M6600 Owners Thread

Well, Dell managed to ship my machine a whole week early. I'm surprised. Much better in that regard than Lenovo; the last time I ordered something from them it took two months and me calling them and threatening to cancel the order to get it shipped.

Short answer? It does vary from machine to machine, and no, there's nothing you can do about it that I can think of that wouldn't void your warranty or make the machine unusable.

Long answer? Refer to comments below:

I'm not an EE by any stretch of the imagination, but I know enough to get myself into trouble, so... take the following as the moderately-well-informed ramblings of someone that's let the magic smoke out of way too many electronic devices.

Any halfway decent switching power supply-including OE laptop power bricks and most desktop power supplies that cost more than about $30-will have a transient filter circuit on the input that will deal with excessive electrical noise on the AC input. If that circuit is present and functioning properly, "dirty" power is, in all but the most extreme cases, a nonissue and it is extremely unlikely to cause choke whine.

This is doubly true for laptops; what comes out of the power brick is regulated DC power. If the power brick is designed properly and working correctly, any meaningful amount of AC power or electrical noise will be filtered out before it reaches the laptop. Just like with desktop PSUs, the generic replacement "universal" laptop adapters can be of very poor quality and a liability to your laptop's long-term health (although a small number of them are good), but OE power bricks for laptops are built by companies like FSP/Sparkle, Delta, and LiteOn. They're built to the system builder's specifications, and they may not use the highest-quality, Japanese-made, solid-electrolyte capacitors because Dell or HP or Clevo may not want to pay for them, but none of these companies make crap. If Dell is shipping a power brick with its machines, I guarantee you that it meets or exceeds all of their design criterion for ac ripple on the dc output, voltage sag, etc.

I can see it being technically possible for "dirty" AC to cause the primary side of a smps to "ring", but for the reasons outlined above, it's unlikely. And, if it were to happen, in the case of a laptop, the noise would always come from the power brick, not from the laptop itself.

The high-pitched squealing, hissing, static-y sound that people complain about is coming from one or more of the power supply circuits within the machine itself-the circuits that take power from the battery and the AC adapter at somewhere between 13 and 21v and regulate it down to ~1v at massive amperages for the CPU, video card, chipset, etc.

And it's caused by the high-speed voltage regulators that are used on the modern, high-current-capacity power supplies that are used for those components. Some of these circuits operate at 25KHz+, and they can create electrical interference that feeds both forward into the filter capacitors for the circuit they're regulating, and backward into the incoming power from the power brick.

Somewhere along the way, that electrical interference encounters either a capacitor or a choke that responds to the feedback by vibrating. This isn't necessarily abnormal, if you've ever been in a factory with equipment that uses big step-down transformers, or stood next to a transformer cabinet you can hear the equipment inside buzzing at about 50 or 60Hz (which is what line level AC is delivered at, depending on where you live). But in the case of the ringing that people complain about, it just happens that the vibration hits a harmonic that causes the whole capacitor or choke to ring like a bell.

Because these voltage regulators often change their frequency based on duty cycle, it won't necessarily happen all the time. It could only happen when your CPU is between 51.8% and 52.5% load; below that and above that the vrm circuit just doesn't operate at a frequency that will cause that excitation in caps and chokes. Or it could excite one component at 55% load, and another at 59%, and another at 84%.

And, like I was saying earlier, it's not consistent across machines because of manufacturing tolerances. You can have two identical chips-let's just take the i7 2820QM as an example. They came off the same line at the fab, even off the same wafer. At 100% load, one of them will draw 44.9w, while the other will draw 42.1w. Another one may use 39w, another might use 43. None of them will use more than 45w (probably plus a little bit of an error margin), because that's Intel's rated design power for the chip. But some of them will come in fairly significantly under that number. When you've got hundreds of millions of transistors in something about the size of your thumbnail, not every chip comes out exactly the same.

