E6540 Owners Thread

Tried using the TurboBoostMonitor. Alternates between these two states only...

 

Sorry I thought I answered this earlier, but forgot. Yeah I bought one of the knockoffs and it needed a little "convincing" to fit in the slot, but it has a pretty decent fit right now. I did take the CD tray face off the CD tray and put it on the HD tray.

 

Try Intel XTU instead of turbo boost monitor, you can get a graph of the clock speed, how many cores are used, temps etc. I've stopped using the TB monitor with the first gen core i7, not that good actually.

 

Tried an assortment of CPU monitoring software, and they all show the CPU static at 2.3Ghz when SpeedStep is enabled and power plugged in, even with heavy loads. Disabling SpeedStep just locks the processor at 2.7Ghz.

 

That's weird... I have no problem going around 3.3 - 3.5 ghz without changing anything in the bios (so SpeedStep enabled). Have you installed Dell Power Manager ? It comes with new power settings, like the "Ultra Performance" who puts my CPU at 3.5ghz even when idle.

However as soon as I use the ATI card... in 5 minutes, my proc goes down to 0.8ghz and the computer becomes *very* slow. Right now I'm in korea so I can't do much about it, but in a few months I'll be back and won't stop calling Dell until they fix that overheating problem.

 

Turnbull might have poor heatsink contact with his CPU or clogged vents.

 

Eeek, that was it! I've downloaded and installed, and now have full control of the CPU.

Seems gaming with the CPU at 2.7Ghz or above is not really feasible with this chasis due to overheating, but seems to cope ok when when rendering in Revit and the GPU is only lightly utilised. With the latter, CPU temp floats around 88-90c.

 

This is really strange.
On the official dell.fr page for France, there is 0 customisations possible.
BUT
I ordered the e6540 the 18/09 on a webpage for students (it's also Dell page, no reseller), and there are many options, like resolution, RAM, HDD, wifi, battery, keyboards (even with backlight).
And the m4800 is even more customisable (processors, graphic card, ... ).
See it for your self: www.portable-etudiant.com/ => login PORTABLE => the yellow button => Acceder a nos offres.

Maybe just give it some time, once these preconfigured machines will be sold, the next wave will be customizable.

 

For my overhating problems, it seems that the processor isn't the culprit, since I can run it at 3.5ghz and 100% load a long time, but as soon as the GPU goes over 60-70% the problems start.
I've been trying to game with a reduced processor speed, I've found that I don't need more than 1.5 - 1.7 ghz for games, since the GPU is the bottleneck anyway. It helps delay the problem, but just a bit...

Is there any way to control the ATI card ? Like underclockings or setting a max load.

This laptop is awesome for work and daily stuff (a hundred internet tabs, multiple VM's, lots of background process...) but it feels bad that my roomate with his 500 euros laptop can run games better than me.

 

How is the Full HD Display on it, viewig angles and colors (blacks and whites)? (Somebody asked at the beginning of thread, but nobody answered him) Thanks.