M4700 Owners Thread

Yep, it will all work 100% fine , get it and enjoy, but I think the mSATA port is only 3GB/s port (SATA 2) so you will not benefit full potential on bigger file writes if you are going to do that alot, I'd recommend instead of mSATA get yourself a proper size 2.5" samsung 850 evo. I've a 128GB Samsung 830 and I found out that this mSATA SSD was actually a SATA 3 6GB/s capable, so I have moved the mechanical drive to ODD drive compartment using slim ODD to HDD converter, then installed my samsung 830 msata in to mSATA to 2.5" HDD bracket adapter and inserted it to primary HDD slot/port. and then added tiny 40gb msata in to the original mSata slot to cache-accelerate the slow mechanical drive so I can get the most out of these things. now samsung mSata running in primary 2.5" port sporting at 6GB/s is noticeably faster on same daily tasks compared to before, and the cached SSD-HDD acceleration I've setup works interestingly well too.

 

Very nice idea! How could you get that caching on the msata drive? Is there a software to get that? And was it difficult to remove the dvd and place the odd adapter for the hdd?

Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 utilizzando Tapatalk

 

for caching mSata drive to boost HDD performance to a SSD-like performance, I used cheap little 40GB intel mSATA SSD, bought on ebay, I think it was ~20$ I found somewhere. Software I used to do the job is called Intel IRST , its part of the drivers package as well, every DELL M4700 has this installed from factory as a default. And option will show up there as long as your mSata is present with one mechanical drive in the system.
To remove DVD drive you got to remove the main battery, undo 2 philips screws holding the bottom panel by sliding it toward screen hinges gently, then there is one screw holding down the ODD , you undo and remove the screw and remove the ODD out of the laptop by pushing it out of the laptop by sliding it out.
I used piece like this (9.5mm height) www.ebay.com/itm/321146653334 to reinstall my mechanical drive to it, and to install it I only needed to remove additional two little philips screws and the holding bracket from the back of the ODD and replaced them in the exact same order on to the ODD-HDD adapter back of it, then reinstalled all back in the reverse order.

For mSATA to 2.5" HDD/SSD bracket I used this kit www.ebay.com/itm//281397090963 , which worked well for me. And it did work with the Samsung 830 mSATA SSD. However, Im not sure if it will work with evo ssd, so you may want to risk it to find out or search for analog that's been confirmed to work.

I think the rest is self explanatory...?

 

Thank you so much for the valuable information.
I always set up my BIOS to avoid RAID and never fully understood Intel's Rapid Storage Technology until now.
I think my IT Management already ordered the new mSATA unit, and wants my old PM830 mSATA back, so I think i'll be stuck with the expected 2-disks configuration, even if i'd love to try your suggested 3-disks configuration to feel the performance increase on the physical HDD... can you confirm that your system's HDD is almost as snappy as a SSD, because of your configuration?

I could partition the new mSATA unit to:
- one 64GB partition to be used as "cache" through Intel IRST
- one "remaining-space" partition to be used as C: system disk
Could this be a good idea?
Does it expose the PC to unnecessary risks, in case of mSATA unit failure, or similar?

 

Well, I can confirm that it does increase the performance of the mechanical drive vastly, but how much of an improvement will it give - it will depend on what type SSD is used to accelerate the HDD.

Here I have a screenshot of the current speed tests done by CrystalDiskMark, right window is of mSATA 128GB Samsung 830 in primary SATA 6GB/s HDD port, and the left window is of the 500GB 5200rpm 8MB cache HDD in ODD compartment accelerated via mSATA port intel mSATA 40GB SSD



PS, this 40GB SSD is somewhat old-tech and on its own its not so quick, read speeds are just mediocre and write speeds are bottlenecked by the limiting factor of the SSD itself (~40MB/s), and writing speeds are also so low right now considering the HDD has just 3GB free space left rendering way lower benchmark score. When I have tested it after installation when it was still empty, writing speeds were ~190MB/s for the first benchmark tab of sequential writes and so was the same for other fields ranking higher little too.

