New M6500 Discussion Thread

[Bokeh]

Is it possible to install regular drivers for these graphics cards in order to play games more efficiently..? Or are the professional drivers good enough..?

In the past i have modded geforce driver inf files to work with my 3600m. The mods work fine, but i don't see much of a difference since Nvidia started putting out notebook drivers on their site. The Quadro drivers are close enough for me not to care about the geforce ones.

[melantye]

Does anyone know if I configure up to 16GB of DDR3-1600MHz SDRAM using 4 slots? seems like on the website i can only do up to 8GB? thx!

[ponx]

Is it really worth paying stupid amounts of extra money for the nVidia graphics over the ATI..? Surely the Quadro FX3800 is not £873 better than the FirePro M7740...?!?! :-|

[mitchellboy]

Is it really worth paying stupid amounts of extra money for the nVidia graphics over the ATI..? Surely the Quadro FX3800 is not £873 better than the FirePro M7740...?!?! :-|

I dont think so. M7740 is 40nm 1G GDDR5 128bit and FX3800M is 55nm 1G GDDR3 256 bit. And m7740 will cost less power.
You can change the card in the future if you want.

http://www.spec.org/gwpg/gpc.data/vp10/summary.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-...L.21333.0.html

[ponx]

Cheers for that info...

However, if you can replace the GPU later, does that mean it comes on a standard card, so for example i could slot in a GTX280M in place of the existing card..??

[Dell-Mano_G]

Does anyone know if I configure up to 16GB of DDR3-1600MHz SDRAM using 4 slots? seems like on the website i can only do up to 8GB? thx!

Short answer, no. Currently 1600MHz is only available with 2GB DIMMs. This gives a max configuration of 8GB. When the 4GB DIMMs become available for 1600MHz then you will be able to go to the max of 16GB in the system. Currently 16GB of system memory can only be done with 1066MHz and 1333MHz memory.

[knight427]

I've heard over and over that RAM speed doesn't matter. I'm just curious if there are exceptions to that "rule" for specific programs.

[sgogeta4]

Cheers for that info...

However, if you can replace the GPU later, does that mean it comes on a standard card, so for example i could slot in a GTX280M in place of the existing card..??

There is no "standard". You will never be able to put in a random GTX 280M unless Dell makes it specifically for this laptop (which they wont), though the FX 3800M is essentially an overclocked workstation variant of the GTX 280M.

I've heard over and over that RAM speed doesn't matter. I'm just curious if there are exceptions to that "rule" for specific programs.

Nope, there are no exceptions since no piece of hardware or software can utilize the speed of the memory, as other hardware will be limiting the performance.

[wearetheborg]

Nope, there are no exceptions since no piece of hardware or software can utilize the speed of the memory, as other hardware will be limiting the performance.

How so ? Surely software handling data repeatedly will benefit from the faster memory speed ?

[Bokeh]

Called the 1-800 number and I have moved from the "build" stage to the "testing" stage on the M6500! All that's left is packing and shipping.

I am already planning out a mini-review with lots of pics.