E6540 Owners Thread

I just bought a 6530 refurb and my rep was able to tell it had the lighted keyboard. You could try calling the outlet and asking a rep to check for you. On the invoice mine says

"DCC54 Module,Keyboard,104,United States,English,B,E-Series Number Pad Dual Point Backlit,W8", but being a 6540, your part number might be different.

 

I wasn'tsure that I'd be able to as I placed the order through a friend.. Sales rep confirmed that it has blkb. +rep

 

laptop arrived today... Loving it! Everything is a huge upgrade over my Inspiron, just not used to the temps.. I know some of you guys mentioned the temps already, but dang.. I'll have to see if I can figure out a way to drop them at all.

 

I recently purchased a new e6540 from Dell and was disappointed to see that many of the drivers and the BIOS are out of date. Also, the Analyze System for Updates tool at Dell's website fails to complete the analysis. Anyways, I have updated my drivers but cannot seem to get the BIOS updated. I tried going to the current BIOS (version A05) and the previous version (A02 from June). I also tried installing these from Windows and a bootable DOS USB drive. In all cases, it appears to run and provides no error messages but the BIOS version is still A01. Any advice?

 

I have attached a video that basically walks through the issue... I can't use screen recording software because that doesn't capture the issue. Let me repeat, SCREEN CAPTURE software does not record this issue. Nor do screenshots! Therefore, something is happening to the picture outside of the GPU/CPU. Furthermore, my external monitor on my port replicator DOES NOT result in the these symptoms. So the problem lies with the LCD panel.

Here is a description:

When any hard edge, horizontal or vertical, is moved in perpendicular to their planes (horizontal edge moved up and down, and vertical edge moved left and right), a bizarre pixel distortion is observed.

Any ideas what I should do?

I am already running the latest drivers, bios, windows updates, etc. It isn't a software issue.

 

I watched the video and see the same behavior. Before watching I had not noticed it. For me no big deal.

 

Get that too.

 

I'm not going to watch it cause i dont want to know it

BTW mine is heating like hell when playing games (Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite), but there is no problem with throttling (cpu or graphic card), even after 3h of nonstop gaming.

I love this computer.

Only problem I have is with the screen (but not the same as said before). On every movement, there is a slight color distortion where the screen is screwed to the frame. It is most remarkable 5cm under the top left corner.

 

I'm getting rather put off from buying this machine at the moment, are the display and heat issues this bad?

Anyone tried a repaste yet?

 

Repasting is very simple on this machine. Just take off the backcover (3 screws) and then you'll see the heatsink/fan assembly. Remove the 7 heatsink screws and disconnect fan connector and lift off assembly. Mine had so much thermal paste that it completely covered the little components just above the die



I cleaned it off using ArctiClean and a fine soft plastic toothpick. I then applied AS5 and my max temps after running Prime95 are about 87-89C. These are pre-burn in times. Before, I was looking at a max temp around 95-97C with stock thermal paste.