New M6500 Discussion Thread

I read someone say they removed Norton. I have had it since 2008 because I thought it has improved since then.

Why shouldnt I run Norton? What would you guys reccomend?

 

Thats I found either, I looked at some forum, and even ccfl screen also is sec5443. I dunno why and I bought RGBLED, except dell gives me a wrong screen. I called Dell in the morning, they told me i got rgb samsung screen and they also told me samsung was better than LG

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=359886

 

thinking of getting one of these beasties, could use some help configuring it.

I do network design and test consultancy for ISPs and run a lot of VMs with various virtual servers and routers on them. I have been using a HP 9420 bought 3 years ago but its time for something bigger / faster.

I'm looking to max out performance fastest cpu, 16GB ram, disk , what would people recommend on the disk front? I've not used SSD before, is that generally recommended as an OS drive for best performance?

the dell configuration screen offers me a secondary battery but I can't find any information about it - is it a genuine secondary battery (to be attached underneath the chassis at the same time as a primary like my HP) or is it just a spare primary that can only be swapped in after shutdown (in which case I won't bother getting one). I run off AC 95% of the time but I did buy the secondary battery for my HP and have found it useful.

What's the cooling/noise like on this thing? on my HP, its not that great and it has a fairly noisy fan, so when I am working it hard in my home office, I connect it to a home-built cooling rig (nexus fan with tape and card as intake guide ducts). I'd prefer it if I didn't have to do that with this feller

I run rmclock to try to underclock/undervolt and get the heat down some, anyone run that on the M6500?

I don't do photo-editing work or any of that kind of thing so I don't care about screen perfection/colour calibration, just nice clear stable image, which screen is recommended for that?

how many monitors can the gfx cards on this drive (with or without docking station) and at what resolution? I'm limited to one analogue (Vga) and one digital (dvi) with my current HP (and thats with the laptop display disabled) both at 1920x1200. Ideally I'd like to drive two digital monitors plus the laptop display.

I've never bought a dell before, where in UK can you get a decent discount off direct/list price from? I am a one man Vat registered small business so don't have any large business buying contract access.

sorry for lots of questions in one post
thanks
Ian

 

M6500 review

Please excuse bad quality pictures I need to invest in a new camera. Oh and bad spelling / proof reading. Images at bottom

The Dell Precision M6500 Covet is Dell’s flagship notebook workstation. Workstation is a little misleading as the available graphics cards and specifications make this also a more than just a competent gaming machine. However its status as a workstation means that the system drivers are verified and optimised for use in CAD and 3D modelling applications guaranteeing performance and stability.

The machine is a 17” machine which is normally classed as large for a notebook; however most people looking at a high end workstation will be likely to compromise the large system size and weight for screen real estate and performance.

The machine I am reviewing was purchased for Dell UK and has the following configuration
Intel™ Core i7-820QM(1.73GHz. 8MB.Quad Core)
English Genuine Windows® 7 Professional (64Bit OS)
17in Widescreen WUXGA (1920x1200) RGB with EdgetoEdge Blood Orange LCD Panel
1GB nVIDIA FX3800M (with 1GB dedicated memory)
8GB 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel (4x2GB)
2x 160 GB (7200 Rpm) Serial ATA in RAID 0
(Replaced with 1x Intel 80GB X-25M 2ND GEN SSD and 1x 500GB HDD)
Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n), Ethernet, Modem, and Bluetooth Connectivity
8X DVD+/-RW Drive Slot Load with Optical Media Included

OS Support, Software and Drivers

An odd place to start but nowhere on the net has anyone covered the M6500 and Linux. I’ll start with Windows however.

As you’d expect the driver support in windows for the M6500 is excellent and the system feels very stable. With the exception of Norton (which I dislike personally) the system was loaded with absolutely no bloatware.

Linux support in my opinion is legendary. I installed ubuntu 9.10 as a test as it seems to be the most popular linux out there. I did a standard install to an ext4 partition and it installed in about 4 minutes.

After the reboot I was surprised to find that despite the lack of the nvidia binary drivers the screen was set up 100% correctly at 1920x1200. I started playing around and found that ALL the hardware was installed and working correctly: Bluetooth, Wireless, Card Reader, Sound, Ethernet, Firewire, Touchpad, Nipple!

I then installed the binary nvidia driver and ubuntu restricted extras and rebooted. Upon reboot the system again was still in the correct resolution and desktop acceleration was enabled. I played a few flash and divx videos and had a bash on tuxracer and everything was perfect. 5 days later and this is still the case.

Build and Design

The laptop’s build quality is outstanding, there is no part of the system that creaks, flexes or feels cheap.

The outer casing is aluminium coated in a metallic orange paint and looks gorgeous. Not gorgeous in a pimped Citroen Saxo sort of way but rather the rugged attractiveness of the original Land Rover Defender (or a Z06 for the Americans.)

I have had a few laptops and this once has received the best thumbs up from a random sample group I’ve ever had (apart from Mac lover Laura who couldn’t find the apple logo so it was bound to be ****)

It’s the sort of machine that if you were using it in star bucks people would probably think you were designing a bridge or something.

