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.
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brshoemak - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
I have found that the one weakness of my Dell E6400 is the Dell Control Point software. My brand new machine felt REALLY sluggish relative to the hardware inside. After experiencing a couple BSOD's (which I never expected on a brand new machine) I deleted the Control Point suite. After that, all my BSOD issues were gone and the everything was much quicker.If you can, blow away Dell Control Point, it should take care of most performance issues. For reference I have a Dell E6400, C2D P8600, 4GB, 160GB, Quadro NVS160M.
hennes - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
I want to confirm the problems with the dell control point software. Some versions of it are broken. Googling will tell you which (older) versions do work. Copying some dlls manually repairs some of the problems.That said, if you do not need WAN access that you can run fine without the DCP software, and I am very happy with the E6400, E6410 and E6500's which we use at work.
For reference, my own laptop is a Latitude E6500 (C2D P8400, 4GB, Quadro NVS 160M and the good 1920x1200 display). No DCP, no sluggish performance.
Zap - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
WD1600BEVT is AFAIK a 5400RPM drive. The Scorpio Black are 7200RPM while Scorpio Blue are 5400RPM.JarredWalton - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
Whoops! You're right; I fixed the table now. I thought all of the HDDs for the E6410 were 7200RPM, but it turns out the one option where you can get a 5400RPM is the minimum 160GB drive. That's what Intel shipped me, and that's almost certainly part of the sluggishness. Dell's Control Point software is probably the other half.mike8675309 - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
Isn't it a sad state of affairs where a 1440 x 900 resolution in a 14" laptop screen on s business laptop is considered great. My 12.1" Toshiba M400 from years ago has 1400 x 1050 for petes sake. 2 years ago I could get a Dell Lattitude with 1920 x 1200 resolution in a 15" panel. WTH has happened to the world where the highest resolution you can get in a 20" panel is only 1920 x 1080?I don't care if a movie looks good on my computer, I just want to be able to get some work done, sigh.
JarredWalton - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
I'd say going higher resolution on 14" will displease the vast majority of users. Enthusiasts and people with great eyesight might be happy, but I've had more than a few encounters with people over the years that think current resolutions make everything "too small". I know our readership is mostly in the 20-35 year old range, but the majority of business people are in the 35+ bracket. Personally, I also find anything more than 900p/WXGA+ at 14" to be too small. Similarly, 768p on a 10" netbook gives you very small pixels. I'd say the vast majority of regular users would prefer the following resolutions:10" and smaller: sadly, 1024x600 is probably enough.
11.6-13.3": 1366x768 or 1280x800.
13.3-14.1": 900p or 1440x900
15-16": Here you can finally go 900p to 1080p
17" and larger: 900p minimum to 1080p or WUXGA.
There's some overlap, especially on the larger side of the scale, but if you gave me 1080p in a 13" LCD I'd be squinting all day long. And before you ask, no, glasses won't help my situation (although corneal replacement might... yeah, a bit extreme if I don't *need* to have it done).
mike8675309 - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
I guess I never have believed that people actually prefer the resolution on these displays. I write, QA, Debug code all day long. Dealing with low resolution displays is o.k. much of the time, but sometimes it becomes unbelievably frustrating. Scroll code up, scroll code down, up, down, up, down.Is there a laptop today, that even is available with a WUXGA screen? The smallest LCD monitor in WUXGA is 24" which is crazy big. Do we really want to have to physically move our head to do our work?
Consider the monitors of 2 to 3 years ago. A typical business class LCD monitor in a 17" size was 1280 x 1024. Tech from 3 years ago. And today, 1440 x 900, something with significantly less horizontal real-estate is considered Great. Great for what? Browsing websites, which most of their content is either up or down? Working on spreadsheets, which has content in both planes? Working on Visio Diagrams, Writing E-mails, writing C# code? About the only thing having wider yet shorter resolution is good for is people who don't like to see black bars when they watch movies.
I appreciate the reviews here, I agree the displays in laptops need to be much better, I just think they also need to do something to improve the resolution, especially in business class machines. People are supposed to be working, not watching movies (at least for most businesses). Why are these machines following along with consumer grade equipment being optimized for movie watching?
JarredWalton - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
The aspect ratio wars are unfortunately pretty much done and over, and the winner is 16:9... but thankfully most business laptops still stick with 16:10. I agree that 16:9 is a lousy choice, and I was happier with 16:10. I'm not sure when the last time was that anyone manufactured a 4:3 or 5:4 laptop; my wife has a 4-year-old Latitude that's 1280x800, so I think it's probably more like 5-6 years since 1280x1024 was readily available.One thing to keep in mind is that wider also worked out better for keyboards. You can make a reasonable sized keyboard fit in a 13.3" widescreen chassis, whereas a 13" 4:3 or 5:4 would be more like the width of a 12.1" widescreen chassis. Remember the old ThinkPad with the butterfly keyboard? So it's a balancing act between how many LCD panels they can get out of a certain size glass substrate, how big they can make the keyboard, how light they can make a laptop, etc.
I'd say movies and games benefit from being wider, and on a higher resolution display you can do two pages side by side in Word. For spreadsheets it's a wash, and for coding if you can do side-by-side view it may help as well (decrease the indent to 2-3 spaces instead of 8 maybe?) It really depends on how you use your system, but there are certainly times when the opposite of widescreen is desirable (i.e. portrait view for reading long web pages).
As for WUXGA laptops, you can still find them, but choices are limited. 17" business laptops (Dell Precision, HP EliteBook) and the MacBook Pro 17 have WUXGA panels I believe.
mike8675309 - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
Get a handle on one of those WUXGA laptops and take a look at it from the approach of productivity. Compare those to perhaps their same version with their standard display from that aspect. And then perhaps discuss the trade off in real-estate vs visual pain vs cost.I think the cost piece is where it would push it over the edge, i.e. the dell m6500 precision is a $300 premium for WUXGA. (yes, the apple 17" mackbook pro has WUXGA)
Interestingly, high rez macs are not new, as there are some posts out there of folks sticking a WUXGA resolution 15" panel into older Mac Book Pros. Apparently I'm not the only one that would prefer a little higher rez.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=20775...
Penti - Friday, December 3, 2010 - link
Why don't hook up your laptop to your dock and a high-res screen at work? That's really why you have business laptops to begin with. Docking capabilities, maybe now days (comes in after docking though) support for AMT/vPro and remote administration features. At the road you have to sacrifice some, at the desk you should have 1920x1200 S-IPS for $400 or better. A good 2560x1440 screen shouldn't cost more then $1000, and you can skimp on the workstation laptop instead and possibly get by with a more usable business model. Some compromises has to be made at least if you want <17".