On Tuesday 19 Jul 2011 21:47:38 Alan McKinnon wrote: > Notebook renewal time has rolled around again, I've had the old one > for 3 years now. Amazing how much can change in 3 years. I don't do > notebook support so my knowledge is always out of date... > > I'm tending towards a Dell Precision M4600 partly because I've had 4 > Dells in a row all troublefree but mostly because the company discount > is a big number that can only be properly described as "obscenely big" > > I'd like to get some input from folks who might have used this > hardware. > > Screens; a choice between > 1920x1080 WLED > 1920x1080 RGBLED IPS > > The IPS screen only comes with an NVIDIA Quadro 2000M with 2GB GDDR3, > The regular screen comes with these choices of video card: > > AMD FirePro M5950 Mobility Pro with 1GB GDDR5 dedicated memory > NVIDIA Quadro 1000M with 2GB GDDR3 dedicated memory > NVIDIA Quadro 2000M with 2GB GDDR3 dedicated memory > > The price difference is substantial. Considering that my usage is > nothing more stressful than KDE eye-candy and mplayer, is the IPS > screen worth the extra price? OTOH the machine has VGA, HDMI and > DisplayPort as well as internal screen and I believe the ATI can drive > all 4 at the same time whereas the nVidia is "pick any two". Up to 4 > screens might be more useful than outright performance.
I don't think it is. When I bought my XPS (a year and a half ago) the RGBLED screen was c. £150 on top of what was a rather expensive machine by my affordability standards. Perhaps it was an early version back then, but although it was claimed by those who bought it that the RGBLED has somewhat superior picture quality, it also had 2 more drawbacks besides the price: 1. You need to calibrate the monitor to get best picture and may need to repeat that every now and then. 2. It will suck your battery dry (much?) faster than the WLED. If you're always on mains then the latter may be less of a problem. A word of warning: the 1920x1080 resolution on a 16" monitor is *small*. Trying to read a typical website or even the content of my desktop menu would cause eye strain! Ha! Fantastic picture if you just want to watch videos in full 1080p HD, but if you are also thinking of productivity you may need to readjust your desktop settings to make reading comfortable. On e17 I had to change the Scaling setting to 80 DPI. A final note about Dell's build quality: This is meant to be a top of the range laptop. However, there are no substantial rubber stops to keep the screen surface away from the keyboard. Even with 3 additional self-adhesive rubber stops that I added, the keyboard is still touching and scratching the screen. For the sort of money I paid to buy it I would expect some more thought to have gone into the design and build of it. I guess all laptops these days are being churned out of some Chinese sweat shop, but for the money I expect a better product. -- Regards, Mick
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