The casing feels strong and a little prone to finger prints which blurs the nice shine it gives under direct light. That is my only criticism.

Internally the E2E Glass screen surround in very sturdy. At the top the E2E glass meets with the alluminium outer casing and at the bottom there is about 1cm of solid plastic between the glass and the hinges. This looks quite rubbish in photos but in real life it looks sweet.

The hinges themselves are magnificent, closing the screen puts up just the right amount of resistance throughout closing, the action is silent and it’s terminated with a study click into place notifying you that you have successfully closed your manly laptop.

Opening the lid is also very good. You press the button (which feels solid) on the front and the lid springs to 1cm open leaving you to enjoy to smooth opening motion of the screen.

The keyboard and track pad surround is hard plastic but has a nice feel to it. At the rear there is the speaker grill which feels strong and thankfully has small enough holes that I won’t get my tobacco stuck in the speakers. To the right of that grill there is the power on and instant on button (which does nothing by default). The power button is decent, glows blue when the machine is receiving power and again is quite solid. I will cover the track pad and keyboard in more detail later.

The only down side of the design is the hard 90 degree edge which you end up placing your wrists on whilst typing. This is more of an issue if you have the laptop positioned right on the edge of your desk/table as if the laptop is further away resting your arms on the desk takes the pressure off. An annoyance but could be annoying enough for some to buy an external keyboard.

The underside of the machine is pretty much all metallic orange and vents with a docking station port in the centre. The battery clips out very easily with the stroke of one latch but is done is such a way that this will not happen accidentally.

One the battery is removed it is incredible simple to get into the internal machine. You remove 2 screws and slide the base towards yourself. Complete internals exposed! Great!

Screen and Speakers

The M6500 Covet comes with a 17” Screen at 19:10 widescreen ratio. The screen is covered with attractive Edge to Edge glass. The resolution is 1920x1200 which will provide great screen real estate for working and allows 1080p movies to be displayed at their correct resolution with small black lines above and below the movie. (Movie loving 16:9 loves can go cry elsewhere).

The RGB Led panel is truly superb, it is too bright at full brightness to be used in a dimly lit room. Colours look bright and vivid, movies look wonderful and contrast is clear. Some photographers have raised concerns that perhaps the screen is too saturated and is difficult to calibrate to perfection. That may be a problem and therefore I suggest you read the full M6500 thread on forum.notebookreview.com. For everybody else the screen as it comes is amazing.

Viewing angles are also great, looking at the screen from the side almost down the screen results in no hugely visible change of colour. From the bottom the screen appears to get darker the lower you look at it but not too much. The inverse is true from the top, looking at the screen straight down it is lighter than normal but still possible to read text.

Reflections from the E2E glass are really not as bad as I was expecting. Saying that I live in England and we don’t really have sun.

The speakers output a decent quality sound although it does sound like someone stole to bass as the machine is not equipped with a subwoofer. The speakers are loud enough for a reasonably sized room to enjoy a film without desiring more volume.

The headphone jack worked great with no real issues at all.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard on the M6500 is a truly full size keyboard, if you place a normal desktop keyboard inline with it everything pretty much lines up so typing for the desktop user will require no adapting.

The keys are of traditional style not this new chiclet thingy. Keys feel nice to the touch and when pressed make minimal noise. The feeling of hitting the keys is wonderful and feedback is nice. You could really type on it all day without much issue.

The backlighting is good and easy to turn off. By default if the keyboard or touchpad is not used for a while the backlighting turns of and resumes as soon as you move the mouse of start to type. It is a little shame that light leaks from between the keys, but would be really hard to stop unless you put a tiny led under each individual key. Overall it’s a very useful and attractive feature.

The touchpad is multitouch which by default was not enabled nor were the synaptics touchpad drivers installed. After installation of the drivers from Dell online I had the option to enable a myriad of features such a two finger scrolling, scroll areas, click on tap etc. I played until it worked as I wanted it to.

In terms of general use the touchpad is very responsive. The texture is nice and would not get annoying after prolonged use. There are 3 buttons which are useful to CAD and 3D people and gives the option to map the 3rd button to something useful for the rest of us.

There is a little mark that looks like a copyright symbol on the touchpad that when pushed quickly lights up the touchpad with an odd circle and 4 numbers which I’ll never use, maybe for DJ’ing?

The nipple... Don’t really use it and I’ve never used a laptop before that had one since the late 90’s. It works...

Ports and Features

The M6500 has a good selection of ports and connectivity around the outside of the unit.

There is nothing apart from the lid button on the front of the machine. On the rear there is the power connector almost central

On the left there is

6-pin firewire 1393 port
2 USB 2.0 ports
Microphone and Headphone port
PC Card / Smart Card Slot
SD Card Slot
Slot loading DVD drive

On the right there is

2 USB 2.0 ports (one doubles as eSATA)
Digital Display port,
VGA port
Ethernet port
Expresscard Slot (There are USB 3 cards on the market)
Wireless Switch

Performance

I’m really not a benchmark sort of man so I’ll rely on WEI for numbers and “feel” i’m sure there will be many benchmarks etc in the M6500 thread

Firstly the feel of the machine. Everything feels very quick, (I’m talking about after apps are open so we can avoid storage device talk for the moment) photoshop, indesign, games all run very well, filters process quickly etc etc, (it’s a quad core i7 and performs as expected). To sum it up it feels like your working on a $5000 machine.

