Latitude 15 3000 - Gaming system for $780? Too good to be true?

TrueG, I didn't know what keyboard flex was, so I had to look it up. If I'm understanding it correctly, and if I'm performing the correct tests, then I don't really notice any kind of keyboard flex at all. The keyboard and the underlying flatboard all seem pretty rigid.

I've tried to witness what keyboard flex was using other business class notebooks as well. A 17 Inch Dell Vostro, a smaller 14 inch Dell Vostro, and very small 12 inch HP Elitebook. Out of all of em, the only resemblence of keyboard flex would be the larger 17 inch Vostro, but only because it has a backlight keyboard. The J key would move a fraction of a millimeter off if I close one eye and stare from about a few centimeters away from the key. Kinda leads me to believe that if you type normally without punching the keyboards down, then you're probably not going to notice any flex.

With that being said, the Latitude 3540's keyboard (and case, and screen as well) feels more rigid than a 17 inch Vostro. There is no reason for me to believe that anyone with a reasonable or gentle key stroke would notice keyboard flex on the Latitude 3540




Other thoughts:

- The lappy will idle at 37 degrees C during the daytime. Will idle much lower at night.
- Dell Support's own AMD drivers are over a year old. It's best to use AMD's latest drivers. They're much faster. 3DMark06 showed a 4K point difference between the old drivers and the latest drivers.
- Once ran the battery down to 38% after 4 hours and some odd minutes when streaming and also running/sharing 2 Wifi signals. I think it'll reach 6 hours easily. It will likely reach 7or 8 hours if you turn off the internet and turn the screen brightness down.
- The lone USB port on the right is USB 2.0. The 3 USB ports on the left side are all USB 3.0. USB 3.0 speeds when transferring 27 gigabytes of music will yield a constant of 14 megabytes/second.
- Booted up the latest Tomb Raider game and it'll run perfectly on high settings with 4xAA on 1080p. Same with Resident Evil: Revelations.
- Using Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, you can restrict how much of a turbo boost you want the CPU to use. With the Latitude 3540, keeping the wattage under 9 Watts is enough to keep it from turbo boosting too much. I find it useful for playing games so that the cpu doesn't throttle itself down to base frequencies. It keeps the turbo boost on constantly without the throttling.
- The included 1 year Subscription of McAfee Antivirus has a nice firewall software BUT, the notifications totally ruin it. Notifications will pop up even if you tell both Windows AND McAfee to stop sending notifications. So it's pretty much best to uninstall the whole thing and then use a different firewall.
- The Dell-branded WiFi hardware is nice. It'll pick up a signal from 2 houses away. The software is also unobtrusive. When using a 3rd party software to set up its own self-contained Wifi router on the laptop itself, the hardware will play nice. It'll connect to the base router from which the internet is received, and then share its internet with its own Wifi router for other hardware to connect to (and share the internet with!). It works better than Intel's own Intel MyWifi technology for sharing Wifi signals. In fact, it's so much better than Intel MyWifi that even if you put the laptop to sleep and wake it up, its own Wifi signal will resume and function without a hitch. Intel's MyWifi technology will crash and stop working after wakeup.




Some caution:

- Don't shut off the computer while installing software. I made that mistake after I had stopped an installation after it was asking the firewall for permission to access the internet. I didn't let it cuz I thought it was BS that it would need to access the internet. So the setup was stuck without any means to cancel it, and I shut the system off. Then Windows wouldn't boot in normal mode. After booting in safe mode, I was able to use Windows Recovery to roll back to an earlier point, and then all was well.
- With the default 78-81 processes working in the background, the system uses 40% of the allotted 4 gigabytes RAM. With games, this reaches 60 to 75% of system resources. If you purchase this laptop, you might want to upgrade the RAM.

 

Are you able to lock the speed at the max turbo and if so, what temp does it get to?

You might need to turn off Speedstep.

 

Short answer - yes. By setting the cpu's thermal envelope, you are able to indirectly control how the cpu runs in turbo mode.

However, so far I've only ran 1 test using a 100% CPU stress test. For this test, the cpu was set at 13watts. This resulted in a constant 2.3ghz frequency. The mean temperatures were between 58 and 60 degrees C. There was one blip at 62 degrees C that lasted only for 1 second. This does not include any graphic load. (See the attachment to view the details and the graph)

I shall try to run more tests later, including a higher thermal envelope (and higher cpu frequencies) as well as a real-world gaming test. Probably Mass Effect 3. Until then.

