M6600 Owners Thread

Slightly incorrect. The FirePro drivers are based on Catalyst drivers that are on average 5-6 revisions behind. The latest Catalyst drivers for Radeon had a major revamp that literally boosts FPS across the board giving on average 5-10 FPS boost in games.

ATI is just starting to update their FirePro drivers but they won't still be up to the latest releases in the Radeon department. In that regards, I still prefer to softmod my drivers over using the FirePro ones on the basis of gaming only.

 

I was looking at the 1600 version of this setup for my M6600 to arrive on Friday. Is there an advantage to the 1866? I thought that 1600 was the cap and anything higher would be throttled to 1600. I ordered the i7-2720 Quad Core.

 

Worth investigating. I had read the same, but just went with the 1866 because it was only a few extra bucks. But if it literally makes no difference, that money would be better spent elsewhere.

Anyone have 1600 that we can compare to? Any suggestions for benchmarks?

 

Your big memory performance jump is due to the 16GB not the memory type. My M6600 with 16GB 1333MHz gives 7.6 score.

 

I was wondering if that was the case, thank you.

I did run the AIDA64 benchmark that iieeann ran in this review of the 4600. I just have the trial, but the read speed and memory bus speed seem to indicate that it may be using all of the 1866.

 

I admit that and agree with you. This will of course matter mostly for games like Metro 2033, Crysis, Crysis 2 only. For a casual gamer not playing too much in killers like ones I listed, even 10FPS will not make any difference. Especially, Games like CoD:MW2, DukeN Forever, maybe even BF2:BC will be performing extremally well on this card cause it is this powerful. Even with older/weaker driver.
So, I am leaving it to your private consideration what driver to use. If you are using engineering software then it is going to be extremely frustrating to keep switching between drivers all the time.
I personally, will use modded ones, cause I don't use any CAD/CAE software at all and I really like to play from time to time with high details set.

AIDA is the actual benchmark. It's hard to say the same about Win Perf Index, so it really makes more sense to compare AIDA results and not get to excited with what Win7 is showing. Synthetic tests will probably show some advantage of faster RAMs but in benchmarks like 3dMark or especially, every day use, difference will be very, very small to none.

 

Any suggestions to figure out whether or not the 1866 is worth the premium over 1600? (Obviously 'worth it' being fairly subjective ) Anyone with a i7-2820QM/16M 1600 want to run something to compare?

 

My replacement system is in. Not Dell replacement - main machine replacement. Quadro 4000M, 2920xm, 1920x1080 touchscreen, 128gb msata, 2x750gb HDD, 8gb 1600mhz ram, most other options.

The msata drive is a Samsung PM810. 750gb drives are Seagate.

This system is amazing. MUCH more to come.

 

Thanks for the info. As I don't have access to an 8900 (yet ), I have nothing base my theory on other than what I have done in the past.

Hopefully I will be ordering my M6600 in about a month and a half or two.

Now just have to decide whether to go with the 8900 or jump to the Nvidia 3000M. I like to game, but will be using Autodesk Inventor, Solidworks, and possibly ProE down the road, so I need a workstation-class card first and foremost.

 

I got 8GB of cas 9 1600MHz.

It updated the WEI to 7.9

Here's the AIDA64 results: