Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

Hello,
I've just received M4600 with nVidia 2000M and IPS panel and 2GB of ram. Of course, I want to buy memory for this machine and I was thinking about Corsair Vengeance 1600MhZ. I decided for 16GB.
May somebody suggest me weather to take 4x4GB or 2x8GB. The latency settings are a bit lower for 4x4GB and it is 30% cheaper than 2x8GB configuration.
On the other hand, I am wondering will and how much autonomy on battery suffer if I use 4 over 2 dimm slots?
thank you for advices
best

 

Well, at least compared to previous iterations of Dell 15" mobile workstations the M4600 is an improvement in that department as M4500 and 4400 had the graphics card soldered on the motherboard. Too bad that 3.0a cards released so far are garbage most of them (aside from 2000M and Firepro 5950M) and not only that but they are pretty hard to find. There is quite bigger offer on 3.0b spare parts. It would be great that Dell uses full 3.0b MXM form factor in M4700, it may be enough reason to replace my M4600.

 

your should be fine with the 4 x 4GB DIMMS

I doubt the different is that great in power consumption between the two.

 

If you have a Quad Core, and plan to stay with 16GB, go 4x4@1600MHz with lower timings. Power will be fine. I did read somewhere that Dell deactivates the 2 DIMMs under the keyboard of the M4600 with a Dual Core, but don't really know. If this applies to you, I would first call Tech Support to verify. Give us your impression so far. My Son's gets here Thursday.

Newegg.com - CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Laptop Memory Model CMSX8GX3M2A1600C9

DELL Precision M4600: i7-2860QM | 32GB DDR3-1333 | 128GB mSATA Boot | 750GB SATA @7200 | Quadro 2000M | WLED FHD | Intel 6300 | Dell 375 BT | Backlit KB | WebCam | Mic | 9 Cell |Windows Pro 7-64

 

Yes, the 2 DIMM slots under the keyboard are deactivated when using a dual-core machine. Colleague of mine found this out the hard way.

 

Thanks for answers, I have quad-core i7-2760qm, so all 4 dimms might be activated.

I was just wondering what is the difference in the power usage and thus the battery life when using 4 over 2 dimms for the same amount of memory, 16gb.
On ibm-lenovo part of the forum I have found some data about using 1x4gb or 2x4gb and difference was ~5W for 4gb or ~7.5W for 8gb. Is this caused only by number of populated dimms or because of the size of memory.

 

Yes occupying all dimms do make quite a difference in battery life. difference for me is about 10~hr vs 8~hr (8G vs 16G) at idle from win7's battery calculation. To answer your question, I do believe it has more to do with the amount of rams (more ram more chips that suck power? or denser the chip will suck more power as well) than the dimms you occupying.

In any case, if you value every bit of battery life then u might want to think twice on the amount of ram u put into. If you are mostly going to have power source around you, I wouldn't worry about it and just max it out.

 

Anyone running the latest NVidia drivers from the NVidia website and have Optimus working..

I tried installing and it broke Optimus, just wondering if anyone had any better luck.

 

Hy Tom_bell07,

After your question I tried a tool called "Optimus Test Tool" that is freely downlodable.
After install, it confirmed that Optimus works properly.
I've installed onto my 4600 last Quadro drivers (296.70).

Doc

 

For whatever reason, my Dell Smart settings are always showing up as running with the 2000m processor which causes me to always use the higher power card with the 296.70 drivers.

Are you running the Dell Feature Enhancement Pack "Smart settings" that show you the brightness, volume, etc indicators?

Thanks.