Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge *Part 2*

Ok, even if non-overclockable, although a piece of its price cannot be justified anymore, its still the only one Quad core. You can find same speeds and even higher (up to 3.06), but not on a Quad. The quad is still one of its own even not overclocked. And in the next periods where both apps and games will use multicore tech as they should it will shine even more..

 

Does anybody have any advice regarding a driver for Dell's 410 UWB/Bluetooth card? I need 64-bit Win7, and I can't seem to find any drivers for that card.

 

Try the m6400 vista 64-bit drivers. I previously successfully used the vista 64-bit drivers for the 370 BT card on Windows 7.

Paul.

 

Hello Paul, I use the 370 BT minicard on Win XP, and i don't understand why it takes sooo long to initiate the service once after it shows the desktop in windows. On the driver installation, did you used only the driver files or also the whole software with it (Widcom i think)? Also, i hate the DCP service as a whole. Everything passes from there and delays all services till it starts..especially the Wifi. Is it possible to do without it? I mean its a bit practical but slows down my booting drastically.
THX

 

Hi M6400 owners,

I'm in the market for a high-end mobile computer, primarily for photography and software engineering. Yesterday at Microsoft's Windows 7 launch event here in Stockholm I got a chance to take a closer look at some of the current offerings and the M6400 Dell had on display was of course quite impressive, in terms of build quality, performance and display appearance.

HP's new Envy 15 with Core i7 and massive batteries is interesting as well, but it's new on the market and there is at this time more than one question mark re display quality and resolution.

The only major concerns I have with M6400 is portability and battery life. How do M6400 owners feel about portability? Especially the power brick?

Do people get more than one battery to reduce the need to bring the power brick, or is that a futile idea?

Best wishes,
Lars

 

This is not an issue that I see under Windows 7 with my BT card - and I do have the widcom stack installed. Try it - if its an issue then at that point try an uninstall and limited reinstall. Not something that I have any particular experience with though.

Paul.

 

As far as portability goes it depends what you mean by 'portable'. To me it's portable as in taking it from a desk in one office to another desk somewhere else. I've used mine on the tailgate of a pickup but it's usually only to show and discuss blueprints and specifications for various projects. It's not working very hard but the display is cranked up to 100% which eats juice. But you can see detail under an equatorial sun. The battery life I've experienced is pretty much as advertised. Two and a half hours, give or take. But size wise it's not for checking your email or 'chatting' in line at the airport. And compared to the Lenovo w700, a very comparable machine spec. wise, it's slim and trim. But it's still a close to 10lb, 17" display computer. 'Portability' is, like I said relative. And battery runtime probably varies with hardware and usage patterns. You could check each components power consumption with the manufacturers or maybe someone else with a different setup will reply. Dimming the display might add noticeable runtime. And how much work the processor and GPU are doing probably also has some affect. With a different CPU battery time may differ considerably, the quad is power hungry compared to other processors, as well as there being two other video cards available that most likely draw differently than the fx3700. So that's the best I can do on sort of a non answer. It all depends on you really. It is a laptop only in the most liberal definition of the word 'laptop' and Desktop replacement is a much closer description of it. And I think the battery runtime I'm getting is remarkable considering how much power it takes to light this thing up.

I carry mine in a huge Targus bag that fits my Precision, a Zalman cooling pad as well as a 17" Toshiba 'laptop' and both power supplies, my full sized camera and all the mice, external drives and such that will fit in it. And I don't find having the thing hanging on my shoulder to be any problem at all. But I don't take power walks with it either. I do think most people would groan about that but as I stated earlier, the questions about size and portability are too subjective to say anything with any certainty, except that it's a beautiful and well built machine. There's pages and pages of complaints about the size of the power brick but I don't mind it and it makes a nice foot warmer. Think 'Desktop replacement' rather than 'laptop' to get a better frame to reference it in. Put it next to it's Lenovo cousin though and it looks like a sports car sitting next to a full sized sedan.
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Precision Covet - QX9300 - 4GB (2x2) - Samsung 64GB SLC SSD & Seagate 320GB - XP Pro 32bit & Windows 7 64bit - & all the standard Covet upgrades

 

Thank you very much for the advice; although speed is crucial and i'm using my m6400 for work, you're right on saying that upcoming processors won't beat the qx9300 by much, so it's the best upgrade i can do; adding a solid state disk and 4gb's more on ram will do excellent for at least a year and a half.

 

Like you, I am deciding between the HP Envy 15 and the Dell M6400 (for heavy duty virtualization purposes) as they seem to be the few notebooks that offer up to 16GB of RAM.

If it is possible to equip the HP Envy 15 with two internal X18 SSDs and the eSATA interface is fast enough, I would overlook the glossy 1980x1080 resolution and the lack of a trackpoint.

 

Exactly, the QX9300 the the best deal right now in all aspects, starting from pricing. In this article for instance http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1084/1/ , you can see some specs of the new i7's (if you want to compare the qx9300 only look at the i7-920 though). The differences are very thin. Think for example that the advertising that the 920 can arrive at 3.20 in turbo boost mode is not with all the 4 cores but only with 1 (& 3.06 with 2), once the other three/two are idling (but the same thing does the qx9300 but arrives to 2.8GHz with 2 cores).Nevertheless, when in turbo mode, the 4 cores of the 920 going up to 2.26, while the QX9300 is at 2.53! (and if you will manage to overclock the qx , surely you will outperform them). Leave apart the 12MB L2 vs the 8MB of the 920, the more transistors 820mil. vs the 774 of the 920 (honestly i don't know if this is a + or -, going the the higher is better principle here)...and the battery life that IMO the qx will give you more cause of the less TDP (55w 920 / 45w qx) ...dunno, if it would be for the 1333 vs 1066 FSB and the HT, but i would hardly believe that the i7-920 at the end is really faster!
Here is a more detailed comparison from intel's site about those two.. http://ark.intel.com/Compare.aspx?ids=43126,36727,

The QX is a tough guy to take out of throne although some people consider it 'old'...that reminds me of...Valentino Rossi!!! (for those who don't know, today he just won his 9th world champion motogp title...at the age of 30!)