WEI scores are
CPU 7.1
RAM 7.4
GPU Aero 6.9
GPU Gaming 6.9
Primary HDD (RAID 0 mechanical) 5.9
Primary HDD (Intel SSD) 7.7

Gaming on the machine is the best on any laptop I’ve used. I had a SLI 2x 9800 GTS setup not long ago and the Nvidia 3800M kicks it.

I’ve only run a few games on the machine, namely Demigod with runs at highest settings 2x AA. SOASE, Maxed out. Unreal Tournament 3, Maxed out.

This brings me to my only real recommendation for the machine. To get the real benefit of the hardware in the machine I implore you to get even a small SSD for your OS and primary apps. With the mechanical RAID 0 the machine felt quick but not $5000 quick, boot time was good not great. As soon as I put in the Intel 80GB SSD, boot and app load times feel so considerably faster the machine felt like it cost $5000 if that makes sense.

Heat and Noise

During normal use the machine is practically silent and all the areas you’d touch remain completely cool. Using the machine on your lap you’ll have warm knees as all the heat seems to be at the rear of the machine.
Ramping up the usage the fans kick in as necessary but do not come on for very long and are not too loud or annoying.

Whilst playing a modern game with high settings the fans stay on all the time, not too loud but not quiet either. The rear of the machine gets very warm but all the areas the user touches stay cool. You wouldn’t want to run a modern game maxed out on your lap.

As soon as the game is finished literally 2 seconds afterwards to fans slow right down. Really impressive cooling Dell.

Battery

I use the battery as an expensive UPS occasionally draining and recharging it.
At full brightness, wifi on etc I got about 2 hours just so I could give you some numbers.

Power Adaptor
I feel this deserves its own section. The standard power adaptor is huge! I have the slim version and in surface area it is very large. I recommend that everyone that is not deskbound gets the slim adaptor.

Bizarrely I’m happy that the power adaptor is manly as some other notebooks with much more portable adaptors struggle to draw sufficient power and throttle because of it.

Portability

The M6500 is a solid lump. It’s by far not the heaviest machine i’ve ever owned but with the power brick it weighs a little. I don’t think that anyone over the age of 6 is really going to have much of an issue though. Saying that you would not want to do an hours commute on foot with the laptop every day.

I purchased the Targus XL backup with the laptop and once worn like a 8 year old school kid with both straps and properly adjusted the machine doesn’t feel too heavy at all.

Conclusion

The Precision M6500 is one of the most powerful notebooks on the market.
A great CPU, GPU, Chipset all packaged in a decent 17” framework with adequate cooling makes this machine the best workhorse notebook on the market.

It’s an expensive machine that is living proof of “you get what you pay for”. Some smaller form factor notebooks struggle with throttling and heat issues with the core i7 cpu’s. With Dell’s impressive cooling this is not an issue on the M6500.

If you have the cash, have enough muscles to carry the unit and power adaptor and want performance in every aspect get the M6500.

Pros

Linux Support
The screen is bright and vivid
The GPU is powerful
The CPU runs fast without any throttling
The system runs cool and quiet
The keyboard is the nicest i've ever typed on
The touchpad and nipple are great
Machine has minimal bloatware, after norton was deleted that is...
All the ports are in sensible locatons
The machine is SOOOOO easy to open and access the internal components.
The screen hinges are strong and dont creak
The screen catch is strong
The sound is decent no subwoofer but thats fine imho
The materials in the machine feel really nice.
Keyboard layout is superb with no annoying changes
Keyboard and Trackpad buttons dont click so loud the room can here
Trackpad and Nipple have 3 buttons
E2E Glass screen is gorgeous
BIOS has a VERY decent amount of options (disable just about anything, only thing you cant do is overclock)
Battery life seems to be very good
System takes the laptopvideo2go.com upated drivers without issue
Quadro Support Nvidia PhysX

Cons

90 degree front side can feel annoying on the wrist after a while
Slot loader is quite loud
Machanical HDD performance is poor even in RAID 0 (got a 5.9 in WEI) put in a small 80GB gen 2 Intel x-25 and get 7.7 and the machine flies. The mechnical drives they use are Seagate Momentus 7200.4
By default the machine ships with the DPI at 125% which if you didn't know it was there as a web developer can screw up some website layout and some older apps.

 

Sweet pictures. I like how it dwarfs your little table.

 

Thanks very much for the review

 

God knows how notebook review manage to write so much stuff it takes ages!

 

tomcom2k: you might want update some of the images (to remove your service/tag numbers etc)

 

Are they readable? I blurred the big ones

 

Thanks for the writeup TomCom2k. Very nice laptop!

I received an email this morning saying that mine has been delayed for a week because of parts. It didn't give any details other than that. It was meant to ship out yesterday and arrive on the 19th and now the est arrival date is the 27th. One week or so won't kill me