M4700 Owners Thread

Welp, I finally got my M4700:

-3740QM
-AMD firepro M4000
-1080P (LG Phillips screen)
-8GB of RAM( 16GB more on the way)
-750GB Samsung 840 EVO
-Backlit keyboard
-DVD drive(thinking about getting another drive later down the road)


First impressions, it's not bad. Feels pretty solid/stable, though there is a little gap on the right side of the LCD bezel, however I do have some quirks/questions I wanted to mention:

-LCD, though bright, has HORRIBLE backlight bleeding when on full brightness(is this normal?)
-Can you make the backlit keyboard stay on all the time? (Keeps dimming, I tried playing with settings on the Dell hot keys settings)
-Speed, my clock speeds are slightly under 2.7ghz (like 2.694ghz, annoys the crap out of me) is this throttling? I tried disabling speedstep and enabling turbo, I noticed that it will not go into turbo if I do this.

-Anyone have any common settings to share to maximize performance in the BIOS?

Last but not least, something that I'll have to live with is the fan noise, it's just like most users said... quiet most of the time, then annoyingly the fanspeed will kick up in a "windy" like pitch noise. Otherwise, I think I might end up keeping it.

 

There may be a setting for the keyboard backlight timeout in the BIOS.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I only saw an option for adjusting brightness in the BIOS, thanks for the input though.

I played around with the settings more to keep the acoustics down while having the speed up. I'm using a 130watt power supply and put the thermal setting (in advanced settings) to "quiet". It still blips, but maybe not as much. I also disabled C- level power state, Intel speed step, and enabled turbo(though it doesn't do anything if I disable speed step), hovering around 2.690 GHZ, not bad.

The Dell Enhanced Thermal Modes don't seem to make sense, here are the tiers in order:
Standard, Cool (reduced temp), Quiet (reduced fan noise), and Ultra Performance.

Cool is before Quiet, reduced temps would indicate more fan speed in order to achieve this.. and I wonder what algorithm "standard" goes by. Whatever they tried to aim for, it does seem that standard is quiet, I'll play a youtube video for testing on other settings and the fans will kick up, then I set it to standard and I'll hear the fans cut off.

It is a bit annoying how just web browsing can trigger the fans to aggressively kick up so loud and then taper down in a fluctuating pattern, it's kind of distracting.

 

Purchased one with the i7-3840QM and AMD FirePro M4000.

Anyone know if it will be sufficient for AutoCAD 2014. SpecVIEW benchmarks do not seem to talk about AutoCAD performance in specific.

I understand Quadro line is optimized but just got a great deal on this.

Thanks in advance!

 

I think it should be fine with 2014, granted I haven't seen benches yet, but judging from 2011 benchmarks for Pro/engineer (autocad) on SpecView, the M4000 was definitely acceptable:

AMD FirePro M4000 - NotebookCheck.net Tech

 

Thanks.

Looking at the benchmarks it's hard to guess what benchmark most closely resembles AutoCAD. The performance advantage goes back and forth between the K1000M and the M4000 for various SpecVIEW tests.

That said, does the CPU play any role in AutoCAD? There was an M6600 for sale with the i7-2620M + Firepro M8900 2GB which seems like a solid alternative if not for the (relatively) weak CPU.

 

AutoCAD uses directx so it is a different beast.

 

So in that case, is the M4000 a poor choice for AutoCAD usage?

Let me check the DirectX benchmarks.

 

From comparing the benchmarks on notebookcheck's page for k2000 vs m4000, the m4000 seems to outperform the k2000 in most benchmarks. I understand the benchmarks by themselves mean nothing and that there are optimized drivers for quadro available for AutoCAD.

But all said and done, how does the M4000 perform with AutoCAD?

Thanks.

 

AutoCAD 2013: 3D Results Overview - Workstation Graphics: 14 FirePro And Quadro Cards
AutoDesk AutoCAD 2014 Professional GPU Acceleration - Puget Custom Computers

Nvidia card "beat" amd card with similar level directx(game)performance. But the benchmark site state this

And these benchmark cant really be translated to real life work.
I guess some one actually use autocad would better answer the question. Personally, I would say it is "good enough" unless you are doing really high end .