Dell M6500: A Precision Strike on Bling

Dell M6500 General Performance

Application performance is what we expect from the Core i7-920XM in the M6500. The Clevo W870CU uses the same CPU and scores similarly, which illustrates again the point that the hardware is only part of the equation with computers (and notebooks in particular). The design is at least as important, and the W870CU feels flimsy and cheap compared to the M6500. PCMark makes the M6500 look very slow, but the SSD in the W870CU (or lack thereof in the M6500) is the culprit; substitute an SSD into the M6500 and you'll see scores equal to the W870CU.

Heavily threaded tasks like video editing and 3D rendering will fly on the M6500, particularly if you have the high-end CPU and GPU options. As stated, you can't get a more powerful mobile CPU or GPU at present. It appears the M6500 lags slightly behind the Clevo W870CU in several of the application tests, but part of that likely comes from differences in memory (4x1GB vs. 2x2GB), plus we expect Dell plays it safe with M6500 optimizations—stability is far more important than being a few percent faster.

As a mobile workstation, heavily threaded applications are the tasks that we expect most owners will be interested in running—along with CAD/CAM and other similar applications. For those users, turn the page for SPECviewperf 10 and SPECapc LightWave results for the M6500 and W870CU. The M6500 should do particularly well in the workstation oriented SPECviewperf test.