D630 LCD Bright or Not?

My wife just received a new D620 from her office this past Thursday. It is a really nice machine - fit and finish are great - it has a very high-quality look to it. But, one glaring problem - the LCD is unbelievably dim at maximum brightness. So - are there any D630 owners/users out there - has Dell improved the brightness on the D630's? Otherwise I have to say, corny as it sounds, that I am thrilled with the D620 and hope to scare up the $$ to order a D630 soon (assuming the D630 uses the same chassis/etc).

 

I have a D630 with WXGA+ and it is bright enough to say the least. It is rated at 220 nits, and is rather bright.

Build quality is great.

Best,
Ilham

 

Ilham - Thank-you for your quick response - I'm really thinking about getting a D630 -the build quality is so nice and it is appreciably (sp?) thinner and lighter than my dv2000t. Did you get the Nvidia 135M graphics?

 

Yup, I did. Drivers are still up in the air for this graphics card, but hopefully better ones will come out. It looks as though it is very easy to overclock as well.

I forgot to mention i have the CMO WXGA+ screen. I don't see any lightbleed, or very little, if there is any. It looks like most of the D630's are shipping with either the AUO or CMO brand LCD's. Either way, they are both bright, from what I am hearing from people with the AUO screens.

CPU wise, I don't think there is much difference from the T7300 and T7500 processor. I ended up getting the T7500, since I don't plan on upgrading anytime soon...maybe in 3 years or so..You'll be fine with T7100 or T7300.

Best,
Ilham

 

I think it does use the same chassis, albeit a different WiFi switch for better ergonomics (very small difference, I know). I understand that it is the screen that was worked on (along with the Santa Rosa chipset) between the D620 > D630, and the reviews out there, plus my own butt-dyno, will say so.

Nice screen!

Paolo

 

Like Ilham said, the NVIDIA 135M seems to be a great card. It does need better drivers written for it, but there are already some at LaptopVideo2Go that will increase it's performance. That, along with a mild overclock, have not made my laptop any warmer. I have seen my WEI go from 3.4 to 4.3, but unfortunately I don't play any GPU-intensive games to be able to give you a real benchmark.

Definitely some HP under the hood for the 135M, one of the first clues being a GDDR3 card.



Regards,
Paolo

 

CVX5832: I see that you have 2 GBs of ram in addition to 4 Gigs of Readyboost. Are you able to notice and big performance differance with and without the 4 Gbs of ready boost?

 

It may all be in my head as computers today are fast by default, but I notice that applications do "pop" open. Granted, it's probably just a one/two second gain, but I think it's cool when they do that.

Other observations on ReadyBoost :

I noticed that the ReadyBoost feature "re-populates" the cache after every boot, so you will see a lot of hard drive action between the computer and flash drive, as indicated by the activity lamps on both devices. I have also noticed that it does this on a delayed startup mode, so your boot time is not affected, and opening applications right at startup is not affected by this "re-caching".

In general, you'll notice a flicker on the flash drive activity lamp just as an application pops open. This applies for the small programs and utilities. For larger programs like Photoshop, i've noticed that ReadyBoost is bypassed altogether and the activity is directed strictly towrds the hard drive.

As reported by some users, reformatting the flash drive to NTFS yields better performance.

All in all, not a bad feature to have, considering how inexpensive flash drives have become. The one I got was also exceptionally small, so having it connected all the time is a non-factor.


Paolo

(Internet photos)

 

Great information - Thank-you very much - and a rep boost - if NBR will let me increase someone's rep (tried three days ago and nothing happened). I have a mid-range D630 in my Dell cart (although not paid yet) and am looking again at the D620. Two more questions though - to save money I'm going with 512-mb of ram (and XP Home) and I noticed only one DIMM under the access panel on the bottom. Hopefully they will ship 512 as one chip under the keyboard and leave the bottom slot empty. Also - is the card slot PCMCIA or the other version (PC-Express I think it is called)? Thanks again...

 

Is there a big difference in price between the two machines? If not, see if the 667 vs 800 processor FSB; 533 vs 667 memory FSB; NVIDIA graphics availability; and brighter screen justify the difference.

If you're running XP home, 512 is ok, and 1GB is even sweeter - which is probably why you're asking about the slot configuration. If their "policy" hasn't changed since I got the D630, then your computer should ship with the module under the keyboard.

The card slot is PCMCIA.

Excerpt from the D630 User's Guide :

 

I have a d620 and it is pretty bright. Are you sure you turned up your setttings

 

The screen on my D630 is very bright when turned up to full brightness.

I have the WXGA 1280 x 800 screen. Manufacturer is CMO.

dordale

 

Thanks to all for your time and your input - I ordered my D630 today from Dell small business - now the wait begins. Ordered the WXGA, XP Home and just 512 of RAM since I have a couple of sticks of 512 sitting around.

 

Nice, you'll definitely enjoy it.

Based on personal experience and input from this board, you'll have that computer in your hands in a couple weeks, most likely less.

I ordered 07/02 before going to sleep, and received my computer before noon 07/09, and i'm in Hawaii.

Paolo

 

Paolo - Yes I am concerned about when it will arrive. I'm leaving for the States in six days - so I had it shipped to my brother's house & will have to borrow my wife's D620 while I'm in Phoenix for a week. Ironically I'm typing this on the D620 but on a new build . I had a spare SATA drive & she received the restore and driver CD's. Her office hdd takes forever to start up and has all of the Norton stuff on it - this build boots to login in less than 45 seconds...Thanks again - George