Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

Is the M6600's lcd cover a fingerprint magnet too?

The lcd screen (not RGB ) is good, but nothing spectacular. It can produce loads of brightness nonetheless.

 

Actually i have no idea as I haven't received it yet....


Sent from my iPhone with Tapatalk

 

Just bought an M4600 after my M4300 finally passed away.

I have some questions regarding the display - I have the LGD02D9 1920x1080 panel with standard white LED backlight. Horizontal viewing angles are very good and vertical good.

I noticed that text, images and video were oversharp. Lossy block compression and other artefacts in videos seemed too obvious. Eventually I settled on a fix whereby I turned down gamma to 0.9 in the Intel control panel. I also tweaked a few other settings (brightness and blue brightness as it's temperature is overly cool).

Has anybody else found this to be necessary or am I the only one? If you've not tried it I'd be keen to hear your comments as to whether it is better/worse.

Hope this hasn't been asked before.

 

Hi, Everyone,

I am now a lucky M4600 owner as well. Did a fantastic deal with a guy from Dell here in Germany. They were really quick as well. Ordered the 27th of October and it arrived from Shanghai on the EARLY morning of the 3rd of November (One of two inconveniences so far with the laptop: The delivery man got me out of bed ).

When talking about inconveniences I got to mention that it took me some time to figure out how to get the LAN working as it connected to the Modem and instantly disconnected again (about 6000 times according to the Windows event log ). Well finally I figured out that manually limiting the speed in the properties to 10Mbps helps...after almost five hours of messing around with protocols and IP settings. A hint for those that have internet that supports more than 10 Mbps: Place a switch between your modem and your computer.

Anyway the display is very nice (got the non IPS 1080p) and VERY bright on highest brightness. At the moment I run it at one setting above the lowest brightness. 16:9 is something to get used to even though it offers the advantage that you can display 2 pages in Word simultaneously.
The backlit keyboard is one of the nicest keyboards i have seen so far and the USB-Ports have a pretty firm "grip". But actually I am just realizing that this is the owners lounge and not the buyers guide forum...

One thing that surprised me was that it shipped with a tray load DVD-Drive. Unlike other trays it leaves a pretty robust impression but I was actually looking forward to a Slot-load. As some were complaining earlier on in this thread that the slot load would not be compatible with Mini-DVDs or Mini-CDs i would consider to swop. Just drop me a message if interested...

Also there are over and over questions raised about batteries and running time so I conducted some testing. For me mobility is not too important but a comfort factor so i ordered the 97Wh 9-cell-battery. So have a look at the following performance figures and keep in mind that due to non-IPS and the Quadro 2000M i have NVidia-Optimus always enabled. Also consider that I don't have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth switched on and work with a LAN-cable but therefore have the 500GB 7400rpm HDD. So read closely, pan:

• The maximum I could ever pull from the Battery ever yet was 70 Watts which was either rendering fur in 3dsMax or having real time ray tracing enabled in Inventor 2012. It both pulls a 100% CPU of all the 8 threads. The graphics card stays nearly untouched though by these applications: The maximum I got it to was about 56% load so far.On constant maximum CPU load and medium GPU usage the 97Wh serve you for theoretically 1 hour and 23.14285 minutes

• The minimum in absolute idle (after about 2 Minutes, you can even hear the Audio switch off) and the Dell Power Management plan the notebook pulls 8.73 Watts. This serves you for theoretically 11 hours and 6.66666 minutes

• As I am just typing this here in Word with 3 Tabs open in Firefox and listening to a 320kBits/s Mp3 in Media Player and the performance monitor running I am running on an average of 14.055 Watts and 3.356% CPU load over the last 10 Minutes. Serves you for about 6 hours and 54.084 minutes

• Stitching a Panorama with 13 Pictures of 14MP using Photomerge takes about 7 Minutes and consumes 34.344 Watts on average.

• Running FurMark on the 1080p preset (100% GPU at 1/3rd of the maximum clocking speed) takes 58.576 Watts.

• The following values will add to the idle Power consumption: The difference between lowest and fullest brightness of the display is roughly 4.3 Watts. The NVidia GPU in Idle (clocked down to 1/5th of the full power) uses about 7 Watts if am not mistaken. Watching a 720p vid on YouTube actually costs you 12 Watts (that is 12% load on the Intel HD Graphics and 3% CPU load). Moderate surfing adds about 6 to 7 Watts

So on average I would say I get about 5 hours when working normally until I have to plug in the power cable.



This didn’t really answer your question directly, pan, but have a look at the product reviews and it tells you that the docking station is compatible with a Precision M6600 (which implies it should be compatible with a M4600 as well) and that the slice battery fits into this port:



E/Port



And I agree with you, pterodactylo, this notebook is attracting fingerprints even more than Megan Fox is attracting men. You could even worsen the situation by setting Megan Fox as a desktop backgrund and the fingerprints would not only extend to the case and lid but also to the screen. I should have gone for the silver case...


