M6600 bricked (fans very loud briefly, now only warm spot on bottom of chassis)

I don't think you need to worry about this for a number of reasons.
* Even if you are using a CPU-heavy single-threaded application, if you check the CPU graph in Task Manager you will probably see the load bouncing around between cores, rather than pounding one to 100% all of the time
* Modern CPUs have fail-safes to throttle down if they get too hot in order to avoid potential damage... but you'll rarely if ever experience this in the Precision, because
* The cooling system in the Precision is second-to-none, I've actually run all cores at 100% at the max turbo speed for multiple days in a row (doing video processing work) with no negative impact

All this to say that I've never heard of a CPU "burning out" from being used (except in one or two cases where the heatsink was not properly attached). It's designed to be able to operate at maximum capacity... forever. Well maybe not "forever" but there are other components that are likely to fail much sooner than the CPU, even under maximum load, unless you push your luck by overclocking or doing other things to change its regular behavior.

Now there may be something to a lower resolution screen saving you power. I've seen comments that 5510/7510/7710 machines with the 4K display use up the battery faster than machines with the 1080p display, but I have not done any first-hand testing.

 

"cool", I'm glad to hear the cores get staggered! My M6600 2620M had only 2 cores, and a modest 35W CPU rating. It'll be interesting having 4 cores going forward, but hopefully the 3740QM uses less than it's 45W rating, and even less than the dual core did, assuming Solidworks uses mostly 1 core at a time.
I didn't know how to check if the M6600 was staying in Turbo mode, but it did seem to get warm a lot. I ended up inverting the laptop, like a tent, and having an cheap household 8" fan blasting it nonstop. Thus the internal fans almost never turned on during a workday.
I'm curious about your days-long-4-cores@100%----were the fans on continuously during that workload?
Since it was video processing, was the GPU also at 100% at the same time! (wow!)

 

To answer the questions, yes, the fans kicked up to max speed for the duration, and no, it was CPU-only video work with no GPU involvement. (Generally I don't exercise the GPU in my line of work, just when gaming...)

 

If your primary workload is single-threaded then the power consumption will be subtantially less than 45W. In fact, full CPU load is likely to be nearer 35W because there is provision in the 45W design thermal envelope for the integrated graphics to also be running. HWiNFO has reported the CPU package power for the i7-6820HQ in my M5510 as being 35.3W for 8 threads, 28.5W for 4 threads, 20.4W for 2 threads and 15.3W for one thread (tests using wPrime). Sustained running of one thread may not even cause the fans to ramp up from the slowest speed.

My work patterns don't need to 8 concurrent threads and I have turned off hyperthreading in the BIOS. This has saved a little CPU power and even fractionally boosted the performance. I presume this was due to the system spending less time on deciding which core / thread to use when sharing out the work.

John

 

Interesting that hyperthreading could be detrimental. I read something similar elsewhere about disable the Intel speedstep in the bios. It was in response to a slower than expected Windows Experience Index, which I have found for my just-acquired M6700 system, only 5.2, which is slower than I had on my M6600. Just fooling around with it now, I gotta install the CPU-Z & HWiNFO, etc....

 

Speaking of fans, I think I might know what killed my M6600's MoBo... I used an old household fan to blow at the bottom of my case, which mostly kept the laptop's internal fans from needing to run. But near the end of the M6600, I had switched household fans to a bigger, quieter old one. That old fan had some stiff bearings because it took almost 5 mins for it to reach speed. Since the laptop was plugged into the same power bar, the struggling fan might have sent some power surges back to the laptop.

Even worse is that I left the laptop battery removed, because I didn't want it to stay fully charged when not required.
I think that now that I have extra M6600 fans, I'll just let them do the cooling. (Are M6600 & M6700 fans interchangeable?)
Also might leave the laptop battery installed since the M6700's BIOS seems to allow control of max charging %.
(I'm not sure that is functioning correctly, I set it to 70%, but when I turn off the computer, the charging seems to continue beyond 70% regardless)...
The battery should smooth any power surges, and also act as an UPS uninterruptable power supply.