M4700 Owners Thread

Nice to hear, is it any cooler or quieter? Do you use two monitors? ...hehe, last question, would you recommend/are happy with the M4000? Or do you wish you had an Nvidia? Sorry for the questions... I'm still trying to decide between the M4000 and K1000m...I know the differences, etc. and I want the M4000 but at the expense of more noise/bugginess and less battery life(as I will be mobile maybe half the times), I'm trying to weigh it out.

 

I have used both K2000m and M4000, IMO, M4000 definitely has better C/P ratio.

1. M4000 runs cooler
2. AMD is catching up in the driver update and performance
3. M4000 is cheaper than K2000m

 

C/P = cooling/performance ratio?

That's assuring to hear from someone who has dealt with both K2000m and M4000. I had my doubts because of posts earlier in this thread, I thought I read about how users couldn't disable the discreet GPU and run on the HD4000 to save battery(do you experience this or do you use HD4000 when you go mobile?) and how when they went multi monitor setup, the HD4000 wouldn't engage properly and stuff.

 

C/p usually mean cost/performance.

Gcn is idle power is pretty good, but it won't beat optimus.

 

Gotcha, thanks, as long as I'm able to disable the M4000 when going mobile(unplugged) I guess I can put up with the Intel gpu. I remember hearing people before saying you coiuldn't with the M4000 due to a driver issue, but hope it's not true today.

 

You can't disable the M4000 and switch to the Intel GPU. The M4700 does not allow for manual switching, the discrete GPU will always be used if it is present unless you have a GPU that supports Optimus. This isn't a driver limitation, but a hardware one.

You can physically disconnect the M4000, and then the laptop will boot using the Intel GPU.

 

Updated my OS to Win 8.

Windows 8 runs pretty well on my M4700, but for others thinking of doing this, the updated drivers from Dells site for Win8 is needed, with out them I found the laptop was freezing up when I opened up IE, or Word, Excel, Outlook etc.

 

Hi, Does anyone know if my M4700 be set up with an SSD to boot from and a HDD for everything else? I was unable to place my order with this configuration and Dell was not all that helpful when explaining options, etc It certainly seems like I should be able to. I don't want to lose the optical drive but could give up the cellular, which I haven't even activated. Thanks!

 

Not sure what "everything else" you want to have on the HDD, but you could certainly use the SSD as the boot drive and have the HDD for additional storage, no problem.

 

Well I'm glad someone chimed in regarding this. But I don't see how it's a hardware limitation because on my Thinkpad T500 with a Radeon, I can disable the discreet GPU and run on Intel's onboard GPU, I have to make this change manually in the power settings via the Thinkpad software and it makes a huge difference in battery life. That's almost a deal breaker if I can't disable the discreet GPU in any settings...