M4700 Owners Thread

Out of interest what idle/max temperatures were you getting before and after?

 

See my post here.

 

Incompatibility Report. HP ZR2740w LCD displays are INCOMPATIBLE with the M4700 w/ K2000M GPU, whether direct or docked in the latest (USB 3.0 equipped) docking station. Many hours with HP Tier 1 and 2 TS, and a display swap, involved to reach the conclusion. Strangely, there's no problem with the big brother ZR30w (30")... it is recognized instantly at 2560x1600.

The 27" ZR2740w is not even detected when connected via DisplayPort to an M4700, and when connected via DVI the display reports a strange 1280x720 setting (exactly half of max res), with only a center subset visible on the panel (using docking station DVI). HP TS said that HP uses the K2000M in some of its Elitebooks... and the ZR2740w works fine in DisplayPort with HP Elitebooks (I tried it with an 8440p and an 8740w), a new gotcha where end-users suffer in the Dell/HP battle.

 

Hi all,

I have recently purchased a battery slice for my M4700 and am having a problem with it, or a combination of it and the laptop...

When running on the battery slice (not on AC) the processor (i7-3740QM) will not run any faster than the 1.2GHz idle speed regardless of stress level. It has no such problem with the standard battery, only the slice. It makes no difference whether the standard battery is attached at the same time or not. I have checked all Windows settings and even tried it in a Linux environment (which behaved the same). [It is OK when charging the slice on AC, it is just when discharging off the slice.]

As soon as the slice becomes low (around 10%) the system switches to the standard battery and instantly the CPU can step above 1.2GHz and boost to well over 3GHz.

I contacted Dell and a technical support rep asked me to change some BIOS settings: disable C-States, Turbo boost and we tried disabling SpeedStep as well. Even with SpeedStep disabled the processor will not run above 1.2GHz yet making these changes forced the CPU to run at the nominal 2.7GHz flat on the standard battery.

The rep asked a senior team to look at it, and their response has been to send out an engineer armed with replacement battery and mainboard. The aim will be to try the battery first and then swap the mainboard if this also runs the CPU slowly.

Before I let an engineer take apart my very new and shiny M4700 I thought I would ask here whether anyone with a slice battery could confirm whether their CPU is allowed to run faster than idle speed when running off the slice...

At least I will then know whether to allow the engineer to replace the mainboard as a test or whether to go back to the rep with some evidence that there is a firmware or other issue to be resolved.

Thanks in advance,

Martin

 

Read through this entire thread - some very useful information. Thanks.

One question though. What is the weight of the base system without the power brick? 6cell and 9cell battery?

The Lenovo w530 reports 2.7kg but the M6400 reports 3.4kg!?

also - can these run off a 90W brick? I'd like to use on an aircraft. Anyone any experience of using on an aircraft?

 

If any M4700 owner has a kill-a-watt meter, he could measure the power draw. It is likely that under light loads, the laptop won't draw 90W of power, the 180W adapter is there for when you use the machine at 100% usage and it should still have some headroom even then. My G73 which is a power hog doesn't use 90W under light loads. There is nothing preventing you from using your 180W adapter on an aircraft as far as I know, the adapter won't draw 180W unless the laptop requires it, so again, for the light workloads you should be fine.

 

I've read reports of the aircraft tripping the power for your plug if you plug in a high-power adapter (even if you don't use 180W normally --- a momentary spike can set it off).

A 90W adapter should work but you may be stuck with reduced performance. Some aircraft now support 150W of power so you can use something a little larger, like the 130W adapter.

Check Bokeh's M6600 review (search down for "Power Adapters" bold heading) --- in there he talks about using the different power adapters and how they behave. It should be a similar situation for the M4700.

 

thanks Aaron - very helpful.

 

hey guys, i have a problem with my precision m4700.
the notebook display is black...it does not work anymore. i have a second monitor connected via dockingstation and that works fine (write that on the precision).
so my question..whats with the notebook display?
till yesterday everything worked fine..i did not moved the notebook from the dockingstation since 3 weeks so it doesnt droped down or something.

what do you think cause the problem and can i fix it by myself? when not i must contact tomorrow dell -.-

 

I'll ask the obvious questions which you likely checked, but did you check your display settings either in Windows or the nVidia control panel, maybe something changed and it's no longer set to output to both displays. If it's not that, try fiddling with the display a little and see if you can get something to display.

If you did all that, I can see it as being one of three things: the internal DP cable is toast or the connection is bad, the display itself went bad or the motherboard is faulty (that's the less likely one).