Dell M6500: A Precision Strike on Bling
by Jarred Walton on March 9, 2010 3:00 AM ESTDell 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.
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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.