M4800 Owner's Thread

Ok, a few last questions before I hit the purchase button. What would you get, QHD or FHD, if you ran the following apps mainly; Google Chrome, AutoCAD, Revit, Photoshop and lightroom? Scaling vs. screen door, price vs. price. Both are matte, yes?

I also run an external Dell u2412 display off I think DVI to VGA adapter on my piece of junk laptop right now, but I haven't looked at it in so long I'm not sure what it is. What is the best hookup for this screen and the m4800? Do I need the DisplayPort-DVI Adapter?

I am sure this is a dumb question, but I am going to add a second ssd drive for data files in the optical bay. I see there's also an opportunity for a mini card drive, which nobody seems to use for their second drive. Is there some drawback to using this and keeping a dvd burner vs. using the optical bay?

I was going also going to get the ssd from crucial. They have a casing you can get for it I believe. Would I be able to pop it out of the laptop, and use it as an external drive if I needed to switch laptops temporarily and wanted that data on the drive?

What's the best wifi option;

Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 802.11n 3x3 Half Mini Card [subtract $14.00]
Dell Wireless 1550 2X2 802.11ac + Bluetooth 4.0 [subtract $31.50]
Dell Wireless 1601 2x2 802.11n+BT+60GHz (WiGig) [Included in Price]
Dell Recommended
Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 802.11ac/a/b/g/n 2x2 Half Mini Card + Bluetooth 4.0 [subtract $24.50]

 

For the screen, I can't really tell you. If battery life is a big concern for you, the QHD screen does make the integrated graphics disabled, so your battery life is a good bit worse than with the FHD screen. Otherwise, assuming you have good eyes, I'd probably go with the QHD screen, but that's just me.

As for the display, a quick newegg search seems to suggest that it supports displayport input as well, so you could just buy a displayport cable and go that way, which is what I would do. Check to make sure your monitor actually has that port though. Otherwise, yeah, you're probably going to want the DVI adapter.

I plan on using the MSATA drive in my m6800 so that I can have two HDD's. I don't think there is anything wrong with it, and the prices are comparable for the msata and 2.5 inch versions of SSD's. I would go that route, and then you have a full size slot still open for a regular hard drive and you can keep the ODD, or you can have 2 HDD if you give up the ODD. There really isn't a con in removing the optical drive besides the obvious not being able to read disks, and both the optical drive and hard drive can be put in external enclosures if you need them for another computer or whatever.

As for the WiFi, I would probably go with the intel if you don't need the wireless dock. That being said I have the dell 1550, and it's been fine so far, but I haven't been on many networks yet with it. Intel just generally has better drivers and is a little more stable, especially if you want to use linux on it at some point.

 

Works well on my M4800, though I don't do CAD. Switching is purely automatic - in fact the only way I could tell which GPU was working was to use MSI Afterburner, and watch the GPU speed go from 0 MHz to ~700 MHz and back again as I started and stopped games. There is also a BIOS setting to enable or disable switchable graphics for both Optimus and Enduro.

Unknown. I read one report of an 4000M in an M4700 overclocking well, but have seen nothing on the 5100M.

 

Hm, alright, I guess I'll have to make do with the automatic switching.

Since M5100 is the same card as 8870M with driver differences, I should be able to overclock it reasonably, someone got a +225MHz overclock on 8870M, bringing it to 950MHz (from 725MHz)

 

So I've been trying to compare the k1100 to the AMD Firepro 5100, for AutoCAD/ Revit, and it seems a near impossible task. First, AMD's website may in fact be the most worthless website ever created. It tells you nothing about the 5100. It's like it doesn't even exist except for the 3 sentence blurb. Anyone have any insight into how these two cards stack up? I can't even tell if the AMD card is Autodesk certified?

 

Look up on 8870M to get an idea of how it performs, essentially the same card as M5100, just driver differences, as for CAD performance, there's not much difference between Radeon and FirePro line (no idea if that has changed recently), unlike GeForce and Quadro where the difference is massive.

Also, check here - http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/workstation/certified

Seems to be Autodesk certified.

 

The firepro m6100 in my 6800 beats my R9 290 in Cinebench OpenGL testing. It also beats an nvidia k4000m in that benchmark as well. The firepro cards are way more powerful than the lower or mid-range quadro cards offered at (usually) a substantial price premium. The only reason IMO to go quadro is if your other computers use quadro and it's just easier for you that way, or if your applications have substantially better driver optimizations on nvidia than on amd. According to notebookcheck, it's about comparable to a gt 750m in non-professional stuff, and on par with a k2100m in most professional applications. Unfortunately, I think autocad is one of the ones that typically performs better on nvidia hardware. That being said, the firepro should still give you great performance, and save you a good amount of money, as I'm pretty sure it would still best the 1100m.

Also, as a general rule, newer AMD cards are substantially faster than Nvidia ones in OpenGL/CL tasks.

 

I wonder how much do you really get more on battery using Intel graphics? 1h 3h? @Alexhawker whats the max distance when signal fades? and if no line of sight, is it becoming unusable complete?

 

I haven't really tested it, since I'm using it in a fairly small room. The 60 GHz signal cannot penetrate walls, so yes, line of sight is needed. I just tried to get up and walk down the hall, and lost signal right as the wall came in between my laptop and the dock. That said, my machine instantly switched over to the slower wifi connection, and then picked the dock right back up when I reentered the room.

Think of it as a very fast, private network that is confined to one room only.

 

Yes quadro and geforce chips have massive difference - few resistors on pcb to stop people from converting cheaper geforce into quadro. By simple vbios flash.

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