Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

Nope. The M6400/M6500 have motherboards that are at least as complex, but they POST in less than half the time the M4500 takes. There's clearly an issue with the M4500 BIOS.

I might add in parentheses that my M4500 also cannot reliably recognize my WinTec ExpressCard SSD, which works fine in my M6400. Probably another BIOS issue, if not a problem with the electrical design of the motherboard.

 

Can I change to IRRT at any time, or is that only an option during a bare metal OS install?

 

Maybe this thread is relevant?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...itch-irrt-ahci-mode-e6400-e6500-vista-16.html

 

Hmmm... This question has suddenly made me concerned about my own setup.

I just did a fresh install of Windows7 64bit with all applications and tweaking on the latest 120GB Intel X25 SSD. Seems there is a lot of discussion going on about "SATA operation" BIOS settings and TRIM support. And it also seems very hard to verify that TRIM commands ACTUALLY arrive at the SSD (IS there a sure way to figure this out?).

Now I didn't pay attention to all this before my install. And it turns out I have SATA operation set to "RAID ON(Intel Rapid Restore Technology IRRT)" in the BIOS. This while talk of the town is that TRIM is not supported on RAID, not even in Windows7


Intel's driver update utility confirms I have the latest version of the Intel(R) ICH8M-E/ICH9M-E/5 Series/6 Series SATA RAID Controller (v 9.6.0.1014 )

And there is also this (Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) — Is there TRIM support for RAID configurations?) statement that "Intel® Rapid Storage Technology 9.6 supports TRIM in AHCI mode and in RAID mode for drives that are not part of a RAID volume."

So this makes me hopefull that my setup is OK after all (since I'm not actually running a RAID volume)

But it would be nice to hear confirmation of this theory, or a way to verify.

 

I assume it is normal that the driver for the SSD itself in device manager is reported as a Microsoft driver? (v6.1.7600.16385)

 

Apologies if this has already been asked, but does anyone know the part # for a second hard drive cover? Not an optical drive bay hard disk caddy, just the small plastic cover that fits on the end of the drive.

I am trying to write a DSDT for my M4500 to use as a hackintosh, right now the power mgmt doesn't work so I am going to get another drive to switch between windows and mac.

Here is an example of what I am talking about:

DELL Precision M4300 D830 SATA Hard Drive Caddy Cover - eBay (item 160508464617 end time Dec-18-10 19:53:19 PST)

 

i have an 840qm + Quadro FX 1800M and the fan does not run constantly, only periodically, and rarely if i'm just doing basic stuff. my previous machine was a 12" Dell D430 with a ULV processor and the fan on that would run often without stop unless I used the Dell fan control software. No need for the software on the M4500 with this spec, though I don't believe it works on the M4500 anyway.

Watt usage on AC can be as low as 25 watts. Typically about 30 watts. Raising to 45 watts for CPU operation, or as much as 60watts when full CPU and GPU activity kicks in.

boot times - very quick with an SSD - you're right the BIOS startup takes longer!
- hardly the end of the world though, i don't use hibernate but prefer sleep mode which is near-instant on and consumes next to no power on batteries
- i tried disabling stuff in the bios but it made no difference, so i've left as is

i done a clean reinstall of windows 7 when i switched to my intel X25 160gb.
- i moved to ACHI mode instead of the raid version, though from what some of you are posting it seems to make no difference... though it did save me from having to install intels RAID driver... maybe with Intels G3 SSD's there may be a performance difference and you're better using Intels driver, but we'll have to see

re: HD/caddy thing
- mine will no longer fit after a few insertions, I'm not sure why - but I think the connector in the motherboard got bent ever so slightly and now it won't go.
- thankfully i got an esata cable from emodeus. in a sense i would never have used the caddy anyway because I would have a noisy spinning harddisk instead of a silent SSD based machine, unless I only put the caddy in when I wanted the HD - at which point the eSATA cable becomes a better bet.

one last point. This concerns Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 users only so forgive me for being a bit specialist, but hopefully those googling for a similar answer will pick this up. People on other forums said the Quadro FX 1800M wouldn't work with Adobe Premiere Pro's Mercury Playback Engine. They were wrong. I think the confusion is because the desktop Quadro FX 1800 has only 768mb of ram. The FX 1800M has a true 1GB, and I'm able to enjoy full 64-bit hardware accelerated video editing... on a 15" laptop!
You just need to ensure you change the "cuda_supported_cards.txt" file to include the line "Quadro FX 1800M". I'm guessing if you omit the "M" you might get the insufficient video RAM message which is what others have reported. I ordered this video card specifically for this software so I was overjoyed when I got it working... despite the whole of the Internet telling me otherwise.

 

I've not installed the new BIOS update yet, but I have identical WEI scores to you... except for hard disk speed, despite having a 160gb Intel X25 SSD I get 5.9, not 7.8. I had the exact same performance for my old 7200rpm hard disk. However, my SSD meets all of it's claimed performance targets in SSD analysis apps, and there is no comparison in real terms: with a HD the M4500 was considerably slower than my old D430 (which had an early generation 1 Sandisk SSD from Dell). With the SSD the M4500 is incredible.

I did some googling and it seems a lot of people are getting their HD speed in WEI recorded as "5.9", the same as their HDs too, just like me. I havn't found any obvious explanation - other than that WEI is bull.

 

Hi, just upgrade to win 7 due to company policy (not allowing it before).
I had very poor disc performance running on XP using my Dell provide SSD (SAMSUNG PM800 256GB), reason on xp seems to be that TRIM wasn't supported.

However now on Win 7 I get WEI as follows (see my system spec in the sign.):
7.1
7.5
6.4
6.4
5.9

So my disc seems to be the weak link again, now on a totaly fresh system!
So can I tune the SSD to improve or is the WEI just bull?

What discs are in system showing 7.8?

(BTW on my old m4300 with a 300GB HDD (7200rpm) i get 5.9 for Disc as well but the overall WEI is 3.5 due to the graphics)

 

There are reports of people having the mysterious "5.9 cap" with the exact same SSDs... at least 3 forums are discussing the exact issue with the Intel X25, with no obvious performance differences. My experience here confirms that, as does yours. I shouldn't worry too much about it - I and many others have spent too much time trying to work out what causes it to be capped at 5.9. What really matters is real world benchmarks.