All is not well in the land of the
E6400- and
E6500-series lappytops. What looks to be hundreds of owners of these machines have been complaining of massive performance issues, throttling themselves down by as much as 95% under what would seem to be normal operating conditions. Whenever the devices get slightly warm the BIOS automatically starts dialing down the performance until they basically crawl to a halt, some indicating that even when cool they won't go over 50% of maximum clock. Users have been reporting this issue since early in the year and Dell has apparently started censoring some posts on its forums, including a link to a PDF created by (now-banned) user Tinkerdude describing the problem in detail. It's entitled "Performance loss during normal operation in a Dell Latitude E6500 laptop due to processor and bus clock throttling", and if you think that's long wait until you see all 59 pages of analysis (at the read link). As of now there's no official fix provided by Dell, leaving many to call this Throttlegate, and we do love a good Stargate reference.
Update: Ibrahim e-mailed to let us know that these two series aren't the only ones being gimped. The Studio XPS 1645 is said to be having similar (but somewhat less drastic) issues
according to this thread, seemingly thanks to an inadequate AC adapter. In this case Dell seems to be shipping replacement adapters to those who call up and complain.
Update 2: Dell's Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca dropped the following in comments, which is something of a positive step:
We're aware of concerns raised in this post and others like it. At this point, our teams are looking into the details. When we have more information to share, we'll update customers via a post on Dell's blog, Direct2Dell.
posted December 1st 2009 8:21AM
Throttlegate = Watergate. Not a Stargate reference....
@barry99705
The first victim.
@barry99705
I think people's stupidity makes a good argument for adopting this into written English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_mark
@(Unverified)
Hell yes, that's awesome. That being said, I like the proposed "sidewise exclamation point" better than the "backwards question mark."
@barry99705 Off topic, but that KisMAC avatar is ftw
I guess that pallet of 6400s we just got at work could be a problem. Wonderful.
@ack154
Here at the govt facility I work at, we've already put out over 200 E6400s and E6500s. No issues yet with throttling, but the internal CAC readers have been a nightmare. If this turns into a recall, the DoD is not gonna be very happy with dell.
@xteam213
We have around 30 of the Latitude E6400's and a few E4300's.
I have noticed that if I pulled the power, no matter what I set the settings to the Laptops will work at like 1-10% cpu (SLOW AS HECK), but as soon as the laptop is on AC again it works fine.
Going to read the PDF now, so not sure if it's the exact same issues.
Our issues have been pretty minor thus far with the E6400's though.
@ack154
And that's why REAL business laptops have the letters I, B, & M written on them.
Tinkerdude for president!
Even my friend too bought E6500 series laptop and to fall in to serious trouble of overheating and overclocking. Can there be any solution for it ?
Regards,
Kristina
web easy 8 reviews
@kristinacallis
I think it just wanted to keep him nice and toasty during this winter. As a plus he could probably fry an egg on that thing.
yes, that's a good marketing tactic there Dell, someone complains of a product not working as expecting and documenting it to show it's not a lie and you BAN HIM FROM POSTING?!?!?!
What the hell did they think was going to happen in response to that?
Wow I'm really surprised by this. We have around 20 of these at work and we haven't received a single complaint. We must have gotten lucky. We'll have to start monitoring them more closely though.
I have an E6400, and I've been really surprised at how slow it is, especially for how much they cost. I'll have to look to see if I'm having this underclocking problem. I know I'm having overheating problems.
Sheet!
thats a nasty PDF...
AHAHHA DEll is pulling an "Apple"? Banning people that find flaws in a product. 1st the iPoop batteryes, then the original iPod nano scratching if you breath on it, and then the craptastic iPhone screen/ back crackings...
Everything istrhottled these days, our cars, internet, wireless minutes, and now our own computers? WTF?
Thats why I like my 4 barrel Carb BIG BLOCK... If you think furl injection was a tool of the GOV, just wait until you see how they limit your electricity charging time...
F-U Obamer!
@(Unverified)
think you hit all the red neck talking points?
you hate Macs, you hate Apple, and now you hate the black President.
Sweet.
@(Unverified)
I'm sure he won't see your reply seeing as he's still out at the tractor pull. Or was it the monster truck rally?
@(Unverified)
Actually my good man, I was discussing the merrits of open source with my good chumette, Ms. darling over tea whilst playing a game of Backgammon...
