M6600 Owners Thread

Thats the plan to get Keplers. So that money investment is not only towards the battery life but also lower temperatures, power drain stress and ofc performance upgrade

 

Hey, I saw there was talk of a failed m8900 firepro. As a quick fore-shadow I'm typing this from new m6700 replacement.

I bought an m6600 last October approximately. A few months ago my m6600 all of a sudden wouldn't turn on. Dell thought it was a motherboard so they sent out a motherboard replacement. The tech replaced it but that didn't fix the problem so they sent out a new motherboard, cpu, and gpu. The tech replaced the gpu and that fixed it. Well about 2 months ago my graphics were acting strange, I tried to change the drivers and reload them but it wasn't working, also my bios boot screen was showing weird text on it. Dell did a remote thing on my computer and spent around 2 hours trying to uninstall drivers, check for problems, viruses, etc, but conclusion was it looked like another hardware failure, probably graphics card. i told the tech this is would be the third card and this wasn't acceptable. I asked for it to at least be replaced with a nvidia 4000 or 5000 or a new system. After sitting on hold for a while he told me I had 3 options, first was to get a new m8900 installed, second was to get changed to the nvidia 3000 (which is lower performance), or third, a brand new m6700 system with the m6000 card. Well, I went for the m6700 option, only bad part was it took 2 weeks to get it as it was custom built to my specs. I really liked my 6600 however the 6700 has a lot of little upgrades and runs a lot cooler and quieter than the 6600, I'm really pleased with it and ultimately Dell took care of me. Best of luck to anyone have troubles with the m8900 card, it was a great card but I'm thinking they tend to burn up. Loving the M6700 (6600 was great too).

 

I dock my M6600 to two 24" displays with my m8900. I do plenty of gaming along with some programs that give it a nice workout. Never had a problem with mine.

 

I purchased my m6600 about the same time you did. The m8900 card is working fine. Before I chose the m8900 card, I searched the web for any possible issues with the m8900. All the information I found about the card gave it good reviews.

On the other hand, an nVidia card in my older XPS fried the motherboard in the fourth year of ownership. Fortunately it was under a four year warranty. After that experience I was leery of nVidia cards.

 

Was that nVidia card a 8000 series, those were know for a problem with the BGA solder, this problem was eliminated with the 100 series and hasn't shown up again.

 

Got myself a 7260 AC. Seems that only one bluetooth device can be run at the same time.

I got the bluetooth driver from dell site.
Driver Details | Dell US

 

That's great that you haven't had any problems, I must have just had some bad luck as I didn't really see many issues with the m8900 when I did my research either prior to buying the system. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was a great card, I just had a few of them die on me, I keep my systems nice and cool on cooling pads, and clean so I don't know what caused them to malfunction.

 

Yep, 8600...I bought the laptop well after the problem first surfaced figuring that surely they would have fixed it by then. And when they replaced the MB, the new GPU was still the 8600 and it still gets hot. The XPS set me back close to $1,800 over five years ago ($400 more dollars than my m6600). Those were good days for Dell!

 

All the 8000 series suffered from that unfortunately, big screw up from nVidia, they lost in court on that too. All 8000 series are bound to die eventually because of that solder problem.

 

Interesting comment! I also had a bad experience with another 8000 series nVidia card in a desktop.

I have an Optiplex 380 that had an EVGA nVidia Geforce 8400 video card installed when the desktop was purchased new. That card was also a problem as it would randomly and frequently crash giving the BSOD. Never could get it to work. EVGA was not particularly helpful and I was stuck with a bad nVidia card. From what I could figure out that card had known problems with the Windows 7 OS and nVidia never fixed it.

Ended up installing a Radeon HD6670 in the Optiplex and never had another problem.

So when I purchased the m6600 it was not a difficult decision to go with the m8900 card. I never heard about any kind of ongoing issues with the m8900 that RPM MX alludes to.