Dell Latitude E6410: Minding Intel's Business
by Jarred Walton on December 2, 2010 2:45 AM ESTConclusion: One Year Later, Arrandale Still Looks Good
Dell didn't send us this laptop, and it may not be their best foot forward. That's not to say that the E6410 is a bad laptop, but like the ThinkPad T-series there's a price premium for the build quality and reliability. During the past month or so of using the E6410 as my primary work/travel laptop, I've been quite happy with it. It's not too heavy, plenty fast, and gets good battery life. I also appreciate the move back to an old-style 16:10 aspect ratio, though I still prefer the 1080p LCD in the Studio XPS 16 over WXGA+. I had no issues with crashing or stability, and about the only real complaints are the lack of a "context key" on the keyboard and performance that just didn't feel quite as snappy as the new XPS 15. I'm not certain whether it's the small 160GB HDD in the test system, or if it's the lack of a faster discrete GPU, or if it's something else, but for performance the XPS 15 still wins out in my book. Aesthetically, though, I'd take the Latitude design (E6410 or E6510) over the rounded XPS chassis if given the choice.
That takes care of the Dell side of things; what about the Intel aspects? Arrandale showed up at the beginning of 2010, and nearly a year later it's still going strong. In many ways, I'm amazed at the fact that Intel is about to replace Arrandale with something "better", but we'll have to wait a bit longer to see exactly how Sandy Bridge laptops stack up to the Arrandale competition. When Clarksfield arrived last September, we got substantially faster mobile processors but also worse battery life. If Sandy Bridge can at least deliver Clarksfield performance and Arrandale power characteristics, it will be a success. We might finally have the ability to get our quad-core mobile cake without the need to pack a power brick everywhere we go. Or we might not.
Intel's current Calpella (Arrandale CPUs) platform delivers good application performance, very good to excellent battery life, but generally poor (but adequate for anything outside of gaming) graphics capabilities. Sandy Bridge looks set to improve the CPU performance by a decent amount (~20% with the same number of cores at the same clock speed), and potentially more than double the GPU performance. The one remaining question is what Sandy Bridge will do for laptops and in particular, how it will affect battery life.
Intel has been good since the Core 2 launch with keeping power requirements relatively constant, but there's certainly wiggle room if they can justify the performance increase. The Intel design philosophy is that every 1% increase in power requirements must come with at least a 2% increase in overall performance, so if Sandy Bridge ends up 50% faster we might see battery life drop, or we might see 10-20% more performance with the same battery life. Arrandale ULV was more like the former, with much better performance than CULV but clearly higher platform power requirements (i.e. the M11x R2 gets less battery life in every case compared to the original M11x). Where will Sandy Bridge fall? We're hoping battery life at least stays static, and ideally we'd like to see improvements—and not just when comparing quad-core Sandy Bridge to quad-core Clarksfield!
Now that we've got a final look at Arrandale in our charts, we're ready for Sandy Bridge to show up. We even know all the mobile Sandy Bridge names. It's a bit concerning that none of the parts have a TDP lower than 35W, but then all the current Core 2010 also list 35W TDP. If nothing else, at least we'll finally get the chance to see Intel quad-core laptops paired up with GPU switching technologies like NVIDIA's Optimus, so the next generation of gaming laptops could finally break into the 3+ hour range without using 95Wh batteries. And of course, we're still waiting to see the next generation of AMD mobile platforms. So mark your calendars, because early 2011 looks set to shake up the mobile market once again and make things interesting.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
51 Comments
View All Comments
rootheday - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
At the outset of the review you stated that the focus was the Intel IGP. Why only compare it to systems with discrete instead of comparing to AMD IGP systems? And why only on 3DMark - why not games, media playback?AssBall - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
Because it is an Intel business laptop?GoodBytes - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
To add,If you do NOT use Dell Fast Track service, and you are in Canada, The Latitude E series, also comes with 3 year next buisness day on site service at a minimum, making it even more attractive.
I have the E6400, with a Hitachi 160GB 5400RPM HDD, the the Quadro NVS 160M, Core 2 Duo P8400, and I see no sluggishness visible (other than the slower boot, or slower start-up of very large programs like PhotoShop), but it's clear it's the HDD.
