New M6500 Discussion Thread

Been to Hell, but back! We are still good for the card! I'll let you know when stuff is ready!

 

@Dynamite: I'm definitely also interested in knowing what the read and write performance is like for these drives in a RAID-0 setup. If I do go full SSD for the primary and secondary drives with the SSDs I'm looking to get, the bottleneck would be the 300MB/s SATA 2.0 transfer rate. I'm certain to get an mSATA SSD though.

Looks like you still have first dibs on the card. Enjoy matey!

 

TBH, I'm pretty impressed with their performance. There will be noticable difference between a 5400 and 7200rpm drive, especially when used in RAID situations. The faster rpm will definitely perform better.

I don't find the 7k1000 HDDs noisy at all. In fact quite the opposite. I find them to be quiet and didn't regret getting them. This is my personal opinion though. Might vary from person to person.

I have not done a benchmark on the RAID-0 setup. I can have a look if you are interested. Yes you are right on the bottleneck, however no drives can saturate the SATA 2.0 transfer rate at the moment.

 

Hello guys.
I also have a Dell Precision M6500 with i7 720QM Clarksfield, 8Gb, Fire Pro M7740,SSD 128 gb. Unfortunately the M7740 is DX10.1 so I can't play the latest titles (Alien Isolation and The Evil Within). I am in searching for a good GPU for my M6500 and because the format of cards for M6500 are different MXM by far there is a slick chance I could get an upgrade. I found that the only DX11 cards are M7820 and Quadro 5000M.I really don't want to sell my laptop, I love it.Do you have some advice? Is it feasible to shift to a new GPU?
Thank You.
igor. 

 

Why so sad? Lol. Technically speaking, yes, the graphics card on an M6500 can be upgraded pretty easily. Refer to the M6500 Service Manual for technical guidance. Both cards you referenced are available for purchase on the Bay. I actually plan to upgrade the FX3800 card in my M6500 to the 5000M.

 

Benchmark results would be really nice and I am interested. I suspect that the performance would be somewhere around 260 MB/s or thereabout. Yeah, I know no HDDs are capable of saturating a SATA 2.0 link by themselves. That's exactly the point and why I'm alternatively somewhat considering having a RAID-0 setup with HDDs which would be close to the theoretical 300 MB/s SATA speed limit. My primary option is to go with SSDs which do perform at speeds higher that the SATA 2.0 speed limit. The SSDs I'm looking at are rated at 550/500 MB/s read/write speeds which would require SATA 3.0 to attain speeds even close to what they are rated.

 

So I have an update. The only upgrades I have done to date are to install the Intel 7260 AC wireless card, install Windows 8.1 on the HDD that came with the M6500 and connect the Logitech MK520 keyboard and mouse combo. I installed latest drivers for the 7260 card found on the Intel website. Both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth work well and without any issues. I haven't installed a Wireless AC router or AP yet so I can't report on the AC speeds. However with my dual band N router I do get the expected 300 Mbps connected speeds. Didn't have issues with the Windows 8.1 install either. I did have to get a couple of drivers from the Dell support website. Besides that, I had to install the latest Nvidia driver set from their website.

Next up for upgrade will be the memory, SSDs and 5000M video card. Hoping that what I read about WDDM 1.3 drivers being made available for Fermi GPUs is true. It would mean I could use Miracast which would really be kewl.

 

The 7260 wireless card is sure a pain. There are so many different models!

I guess from your update that you specifically went for AC 7260HMW? Did you get the generic version or the version specific for Dell?

Can you check the FCC ID on your Intel 7260 AC card? Is it PD97260H (standard/generic version), PD97260HU (presumably the BIOS lockdown version) or E2K7260WY (Dell version)?


What the part models mean.

http://www.legitreviews.com/intel-7260hmwg-802-11ac-versus-intel-7260hmw-bn-802-11n_135541


The different FCC IDs.

https://wikidevi.com/wiki/Intel_Dual_Band_Wireless-AC_7260_(7260HMW)

 

Without going through the chore of getting to the card itself, I'm pretty sure it's the generic Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 card, with model # 7260HMW and product code / SKU 7260HMWWB.R or 7260HMWG.R. Yeah, this is supposedly a revised version. Hence the "R". You may already know this - both SKU codes, WB and G refer to the same item. Just a reference to the packaging size, i.e. 10 vs 100 units in quantity.

Here's a direct link to the item I bought on Amazon:
Intel Network 7260.HMWG.R Revised WiFi Wireless-AC 7260 H/T Dual Band 2x2 AC+Bluetooth HMC Free Mounting Screws Included

Hope this helps.

PS: Here's a pic of the actual card.

 

Thanks for the heads up! Didn't know about the revised version of the AC 7620. Armed with that info, I managed to track down a local computer shop that stocks the revised version of the AC 7260!

Their website listed it as 7260HMWWB.R. I confirmed with their online chat support personnel that the product code listed on their website is correct and that the stock just came in two weeks ago.