Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ocking-vbios-mod-dell-precision-m4800.789891/

Just installed the m5100 and overclocked, pretty happy with the results so far. Looking at this now i dont know if i should have posted my results in the above thread (since im using a 4600), however, its the only thread where people are talking about overclocking this particular card (that I know of).

Bought my m4600 refurbished a few months ago. All the upgrades included it cost me around $400 which is amazing for what is actually a pretty capable workstation (i dabble in Premier Pro).
That being said i got a great deal on the ES cpu and picked up the m5100 for $90, but nonetheless the refurbished m4600 seems to be a great option for those of us on a budget.

Also ordered an mSATA 256gb SSD which is on the way.

As far as I know... Im using HWinfo. it works alright, a little weird. Have to use the respin feature, I set it to 100ms, using custom auto. Saved my cpu from running incredibly hot.

 

I had a M4600 with the Quadro 2000M card and a Dell 4k monitor that I hooked it up to. I used the Displayport connection and resolution was limited to 2560x1440. I didn't try it with HDMI.

 

M4600/M6600 do not have HDMI 1.4 or DIsplayPort 1.2 (these were new to the M4700/M6700 series). I am rather certain you won't be able to get 4K over HDMI. If you are able to get 4K of DisplayPort it will be at 30 Hz.

 

Ok, i bought and successfully setup my card. I used my heatsink from Quadro 2000M. The most important problem was very big temperatures. On ide:was aprox 50 C, but on any load, it was increase rapidly to more than 80C and computer went in emergency shut down. First what i made was make sure that heatsink touch main core. Was 1mm space between them. I take some copper pipe with 1mm girth (junk from house heater system) . I cuted square on 1x1cm dimension and mount it with thermal paste on both side. Works perfectly, i don't need hwinfo. I set my own powerplan with "Cool" thermal mode by Dell(Control Panel ->All Control Panel Items -> Power Options->Edit Plan Settings->Change Advanced Power Options ->Dell Enhanced Settings _> Thermal Mode). Temperatures are really low, on ide aprox 40C. On 100% gpu load, did't jump more than 62 C. I had 2 the same heatsinks on this dell to test, and any of them require that kind operation. And work great on both.

 

I just bought a Dell M4600 from a pawn shop. No blemishes on the outside that I could see.

Intel Core i7-2860QM
320 GB Toshiba HD
16 GB DDR3 Kingston RAM
Nvidia Quadro 1000M graphics card with 2 GB
1920 x 1080 matte non-IPS screen
Webcam
Back-lit keyboard
Windows 8 Pro 64-bit installed on Legacy BIOS ver. A08

I got it all for $340 out the door which was a good price considering it seemed to be in excellent condition.

It ran really hot when I got it home though, like up to 97 deg C with almost no load.

The M4600 had a Windows 7 Pro COA underneath the battery, so I set the BIOS to default and re-installed Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (I had a Dell recovery disk lying around). I also updated the BIOS to A16 per the recommendation on Dell's website.

Much better on the temperatures, but still kinda hot. Idle is around 50-60 deg C, and with any load (such as disk defrag, multiple sites open, etc) it goes up to 70-85 deg C.

I noticed some lag on simple commands like opening Windows Explorer and browsers, so I ran Malwarebytes and other anti-virus to see if there was a virus lurking somewhere, but with a clean install of OS that shouldn't be an issue. Another potential possibility for the lag is an old hard drive wearing out. I ran diagnostics on the hardware - CPU, memory, video, HD - and they all passed.

Still the lag was bothering me, so I went into the BIOS and disabled speedstep (no effect), and tried booting into Safe Mode to see if the lag was still there (it was). Finally, I disabled C-states in the BIOS, and it seemed to help with the lag a little, but the M4600 still runs a little warm.

Right now, I am posting this on Notebookreview and running defrag in the background, and the 4 core CPU temps are at 70 - 80 deg C range.

The only things I haven't done is take it apart to examine the fan/heatsink, or blow some air through the vents to clear out any dust bunnies. I will do the latter shortly.

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So are the normal operational temperatures of 70 - 85 deg C normal for this laptop? I understand the 2860QM is a hot and hard-working CPU, so is that okay. I'm not really worried about the CPU being damaged by temperatures of 97 deg C as it is fine to slightly over 100 deg C, but just wondering it these M4600 notebooks tend to run hot anyway, despite what you do.

Does anyone have the M4600 running at 35 deg C or something like that?


Thanks.

 

I just went through a lot of these issues with my m4600 that i bought refurbished a couple months ago. With some modifications my cpu now idles at 35 to 40 and gpu at 33. At load it is definitely 70s and sometimes 80, but your CPU should be cooler than mine.

your 2860qm should not be running that hot. My CPU is an engineering sample which is essentially a 2860qm with a higher TDP and it was running really hot at first. I dont know if it will damage it but ive heard running in the 90s can shorten the life of your CPU.

Definitely take out our CPU heatsink and fan and clean it. Its probably full of dust. Its also worth doing the same for the gpu heatsink and fan because the gpu has a heat pipe running to the CPU fan which adds even more heat to your CPU. Then do a repaste (i used arctic MX 4 but there are some others that are better i think like gelid extreme).

Then use HWinfo to control the fan speed (fan runs way to slow on system defaults). You will need to use the "respin" feature. I have it set to 100ms. I use custom auto with both fans set to go from 2500 to 4900 rpms when the cpu core max hits 70. If you dont do a cleaning and repaste itll be annoying because your fan will be on full speed most of the time. But you definitely want the fan to be running at 2500 rpm pretty much all the time. This will help your idling (and load) temps immensely.

