M6600 Owners Thread

Those only show temperatures, not clock speed. As long as you don't do insane vBIOS flashing, you are fine. Software-enhanced OC's are hard to detect and most cards will fail safe if an OC goes wrong to prevent any damage and they would fail safe by shutting down the drivers before all else.

Then again, if you all are uneasy about OC-ing then don't do it. However, I feel comfortable enough to give it a shot here and there and having prior experience.

 

I'm having some issues with this M6600. This is a work supplied laptop, but our IT sucks.

I put a 2nd hard drive in the 2nd bay when I want to use it for personal stuff (just boot into my own W7 install)

In my W7 install, I painstakingly installed all of the newest drivers I could (Intel, IDT, Realtek, station-drivers, etc)

Issues:

In my install I can't adjust the screen brightness. I can adjust the brightness while BIOS is loading and just as windows is loading, but once I am into windows brightness is locked at whatever it is at.

Terrible screen flickering on battery. screen shuts off for a millisecond repeatidly, brightness fluctuates, it's basically unusable on battery...

Very poor Pro/E performance (and intralink) it's really terrible, doing operations on "larger" assemblies results in lag on every step. I noticed there is weird lag in places in windows as well, like setting checkboxes in the nvidia control panel. It just does not respond immediatly like I know it should be.

^^I have tried Dell, Nvidia partner certified, Nvidia performance and regular Nvidia graphics drives to no avail. I have not gone through and tried to redo ALL of the other drivers (this is the work image, came with whatever drivers...)

System is Quadro 3000 with the lowest quad core 2720QM?

anyone seen 1 or more of these issues?

EDIT: screen flicker does not exist with the work install. and brightness adjust works... But there is lag, poor performance on certain operations. Work install runs from a 3rd gen intel SSD and my install from a 120GB Sandforce 2 controller SSD, so it can't be that.

 

Yes...I've been looking at that UJ-242 model...seems that if I Google it there are all sorts of foreign (mostly Asian) companies that one can buy it from, and a few places here in the US. I've seen prices ranging from about $150 to the mid $300's. Even at the cheaper price, having it shipped from Asia is a source of concern should something not be quite right with the drive. After all, it seems that there are a few different "flavors" of this drive floating around, and I just don't know if they are all compatible with the M6600.

When I run the figures, the $400 Dell option, after a 35% coupon discount, and then with tax added on, would put me somewhere around the $280+ area for just the cost of the drive. I can get the drive from one e-tailer out of TN for $218 total, with a 6 month warranty. So.... I'm wondering if I should take the Dell option and part with the $62 just to avoid hassles similar to what you experienced, and have the piece of mind of a 3 year warranty.

Furthermore, it pains me to think that I might pay so much, either way I chose to go, for a drive that is only 2x BD-R (despite some retailers advertising it as 4x), when the Sony I mentioned is 6x.

 

And for $62 in addition to a lot less hassle and time, you also get full dell warranty and tech support for any Dell compatible parts for your system.

 

I have tested both drives in addition to many others. The Sony Optiarc BD-5730S is the best of the bunch and you can find them for around $200-$225. The biggest difference with the Sony is how snappy it is due to the larger data buffer. The risk of a bad unit is also low so I would not give Dell the extra $$ for a lower end drive.

Scott-

 

could you post a link from those reference drivers please cause i don't find them anywhere... btw does gpu-z recognize it as a 6970 too? i'd love to see my fps improved in tf2 css and l4d

 

Here are just released WHQL 11.7. Should work on the M8900 without any modding or tweaking of the .INF

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/598197-amd-catalyst-11-7-whql.html

It would be listed under GPU-Z as "AMD Mobility Radeon 6900 Series"

 

thanks going to give it a try later tonight.

btw whats is that codec installer from ati?

one last thing does someone have an issue with sound? sometimes when i put on my headphones the sound won't switch from laptop speakers to headphones... this can be annoying! it can be related to sound driver or even windows seven settings tough... but then why sometimes it works and sometimes not :s

 

The only problem with the BD-5730S, is that it's 12.7mm. The drive bay in the M6600 is 9.5mm. The only other alternative that I can think of is the older UJ-232, which is slower and is not quite as versatile as the 242 model. For awhile I had used an external model, that aside from portability was a great option and perhaps shoudl be considered if the OP isn't going to move the laptop around much, or at least going to have the laptop sitting when using/burning. It was cheaper and faster.

 

Try disabling Optimus on your system and see if that improves your performance. You can do this by going into the BIOS, Video, disable Optimus. This will force the system to use the NVIDIA GFX card 100%.