M6600 Owner's Review - Warning - Large pics - Personal Opinions

Bokeh, I was thinking about tearing the video card out of mine when I get it to grab the part # off the RAM on the Quadro 4000 to see what its rated clockspeed is. I'm not going to get my machine for a few weeks yet so if you end up taking the video card out I'd really appreciate having those part #s documented.

It's a pity neither of us have a machine with an ATI MXM card in it around or I'd be curious to see if it'd play nice with a machine that shipped with an nVidia card; it should, but with the BIOS stuff for Optimus, who knows.

Also, if you do end up tearing it down, some high-res photos of the CPU and GPU heatsinks-especially the contact areas with the CPU and the GPU themselves-would be of great interest to me; another reason that I was going to tear mine down was to determine if lapping the heatsinks or throwing them on a mill and fly cutting them would be feasible, so that would help me out a lot.

The other thing I wanted to look at when I got mine was whether it would be practical or beneficial to heatsink the voltage regulators visible to the left of the CPU socket right next to the fan cutout in the first picture in the service manual here.

If it's too much trouble, don't worry about it, I'll probably end up doing it when mine shows up. But if you end up taking it apart, lots and lots of high-res pictures and anal-retentive documentation would be appreciated.

Also, nixie tubes are awesome and I'm jealous. I need to get around to ordering one of the nixie clock kits people sell on ebay. But I should probably get my existing tube stuff working first.

 

Swapping the nVidia with the ATI should be no problem since all M6600 uses the same BIOS. I think when the M6600 detects an ATI card it will disable the option to turn on or off Optimus.

Also, you do need a new heatsink for the ATI card I think if you want to go ATI.

 

Actually what is needed is the bracket that is underneath the card that the HSF screws into.

They are slightly different for nvidia and ATI.

 

You listed 3dmark 06 score for the M6600 as
3D Mark 06 - 20556 - Quadro 4000M OC

Please check the following score...
Nvidia 580M SLI and ATI 6970M Crossfire are a little over 22000 according to the Notebookcheck, but I am not sure how a single card based on 480M is supposed to have such high score..

I am trying to grasp the graphics performance of this thing. So please double check for all of us prospective buyers..

Thank you very much and this is a really really nice review!!

 

A single 580M does 20300-21100 3Dmarks. I was running similar clocks on the Quadro 4000M so the 20500 should make sense.

I am confused as to why there is so little gained from SLI on the 580M.

 

Will get lots of pics for you. We have our own repair center on site at work and I have already talked with them about repasting the 2920XM and swapping the 2620M for a 2720QM in the other one. I am seeing a 10C difference in temps between cores on the 2920XM and in the past this has been a sign of uneven contact with the heat sink or uneven thermal paste / pad. It works fine, but I am trying to get more speed by keeping temps down below 78 so that it will stay in 3.2ghz mode longer.

 

What is your Geekbench score?

 

Around 9400. It seems to range from 9200-9500. It also incorrectly identifies my RAM as 1333 instead of 1600.

Geekbench Score 9405
Integer Processor integer performance 10189
Floating Point Processor floating point performance 11865
Memory Memory performance 5844
Stream Memory bandwidth performance 5178

 

I would also like to point out that 3DMark06 is no longer reliable for accurate GPU testing. 3DMark06 buts CPU in high consideration on the point scale and also de-emphasizes the usage of SLI or CrossfireX If you wan to use 3DMark as a benchmark for GPU performance, please test under Vantage or 3DMark11. I will be running my M8900 OC'ed to 850/1100 on Vantage and 3DMark11 shortly and if you would like to compare, please run the 4000M in Vantage or 3DMark11.

 

I did run Vantage and 3DMark11 benchmarks. They are in the review.

3D Mark 11
3DMark Score P3164
Graphics Score 2885
Physics Score 6661
Combined Score 2979

3D Mark Vantage

3DMark Score 13255 3DMarks
Graphics Score 11734
CPU Score 21684
Jane Nash 35 FPS
New Calico 33 FPS
AI Test 3014 operations/s
Physics Test 28 operations/s

Nvidia came out with new drivers two days ago, so I will be retesting to see if there are any changes.