New M6500 Discussion Thread

Interesting -- I am running the A04 BIOS, and it shipped with the A02 BIOS (the A03 BIOS was never released in Denmark, aparrently).

Well, I think the 3800M likely gives a lot more heat, but I don't know -- if it's stable, I don't mind anyway I'll watch out for any more troubles with it shutting down due to heat. 15 minutes with FluidMark and Furmark running heavily left my GPU at 74°C max, and kept hovering there -- and the computer was at it's limits of what it could do, so I doubt it was a normal thermal trip when it shut down yesterday (Flatout 2 also not being a very graphically intensive game, either)

 

74 is pretty good where I come from

 

I was wondering what Nvidia driver to use. I'm considering getting an M6500, but it appears to me that the linux driver on Nvidia's website does not support the FX 2800M or the FX 3800M. Dell has an ATI driver for Linux on the support site, but no Nvidia driver.

There's always the open source drivers, but I don't think that performance is that great. Also, is there anyway to use the FX 3800M power management under linux?

I think that the FX 3800M will support 2 external monitors, but the 2800M will only support 1. I'm guessing this because the DELL store configurator offers you two monitors instead of 1 when you switch to the 3800M. It's unclear whether these are DVI interfaces or not.

Nataraj

 

The 2800M and 3800M are officially supported since 190.42. Maybe they work even in earlier versions.

Frankly, I don't care what Dell has on their website. I want to stick with my package manager.

I tried the nouveau driver that came with Absolute Linux 13.0 half a year ago. It was not usable.

I doubt whether this is correct. I don't see why NVIDIA should make the design of the 2800M and 3800M so different. As I understood, they have the same basic design.
I can try to get an output via VGA and DP simultaneously. But it might take some days. Since I have no docking station I can't try two external digital displays.

First rule: Don't trust the online configurator!
Second rule: Don't trust the 1st level telephone supporters when it comes to technical details.

 

When I am running multi hour encoding ques my processors settle around 74. That is 6 hours at 100% here in the office on a dock.

Did it give you a message that said thermal shutdown or trip?

I have run my machine in all sorts of stupid circumstances over the last 7 months and never had a thermal issue.

 

Me neither. And 50C in almost-idle in a reasonably warm climate is not especially terrible - especially if you happen to catch it at the upper end of the M6500 cooling yo-yo.

Are you Speedfan users sure you're not overnerding this stuff? Or perhaps it's particularly stuffy in your basement? We aren't (or at least, when I'm not actually on the Macs) Mac users you know - there's rarely a need to watch the CPU case temps like a hawk because there's a genuine danger of it getting real close to max case.

 

Mr. Vogelbung.....do you still have your m6500? Just wondering how you and it were getting along these days

 

See the asterisk in my sig. Yes - I still have the M6500's.

It doesn't change the fact that I'm very unhappy with many aspects of how Dell have handled my account recently - so not necessarily a permanent fixture. Depends on how they handle things from here on. If you see the M6500 disappear from my sig, you'll know that I won't be going near Dell for anything for a long time.

 

haha....just saw the on-probation....coolsky...c. ya around then....

 

I've had similar sessions (without dock) but have never seen 70°C. Do you use your graphics card for encoding? I don't, so your heat pipes might be more occupied.

I guess the rest of your post goes to basketweaver.

btw:
Yesterday I tried two external monitors via DP and VGA. I can run both in parallel but only if I switch off the internal display. Or to say it more general, in a three-display configuration I can run any combination of two. This seems to be a limitation of either the graphics card itself or the proprietary NVIDIA driver. So the situation should be the same under Windows. Can anyone with a 3800M confirm that only 2 of 3 displays can be used at once?
The internal display is connected via DP too, so it shouldn't make a difference if one connects two external digital display with the help of a docking station. It should still be required to turn off the internal display to make both external displays work.
Once nouveau is mature enough I'll try if I can get all three displays running with it.