Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

I did. Right out the box I pushed it to 600/1205/900. It just broke 8000 3dmark06.

I haven't pushed the limits yet.

Have been playing Starcraft 2 like a mad man after work and it's been a charm.

Temps are ~70 C underload. No difference @ stock or overclocked.

I'll leave it as is.

Do you still have possession of the m4400?

 

we bought 13 M4500's and i grabbed one that made a hissing noise in the front left, very high pitched. after a few days i figured it was the fan and took my harddrive to a new chasis. The hissing persisted. Other laptops didn't seem to be making the hissing noise, so i concluded it was the harddrive.

2 weeks later upon a reboot, certain files were missing from my drive that shouldn't have been. I immediately switched to a new laptop that didn't have the hissing noise.

a week later i imaged all the laptops with a standard image. The one that had the hissing imaged successfully, but upon boot key files were missing again (files in the windows directories, etc).

So my final determination was hissing sound-->bad hard drive.

One other note. The hissing drive's board was a aqua blue color, all the other non hissing drives that i checked (4 of the other 12) where more of a aqua green color. The models/firmware/other identifying information were the exact same.

These were the 500 GB 7200 drives, which turned out to be samsungs.

 

IRRT (Intel Rapid Restore Technology) has nothing to do with IRST (Intel Rapid Storage Technology)...the names are confusing though. Setting your SATA operation to IRRT instead of AHCI adds RAID functionality but if your not using this it's better to stick with AHCI. In the M4400 for instance the IRRT setting caused quite a big part of the DPC latency issues. IRST is the newest version of what used to be called IMSM (Intel Matrix Storage Manager...yeah, more of those) and installs drivers and hdd management functionality for your hdd's

Did you try the guide for switching that was done for the M4400?
What worked for me was uninstalling the drivers through "device manager", reboot into BIOS, set "SATA operation" to AHCI, insert Win7 DVD, reboot and let it fail, then it'll ask if you want to run "startup repair which installed the AHCI drivers and all was done. Your milage may vary though, with others this somehow didn't work.

 

Whats the part number again for the 64gb SSD??

 

What devices in device manager did you uninstall drivers for?

 

Hello guys,

I'm following your thread really carefully. Best info about the M4500 on the internet

I'm planning to buy one of these machines. But I've got a doubt and I couldn't find a feedback online.

The question is to understand what could be the best deal between two configs (good discount on both) :

ALIENWARE M17x R2................... M6500 Precision
Double ATI 5870 Crossfire...............ATI Firepro M7820
Full HD (1920x1200) RGBLED...........Full HD (1920x1200) RGBLED
Intel Core I7-720QM.......................Intel Core I7-720QM
6Go RAM.......................................6Go RAM
500Go 7200 tr/min.........................500Go 7200 tr/min
5.3kg............................................3.8kg
2000€...........................................2000€

Clearly the GPU is more powerfull on the Alienware. But except that, how to choose between both ?

Thank you very much for your help,

Cheers,

 

wrong forum. this is the M4500, what you're looking at is the M6500. Check the dell outlet, the M6500's start from around $1200 at the moment.

 

Thanks, sorry, my mistake

 

To be honest, i can't remember exactly. I know it's now listed as Intel ICH9M-E/M SATA AHCI controller under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers but i think it was something different before.
I also once had several devices/connections showing under storage controllers which where gone after the installation. The layout is different now so no way to get that info back i'm afraid

 

think it could have been under "Storage Controllers" listed as "Intel(R) ICH8M-E/ICH9M-E SATA RAID Controller"?