New M6500 Discussion Thread

Why do they have to pretend everything is made by them?

It's the Firewire controller, which is made by Texas Instruments, not by Microsoft btw:

Code:

03:01.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments PCIxx12 OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller (prog-if 10 [OHCI])

Since it's OHCI compliant there shouldn't be any driver problem. On the other hand I have no idea what driver this game starter from Redmond expects.
Just ignore it if you don't need your Firewire port!

/rant

 

So, I managed to test with the live: exactly the same behaviour. And even with only two ram module (for which i cannot prove any corruption problem) I'm still experiencing occasional and apparently uneproducible freezes, especially during heavy disk IO operations...
I'd like to convince dell to replace the whole thing, any suggestion about how to convince them that this is actually needed?

 

New/Unused 85 Whr 9-Cell Lithium-Ion Battery for Dell Precision M6400. Sells for $140. I am selling it for $60 and you pay shipping (but no tax). See photo.

 

I'm already using two Intel x-25mm SSD. Any benefit on addding an Intel 310 series?

 

Hey guys, got a quick question. Is 1100 USD a good price for a M6600 with 4000M nvidia and 256 SSD a good buy? I usually don't buy dell's mobile workstations so not too sure about their pricing (usually i just get alienwares or build my own) I thought the specs look pretty good for the price but I have no need for it so am debating whether to buy it or not. exact specs:
i7 2.2ghz
256ssd
4000M
16gb ram
WUXGA anti glare
about one month into the warranty period. A local company is going out of business so they are selling them, already bought one, good price to get another? They come with a extra battery too.

 

Uhhh... That is a steal! You must be mad to not get one!!! :O

 

already bought one but trying to convince myself to buy the other that the company is selling, exact same specs, only thing is, have to pay cash.

 

@WohthaN:
During your freeze tests did you ever encounter the screen just going black?
Since I ran the tests my display sometimes shuts off for no apparrent reason and I guess the whole system is following. But I don't know if both are related.
The fans still run normally but I can neither log in via SSH nor can I shut the machine down blindly from tty1. And the logs (/var/log and BIOS log) don't provide any info either.

I'm on my 3rd graphics card at the moment because my 1st one died during a benchmark and the 2nd one was faulty right from the start (Dell's replacement cards are all refurbished). So it might just as well be another graphics card failure.

 

Hey debguy, so sorry for the extremely delayed response to Post 4477.

My company made the mistake...but I got a hold a really cool Dell Support Eng and he swapped out all three boards for the quad-dimm version. I've been running it for over a year now with a 940XM and absolutely love it! It's a fire-breathing MONSTER, not only is it super fast but it has massive "torque". BTW, i did successfully run the 940XM on the dual-dimm board.

My one big gripe is heat, boy does it get hot. I've read that the 940XM has a considerable amount of voltage leak and that the 2940XM has far less and therefore inherently runs much cooler. Doesn't help me right now, but I thought it was interesting.

I'd have to say that Dell really porked the pooch with the docking station design...man that thing sux for cooling, and it pales in comparison to my old D830's docking station which had a HD activity light -AND- a full-height, half-length pci expansion slot. I thought for sure that my M6500's would come with a pcie slot. Im seriously considering taking a dremmel tool to it to carve out some channels for greatly improved air or maybe even water flow.

The very middle back bottom portion (by the dock connector) get's wicked hot...in fact, it's thermal tripped once. And get this, the damn fans never spun above like 2750RPM. Since then i use the hidden Dell Eng Mode to disable bios fan control and manually set the fans wide open, which helps some.

I've been experimenting with some heatshift pads in which i had to take the docking station out of the integrated monitor stand. And i'd have to say that those pads are fantastic, but I haven't been able to get a configuration with them that can last a full 10 hours with my laptop full tilt. But they weren't designed or meant for that.

I've been researching coolers for the past couple weeks and I'm leaning towards the StrikeForce 19 w/usb3 because it appears to have the best cooling but it's hard to really quantify that...all I know is that I want the absolute coldest cooler available, i don't care about price or noise and almost every review weighs them heavily...which is understandable i guess. Just wish there was a pure performance based comparison somewhere.

Anyway, hope yours is doing great.

 

I didn't notice any temporal relation between tests and failures (i was having freezes before i tried to test as i still have after). Some time ago it happend that the screen would just turn black and the system would stop answering to everything (but fans not rising speed). With kernel 3.0.0 and nvidia drivers 285.05.09 this didn't happen since long long time, but what happens is the same freeze of the system but with the last image displayed on the screen. With some external monitors connected to the dock occasionally i have artifacts or white screen patterns (like desynchronized signals). Same 'no logs' issue. But once during a crash i was lucky enough to have a kernel dump, then the system was unusable (any IO operation would get stuck) but i could at least move the mouse around and switch windows. No luck in reading any logs anyway, everything stuck, but it was a different behavior at least. Honestly I can see only two causes for the freezes: video card frequency switches (which can be the cause of your black screens) and problems in the memory chain. Since I left only two ram modules (8G) of ram i couldn't memtest any memory troubles, but i'm still experiencing freezes from time to time. Much less frequently then before (4 modules for 16G) but still something is wrong...
But I don't know how to convince DELL to replace anything, as the problems are really hard to reproduce and apparently random, still they shouldn't happen.

Thanks for any help!