Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

Actually, that's a pretty old fairy tale. First, the chips are exactly identical, they are simply running with different firmware. Second, the workstation versus the gaming cards typically show gaming performance that is identical within the uncertainty of the benchmarks. However, they usually outperform the gaming cards by quite large factors in professional graphics applications (sometimes by a factor of ten or more). Ironically, the links you posted actually show the workstation card outperforming the gaming card by a noticeable margin, but my guess is that this is due to differing hardware/software configs.

 

Well, the chips are indeed the same, but the FX 1800M does seem to be clocked higher than its gaming counterpart.
You're right about the benchmarks, and probably also about why they're that way. However, I did read something about the driver changing the way 3D objects are calculated, between professional and gaming lineups, where professional cards tend to completely render an object before allowing it to be displayed, and gaming cards improve speed over accurate rendering.
But don't get me wrong, I'd love that you be right!

 

Why didn't Dell use DX11 chips with their new notebooks? GT330 is 10.1 only . As for the difference between Quadro cards and their gaming counterparts I think that appart from different firmware/drivers the former must be cherry-picked samples of the same chip so they can run at higher frequencies.

 

You may be right for the stock drivers, not sure. But you should go to a place like NVIDIA & Laptop News | Latest NVIDIA drivers and related news | laptopvideo2go.com anyway to obtain current drivers (Dell drivers are usually extremely old and don't get updated at all once a system is out of production). Use the .inf enhancer at that site to get a driver that not only works on your Dell, but also to actually select "Performance" over "Quality" settings, if you so choose.

 

I'm looking at a M4500, and I have a question.

What is the screen quality of the HD+ vs Full HD? I want a great screen, but I'm thinking the Full HD is going to be a bit small, and I plan on doing some gaming on it and I'd rather have more effects than resolution.

 

Well, indeed, FHD looks very small on a 15,6" IMO. My M4500 shipped with system fonts set to 125% zoom factor, which made it more readable. At the end of the day, if you're not looking to watch 1080p movies on your laptop screen, I guess it's better to go for 1600x900, in order to get better gaming performance in native resolution. As for the screen real estate, HD+ is already enough for that screen size, and you can always use a secondary monitor!
Otherwise, regarding screen quality, I can only talk for the FHD screen, but I can tell you it looks great, very bright and great contrast. However, the colors on the non-RGBLED version (I have the WLED one, non-RGBLED) are usually not that true (I'm no pro, though), and will probably need a little tweaking on color profiles. Still looks great though, so if you're not a professional photographer or graphic designer, you probably won't give a rat's a**.

 

I have the same screen and I love it. It's comparable to an entry level desktop LCD...which is light years ahead of "most" notebook lcd's these days.

I have my window's set to 114% and in firefox I have it set to 110%.

Before this I had a 1600x900 screen on a 14.1" screen and in terms of "feel", it's very similar. I love this laptop. I loathed the screen/contrast on my Sony CW the moment I turned it on the first time.

 

Here is what Linux reports while booting:

ata4: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
ata4.00: ATA-7: SAMSUNG SSD PM800 mSATA 64GB, VBM72D1Q, max UDMA/100
ata4.00: 125045424 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32), AA
ata4.00: configured for UDMA/100
scsi 3:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA SAMSUNG SSD PM80 VBM7 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 125045424 512-byte logical blocks: (64.0 GB/59.6 GiB)
sd 3:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 sdb4

So it looks the same to me. It's odd that Linux and Windows see the devices in opposite orders, but it doesn't cause any problems.

 

Another Fedora 13 observation: I had to artificially set the DPI down to 100 DPI to make things look proper. I didn't have to do this with the NVidia nouveau drivers, but only with the official NVidia drivers.

To do this, go to System -> Preferences -> Appearance. Then click on the "Fonts" tab and click on the "Details..." button. In that pop-up, you can set the dots per inch to any arbitrary value. I think that the OS tried to set it to the correct value, but with the NVidia drivers everything looked funny until I changed the DPI to be 100.

While you're there you will want to enable subpixel smothing.

 

Thanks ekuns! According to the firmware version, it seems that I got the right disk off of eBay =)