Dell M6500: A Precision Strike on Bling
by Jarred Walton on March 9, 2010 3:00 AM ESTDesign: Understated and Attractive
Some women have natural beauty and don't need to put a lot of effort into their hair, makeup, and clothing. They can put on an understated outfit and still turn heads. Others need some good lighting and photoshopping skills to reach the level of magazine covers. We'd place the M6500 firmly into the former category, and when we unpacked it our first thought was, "Wow… why can't more desktop replacements look this nice?" There are no real extra lights or chrome to liven things up, just clean lines and an excellent industrial design aesthetic. The flashiest part of the M6500 is the backlit keyboard, but it's a truly useful feature rather than just unnecessary flare. If you walk into a meeting carrying the M6500, it will likely go unnoticed, but anyone that gives it a closer look is sure to be impressed with the design and construction.
Part of what we like about the M6500 is the flat design; there's no sloping keyboard or chassis here. Many notebooks with a high-end CPU and GPU will have a thicker back to accommodate larger cooling configurations. Dell has put some real effort into keeping the chassis as slim as possible. Make no mistake, it's still a 17" chassis, but compared to many other such notebooks the M6500 looks and feels a bit smaller. It also fits into my "standard" 17" notebook bag quite easily, which isn't always the case. The slim slot-load drive also helps with the chassis design.
While we really like a lot of the features in the M6500 construction, there are a few areas where it falls a bit short. The biggest complaint we have is with the number and type of ports. It's little surprise that Dell includes DisplayPort for video output, and it worked quite well connected to a Dell U2711 LCD. The problem is that there are no other video output options other than an aging VGA port! You want HDMI or dual-link DVI? Sorry. (Note that the docking station can support additional DVI ports, but we still would have preferred a DVI output instead of the VGA port; DVI-to-HDMI and DVI-to-VGA dongles would seal the deal.) As mentioned on the previous page, there is a lot of unused space on the sides of the chassis where Dell could have added additional ports. Sure, routing traces for another video port costs money, but we'd much rather have a DVI port with a DVI-to-VGA adapter, and a couple extra USB ports would have been nice. Not everyone needs a ton of USB ports, particularly on a laptop, but then not everyone needs some of the other extras (contactless Smart Card, FireWire, DisplayPort, PC Card, etc.).
Back to the better aspects of the design, the chassis and metal exterior are a great example of what Dell has done to help the M6500 stand out from the competition. For one, it gives the notebook a durable feel without adding to the weight. What's more, the chassis is extremely easy to disassemble compared to most notebooks. Remove the battery and two screws and you can access two of the SO-DIMMs and both hard drives. Accessing the other two SO-DIMMs requires a bit more effort, as you have to pop off the hinge cover and remove the keyboard first (four screws), but that's a small price to pay to get four DIMM slots. Even with the extra steps to remove the keyboard the disassembly process is far easier than most notebooks.
The chassis does come with a huge palm rest area and a full size keyboard. It's good to see Dell make full use of the available chassis space, though the palm rest is so large that it almost looks barren compared to smaller laptops. Or maybe it's the lack of stickers? Thankfully, Dell doesn't slap a bunch of stickers on the palm rest listing features and branding; the only sticker on our test unit was for "Windows Vista"—and Dell actually shipped both Vista and Win7 hard drives for testing. (Vista was required for SPECviewperf testing; otherwise we stuck with Win7.)
In the end, what appeals to your sense of aesthetic will largely determine what you think of the M6500. It's either simple and elegant… or boring and dull. Dell does offer a "covet" version that ditches the sliver/grey exterior for an orange anodized aluminum finish if you want a bit more flash. The Covet version also comes standard with WUXGA RGBLED, only with a glossy "edge to edge" sheet of plastic in front of the LCD panel. If you want more bling than that, you'll need to look elsewhere, but "bling" and "mobile workstation" make strange bedfellows.
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GeorgeH - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
Wow, those LCD results were shockingly poor, and there's simply no excuse for it in this class of laptop. Hopefully HP and Lenovo will do a better job with their updated models.For personal use the way to order laptops of this class is to get the most stripped version possible and then upgrade it yourself; once the "New and Shiny" tax expires you could probably put together an equivalent laptop for around 3k. Still expensive but the build quality might be worth it, as AFAIK you simply cannot get a "gaming" laptop with anywhere close to the level of this and other "workstation" laptops.
P.S. @ Jarred - Unless you're talking about the design's weight in earth's gravity, I think your dictation software has failed you. ;)
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
Figured out how to get the LCD to calibrate better... and it's MUCH better. But no one should need to calibrate to 1.8 gamma on Windows, and more to the point you should be able to calibrate to 2.2 just as easily. *Weird* to say the least.And I understand that aesthetics are a personal taste, but seriously: this is a better built and more attractive notebook than any of the gaming monsters I see. You're not going to make a thin and light Apple MacBook Pro out of these components, but this is about 2x as fast as the top MBP in CPU tests and an order of magnitude (actually more) faster in workstation apps.
ghotz - Saturday, July 10, 2010 - link
I've been trying to calibrate the monitor for some time now but didn't achieved yet the good results I had with my M90 yet.There are some problems that Dell should definitely address (the sRGB and aRGB color profiles that come with Dell ControlPoint have strong color casts) and other "features" they should definitely tell customer about like the LCD changing color temperature as shown in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_UQpeI8CRY
I'm starting to become really unsatisfied with this machine, nearly as much as I was satisfied with my 4 year old M90 :(
CList - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
All that sex appeal and modern technology and they STILL have a VGA port.FFS Dell!!! Get with the program already and ditch that crap. DVI -> VGA adapters do exist for those presentation projectors after all...
They probably still have a parallel port on the back of their docking station as well.
Cheers,
CList
Granseth - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
We still uses software that needs a parallel port for dongels, as well as allot of hardware that uses serial ports.And the VGA port would be invaluable if you travel around and have to use projectors at different locations.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
Well, by the same token they sell a DP -> HDMI dongle, so you could adapt to other ports. I would guess their research has shown there is still enough need for VGA to not remove it yet.justaviking - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
You did a great job of positioning this beast (I mean that in a good way) by talking about what software you would run on it.I see my former employer's logo on the slide on the last page.
We used to demonstrate enterprise-level software to potential clients, or conduct training classes before their system was up and running. We basically used our laptops as portable servers.
We ran large databases, our application, a web server, CAD rendering software, and clients, all from the same "laptop". It's amazing it ran at all, let alone usually having decent performance. Nothing we had would come close this this.
The pre-sales "demo" guys always had the faster, newer hardware, but they were trying to make multi-million dollar sales. If a $5k laptop makes your software run better than a $2k laptop, it could be a very good investment.
kahmisz - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
Speaking of use in Enterprise situations. Under $1600 for Enterprise pricing with i5, under $2100 with i7.lordmetroid - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
I think that may be one of the ugliest laptops I have ever seen. Damn, I can't stop looking, it is like watching the horrible scene of a car crash.TEAMSWITCHER - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
I agree, this laptop looks like it was beaten severely with an ugly stick. I'm sure the engineers over at Apple will hang a picture of this up in the design room to improve morale.I'm beginning to think that Apple has a patent on eye pleasing notebook designs.
Dell, please send this one back.