Moreover, it is to be noted, that the laptop comes with really solid hinges, all in metal (and not plastic which can break easy, after a year or so of usage). As for the laptop lid, I can't say for sure about the E6410 as I don't have it, but if it's the same as the E6400 (which probably is the case), then it's in metal (magnesium allow), with a very thick coat of primer and paint, except the small \___/ shape edge of the lid is in plastic (probably having it in metal would effect the wireless antenna as they are found there). I know this, because I had my lid change once on my E6400 (I have the On-site service - which is excellent by the way), and you can clearly see it's metal, from the inside.
Another point that was not cover in the E6410, well it's not the focus of the review, but still, is to access the laptop internal you are 1 screw away from getting FULL access, you can switch anything very easily. Wireless card, Bluetooth, heatsink, CPU, heck you can even pull out the motherboard with a few screws (ok well you have 2-3 screws under the keyboard to remove for this part... but never the less it's super easy to remove the keyboard.... for a laptop, of course. (See picture from Anatech review)
Backlit keyboard is a must, and the in my opinion, the Latitude E series back lit keyboard is very good. It lit very well the keys, where you can clearly see the lettering. The brightness is fully adjustable via Dell Control Point software.
Finally, this laptop also has Dell new long lasting 9-cell battery with a 3 year warranty on it.
rembo666 - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
I agree with your point about the easy internal access. Business laptops are so much easier to work on in general, and they actually come with instructions. It's nice to be able to open up the machine and swap out or repair anything you want and never get that feeling "am I going to be able to put this back together".HilbertSpace - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
I have the E6510 (work supplied laptop) and the lid is different than on the E6400 or E6500 - it's definitely plastic. The E6400's and E6500's definitely do look better with the metal lid.Sluggishness could be the Dell controlpoint software (inane security stuff). First thing I did was take the HD out and replace it with an SSD. Now it's nice and fast. Although I have the NVS3100m option - and Autodesk Inventor works really smoothly on it.
Hxx - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
best thing you can do to a laptop is get an SSD. I own like many here a refurb e6410 fully loaded with 310m, bl keyboard, core i5, etc that i got for about $650 so no complaints on price/specs. However it would be so much nicer if Dell will give us the ability to replace the removable dvd drive with an ssd. A removable hdd cage where i can fit an ssd would be the best feature of this lappy.somedude1234 - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
Dell doesn't offer a 2.5" SATA HDD adapter for the modular bay, but I bought an after market one from newmodeus that works great: http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=prod...Kinda pricey for what it is, but if you spend as much time on your work laptop as I do on mine, the extra $ is worth it.
In my E6400 I currently have an Intel 80GB G2 SSD in the primary HDD bay and the 160GB HDD that came with the laptop in the modular bay. I swap this out with the DVD burner as needed.
Fast dual core processor + 4GB RAM + SSD and Windows 7 64 bit is a great combination.
webmastir - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
our company ordered a batch of these, and about half of them we received had motherboard related issues. yes, i know it can happen to any band of laptop and/or batch of computers that get manufactured, but this doesn't help ones reliability thoughts on the maker. i was very disappointed. of the few that did work fully, i was very happy with the performance. hopefully, this doesn't happen to us again from dell.nice review btw, thx.
SandmanWN - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
The E6410 is the standard for our company right now as well. We've come across a number of issues such as bad memory modules and bad cdrom drives. About 40% of the E6400's we've ordered so far have had an issue of quality control of some type so far.Donkey2008 - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
I would say we have had issues with about 20% of all current-generation Latitudes at the companies I service. Of those, the majority were related to the cheap Hynix RAM or Seagate 2.5" drives that Dell chooses to ship in their laptops. In fact, the Seagate failure rate is so annoying that I will never buy that brand again, for home or work.The only MAJOR issue that I have ever had with Latitude was that ~75% of all D620 laptops that I ever worked on eventually had graphics card failure with the onboard Quadra chipset. Like the Deathstar drives years ago, it was one of those things you read about on tech forums, then actually experience in real life.
Overall though, the quality of Latitude is more or less equal to Lenovo business class laptops.