By the same token, you can have two ostensibly identical capacitors, one of which resonates at 25,008Hz, and one that resonates at 24,579Hz. Or whatever.

Add up all of these variables, and you can end up with two systems that will respond very differently to the exact same situation. There is, unfortunately, not that much that can be done about this on a practical level.

I've heard of some people going through their machines and painting clear nail polish on the affected parts because it changes the mass of the component and thus alters its resonant frequency, but I mean... You'll thoroughly and completely void your warranty, there's /always/ a chance of messing something up while you have it apart, you have to track down the noise first unless you just want to slather it all over everything (not a good idea) and you're adding a layer of material that's not necessarily particularly thermally conductive to the components you're painting it on, so there's always a chance of shortening their lifespan by running them too hot. The odds of cooking a capacitor with nail polish are probably pretty remote, but they'd be higher in a laptop due to the limited airflow through the machine, and it's not a risk I'd personally be willing to take.

If it's insufferable you might ask them if they can exchange it, but I doubt they will, and there's always the risk of the next one being worse.

 

If this forum had a working in-thread search function I may not have to ask this, but it doesn't... so:

Is there any way to use the E-Port Plus dock with 2 DisplayPort monitors WITH Optimus enabled AND be able to see anything on the screen during boot-up (like the splash screen/boot options, etc)?

Whenever I have Optimus enabled, I can't start the computer while connected to the dock and expect to have anything show on my scree. If I'm lucky, the external monitors will turn on after Windows loads, but usually it doesn't.

I think this is a HUGE problem.

I have 2 U2711's connected, and it is frustrating that I can't use Optimus.

EDIT: Looks like I'm not the only one with this issue.

 

Did the memory work in your computer?
i called kingston and they said that it is not compatible with the m6600

 

Good suggestion but static noise still present with battery power.

Siorus, thanks for the detailed reply.

 

Also I got something to point out about that. When I had the Dual-Core M6600 with that plastic piece, it also eliminated any flexing on the keyboard!

So if you aren't planning on going 16 GB or something like that, ask for Dell for that piece and shove it in the DIMM slot to give you a better rigidity keyboard!

 

I just put two of the Kingston 8GB HyperX DDR3-1866 kits in my M6600. I haven't put Windows on the SSD I put in with the RAM yet, but it POSTs fine, is all detected by the BIOS @ 1866MHz and passes the preliminary dell memory test fine.

/Edit: Also, about the flexy keyboard. What flex? I haven't used the machine much at all yet (like, less than 10 minutes) but it feels solid to me. I don't notice any more flex than on my W700. *shrug* Maybe I'm not as sensitive to it as some of you guys are.

 

It is not that noticible and I sure do notice it on my replacement Quad Core machine, but people in the earlier pages of this Thread were moaning about flexing, which can be eliminated with that plastic piece if so choose. Otherwise, the flex is not that bad or not that significant at all in the first place.

 

On the Kingston Hyper X 1600 RAM - it works in mine.

On the keyboard flex - the non backlit keyboard flexes more. It does not have the extra slab of plastic behind it.

 

For all those wondering about the 580M...

I installed it today, re-pasted and tested.

The 3dmark11 score was 3082.
The 3dmark11 score with the M8900 firepro is 3098.

The cards perform so similarly in benchmarks it's not worth the effort (although the M8900 is twice as fast in a few Specview11 tests, but that is to be expected).
Real world performance: the M8900 feels smother and faster (especially in WoW).
Optimus seems to be a gimmick.

The only advantage I saw with the 580M was lower temps.
Idle: the 580M is 39-41c and the M8900 is around 42-46c.
Under load: the 580M is 63-69 and the M8900 is 70-77.

Neither card was overclocked.

Very disappointing.

The 580M has returned to his home in a Clevo P170HM.

 

That is so weird because the 580M should decimate the 6970M by at least 20%, even more when the 6970M is a M8900. That is very strange... However, I am very interested to see if the M6600 will take a 6990M.