E6540 Owners Thread

I am surprised how poorly the laptop performs with a 90W adapter. I loaned my 130W adapter to a coworker for a few days while on a road trip, and used a Dell 90W for a few days. The CPU cores were all locked at 799MHz. Web browsing was painful, pages loaded like I was on a modem even though I was connected to a 20Mbps connection. Outlook was slow. Adobe Illustrator pretty much unusable.

Once I got back home and plugged in the 130W adapter, the laptop is back to blazing fast again... I

 

In that scenario, I'd try and work off battery as much as possible, and only connect the charger when not using the computer. I realize that's not always possible, but it will help avoid the painfully slow behavior you're talking about.

 

One of the bios updates changed the throttling the machine does when on the lower wattage adapters - same thing they did with the M4800.

 

hi,

ordered a e6540 laptop for my studies with an i5 4200m and a 8790m because i like to play games (when i found the time ....) . Never saw any topic about overheating problem or heavy throtling and now i'm waiting for mine to arrives.... You got me worried about my future laptop :/

are the problems that big ? i mean can it be used for daily usage like movies and web browsing without major problem ? can it run some games without major throtling ? is the problem specific to the i7 ?

i'm starting consider the idea of asking for full refund .... paid mine 1100€ as a student price with full HD, completeCare 3yrs insurance, fullHD and big battery. I can't find any other laptop with this specs at this price.

 

Answering/observing in order:
[1] i5-4200M is 37W, i7-4800MQ was 47W, so you're just a little cooler, but not tons of difference.
[2] Movies and web should be no problem, the AMD graphics won't even be enabled when doing that.
[3] Games, that's hard to say. Your best chance to test this is to find some sort of 3D benchmark like Unigine Heaven, and see if it can be run in a loop. Set it up, run it, and take note of the performance. Come back in 30 minutes and see if the performance is lots lower. It probably will be. After an hour to an hour and a half, you'll probably be watching a slideshow, if the problems I had are not just an insolated incident. Unfortunately the thing that's most likely to show the problems (gaming, which uses the CPU and GPU both), is the thing that causes the machine to overheat and fail, and it's also the big seller that gets people to buy this model instead of something better.
[4] No, not specific to the i7. The underlying problem is that the dedicated graphics chip (8790M) and CPU both have heatpipes running to one fairly small heatsink. The fan will run up to high speed, to blow as much air across the heatsink as it can, but the heatsink just isn't capable of getting rid of more than a specific amount of heat. Once you pass that amount, the machine *will* get hotter and hotter until things start to either slow down, overheat, or both. I was able to run light games on my E6540 without too much trouble, just a loud fan, but heavy games would make the machine grind to a crawl after a while.

Worst case, you should have 30 days of 'no questions asked' return period, and Dell just might swat you with something nicer if you're polite but angry. I got lucky and got a M4800, which performs much better, mostly because it has two heatsinks and two fans, which are all larger than the ones the E6540 tries to get by with.

 

Hello all,

I just ordered a E6540 refurbished machine and am curious of a couple of items:

On the order details it says it has the:

X6HD6 Module,Keyboard,104,United States,England/English,ENDB3,E5 Is this the backlit keyboard ?

9FD2C Module,Assembly,Base,Discrete Video,T,N-EC,E6540 Is this the AMD Radeon HD 8790M Graphics 2GB GDDR5 card

I thought they were both on the refurbished listing but it is mighty hard to figure out the dell order codes.

Thanks all

 

Hello.

I have a massive problem with my E6540.
I have an Intel mSATA SSD drive with win8.1 pro installed. When I am trying to boot system I am getting an error "no bootable partition found".
The strangest thing is that sometimes it is booting normally.
Intel drive is locked with prebuild locker. HDD drive is locked by bitlocker.

Things I have tried to repair this:
- bios updated
- win 8.1 reinstall
- secure boot turned off
- checked with smartmontools both drives - both are ok

I have no idea what more can I do to make this laptop work normally. :/

 

Hi guys,

I'm thinking about buy e7440 or e6440. but e6540 looks nice to (specially FHD matrix), but I read somewhere about poor matrix with weak colors in e6xxx series. Is it true?

 

If someone interested I successfully installed LP156WF4(SL)(B1) AH-IPS FullHD lcd to my notebook.
Because I had HD+ display by default I also had to upgrade LCD cable to dual channel but it was only ~12 USD from the distributor without VAT.
Screen cost 53 GBP with shipping. New LG Philips LP156WF4(SL)(B3)
Unfortunately they sent me SL-B1 instead of SL-B3 (what is in the listing).
Based on the datasheet the latter has higher brightness (300 instead of 250 cd/m2).
By the way it is bright enough, picture is awesome, absolutely worth this money and I'll try to sell removed parts.
Regards

 

Something is not right here. The panel you link and the stats from LG don't match. LG mentions their panel being dual link eDP, but the E6540 only has LVDS connected.

Not sure if the eBay listing is wrong, the LG spec sheet is wrong, or what, but it makes me nervous about putting down money.