Dell Precision Mobile Workstations: Now with Larger and Faster SSDs

I recently received an email from a reader asking for advice on the "best" laptop Dell has to offer. The reader's work is footing the bill, but with the requirement that it had to be a Dell laptop. He wanted to get the best Dell had to offer, which immediately brought the Precision line into play. Without knowing the exact intended use, however, it's difficult to say whether the money and performance would be justified. For those of you running CAD/CAM, 3D rendering, or doing heavy video editing on the other hand, such a purchase could certainly pay dividends, as Dustin recently showed in our HP EliteBook 8670w review.

Once you've got the fastest mobile CPU and GPU in your laptop, the next performance upgrade should be clear: you add an SSD or two. Dell has now updated their M4600 and M6600 that launched in May with the option to add up to two 512GB SATA 6Gbps SSDs, plus a 128GB mini-PCIe SSD if you need even more storage. Dell informs us they are using the Micron C400 family of SSDs, which we looked at in March, and recently we looked at the M4/C400 again with the latest firmware.

Dell specifically cites working with video content in their Enterprise IT blog as a major advantage of a fast storage subsystem, and we can attest to the benefit of fast SSDs for such tasks. Another benefit Dell touts is the durability aspect of SSDs—no moving parts makes them far more shock resistant than even the best HDDs.

Of course, 512GB SSDs don't come cheap, and Dell is charging $1120 to upgrade the M4600/6600 from the base 250GB HDD to the 512GB SSD; adding a second/third 512GB SSD will tack on a cool $1350 (making the first SSD a substantially better value, unless you think a 250GB HDD is worth anywhere near $230). By comparison, you can grab Crucial's M4 512GB for $770 if you'd rather do the upgrade yourself. RAID 0/1 support is also available on the M4600, and the M6600 includes an option for a third drive and RAID 5 (but only with the 128GB mini-PCIe SSD).

As a final note, Dell has also updated the graphics offerings on the M6600 to include the NVIDIA Quadro 5010M with 4GB GDDR5. That brings the Precision M6600 up to parity with the HP EliteBook 8670w, though there are still differences. If it wasn't immediately clear, the Precision line is for serious work and professional use, and the $1640 upgrade from the AMD FirePro M8900 to the Quadro 5010M is yet another indication of the target market. Max out the hardware configuration on the M6600 with three SSDs, the i7-2920XM, 16GB DDR3-1600, and a Quadro 5010M and you're staring at a fat $10G. That might seem crazy, until you consider the software packages these things are designed and certified to run can cost easily twice as much as the hardware.

Update: We incorrectly assumed Dell was using the Samsung P830. Dell has informed us they are using Micron C400 SSDs, and we have edited the above text as appropriate.

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Dell's New Mobile Workstations: These Are The Laptops You're Looking For

Having had the chance to check out Toshiba's and HP's impending enterprise-class notebooks, more and more I'm convinced spending up is the way to go when it comes to buying a notebook that both looks and feels like quality. While Dell's Precision notebooks are still a little boxy and aren't quite the ladykillers the new HP EliteBooks are, there's still something very austere and functional about them that puts consumer-grade laptops from any manufacturer to shame. If you're one of the people that didn't much care for Dell's new XPS line, these may be for you.

Dell has announced two new mobile workstations, the Precision M4600 and M6600, 15.6" and 17.3" respectively. Both are based on Intel's Sandy Bridge platform, supporting up to 32GB of DDR3-1333 (16GB of DDR3-1600) in four DIMM slots along with ramping all the way up to the 55-watt Core i7-2920XM, and each offers a range of choices from AMD's FirePro Mobility GPUs and NVIDIA's Quadro GPUs. Best of all, Dell is offering bare-minimum 72% gamut displays on each of these notebooks along with an optional upgrade to an IPS RGB-LED display on the M4600. Let's break them down.

The 15.6" Precision M4600's screen options start from a basic 1366x768 screen, move up to a multi-touch enabled 1366x768 screen, then on to a 1080p screen, and then finally Dell's PremierColor IPS RGB-LED backlit 1080p screen. GPU options include the AMD FirePro M5950 Mobility Pro with 1GB of GDDR5 (GPU equivalent to the 480-shader Radeon HD 6670), the NVIDIA Quadro 1000M with 2GB of GDDR3 (GPU equivalent to the 96-core GeForce GT 540M, depending on the clocks), and the NVIDIA Quadro 200M with 2GB of GDDR3 (GPU equivalent to the 192-core GeForce GTX 460M, but without GDDR5 and only a 128-bit memory interface). Additionally, the M4600 can be configured with a 128GB SSD mini-card to supplement the hard drive; two 128GB SSDs can be configured to run in RAID 0 or RAID 1. It offers virtually every type of connectivity under the sun: gigabit ethernet, 802.11n, Bluetooth 3.0, WWAN, 2x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0, FireWire, eSATA, HDMI, DisplayPort, VGA, ExpressCard/54, and a SmartCard reader. The M4600 starts at $1,678 and will be available on May 10th.

Moving up to the Papa Bear, the 17.3" Precision M6600 brings to bear all of the same processor options and connectivity as the M4600, but graphics, display, and storage options are improved. This time, the display starts at a basic 1600x900 panel, but can be upgraded to a 1080p display with or without multi-touch capability. It won't be launching with an IPS display option, but Dell expects availability soon after. Graphics get a boost as well, allowing the following: the AMD FirePro M8900 Mobility Pro with 2GB of GDDR5 (GPU equivalent to the 960-shader Radeon HD 6970M), the NVIDIA Quadro 3000M with 2GB of GDDR5 (240 cores, likely using a GF106/GF116 die, which means roughly GTX 470M with more bandwidth but fewer cores), the NVIDIA Quadro 4000M with 2GB of GDDR5 (336 cores, again with a GF106/GF116 core, but now surpassing GTX 470M), and topping out at the NVIDIA Quadro 5010M with a whopping 4GB of GDDR5 (a full 384 cores, a full-fledged GF104/GF114, matching up with the GTX 485M). Besides the graphics and processor choices, the M6600 adds a second 2.5" drive bay to go alongside the first bay and the offered 128GB mini-card SSD, and these three can be configured together into RAID 0, RAID 1, or even RAID 5. The M6600 starts at $2,158 and will be available on May 10th.

Besides these two notebooks, Dell is offering the Precision R5500 rackmount workstation. This monster is capable of supporting up to five full-length, full-height PCIe x16 cards, dual graphics cards, up to 192GB of memory, up to five SATA drives and six SAS drives, and runs one or two Xeon 5600 series processors. These chips are still based on Westmere technology as opposed to Sandy Bridge, but combined can allow for a total of twelve physical cores and twenty-four logical cores. The R5500 starts at $2,551 and will be available in the states and Europe on May 3rd, showing up in the Asia-Pacific region a week later on the 10th.

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