New M6500 Discussion Thread

1 Processor: Intel Core i7-920 Processor (8MB L3 Cache, 1MB L2 Cache, 2.66GHz)

I believe this is a typo and will turn out to be an i7-620 based on the clock speed but I hope you get a 920XM!

 

yeah its a 920XM, when I pull up the invoice it shows this:

1 X3MH9 MOD,PRC,CLF,XXXXX,2.00,8M,55W

 

Wow you got a great deal

 

Thanks, putting up this other unit for sale now with a 256GB SSD in it, everyone think $2100 is a fair price for that??

 

Another update regarding my USB 3.0 problem. I just received a call from Dell, this time from another gentleman who's filling in for the previous one, who's sick. He wanted to make sure if the ports are getting any power, which they don't.

He was also wondering why they hadn't sent someone to replace the daughter board yet, but sent it up the line all the way to the engineers in Ireland. He was all "It's new tech so faulty connectors and such are a much larger possibility. Why just send it up the line and twiddle your thumbs while we could be trying to see if it's just this one little thing AND sending it up the line."

In short, he's putting in a repair request tomorrow morning. I'll get a call Thursday from the tech at what time he'll be arriving. He'll install it and the drivers, then test it. If something still is wrong, he can call the gentleman I spoke to just now, who gave me his name.

Now, isn't this what they should've been doing from the start? The gentleman I spoke with today, isn't even from second-line Precision notebook support, he's from another group's second-line, just filling in until the other guy gets back from sick leave, yet on his first day filling in, he's doing a whole lot more.

If only all of Dell tech support was like this.

 

I saw another 920xm up last night on the outlet so they are available you just have to grab them fast.

Yes if I had the money to spend I would buy it from you in a heartbeat.

 

CShawkeye, how much'd you pay? I found one /w 720qm/4gb/RGB matte/FX3800 for $1500.

 

Would you care to help me spec out a M6500? I will use this for Solidworks CAD, Photoshop, Lightroom and Abaqus FEA, and this is a replacement for a M90 with XP. I’m a consulting mechanical engineer and photographer (shooting 25MP raw files). I’ve read this thread some throughout the year and now it’s my time to buy. My mode is to buy top hardware and keep it for as long as feasible.

I think Win7 Professional is the correct OS choice, skipping the XP mode, and buy that "recovery" OS reinstallation disk separately – is that right?

Current thinking is to use a 256GB boot SSD plus a larger high-rpm HDD for mass storage. I could consider using only SSD drives but would like a healthy amount of storage capacity. Because Dell charges that premium for pre-installed hardware, I’m thinking of buying an installed HDD from Dell and the SSD from an outside source and installing myself. The question is if there are any real pitfalls with this approach. I’ve reformatted my old M90 with XP several times when upgrading HDDs, but other than that I’m a casual user and not an IT guy. I do run nightly backups to a 12TB NAS already. A quick net search is showing that the Crucial RealSSD 256GB is the strongest contender ($620). There is apparently a better newer model, is that CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1CCA?

Also 16GB DDR3-1333 RAM from a 3rd party, also perhaps Crucial or G.Skill (~$370), and taking your suggestions.

The available LED screen is attractive for photography edits which cannot be accurately done with a laptop LCD screen, but I must figure out how to get it in matte. I do already own a photographer’s desktop monitor (NEC LCD2690), and will be keen to learn how to calibrate an external monitor with this laptop (one profile for the laptop screen, one for the external).

Attached is a PDF showing the customization I’ve selected from the Dell website. If you’ve got a good sales contact, I’ll listen! Thanks so much! - Ralph

 

Hi reburns, I think your plan to upgrade the drives and memory is sound. Make sure you really need the WiMAX and UWB wireless because you may be wasting money.

Decide if you need the higher graphics card as dell charges $440 for the 3800 over the 2800- it doesn't sound to me like you need it but I don't use those apps.

All the M6500s are matte displays so no worries there.

If you are using an M90 now it sounds like you keep your machines for awhile, I would shoot for a i7-840qm if the ~$300 premium is not too much in order to have the fastest reasonably priced CPU. Personally I would not pay full price for the extreme cpu.

 

I am new to M6500, but more than half of M6500's I've seen in the outlet had "glossy" RGB.