Should I buy an M6400?

Hi everyone.

I've currently got a Vostro 1710 and have had it for some years now. The exact spec. I've got escapes me but broadly speaking it's running anan Intel T7300 @ 2Ghz, has 2Gb RAM and an nVidia GeForce 8400M graphics card.

I'm a .Net developer and am now finding the machine performance is affecting my work.

I'm considering upgrading to a Precision M6400.

I'd really appreciate any general advice at all but especially on the following:

a) Would upgrading the RAM of the Vostro to 4Gb affect the speed much?
b) Should I forget upgrading the RAM of the Vostro and buy an M6400?
c) If I go for the M6400, I wouldn't be going 64bit so 4Gb RAM would be my limit. What kind of CPU should I go for?
d) Assuming the limitations of point (c) above, am I really likely to see a performance improvement significant enough to justify the cost?

Any help gratefully received!

 

you dont need workstation m6400 if your not going to use vista x64.
just an vostro 1720 with p2.4 and 9500m gs
and 4gb ram and 7200 rpm hard drive will do.

 

yeah, uh, unless you need a quadro fx 2700, a core 2 quad extreme and 16gbs of ram you can pretty safely get a really high performance vostro.

 

That's great guys - thank you.

A high-performance Vostro is also a whole lot cheaper too!

Thanks again...

 

just upgrade your ram really and maybe cpu.
No need to buy a whole new system

 

I am a .net developer using an M6400. My previous machine was either a D820 (when out on the road) or a Precision P380 when back at base. The M6400 has replaced them both.

I am running Vista64bit - and all the .net apps from 2005 onwards work just fine. I have also, a virtual machine on the M6400 that runs XP that is loaded with VS6 and .Net 2003 for legacy stuff.

Spec wise I have the QX9300 and the FX2700m with 1920x1200 resolution and 8Gb ram and a 512Gb RAID0 disk setup.

I can say it is the fastest machine that I have ever owned, by quite a long shot.

The P380 that I used to have was quard core with 4GB RAM and RAID0. I restored a backup of that XP install to the virtual machine - and the VM runs faster than the original machine.

Hope that is useful.
M

 

I'm using a vostro 1700 which is older and dont run into any issues using VS 2008. Are you sure its hardware and not a software related issue? Because the 1710 came out after the 1700 as well as they are identical.

 

I say you will upgrade the RAM and then shortly find you are again unhappy with speed.
With an M6400 (Quad processor) you can buy tons of RAM (8-16GB) and load up Windows 7 64bit (I know you don't intend to run 64bit, bear with me ) and run practically as many virtual developer environments as you want (they can run as 32bit or 64bit)

They will all run a lot quicker than your environment now (I am running Windows Server 2003 in a virtual environment, it is just smoking....) even if you run them at the same time...

The overall system will fly, (especially with Windows 7 really taking advantage of all those processors) much much faster than what you have...

When I bought mine I knew it was overkill (I intended just to use it for Lightroom and maybe light use of Photoshop) - but I knew that the overall lack of OS delay would speed me up, all those wasted minutes of watching the hour glass gone... and then I realized I could load test scenarios of Server systems for work, replace my desktop (run it in a Virtual machine) -- no limits and no worry about upgrading again for quite some time...

I used to be all into the upgrade RAM, upgrade CPU, etc etc cycle, but the underlying motherboard and controllers usually then become the bottleneck, and my time lost is very much wasted energy I could use for other things (like sleeping, I work in IT so you know, sleep is optional)

I really hope this helps and I didn't confuse things

There are some amazing deals in the Outlet... so why not?

--- Bruce

 

oh actually, Windows 2008 Server as the host would probably be even faster
There is a pretty good guide I just found here (for Virtualizing development environments)
http://www.keithelder.net/blog/arch...er-2008-VMWare-Virtual-Machines-For-.Net.aspx