Dell M6500: A Precision Strike on Bling

Dell M6500 Battery Life

Obviously, battery life on a mobile workstation isn't going to be a strong point, and the M6500 does about as well as we expected. It lasts a bit more than two hours for idle workloads (i.e. just typing in Word), about an hour and a half for heavy Internet surfing, and slightly more than an hour for HD H.264 playback (from the HDD—if you get the Blu-ray upgrade, expect even lower battery life due to the need to power a spinning disc). Relative battery life isn't as high as the W870CU, despite similar specs in most areas. We would venture a guess that even at similar brightness levels, the WUXGA RGB LED backlit LCD in the M6500 uses more power than the HD+ WLED panel in the W870CU; the Quadro GPU and other extras of the M6500 likely also draw more power than the W870CU with GTX 280M.

In other areas, we were pleased to find that the notebook never got extremely hot, though it's not exactly cool either. Under a heavy "workstation" load (i.e. SPECviewperf), temperatures on the palm rest are around 25-30C, with the bottom left and right sides of the chassis running ~5C higher (30-35C)… and that's in a 21C testing environment (70F). The bottom middle portion of the notebook gets quite a bit hotter, hitting 40-45C, and the middle of the keyboard also runs hotter at around 35C. The exhaust ports on the rear of the M6500 under full load were about 42~45C. You'll want to keep the M6500 in an area where the bottom fan intakes are all able to get plenty of air, and long-term you'll want to watch out for dust buildup… but we'd say the same for any high-end notebook. Overall, considering the performance on tap, the M6500 runs relatively cool.

Going along with temperatures, the fan speed ramps up and system noise is definitely noticeable when the system is under a heavy load. It's not the loudest notebook we've tested, but at 42dB(A) it's not at all that quiet either. When it's not running a CPU/GPU load, noise levels are much better, coming in close to the 30dB floor of our SPL meter. Noise levels in general are a lot better than some of the other high-end notebooks we've used over the years, and it's clear Dell put some effort into this area. Short of using a larger (taller) chassis to fit bigger HSFs, there's really not much to do other than live with moderate noise output.