Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

A brief review.

Materials:

3 Identical external monitors.
1 Docking station (from my friend), to the next time.
2 Precisions M4600.
3 Cable VGA.
3 Cable DVI.
3 Cable HDMI.
1 Displayport to HDMI Cable .
1 Displayport to DVI Adapter (comes with another Graphic card I have, ATI Firepro V4800).
Precisions 1 (That of my friend): Quadro 1000M plus an integrated Intel card.
Precisions 2 (Mine): Firepro M5950.

Precision Quadro 1000M: Connect 3 external monitor form VGA, HDMI and Displayport (We used both, "Displayport to HDMI cable" as "Displayport to DVI Adapter"), easy and fast, just plug and play, plus LCD Laptop, total 4 monitors.

Precision Firepro M5950: Impossible connect 3 externals monitors from the 3 Laptop ports (VGA, HDMI and Displayport. In theory, the reason is the "Displayport to HDMI cable" and "Displayport to DVI adapter" is not active. So far I don't know if the ATI adapter is active or not, well I assume that is not active because in theory the "active" must be powered. Anyway I bought an adapter that may work (check it out here). total only 2 monitors (without an "Active" Adapter). I'll wait to get the adapter and see what happens.

Accell B087B-005B UltraAV DisplayPort to DVI-D Single-Link Active Adapter ATI Certified (Black).

You don't need a docking station to do it, I mean to connect 3 monitors. He just wants to sell the Docking, forget it. I tried to connect the monitors via Docking Station (with M5950), and didn't work, only 2 monitors.

 

Just to provide another data point, I just wanted to point out that my M4600, with the RGB display, only seems to support two monitors at once. I have tried two setups -- two external monitors, both with display port connected to a docking station, and two external monitors, one connected via HDMI and the other via VGA directly to the laptop, and while the two external displays and the internal LCD all show up in the nvidia control panel, it will only allow me to enable 2.

I suspect my system only supports two monitors because it can't use the intel graphics.

Are you sure the quadro is driving the 3 external displays? I can only get mine to drive 2, and as far as I know, all single GPU nvidia chips can only drive two displays simultaneously (though I would love to be wrong).

 

I think your right, and that is because of the 10bit deal i think. With 4 monitors it seems 2 or 3 are being driven off the Nvidia and 2 or 1 is being driven off the Optimus or Intel graphics. That very well could be.

 

does the m4600 support the Dell 5540 WWAN card or only the 5550?

 

Has anyone purchased and used a media bay replacement for the DVD that they have confirmed works with the M4600? I got one on eBay and I've tried various HDs with no success. I've made sure that some of the HDs are low enough power to be powered off a single USB port and still nothing. Are there any BIOS settings that might help?

 

Does anyone know if the m4600 supports raid 5? Since I'm limited to 128GB for the mSATA drive, I was hoping to replace the optical drive and the second hard drive slot with a pair of 128GB SSD's and run them in raid 5.

The other option is finding a 256GB mSATA drive which I'm having a hard time doing.

 

I was going to ask the same thing. These look like the unpacked setup files.

My computer has this:

c:\apps\n2dpw (cyberlink)

There are others as well:

c:\dell\dbrm
c:\drivers

I'd like to blow this stuff away, but I want to be sure it won't cause problems.

Anyone know if they can be removed?

 

I removed the dell/driver once I installed the drivers. That is safe to do since your drivers are already installed.




I don't have the apps folder as well prorably removed it as well. Can't remember what what was in it so I'm not going to say you can remove it safely.

 

I have an M4600 and my brother-in-law has an M6600. We put them side-by-side today. The M6600 is a nice machine, but it's a very big beast. I travel a lot and I'm glad I don't have to lug it around. You could never open the M6600 up on an airplane because it wouldn't fit on the tray.

 

Mine came with A04 but I installed A05 from the Dell website.