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I want to preface this. 10 years ago I owned a Dell Inspiron 8000 with the original mobile GeForce chip and a 1 GHz Pentium 3. It was awesome. The screen was great. Thermal management was by a heatsink with dual non-centrifugal fans. It was never loud, and it wasn't actually that big either. This was as much a gaming laptop as one could get in those days.
10 years later:
I had an M11x R3 delivered today. It is optioned with an i5, 6 GB memory, and a mechanical hard drive. For those not familiar, the graphics setup on these machines is HD 3000 on the CPU die with a GT 540M through Optimus software switching.
There's a lot of good as well as things that should be a deal breaker to some who are considering this laptop. Please keep in mind while reading this that I am doing my level best to be fair.
Build is overall very solid. The laptop feels like a brick in hand -- not a bad thing as far as I'm concerned. The keyboard deck is extra rigid, and materials resist fingerprints.
Optimus works, at least with what limited experience I have so far. Driver profiles allow a GPU preference for applications, and the nVidia chip kicks in when appropriate.
Anandtech did a quantitative evaluation of the M11x R3 screen, and their results were so bad that I didn't believe them. I believe them. The screen is horrible. When you place your order, you know you're getting a gloss screen, so that is easy to deal with, but... damn. I have worked on some shitty laptops and none fail like this one, at least not in 10 years. It's not size, it's color. A reasonable black may be achieved by turning gamma, brightness, and contrast all the way down but with the obvious severe consequences. Dell looked around for the worst possible panel, got a boner for the low cost, and sourced it for the M11x R3.
At load, the cooling fan is loud, and that's fine except that it whines. And there is no continuous fan control! It's a high / low transition at about 65 C CPU/GPU temp with little if any hysteresis. Welcome, Dell, to the modern computing world in which everybody has discovered the PI loop except you. (I know that there's about 50 Watts TDP to be dealt with from the CPU/GPU, but less obnoxious fans exist. This is a very rudimentary centrifugal design with even more rudimentary control.)
I haven't gotten to test USB 3 or other minor functions yet.
Roughly 80 processes are running at Windows 7 startup which speaks for itself. Clean OS installs are the norm around here anyway, so I guess that's not a major thing.
Light leaks out of the gap at the front-edge keys, so every tap on the spacebar is like a blinking light in your face. Also not a major thing, but pretty lame for a revision 3 product.
I think that I will ask Dell to take it back. If the things I described above do not bother you, give it a shot.
10 years later:
I had an M11x R3 delivered today. It is optioned with an i5, 6 GB memory, and a mechanical hard drive. For those not familiar, the graphics setup on these machines is HD 3000 on the CPU die with a GT 540M through Optimus software switching.
There's a lot of good as well as things that should be a deal breaker to some who are considering this laptop. Please keep in mind while reading this that I am doing my level best to be fair.
Build is overall very solid. The laptop feels like a brick in hand -- not a bad thing as far as I'm concerned. The keyboard deck is extra rigid, and materials resist fingerprints.
Optimus works, at least with what limited experience I have so far. Driver profiles allow a GPU preference for applications, and the nVidia chip kicks in when appropriate.
Anandtech did a quantitative evaluation of the M11x R3 screen, and their results were so bad that I didn't believe them. I believe them. The screen is horrible. When you place your order, you know you're getting a gloss screen, so that is easy to deal with, but... damn. I have worked on some shitty laptops and none fail like this one, at least not in 10 years. It's not size, it's color. A reasonable black may be achieved by turning gamma, brightness, and contrast all the way down but with the obvious severe consequences. Dell looked around for the worst possible panel, got a boner for the low cost, and sourced it for the M11x R3.
At load, the cooling fan is loud, and that's fine except that it whines. And there is no continuous fan control! It's a high / low transition at about 65 C CPU/GPU temp with little if any hysteresis. Welcome, Dell, to the modern computing world in which everybody has discovered the PI loop except you. (I know that there's about 50 Watts TDP to be dealt with from the CPU/GPU, but less obnoxious fans exist. This is a very rudimentary centrifugal design with even more rudimentary control.)
I haven't gotten to test USB 3 or other minor functions yet.
Roughly 80 processes are running at Windows 7 startup which speaks for itself. Clean OS installs are the norm around here anyway, so I guess that's not a major thing.
Light leaks out of the gap at the front-edge keys, so every tap on the spacebar is like a blinking light in your face. Also not a major thing, but pretty lame for a revision 3 product.
I think that I will ask Dell to take it back. If the things I described above do not bother you, give it a shot.
