[User Review] Dell Precision M4600 15.6" Mobile Workstation

Is Optimus enough reason to not get the IPS display? Stuggling with this decision.

edit: I plan to get the Quado 2000M vid card.

 

I guess it depends on what you are going to use this laptop for. If 25% longer battery life is more important for you than the color accuracy, then the IPS may not be the best choice. I am struggling with the same dilema too and I am currently leaning toward getting an external IPS monitor for photo and video editing. I am not sure I need IPS on the laptop itself.

 

If you want almost as much quality as the IPS display, but still want Optimus, consider the Lenovo Thinkpad W520 with the FHD 95% gamut display.

It's got slightly less color gamut (95% vs 100%-110%), slightly less color depth (6-bit vs 10-bit), slightly narrower viewing angles, but slightly higher brightness.

 

6 bit is 64 shades of red, green, and blue
10 bit is 1024 shades

Gamut may be wide, but banding and false coloring from the dithering will cause issues.

For color work, you will likely work between 120 and 200 nits. If your monitor is too bright, you will end up with dark prints. I usually set the brightness on my M6500 to 5 or 7 (out of 15) depending on how bright the room is.

 

SATA3 SSD over the SATA2 SSD? Can the increased bandwidth of SATA3 be fully utilized by the SSD and the computer, or is this a similar scenario as the 1333MHz vs. 1600MHz memory (very little noticable difference?)

 

What he means by dithering is the lenovo uses FRC to simulate 8bit color as do most consumer LCD's. Dithering can create artifacts and flickering. I also read a review of the lenovo that said it had poor color accuracy.

The major reason to get the IPS is mobility for graphic designers/photographers. If you have a high end monitor built into your laptop you can work from anywhere and still put out print safe graphics. The only exception is working outside. 210 nits isn't quite bright enough for working outside. Then again I don't plan on taking my $3000 laptop outdoors...

 

As stated by a Dell rep, Optimus will never work with any 10-bit IPS panel since Intel GMA only supports up to 8-bit.

Dell also has a good TN panel (which may be 8-bit like in previous iterations) and it will have Optimus.

The interface itself adds zero performance to the SSD, just like increasing memory speed (since it's never the bottleneck, though bandwidth for memory is utilized if running an GPU intensive program on integrated graphics, such as a game). If you're running a SATA/600 SSD in SATA/300, then for the most part, you won't notice much difference since sequential speeds have little impact on system performance (relative to access time and random speeds, which the latter doesn't even saturate SATA/150).

 

At the moment, SSDs SATA3 and SATA2 don't have obvious performance difference. Don't be cheated by the marketing tactics, you are not copying Gbytes of big files very often do you? What matters is random read/write speed, look for SSD good in these. The old intel x25m gen2 is still good because of strong random read/write speed, although the sequential write is only 100Mbytes/sec compared to others >200

Let's say intel 510 SATA3 SSD can write single big file at 315 Mbytes/sec which is above SATA2 spec. To get that speed, the source where you are copying from must have read speed > 315Mbytes/sec (which must also be another SATA3 SSD), which I doubt many people have that type of setup.

intel 510 can read single big file at 500Mbytes/sec, but there is no single normal hard drive in this world with write speed >500Mbytes/sec to receive it (except for PCIe SSD), so the 500 Mbytes/sec is merely a number on paper.

If the SSD SATA3 you are looking for is having much better random read/write speed than the SSD SATA2 you have, then that make sense for the upgrade, and you benefit from the random read/write speed only and not the advertised >300 mbytes/sec speed.

 

Thanks for the explanation.

So I am not sure which brand of SSD is offered by Dell - is it the Intel one? While I understand what you are saying with respect to read/write speeds, my question was more around "can the computer process/accept/has enough IO bandwidth to utilize the SATA3 SSD", and not so much around transferring between HDs.

 

One usage scenario for writing/reading large sequential files:
When you close the lid, the laptop goes into suspend by writing relevant information from memory into the paging area. If you have your laptop populated with 32GiB memory, the worst case scenario is that 32GiB of memory has to be written to disk. With a transfer rate of 100MiB/sec this would take some five minutes. With 500MiB/sec you are done in a minute. The reverse takes place when you open the lid again.