M4800 Owner's Thread

I have tried using my m4800 with a 90W? power supply originally shipped with a Latitude E6520. Even for light computing, the performance drop is too high. And furthermore CPU usage goes up by 5-10% when I connect the 90W power supply, or is this the side-effect that explains the reduced performance? I would rather have higher performance w/o charging the battery, is this possible? Can this be achieved with a 'Dell Power Manager' setting? Otherwise I'm going to have to buy another 180W power supply for out-of-office usage.

When I unplug the power supply, performance goes up drastically.

 

I just replaced the 1080p screen on my m4800 with the AUO B156HW01 V.4 that I mentioned earlier. I bought it from laptopscreen.com but there was also a seller on ebay with a large stock of them for about $50 less. The better warranty, shipping and dead/stuck pixel policy led me to go with the aforementioned seller though.

While the stock 1080p Dell screen (Chimei Innolux N156HGE) was bright and had decent viewing angles, the screen door effect totally killed it for me (the colour spectrum coverage wasn't great either but I could have lived with that flaw). I was very happy with the AUO screen on my Thinkpad T530 and can't believe how much better the AUO screen looks now even though I haven't a chance to dig up my old T530 color profile to dial in the calibration. Replacement took me about 20 minutes, mainly because I was pretty cautious prying the bezel off. Spending $120 for a better screen that I am going to look at for 8+ hours a day at for several years is a complete no-brainer for me, so yes, I highly recommend replacing the screen.

 

Sure it is. When the CPU is clocked down to accomodate the allowed reduced power envelope, it takes longer to process and thus the utilization goes up roughly by the same percentage.

Where exactly do you see a "too high" performance drop? Did you run comparisons? What are the numbers?

I have like half a dozend 90W power supplies from my old D800 and D830
that I'm using happily.

 

In case anyone was wondering, the m4800 with the FHD screen works without a hitch if you remove the discrete GPU. Having multiple GPUs complicates life under Linux and it doesn't seem like Dell is ever going to release a BIOS that allows disabling the discrete GPU so I tore down the machine to remove it as I never used it.

 

Removing the dGPU may leave you without HDMI and DisplayPort working (I'd be curious to see if this is actually the case on the M4800).

 

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case but I don't have the right combination of monitors / cables to test this out at the moment. I'll test it out at work and report back.

 

Just to clarify, what 'hitch' were you working around? Is it the freezing problem recently discussed, or a Linux-specific problem?

(I hope Linux users shouldn't usually need to go to such extremes. For example, tririver reports successful Bumblebee explicit GPU switching on the M6800 under ArchLinux.)

 

Got a question about self upgrading the M4800.

I purchased the Samsung 1TB SSD and mSATA. I used the Samsung Data Migration software to clone the OS on the original 256GB SSD to the mSATA, and replaced the 256 with the new 1TB SSDdrive.

Went into the BIOS and in the Boot Sequence I set the CD/DVD Drive as the first, then the MiniCard SSD, followed by the Diskette Drive, USB Storage and Onboard NIC. I disabled the Internal HDD from the boot sequence.

Went into the System Configuration and set the SATA Operation to AHCI.

Booted up the machine and everything is working.

Only thing I noticed was that the SSD was still listed as Disk 0 in the disk management tool, and the mSATA is listed as Disk 1.

Did I do something wrong?

Only reason I ask is I've read here that to install do a clean install of the OS on the mSATA because it wasn't booting up properly...but I'm not seeing these problems.

 

I would expect the buses are numbered zero and one. Shouldn't be anything to worry about.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Thanks Alex!

Another question...any idea how I can get the RECOVERY partition on my new drive? Apparently when I ghosted the OEM drive to the new one the recovery partition did not copy over. And now when I try to access the Dell Backup and Recovery its telling me the partition is missing or corrupted.