Anyway I hope it helps resolving the myth that Precision Workstations are Battery Monsters that make people wander over and buy a lenovo W520 due to longer battery life.


Little question in the end here though: Is Runcore putting efforts into making their Pro V Sata III become compatible with the intel QM67 chipset? Any news on that? I am actually waiting for it...


Hoping for good news


Tradeiteasy

 

Just got my M4600 tonight. I don't think my text is overly sharp. It is sharp but as sharp as I would expect. My screen's temperature may be slightly on the cool side, now that you mention it.

 

IPS or non-IPS?

 

Ah, interesting. Assuming you have the same panel as me (TN not IPS) I'm curious to know whether you are running on AC or battery.

After more searching I realise that my 'fix' of dropping the gamma is wrong. In fact the panel was doing adaptive contrast enhancement which is what was screwing me over. This is not done by default on AC.

The effects are very obvious when you switch between fullscreen photos that have very differing overall brightness levels. I noticed that the image would be adjusted within a fraction of a second after it was first displayed.

In the Intel graphics properties under Power, Battery there is an option to disable this although I don't have my laptop with me to confirm the exact option name. Once I disabled this 'functionality' I am extremely happy with the TN display - great viewing angles, colours and black point. Such a shame that Dell/Intel enable this broken power saving functionality by default.

 

Valuable hint, lewiz! Thanks a lot. I disabled the power savings and the display got better.

I always wondered why my desktop background would change in color a little once i clicked the start button. Now it's gone...

@nano: Have you played around with ClearType yet? Has helped me a little. You can configure cleartype under Control Center\Display\ and on the left you will find an entry containing something like "configure Cleartype".

 

Hi all,

I was considering buying a w520 but after considerable research and, more importantly, the $200 discount at the moment, Im in the favour of m4600, due to the fact that it has two fans and two heatsinks,which is awesome.

What is not so awesome however, is the fact that the RAID configuration is a nightmare and I would really like one.

My question is:

1: Can I buy the cheapest quad core rig, MINUS the raid, and enable RAID myself later buy buying two identical disks? Is that possible, because with the lenovo w520, one has to get it configured with RAID when configuring otherwise raid will never be enabled on it.

Please let me know if I can just buy it with one HD minus the RAID and enable it later.


My config:

Module Description Show Details
Mobile Precision M4600 Precision Mobile M4600
Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Professional, No Media, 64-bit, English
Processor Intel® Core™ i7-2720QM (Quad Core 2.20GHz,6M cache) with Turbo BoostTechnology 2.0
Memory 2.0GB, DDR3-1333MHz SDRAM, 1 DIMM
Internal Keyboard Internal English Keyboard
Graphics NVIDIA® Quadro® 1000M with 2GB GDDR3
Primary Storage 250GB 7200rpm Hard Drive
Fingerprint Reader Options No Fingerprint Reader and No Contactless Smartcard Reader
LCDs 15.6" UltraSharp™ FHD(1920x1080) Anti-Glare LED-backlit with Premium Panel Guarantee
AC Adapter 180W 3P, A/C Adapter
Media Bay Devices 8X DVD with Cyberlink Power DVD™, no media
Camera / Microphone Noise Cancelling Digital Array Microphone
Wireless LAN (802.11) Intel® Centrino® Ultimate-N 6300 802.11a/b/g/n Half Mini Card
Systems Management Intel vPro™ Technology’s Advanced Management Features
Productivity Software Microsoft Office Starter: reduced-functionality Word and Excel with ads. No PowerPoint or Outlook
RAID Configuration All Hard Drives, Non-RAID, 1 or 2 drive total configuration
Primary Battery 6-cell (60Wh) Lithium Ion Battery
Hardware Support Services 3 Year Basic Hardware Service with 3 Year NBD Limited Onsite Service After Remote Diagnosis
Energy Star/E-PEAT Gold Energy Star 5.0/E-PEAT Gold
System Recovery Resource DVD - Contains Drivers
System Recovery Recovery Media for Genuine Windows® 7 Professional,64bit,Multiple Language
Processor Branding Intel Core i7 vPro Label



Above config is costing me 1365. A W520 with almost the same but 2 RAID 0 320 gig drives and 2760QM and 4 gig ram is going for 1335.

Much thanks in advance.

 

Non-IPS

I don't notice the option that you speak of. I haven't noticed what you've noticed with the contrast enhancement although I haven't used it on battery much, and I run it on the high performance profile always. I've also been using brightness at 100%. I did do the monitor calibration in the control panel and found the monitor to be a tad bit off. I'll probably run a 3rd party calibration program just to make sure it wasn't just my mind playing tricks on me though.

I just got through configuring ClearType. Made some minor adjustments. You can cut a finger on the edges of this text