New M6500 Discussion Thread

I think bios A03 was pulled for some reason. Seem to remember that it was incompatible with the intel storage driver. If you don't care about that and don't blame me if a03 breaks anything for you then try to pm me and see if disabling HT in the a03 bios does help you. Never used the pm function so I am not sure if and how that works for me.

I run Win7 x64 with the windows AHCI driver, ATI card, 820qm and dell 1510 wlan and have no issues with a03.

If anybody else knows more about breaking details with a03, please feel free to add warnings for TabSel.

 

---vent on----

Ok, tech arrived next day after service call. Pretty good considering the distance. He was pretty competant considering this was the first m6500 he had ever seen. Dell had shipped him motherboard vidcard and power supply to cover all bases. Fairly demoralising seeing your three day old $5000 laptop being stripped bare then reassembled.

He replaced motherboard, rebuilt and i am typing on the laptop now. I'm going to give it a few days of 100% cpu via very demanding v-ray renders i am running on my farm at he moment to see how it holds up.

I have tried to read as much of this thread as I could but i would like to get some advice on any problem areas I can torture test to make sure everything else is 100% ok.

Someone (with more time than I) really needs to make a sticky summary of this thread, really useful info just way tool long.

Spec as follows

820
rgb led
320gig 7200
4*2gig ram

Trivial but they also forgot to ship the carry case. I will send an email to my sale rep when i have a moment venting some more.

-----vent off----------

MD

 

Tabsel,

Try looking into Core Parking. I had the same type of glitching when I was using Cubase 5. Are you running Windows 7 64bit or are you on 32bit?

Also I am using a Sonic-Core XITE-1 as my main audio interface

Welcome to SONIC CORE

Still waiting for them to release the 64bit drivers for it, so I had to set up a dual boot and run my DAW from Win7 32bit for now, but I believe this tweak is applicable to both 32 and 64 bit OS, and is basically to do with the load balancing on i7 processors in particular.

My own story is that I had a similar glitching experience to what it sounds like you have when I originally set up my DAW partition, even after doing most of the recommended tweaking. I also originally tested using DPC latency checker which showed that the latency was fine, and I asked in here a few times if there was anything that might be causing the glitching but no one seemed to know at the time. I tried turning off just about everything in the BIOS and disabling as many things as possible, such as wireless, bluetooth, etc etc. I also disabled as many windows services as possible, but still the glitching occurred.

But since I followed the core parking tweak it seems to have solved this issue and Cubase runs smoothly even with a whole bunch of intensive VSTi and plugins running. It also runs smoothly when using with XITE-1 and when just using the M6500 IDT low latency driver.

Finally for what it is worth I did also upgrade to BIOS A03 and that worked ok for me. I wanted that as that had the disable Hyperthreading option, but in the end I have not used that, so am running with HT on.....BUT.....I would be very careful about using the A03 BIOS as it really messed up a few other M6500 users system..as SvenC stated it messed with the intel storage drivers somehow, but not sure exactly how. Hence that is why it quickly disappeared from Dell's driver sites. So I would try the core parking tweak first, as at least you can change it back if worst comes to worst.

Here are some links to more info about Core Parking, and how to do it. It is a simple registry tweak so should be straight forward, but if you get a bit stuck let me know and I will try to help more.

Cubase.net .:::. View topic - Disable core parking for daws ?

** Critical ** Windows 7 DAW Tweak .... Disable CPU Core Parking

Windows 7 "Core Parking" Causes CPU Spikes - Avid Audio Forums

Those links should cover it. Gotta be worth a try. So good luck and let us know if it works for you.

Cheers

t_t

 

Thank you for your response. I've been reading almost half of this thread and it hasn't made matters any more clear as far as the display is concerned. I think I've picked up that the problem of oversaturated colors with the RGBLED in non-color managed applications can be mitigated by turning down the overall saturation settings or setting the color profile to sRGB in ControlPoint, but maybe that defeats the purpose of having an RGBLED in the first place. There are a lot of people saying the RGBLED is "outstanding" and "brilliant" etc., but I'm never sure if they mean the general impression or more specific uses such as image and video editing.

Nevertheless I'm leaning toward the WLED right now because it feels like the simplest, surest option, but I'd love some more input from people who got the RGBLED and who know more about these display and color matters than I do. Also I'm pretty sure I'll get the Intel WLAN adapter even though at least at the moment I don't plan to use any open source operating system. Intel is a company that I trust for quality and also I read a couple of posts in the thread here saying the 5300 is superior in signal strength and range which makes it sound like it will be worth the extra cash.

 

(post somehow got double when I edited, sorry)

 

the intel 6300 is the one you want really....

 

The 6300 is not available where I live (Sweden). Only the 5300 and the two Dell cards. I don't know the difference from the 5300 or if there is any since Google results are meagre (and so are results for the Pro/Wireless 5300), but somehow I suspect that they're the same product only with different names for different regions.

 

The ATI offering just changed on the Swedish site from the M7740 to the M7820. Has the same occurred in other countries/regions? (Although from what I can tell ATI GPU's are not offered at all on the American website at least.)

Btw I just ordered mine today (in the end I went for the WLED). Can't wait to join the club of proud M6500 owners, lol =P

 

Hey guys? Is dell really worth for its price tag? Does it have any issues? Like crashing like the 8740w or the W510? I want a laptop, first time and I don't know what to do. So confusing I tell ya

Also is workstation cards really needed? also is there any problems with Security protocol or some s*** like that?

 

@True_Sultan:
The M6500 is no good "laptop" if you take that literally. For mobile work it's too big, too heavy and has a too short battery runtime.
It's a fine computer to take it from A to B. But you don't really want to work with it in between.
If that's still fine for you, go for the M6500. Otherwise look for something smaller (15" at most). If you want to stick with Dell, have a look at the M4500.

That's a question only you can answer. If you have a look at the general market and want to draw a diagram with price over quality, the answer is "no". It's clearly off that line. But if you want something extraordinary that only Dell can give you, it's not a question of price (as long as you can afford it).

Since there is no other option in the M6500, this question is irrelevant. But do I see that right that you intend to use Linux on it? Then I urge you to make three things sure:
1. Get one of the NVIDIA cards. As you might know, the support from ATI is terrible.
2. Don't take the tray DVD drive if you intend to burn DVD+R(W). It doesn't work well with recent kernel versions.
3. Don't take the default Dell WLAN adapter as I described some posts above.