmark, but monitored only with intel power gadget as it was running OSx. The results were a world different.



Wonderfully stable frequencies and temps, the fan even backed off when only running prime95. The case remained cool. Even the FPS was higher. Just a beautiful test. If only the Mac were upgradeable.

The stability of the MacBook shows me that a solution should be possible. It seems like the Mac responds more like it has a cooling model running in the bios, using intake temps and processor wattages to determine the right fan and clock speeds instantly. The Dell on the other hand seems to be simply responding to temps and times, like it has a simple table of temps and fan speeds and if the temp is exceeded, just back off the clock. The M2800 gives me some hope that Dell will solve this, I can't imagine them tarnishing the Precision brand.

So now I am left with a dilemma, do I wait for Dell to release a better bios? Have them re-paste my heatsinks? Hope Dell releases a revised / faster fan in the run up to the M2800? The one advantage the E6540 has over the old M4400/E6500, is the integrated Intel graphics, while it's not upto the levels I would like, it offers the option of completely disabling the AMD card. This would leave me with a solid data machine.

I am also still within the return window. The price was a great deal but will it be years of headaches? I'd love to see the results of this stress test on an M4800 or even an M4700, really any 45-47W i7 notebook with two fans.

Thanks for your time.

 

I ran the same stuff with the M4800 and temps never passed 80c. Unless you got a killer deal I'd say return it. You won't get anywhere with Dell. I have had 4 system replacements, 5 different heatsinks, two motherboards and two cpu swaps with no change. No bios is going to fix this issue and I highly doubt they will redesign a heatsink. My only hope is they release the next model and I can request an upgrade to that since it would be within the same latitude line, which is all they will replace for (except it seems in the rare case for Forge).

 

Just a little FYI - it was the bios updates that killed the screen turning off when the lid is closed and "do nothing" is selected. My latest machine has A05 and it worked fine, updated it to the latest version and it stopped. Downgraded back and it works. Pretty crappy!

 

Can anyone help me out on this, I need to have the emails of senior Dell executives that are monitored. I want to see if this helps my case to progress if I send them an email.

I remember posting some a while back but it seems that they do not work.

 

IMHO I think it was a bad move to flash the earliest BIOS you could find, A07 probably would have sufficed. It's likely your E6540 is bricked unless you want to try to flash A07 via a flash drive.

 

A07 was pulled shortly after release and A08 was the corrected version.

 

I have a M4800 now, and I can run Furmark and Prime95, together, at Turbo Boosted speeds, indefinitely. My temps never go past 85C, and I haven't gone all the way down to 2.7GHz base speed, much less any throttling, even after multiple hours at that load.

The M4800 is a solid machine, as long as you stay away from the admittedly-sexy QHD screen. The E6540 is a buggy, badly designed mess, and I have a feeling the upcoming M2800 is going to be a monumental flop.

The issue underlying all the E6540/M2800's problems is the single tiny heatsink. No amount of bios modification or more aggressive fan speed profiles is going to address the heatsink just plain being TOO SMALL to move as many watts as the E6540 tries to.

The CPU/GPU/heatsink all run within a few degrees of each other, in my testing, so it wasn't a problem getting the heat off the chips and into the heatsink (which repasting might help). The problem was getting the heat off of the heatsink, and only two things come into play in that sitation, those being airflow and surface area. The E6540 has plenty of airflow, mine would get very loud and have a pretty serious amount of hot air shooting out of the side after it spent some time throttling. The problem is surface area. The E6530 had the same fan, similar CPU wattages, and a lower wattage GPU, but a larger heatsink surface. Never had a problem with the fan needing to run hard in my E6530.