 

That's awesome, thank you.

That's a pretty low temp for running in turbo (albeit, not at maximum).

It would be cool if the CPU could run in dual-core mode at 2.3 GHz constantly while gaming with the GPU also in Turbo.

I was also considering the Dell Latitude E6540, but there are a bunch of reports of the CPU getting up to 90 degrees and then throttling down to under 1 Ghz. The Radeon HD 8790m in that model also gets very hot and throttles as well.

Edit: Oh, I guess 2.3 GHz is the max for 2 cores. 2.6GHz is the max for a single core.

 

Yep, 2.3ghz sure does seem like the maximum frequency for gaming use. Completed another test using Mass Effect 3. The cpu was able to run constantly at 2.3ghz during gameplay for bout 30 minutes or so. Temperatures stayed between 70 an 73 degrees C. This is a lot higher than 58 degrees C probably because the GPU was also running at the same time. There was one problem though. When the game autosaved, I noticed that the CPU usage spiked up to 84% and then the CPU clocked itself down to 1.6ghz. After that, I continued the game for 15 or so minutes, but the clock stayed at 1.6ghz. I wonder why it didn't clock itself up even though cpu usage remained below 55%...

Perhaps I need to increase the thermal envelope above 13watts in order for the CPU to clock itself back up after the game saves. Will try again at 15watts on another day.

 

The Acer Aspire V5 573G running the same CPU got up to 90 degrees C running Prime95 and Furmark. At the same time the NVidia GT750M got up to 89. The CPU ran at 2.2 while the GPU remained in Turbo mode.

The Acer uses a dual fan cooling solution. It would be interesting to see how the 3540 handles the same test.

Review Acer Aspire V5-573G-54208G50aii Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

 

So far while running both FurMark and Prime95, the temperatures are reaching a maximum of 74 degrees C on the CPU and 71 degrees C on the GPU. I've caught the cpu throttling down in the middle of a half-hour test for a minute, and then it clocks itself back up. So I'm trying to find which parameters on the CPU-wattage would allow a sustainable turbo mode when running both GPU and CPU at 100%.

 

That's awesome.

Plus I realized that since this unit has a removable optical drive, it's a piece of cake to swap it for a hard drive caddy and have two drives. Unlike the Inspiron 15 7000 (which I was also considering), which has just a single hard drive with no optical and no mSATA.

 

Alright. Here ye go. CPU Wattage set to 19watts. Ran both FurMark and Prime95 for over a half hour at the same time. CPU temperatures liked to stay around 68 to 69 degrees C, but hit 71 degrees a couple of times. CPU Frequencies never dropped below 2.29ghz.

Unfortunately, the stated GPU temperatures of the last post is incorrect - that seems to be the temperature of the integrated GPU. However, FurMark does recognize the HD Radeon 8800m Series as the GPU during the OpenGL Burn-In test. So I'm confident that the 8850m was performing all of the graphical load. Otherwise, I'm unable to find any temperature readings on the 8850m - all of the apps I've tested aren't able to read the new GPU's temperature at all. Perhaps this is due to the Catalyst drivers being the newest and latest (beta).

And one last note - the system fan had a mind of its own. It went near-silent a couple of times and then sped up like a jack-rabbit once the CPU temperatures went up again. You can probably see how the system fan was used by looking at the CPU graph.


EDIT: Just read your last post. Wow, I didn't know that the optical drive was removable. Would be nice to install an SSD drive there. I'm also curious to see what the battery life will be like if the optical drive is removed.

 

Here is an example of a place selling them...
Dell Latitude 3540 HDD Caddy

I was thinking of installing a SSD in the main bay and move the mechanical drive to the optical bay. Depending on the connector used for the optical drive, it may also be possible to buy a USB adapter so that it can still be used on the rare occasion that it is required.

Hmm, it's possible that Furmark recognizes the GPU, but I don't think it is using it. Your screenshot shows a GPU frequency of 998 MHz, which is the max frequency of the integrated Intel 4400 GPU. I would think that it should either be off or at the base frequency of 200 MHz. At 1GHz, it's working at full speed. The 8850m should be operating between 575 to 725 MHz.

TrueG