Placing an order of 50 Dell E6400 units

You didn't mention what kind of work they are for. Unless heavy 3D work is involved, I would definitely skip the Nvidia card. The Intel option should be sufficient for other types of office work. I have the Nvidia in my E6500 (I'm returning it), and it causes the fan to run continuously for up to an hour, just to pause for 10 min. (ambient temp. 21 deg.). This is with practically nothing going on on the computer (5 % CPU load, MS Word in front and some other programs in the background). Temp. measurements show that it's the GPU temperature that vary and causes the fan to kick in (at 53 deg C).

There seem to be solid evidence that the Nvidia chips have a design flaw (see other threads on this forum) - that is probably why DELL try to hold them cold and with as little temperature variation as possible. These chips may nevertheless cause an earlier death to your notebooks than an Intel option.

The fan noise is an issue for me and may be for some of your users as well if in silent surroundings. And the fan drains the battery.

If noise is a concern, 7200 RPM disks are normally more noisy than 5400 disks. The E6500/6400 amplifies hard disk noise.

 

I concur with the above post. Only get the nVidia GPU if you really need the extra 3D graphics performance. The Intel X4500 will handle all the normal 2D graphics and includes features such as an HD decoder. Also, the 5400rpm HDDs tend to be quieter. The 160GB 5400rpm HDDs may be single platter (I got the Samsung HM160HI) which have very respectable performance.

John

 

Thanks for the info, the computers will mostly be used for regular office tasks, but they will also be going to run Adobe Photoshop, and Flash CS4, not all of them will do so, but they might want to as we already got the license for it, and as far as I know they have 3d support now, not sure what the requirements for it is though, I don’t think it’s that though on the computer, and I never knew that the nVidia cards were "faulty", and I guess they don’t really need the faster HDD, it does not really matter for them I guess, as they are only 6people in several rooms, and each of them again in a cubicle, so it’s really quiet in the rooms, so I guess a quiet computer would be good so that they won’t annoy them with it.

Thanks again for all the excellent help.

 

You should have backlit keyboards if you ever expect the employees to be working outside of the office, it's worth every dollar. I think that the 1440x900 LED screen is worth the money too. Maybe you could buy the 4GB RAM 3rd party to offset the added productivity features?

I wouldn't buy the NVIDIA card due to fan noise issues. Once the fan turns on it does not turn off so I end up restarting to make it go away.