RAID option is only useful if you use cache accelerate or are planing on using acceleration in the future. So if you would be thinking to do so, I would encourage to set your bios settings to RAID before reinstalling OS, because if you change ACHI to RAID later on, your machine will fail to boot and you will need to reinstall the entire OS in order to make it work well again. Otherwise, makes no difference in performance ACHI vs RAID, unless you will use Samsung EVO SSD and will enable EVO RAPID mode, then it must be set as ACHI mode. Although SSD is so fast as it is, I dont know how beneficial to use the EVO RAPID function, marketing bubble I believe that makes these drives sell better, not necessarily benefits the performance in my opinion.

For the splitting the partition, its little complicated if you were to do it this way, but not impossible.

You would want to reinstall OS in the HDD, then after all is done, setup your SSD mSATA cache accelerate option, and well you dont have to sacrify so much space, as little as 15GB is sufficient to cache accelerate the HDD. So once this acceleration is setup, you could create the remaining available space partition of the mSATA SSD and format it to NTFS, then reboot the machine and install the fresh copy of the OS in to that partition. As a matter of fact you will have dual boot after this, but by any means do not format the cached HDD after the reinstallation of secondary OS on the SSD.

Failure rates are extremely low for these SSD's so reliability wise, there is nothing more/less dangerous than otherwise would have been if you didn't do any of it, in other words , makes no difference to your files security/overall reliability one vs another option

 

Thanks for the information, much appreciated!

 

oh, just now I have noted the screenshot didn't attach, retrying now again... no problem, hope it helps

 

For the people who are asking, the FirePro M5100 works fine in the M4700. No certified pro drivers (decreased double precision floating point performance?), but the general graphics performance ends up being about 30-35% faster than the M4000. It also allows you to boot with legacy ROM's disabled and thus enable secure boot. It will also return life to your laptop if you are suffering the issue outlined here (thanks, Dell, for allowing that to even happen in the first place).

[NOTE: My laptop was a M4000 card to begin with. The upgrade may not work if you had an nVidia card originally.]

I noticed that AMD recently announced a new line of MXM embedded GPU's. Anyone have in information on that? There seems to be not very much information regarding the one that would fit in our systems (the E8860). Curious as to the architecture and performance.

============= EDIT ==================

You can get certified FirePro drivers with the M5100 after all. Just download them from the Dell site here instead of going straight to AMD. If you use the drivers from the AMD site, graphics will be buggy. Using the drivers supplied by Dell works like a charm. Weird that.

 

I've been using the AMD M5100 in my M4700 for a few weeks now, and it seems to be working well. Under gaming load, however, the laptop is having trouble keeping the M5100 cool. I think the card's 55W TDP vs. the M4000's 37W TDP is the main problem here. I know there is a heatsink with two heatpipes available for the 55W CPU's. Is there something similar for the GPU in either this or the M4800?

 

I just got my wife a refurb M4700 from dellrefurbished.com. I wish I had found and read this thread first. Her laptop has the infamous K2000M nVidia graphics, plus a 3.7GHz i7-3820QM CPU. When she simply does light Internet websurfing, the fan occasionally roars to life for a few seconds, then goes quiet, just as others have said. This is with her using the laptop on her lap using the built-in display, with the 180W power supply.

As an electrical engineer, I am absolutely floored that (1) a simple PWM fan modulation was not used in the first place, and (2) years have gone by without IMPLEMENTING SUCH A SIMPLE SOLUTION.

We've only had it one day, but this fan noise might very well be the reason we send this stupid thing back. Everything else is fine except that. I've read through all pages of this thread. I saw some references to power profiles (with mixed reports on whether it works or not), GPU BIOS reflashing, and regooping things. I can only try the first without giving up my option to return, though.

So it's almost 2016 and this fan noise is still an issue, huh?

Really, Dell? Really?