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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beginner99 - Thursday, December 2, 2010 - link
... if you want non-glossy and matte you pay the extra price for the business type notebooks. Even though they tend to have crappier components. At least the have display port and not only vga but I tend to agree to still include vga especially in business laptops because so many vga beamers still out there.thomberg - Friday, December 3, 2010 - link
I just got an E6410 from work and I'm quite happy with it. There is one big problem at the moment though and that is Linux support for the Intel integrated graphics. This is not Dells fault but a problem none the less.When you boot with no modifications the screen just goes blank. With some added kernel parameters you can some times get it to boot (typically modesetting). Success depends on kernel version and maybe other factors. There's also the option to revert to an older kernel or boot in VESA mode but that's not really a solution I can live with.
Just google "E6410 blank screen" if you want to look at user discussions.
So my advice if you want to get an E6410 to run Linux on now is to get one with the Nvidia addon graphic card.
mrmbmh - Friday, December 3, 2010 - link
Asus has released new laptops including U41,U31,U36They seem pretty cool, specially U36 because of its weight and thickness....
I hope you review them soon.... :)
yehuda - Monday, December 6, 2010 - link
The best part about the U36 is it'll soon become yesterday's tech and we might get some great deals on it.jp7189 - Friday, December 3, 2010 - link
The performace problems with the Latitude 6x10 line is an STM accelerometer. Uninstall the drivers, and disable the 'unknown device' and the stutters will vanish. Also, right at startup, the touchpad app eats CPU cycles and causes the touchpad to stutter. Get rid of the app (not the drivers), or wait a bit after login before using it.BTW, on the issue of price, Dell has huge markup in the website pricing. Call the 800 #, and they'll knock 20-30% or more off. I've been buying E6510's for $800, when the web lists them at $1250 for the config I use.
ExogenBoy - Friday, December 3, 2010 - link
I've had original 6400 for about 20 months now. The baby has not had even a slighest feeling of build quality after about six moths of use -- for example, paint wairing of from the speaker grills, making everyone think I have an ancient laptop. The whole body appears to have given up for resistance -- almost all parts feeling that they will drop of accidentally any day,Quite surprisingly,the feeling just ain't enough. The laptop has not really shown any true phyhysical weaknesses, it's really pushing on despite the in the end more or less cosmetic damages it has suffered from quite intesive daily use. I would not like to pay any compliments to Dell -- the laptop has felt as if it has a very weak build quality since about the six first months of use. Despite of this it has really done everything that was expected -- and still does, after more than 1,5 years of usage. Apparently they are doing something correct. And even if they do not, they still have on-site quarantee that absolutely works also in the Northern Europe (proven with previousn Dell laptop with screen breaking during the holidays in the middle of nowhere on the countryside) .
JarredWalton - Friday, December 3, 2010 - link
Well, I should have the E6410 for more than a couple months thanks to Intel, so we'll see what it looks and feels like in another six months. I've used plenty of Inspirons over the years, and my wife has an older Latitude, and they generally hold up well (unlike the Inspirons). The hinges definitely LOOK solid, but they might degrade over time. I'll be using this as my "main" laptop for a while and so I plan on doing some sort of blog update down the road.sammykismail - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Good review however the weight spec is incorrect. I've weighed about 6-7 different Dell latitude e6410's and none of them weigh under 5lbs (with optical drive and 6 cell battery, not including the power adapter) on my home scale. For some reason, Dell continues to post misleading weight weight specs with hard to find 4 cell batteries on it's website.Please weigh the laptop on a weighing scale and if i'm correct revise the weight in the specs.
Thanks!
Xenoterranos - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link
Anyone know how to replace the screen in a Thinkpad T410 with an IPS panel? :)theangryintern - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
Funny how quickly Dell jumped from the E6400 to the E6410. The 6400s were crap. We've had to have the motherboard replaced in at least half of the ones we've gotten due to some weird bug that severely underclocks the CPU to the point of crippling the machine. We tried driver updates, we tried BIOS updates, we tried completed OS rebuilds, nothing would fix it. We finally tried having the mobo replaced and that seems to be fixing the issue 99% of the time. We're now starting to get 6410s, and they're much better so far.