Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

$10 says you never buy an HP or a Dell.

 

Go to the top of the dell page and go to support. Go to drivers and downloads, select the M4600 from the selection menu and then on the far left click on Manuals its right there.

 

Just a random question...

Does anyone else have BIOS A05? I received my replacement system a week ago and almost immediately noticed it had A05, but today I saw that it still isn't on the Dell site. Just curious.

 

What was wrong with your other laptop that it needed replacement out of curiosity? A05 is good news



Question has anyone tried overclocking their i7-2920XM?

 

Can someone explain how Dell disable Optimus and integrated gpu on laptop with IPS display?

is it possible to use bios from like say one without the ips display to show/enable the integrated gpu on the one with the IPS display?

 

OK .. I accept your bet .. if you could pay it

 

Its a Deal

 

This is great news.. Can't wait to see the change log.

 

There is only one version of the BIOS for IPS and non-IPS systems. The BIOS knows what panel is installed and enables different features accordingly. The IPS panel systems do not support Optimus due to the reasons that Boken has spoken about in great detail, and accurately.

 

I spent a lot of time reading through Intel's engineering whitepapers for their current Sandy Bridge mobile chips.

To get Optimus to work, the video card and integrated GPU need to be able to basically share all of the information needed to drive the display.

The Intel integrated GPUs currently support 8 bit color. The Nvidia and ATI video cards currently support 10 bit color.

Since the vast majority of laptop panels only support 6bit color, there are no problems with Optimus working. The video card runs at 6 bits and the integrated GPU run at 6 bits. They are able to "share" their data and switch off seamlessly.

The problem comes from the IPS panel in the Dell M4600 being a 10 bit panel. Since the Intel GPU only supports 8bit color, it can not share the data with the 10 bit video card.

You could do what HP does and have a 10 bit video card taken down to 8 bits for transfer to a 10 bit panel. The only problem with this is that you are throwing away 768 shades of red, green, and blue. To be honest, I have no idea of why HP has that 8 bit connection. They don't support Optimus.

If Dell had thrown away those 768 shades of r,g, and b, they probably could have made Optimus work with no issues. They didn't. They probably know how obsessive about accurate color some people are.

Dell chose to bypass Optimus altogether for the best possible color performance from the IPS panel.

I do wish there were some way to switch down to 8bit color in the bios and enable Optimus. The problem is that it would mess up a lot of things in a color managed workflow.