M6600 Owners Thread

any chances to add thunderbolt to the m 6600?

 

No

/10char

 

Haha that's funny that they don't display my name
Well using a swap file SSD would require a second SSD though. I'm just curious as to if having that extra hard drive would technically be faster overall for video editing. I know having the regular SSD (vs mSATA) as the boot drive would be faster for booting since its SATA3 but what about performance for editing?

(To those that don't know what I'm talking about since my post is a few pages back)
mSATA + 3 mechanical drives or just regular SSD + 2 mechanical drives.

 

As a random note, Amazon dropped the price of the Samsung ssd to 189 (256gb). It might also drop down to 179 as well. It changes daily and I finally ordered mine. Also this price is for the laptop kit. As spending an extra 10 for norton and the external drive cord seemed like a good price, also samsungs offer for a free game doesn't hurt either.

 

I should probably ask if you've considered an M6700 instead of a 6600?

You might want to post the question in the 6700 owners thread and at Adobe, I notice that the article you linked to was a couple years old, SSD's have gained more prominence since.

The options at Dell are quite expensive. If your willing to DIY regarding the drives then a couple possibilities present themselves.

One would be to order the computer with the 750Gb 7200rpm Hard-Drive to be later put in 1 of 2 SATA III or SATA II optical bays; Purchase separately a mSATA II <=256GB SSD for boot/OS/Programs and a <=512Gb SATA III SSD, or divide the latter over 2 drives in both SATA III bays for the swap files. Hard-Drives are still SATA II, as you already know.

I've not used video editing but I've heard processor cache also helps improve performance there and so does maxing out the RAM probably to aftermarket 32Gb. I don't notice any difference using a HDD for the swap file with PS CS5 but that could just be the way I work doesn't demand it, non professional and my build.

Maybe tijo or someone can weigh in on partitioning an SSD and if that would hinder any performance. Maybe one could be split into two partitions or more which would effectively increase bottleneck but each partition should still outperform a single HDD, a needed consideration for that would be any wear-leveling effect.

Overall the SSD config would probably be better if the wallet can be squeezed a little bit. Weight, Heat and Noise is going up with 3 HDD's and possibly a loss of reliability and certainty.

Definitely a lot to consider and research.

 

Hello everyone. I am the proud new owner of an M6600. I purchased and received a new M6600 last week and have been getting used to Windows again. I got it for business so I have 3 year complete care, etc, also I'm in Canada so there aren't any refurb units available up here. I was on a macbook air (which was a great computer in some respects) for a couple of years but am happy to be back with windows and dell. Anyways, I got a core i7 2860, 8 gigs ram, 128ssd boot drive (liteon), 750gb drive (seagate), and the M8900. This computer is awesome, I love the power it has, the nice big screen, and the upgradeability (coming from a sealed macbook air). Also the freedom of windows, people say everything just works on the macs, but I didn't find that was always the case.

Anyways I have read many past posts about overclocking the m8900 graphics card. I uninstalled all the drivers then ran driversweeper to clear out all amd drivers. I downloaded the catalyst control and it installed the pro version automatically which doesn't allow for overclocking. GPU-Z identifies my card as a 6900m radeon series, and shows as a Radeon HD 6900M series in my device manager. I downloaded sapphire trixx and tried overclocking but it always just pulls the clocks back down again to the stock 680 and 900 speeds. Am I missing something here? Please help with any suggestions.

Awesome thread by the way, you guys are great with support and modifications to these computers, I've enjoyed reading many threads. My previous computer a few years ago was an asus w90vp which had the 4870x2 cards, that thing was a beast, but is surpassed easily by my new m6600.

Update: Is it possible that Dell has locked the clocks on the M8900? I bought it new so maybe it has a newer bios?

 

Since many M6600 owners have Kingston Hyper X memory, I just wanted to let everyone know that Kingston has change the heatsink to what appears to be just a sticker now.

I do not know what effect it will have.

 

Yeah I've noticed that. Just bought an extra 8G of Kingston ram to go with my previous 8G which had the heatsink.

Don't think it'll make any difference.

 

I don't think partitioning a SSD in two to use one as a scratchdisk/cache and the other for programs will have an impact compared to using without partitions. If i remember my stuff right (which i sometimes don't) the controller is handling where data gets written to NAND and that process is independent of the OS so the number of partitions in use doesn't matter.

Where partitioning has an advantage is that it allows you to overprovision the drive if you're planning to use it heavily for writes, but that also means that whatever portion of the SSD you leave unallocated won't be usable by the OS. In case i am unclear, i'm talking about doing something like buying a 256GB drive, partitioning 128GB of it for use and leaving the other 128GB unallocated. That way even if you fill up the partition, the drive won't fill up completely and you won't hit a performance wall due to having enough space for garbage collection to work under heavy use (heavy use meaning constant writes to the SSD for very long periods of time in this case). That kind of scenario won't be encountered by 99% of people though.

Partitioning for performance on a HDD (or short stroking it if you prefer) does have an impact on performance. While the platers have the same angular velocity (RPM), the actual speed at which one point on the platter will pass the heads is faster on the outer edge of the platter. When you partition your drive, the first partition is always on the outer edge of the platter and so on so you could technically, make the first partition your scratch disk and that way it would be slightly faster. It's a bit "enthusiastic", but before SSD made their appearance and became affordable some did it.

As whether using a HDD instead of the SSD for Laptopz's projects, it depends on I/O to the disk, if your project is gonna be maxing the I/O capacity of the drive, then yeah having it on a second drive might be a good idea. That way the OS and file won't be competing with each other. and you won't see any slowdowns on either OS or project. That said, i have a hunch that it would still overall be faster on the SSD. You'd have to try it and given that you will have a multiple drive configuration anyways, you might as well try it, your experience will benefit others.

Boy that was a mouthful. Rob is right, max the RAM before anything else RAM is still way faster than a SSD so you want to have as much as possible available. If you can load everything that's needed to RAM, you won't see a difference between SSD and HDD, it could be why rob doesn't see any difference or whatever he's working on is not enough to saturate the bandwidth of a HDD.

Regarding the HyperX memory: no effect whatsoever, the heatsinks were purely cosmetic, you have to really OC the hell out of RAM to have a change of seeing it overheat. RAM heatsinks are mostly useless in desktops, same for laptops. Besides, i'm not certain the HS added enough surface area to outset the extra thermal resistance incurred by the IC to heatsink contact.

 

tijo,

I'm not thinking to put programs on a secondary SSD. What got me thinking was your earlier comment about finite elements.
Windows only makes about 5% writes when optimized for SSD so a good mSATA while not quite as quick as full SATA might still be good for Boot/OS/Programs all in there.
Where adding a secondary full SATA SSD in the 6GB/s slot might be good as a dedicated Premiere Video swapfile/scratchdisk. Whether splitting the drive is useful or not I wouldn't know. But your comment caused me to think about something, does garbage collection take place in the unallocated space - I understand that it does and manufacturers provide some for it, but can all SSDs benefit from doing this and if so how much space should it be?

I attached a screen shot of the PS scratchdisk dialog form. I'm pretty sure this was designed awhile back to benefit HDD users to optimize for speed. I'm not sure if Adobe* can benefit from spreading out to multiple SSD drives or partitions.

I was thinking:
mSATA II SSD - Boot/OS/Programs
SATA III SSD - Dedicated to Adobe (whether split part. or not)
SATA II HDD or SATA III SSD - large file storage.
SATA II HDD - in optical bay - more large file storage.

Cost seems to be always a concern, but there is enough here for a few extra $ to try out all sorts of configurations and none would be a flushed waste of a mistake.