I almost always use it with the bottom cover off and the back propped up with a book (on a hard surface) so theres at least 2 or 3 inches of clearance under the fans.

This is the weird thing with speedstep: It should be helping you not hurting you. However, for some reason with a 130w PSU it can really slow things down (in my experience). With a 180w PSU and speed step enabled it should be running nice and quick... either way you should probably have a 180w with a quad core on this laptop.

A really cheap and easy hard drive fix is to buy an mSATA SSD (i bought a "wave" 256gb from china on ebay for 65 dollars.. so far so good.) and put it where you probably have a WWAN card right now (right above the hard drive slot, very easy install). You will need a usb or dvd to do a clean install of windows on the SSD. Now it runs real quick even though its not a great SSD.

Im really happy with my m4600 now, CPU still hits 90 sometimes when im rendering videos which I would like to improve but am comfortable with in small doses. I have a "safe" power setting where ive simply set the max processor usage to 99 percent which keeps it from using turbo boost. In my case this limits it to 55 watts instead of 66 and this keeps it generally under 80 at full load (with fan control). This is much easier than going into the bios constantly to enable and disable turbo boost.

I apologize if this went on for too long or if im telling you stuff you already know (like i said im kind of a newb), but ive been working on this laptop for a month or so and am very pleased with the results. Spent about 450 all told, including all upgrades.

 

Thank you for all the response.

I had a professional computer repair guy tell me the thermal paste needs to be refreshed.

I did all I could do otherwise.

 

So I got bored the other day and did a CPU swap on my M4600 (i7 2640M/16GB DDR3/500GB HDD/Quadro 2000M) and swapped it with a config unsupported by Dell. I took the Quad-core i7-2630QM from my Asus G74SX and put it in. Passmark CPU improved from 4500 (2640M) to 6300 (2630QM). Sizable 30% improvement which is nice.

Will post more on temperatures and stuff once I benchmark and stress test some more. At first there was some bird chriping noise, so I hope thats not electrons jumping across the air and frying circuits.

 

http://imgur.com/a/0nmgM

Above are the results of AIDA64 stress test with newly swapped CPU. No stability issues at all. I am currently running a quad 1080p monitor configuration off this setup with no issues.
CPU seems to stabilize at 2.22 to 2.24Ghz out of a max 2.6Ghz turbo on the i7-2630QM. Looks like its hitting the TDP of 45W rather than the thermals though as HWmonitor reports usage of up to 50W by the CPU package. No throttling reported by AIDA64 at all.

Pretty decent results I would say. I'm surprised the CPU even worked despite Dell not having it on the support website. Pins and stuff matched, but the CPU itself was much longer than the i7-2640M it replaced. Thermal paste used was the stock paste that comes with the Cooler Master 212 Evo, so its not some expensive fancy stuff either. I just used the leftover from my desktop build

The bird chirping noise was gone after I disabled express charge for the battery. It probably was indeed electrons jumping across the air from circuit to circuit, and the reduced current must have fixed that. Other than that, battery life hasn't changed but I've got a smoother, faster PC now.

 

Good day to you,

I browsed the thread a bit before posting, but I did not see anyone having a similar issue as mine. Apologies if I missed a post somehow.

I own a Precision M4600 for 4 years now, bought it brand new, and it has been working like a charm all the time.
The original hard drive has become quite slow after intensive usage these years, so I wanted to upgrade to a SSD, a 500GB Samsung 850 Pro, and also upgrade my old and rusty Windows installation to Windows 10.

However, with the SSD installed (and height difference fixed to avoid movements in the drive bay), I started to face unexpected shutdowns in Windows. I face no issue when I stay in the BIOS.
It could happen immediately after the initial startup, at the login screen or after some time, usually it halts within the hour. The best I was able to make it work was almost three hours.
There shutdowns are not BSODs, there is no log entry in the Event viewer. Only useful info is a "ASF2 Force Off" in the BIOS logs. It is like someone was removing the power cord.

Suspecting Windows 10 to be incompatible, I tried to reinstall Windows 8.1. Same issue. Windows 8, same. Original Windows 7 restored? Same issue.

At that time, I thought the SSD was not supported. I popped back the original hard drive, and all unexpected shutdowns went away, the laptop runs perfectly fine again.
Then I ordered a new hard drive, same model, same reference as the original one.
All installations I tried with that hard drive faced unexpected shutdowns, as for the SSD.

And if I try to plug either the SSD or the HDD into my colleague's Precision M4600, it would run smoothly and fine for hours and hours. Definitely not a drive issue.

So I am wondering: Is my Precision laptop somehow bound to my original hard drive, and is anything stored in an internal memory and trying to reach a specific information on the disk, causing these shutdowns? Or could the motherboard be the possible root cause?

As there is no issue when using the default drive, I already excluded RAM and overheating issues. The battery is not the problem as it happened with and without the battery in.
Also Dell system scan did not detect any problems with my hardware.
All Windows installations were fresh installs (except the original Windows 7 restore, but it happened also with a fresh Win7 install)

Technical bits:
Precision M4600
Core i7 2760QM
NVIDIA Quadro 2000M
24GB RAM
750GB WD Scorpio Black SATA 7.200RPM (Original drive)
Additional stuff, such as a fingerprint reader, webcam, DVD drive, Bluetooth card.


Do you have any hints?
Thanks.