Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

And since you've got 4GB DDR2 800MHz, I highly recommend going for Vista x64.. Never thought I would be saying this, from all the -ve press Vista has gotten, and I was definitely an XP man until I tried it. Vista x64 drivers have been nothing but stable for me, I stripped down the OS to run only the functions I want, and its just so smooth, transparent to all my work and day-to-day uses.. and better use of your extra phys memory and computing power.

The posts to this forum and others on NBR have been comprehensive and awesome, current M4400 setup has been by far my best computing experience yet. Enjoy

 

Does anyone knows this issue?

 

Hallo Everybody!

My first post here. Just ordered my M4400 with the following config:

P8600
FX770M
WXGA+ White LED
4096 MB RAM
320GB (7200Rpm) Hard Drive
UPEK Fingerprint Reader
6-cell Battery
Dell Wireless 370 Bluetooth 2.1 MiniCard
Intel Pro Wireless 5300 (802.11a/g/ Draft-n 3x3) MiniCard
US-Int Qwerty Backlit Keyboard
XP PRO SP3

It will be assembled in the most modern Dell's fab in Łódź, Poland. And Poland is a place where I live . So, will see about the quality as some users over here experienced very bad assembly quality, but their machines were assembled in Ireland and bought indirectly, so maybe coming from an outlet. Anyway, I'm quite excited about it, but have to wait probably some two weeks before I lay my hands on it.

And a question to WestDev, how about heat and noise while gaming with your overclocked Quadro?

Cheers

 

Another question to WestDev on your overclocked Quadro...

What score did you get when running 3DMark06 and what gpu driver version are you using?

 

Have you tried Windows 7 64-bit? I always preferred Vista to XP, even when Vista was still cranky, and I still like Vista, but with Windows 7 Beta (even with some minor problems) I hardly ever boot Vista, and Win 7 RTM with M4400 shall be the best experience ever.

 

@spencerwop
Laptops will downclock using Intel's SpeedStepping technology for the processor, but you can override this as you found w/ Windows power management (just remove the processor clock cap).
NVidia will also use a power management feature in many of their drivers for video (PowerMizer I believe it's called). You can disable this, but I just used NVidia Tools to set the clock speeds at default all the time, so there is no performance difference when I am on AC or battery. It will also allow OCing if you want that to get a little more performance.

 

Xirurg: You need this patch to fix DCP reporting that you have a P3 Xeon.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946554

 

Haven't gamed much, primary use is design and business apps.. OC'd just to explore hardware potentials (set rules in Nvidia to OC only in response to specific program launches). That said, I can offer the following HWMonitor CPU heat comparisons under ORTHOS stress and GPU performance measured with 3DMark06 (driver 176.53).


Stock 770M (500/800/1200):
5933 3DMarks, GPU@78C

OC'd 770M (675/920/1685):
7316 3Dmarks, GPU@85C

System at Idle
Core 0 -- 22C
Core 1 -- 24C
GPU -- 47C
HDD -- 34C

Orthos, CPU Stock V
Core 0 -- 77C
Core 1 -- 85C
GPU -- 62C
HDD -- 40C

Orthos, CPU UV 15%
Core 0 -- 53C
Core 1 -- 61C
GPU -- 58C
HDD -- 38C

The system is pretty quiet under normal browsing/wp, but low fan seems to run frequently under A11; less fan under A13 but more DPC Latency. Overclocking raises the "idle" GPU Temp by 2C. Of course, stressing the CPU or GPU sets fan to high, but its never very loud (compared to my Inspiron 8200 ; ). Undervolted, the fan rarely runs under idle or normal browsing. My stock heat profile from Dell was ok, including an apparently decent thermal paste/clay application; replacing with AS5 myself only reduced temps by maybe 1C-2C. However, note that lowering the wattage by 15% reduced average CPU temps by 23C. Try it here (NBR UV Guide).

Sorry for no screen shoots, I just happened to have scribbled some of this down.. Can you guys share similar stats or observations?

 

I loaded a dual boot of ver 7057 x64 and poked around a bit, but I didn't really like it too much.. didn't dislike it either, OS ram usage down to 27% from 36% was cool, just not compelling enough to load all my programs again, sort partition assignments and try to find a couple of missing drivers. But I wish that I had tested temps, latency and GPU/Application performance under Windows 7. Have you?

 

Thanks WestDev for the overclocked Quadro info. Much appreciated.