Latitude 6430u owners thread

I have one of these devices incoming from my work - unfortunately the size of the SSD is going to be an issue for me. Can anyone tell me if the 5 in 1 card reader can take the high capacity SDXC cards - I cannot find a straight answer on this anywhere, including the Dell online manuals.

 

gman5608 - Yes the SD reader is works fine with a Sandisk 64G SDXC card that I had lying around.

- Tim

 

Excellent!

Cheers for the response Tim - thats made my day (I'm easily pleased I know)

 

Anyone having trouble where the "System" process consumes 25% of the CPU for long periods of time? I'm NOT talking about "system idle process" here, but the process named "System".

 

No problems with system process on mine. All running smoothly, on the original Dell factory image. Although I did remove wireless dock and a few other bits and bobs I don't use.

Another observation regarding the noisy fan - if you lift the rear of the laptop off your desk by about 1cm, the noise level almost halves. It looks like the exhaust is too close to the surface which makes the noise louder.

 

Do you know if your laptop is in AHCI or RAID mode? From the factory mine came in RAID mode and I switched it to AHCI for proper TRIM support. I'm wondering if that is part of the problem.

 

Normally and historically (recent history at least) AHCI has always performed better on laptops with SSDs. However, the new IRST (RAID) from Intel (circa last 12 months) actually performs better in RAID mode. The first thing I did with mine was switched to AHCI and then ran Crystal Disk Mark. The 4k read speeds were a paltry 11MB/sec. I switched back to RAID and re-ran the tests and it's now on a much better 17MB/sec. Note, it's the 4k read speeds which make the real-world difference. The large sequential read/writes only make any difference if you're copying large files from a to b. For application launch times, code compiling speeds etc it's the 4k read/writes that give you the extra ooomph over a standard hard drive. My suggestion, switch back to RAID.

 

Hi All.

I'm considering buying the 6430u with I5 CPU and Win 7 but am concerned about the fan issue. Has anybody been able to resolve this? Is there anyway of controlling it using something like Speedfan?

I haven't taken the plunge yet but will do as soon as the right model comes up on the UK Outlet, so any update would be appreciated.

 

I don't think it's really an issue with the i5's because they run much cooler than the i7's so the fan doesn't need to run as much or at such a high speed. An i5 owner maybe able to confirm.

 

Thanks CowboyCoder

By the way, how do you like the XPS 14? That what also on my shortlist but I thought the 6430u would suit better as this is for business use and VGA is an advantage.