Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Dell Laptop Battery
It’s been a couple of years since it refreshed its high-end Precision workstations, but Dell clearly knows the formula works. On the outside, little has changed between the 2010 vintage and 2012’s M6700 with adapters such as Dell G555N Ac Adapter, Dell J399N Ac Adapter, Dell J415N Ac Adapter, Dell K450N Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 1440 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 1750 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 1440N Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 1750N Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 17 Ac Adapter, Dell Inspiron 14 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude E6400 Ac Adapter, Dell Latitude E6500 Ac Adapter .
There’s nothing wrong with the chassis Dell designed back in 2010. Our sample is a pre-production model, but build quality is excellent: there’s barely any give in the wristrest, the base feels rock-solid, and the slight give in the lid doesn’t translate to any distortion in the display. The M6700’s 17in screen, 3.7kg weight and 1kg charger mean it isn’t likely to be lugged around very much.
The chassis also has plenty of touches that will prove their worth in the office. The touchpad is bolstered by a ThinkPad-style trackpoint nib set into the centre of the keyboard, and there’s a fingerprint reader on the right-hand side of the wristrest. The trackpad, trackpoint and buttons are responsive, and the keyboard combines a solid base with a comfortable key action that’s a dream to type on – it’s soft, but very positive and with plenty of travel.
Port selection is generous, with two USB 3 sockets, FireWire, an SD card reader, ExpressCard slot and battery status lights on the left-hand side, two more USB 3 ports and a DisplayPort output on the right, and HDMI, D-SUB, Gigabit Ethernet and eSATA on the rear.
The M6700 is also one of the most upgradeable laptops we’ve seen. The base comes off with two screws, and once inside, repairs, replacements and additions are easily made. The cooling fans can be popped out in seconds, both SO-DIMMs are easily accessible (one was free on our review model), there’s a free 2.5in hard disk cage, and there are spare mini-PCI Express and mSATA slots as well. The machine’s primary hard disk is easily accessible, too: a button underneath the battery pops it out of its own bay on the side of the machine.
The matte finish on the 17in, 1,920 x 1,080 screen helps under office lights, and it performed well in our tests, with brightness and contrast ratio results of 252cd/m2 and 523:1 alongside an average Delta E of 5.5. It isn’t the best screen we’ve seen on a business machine, though: the Sony VAIO Z Series registered a top brightness of 353cd/m2, a contrast ratio of 860:1 and a Delta E of 4.3 (a lower score in this test indicates more accurate colours).
Dell has sent us one of its cheapest M6700 models, and that shows in performance testing. Its Core i5-3320M is a mid-range Ivy Bridge processor that runs at 2.6GHz and Turbo Boosts to a maximum of 3.3GHz, and it delivered a score of 0.68 in our tests. That’s significantly slower than the Sony VAIO Z Series, which scored 0.74 with a Sandy Bridge Core i5, but with our pre-production unit sporting an early release BIOS and drivers we expect retail models will squeeze more performance from the Ivy Bridge CPUs.
There’s only one option when it comes to graphics, but it’s significant. Upgrading to a K5000M, which is Nvidia’s top-end mobile Quadro chip, will set you back an additional £1,735. In fact, with a huge selection of other options, it’s possible to hit a price over £8,000 for a top-specification model.
Back in the real world, even our low-end £1,739 Precision isn’t cheap, but the superb build quality, 1080p screen and broad range of features justifies the considerable price. That and a vast range of upgrade options ensures the Precision M6700 retains its crown as the king of high-end portable workstations.
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