And F-U, I hate the prez because he is just like any other bush, ooh so he is Black.. I dont care, I EQUALLY HATE HIM
AHAHHAAH!
thats what you get for not buying a Thinkpad.
@MaX PL
Darn straight!
A classic functional design that is solid and professional.
you cant go wrong. Today is all flash and trash. ooh look at me I'm 2mm thin! butI only have 1/2 of a USB drive.
@(Unverified)
agree, i have a thinkpad and its working fine, but the university here wanted to get this new latitudes....
@MaX PL
Agreed
@MaX PL As a former owner of a Thinkpad whose graphics card crapped out (the Nvidia fiasco of '08), out of warranty, I might disagree. However, I do still love the Thinkpad, and I'll probably buy a newer model again someday; though I'll probably wait 'till the kinks are ironed out, first.
@MaX PL I actually returned the Lenovo W500 in favor of E6500 and while I haven't been totally happy with the latter, I am still much happier with it than the Lenovo. Mine flies too - no overheating issues.
I have had similiar issues/experience with my M6400. The heat generated as a result of standby-hibernation was quite significant that I was prompted to do a diagnostic on 1 occasion. Since then the system did feel far slower and now I have returned it to our IT deptartment. I have recently had my motherboard replaced on my xps m1210 and my user experience is that its far zippier than the M6400 ....hey who would have thought!?
I do think the m6400 is a beast of machine, potentially my unit had a fault.. guess its the drawback of bleeding edge...and dell have a great design here so hope they sort out the issues
I guess they forgot to read the fine print:
"Extended battery life is achieved by scaling the processor back to Pentium III and slowly regressing down to Pentium I thereafter. Your Mileage May Vary."
Guess Dell included a feature to autoclock depending on ambient room temp. I'm sure they just figured people need faster speeds and less battery in the winter and slower speeds in the summer for extended outdoor usage.
@Eternity
Worse, it's all part of a government plot to make us healthier by getting us to give up on our computers and actually go outside and get some exercise during the warmer months. Dell is in the pockets of the Obama administration, all trying to force us to be healthier instead of dying in our forties with cholesterol-clogged arteries.
@Old fogie late bloomer
Ok that's it I'm moving to Europe!
On second thought maybe not...
they pay more for gadgets than we do..
my collegue has Dell E6400 and got the same problem and the problem and sollution was very easy - she got her notebook full of dust. So i have simply open the notebook and vacuum the ventilator. few minutes of work and now no overheating and no performance issues. The same problem got every notebook i know with ventilator, so I do not thing it is some dell specific problem
After all these years it seems to me Dell would have learned how to build a superb computer by now. Alas!
Latitude 6400 user, C2D T9550, windows 7, not a single issue, except for the minimalistic touch-pad and the stupid track-pad. All the rest has been wonderful. It does underclock the processor whenever is in power-saver mode and the performance does reduce dramatically, however, 95% performance reduction? Cooling on this system is truly wonderful, never had overheating issues. Now, I'm on Panama (Central America) we live in a hot environment 32C is kind of normal, so for this system not to get hot, it should have a good cooling design.
Team of 20 people using these, no issues as of yet had for 3 months.
@Feaross
No issue here... maybe because I took the Nvidia graphic solution instead of the Intel 4500XHD. In any case, I can even seriously overclock my GPU during gaming (use Nvidia System tool with profiles) and it still doesn't throttle. I guess this issue only affects some users. Perhaps some board or chip revision causes a problem.
Any idea which builds are affected, We have Core 2 9600 Processors...
My wife carries an E6400 and a friend of mine works at a copy that has probably issued what, 30-40 of them? And no issues, and they've had them since they launched at the beginning of the year..
@(Unverified) Works at a COMPANY
geesh
Any idea as to how to become "VERIFIED" ???
@(Unverified)
Log-out and then login , it will ask you to register and then join us :)
Wow.. My (quite friggin' massive) client is having some serious issues because of these models. Exactly how the article describes, the PCs just stall to a full stop and have to be rebooted. Also, rebooting might take up to 2 hours (the infamous "Applying you computer settings" error).
Dell made a really big boo-boo with this one.
Fix it, so I can get rid of those annoying support calls!
This is 100% true. I have this problem and have already had to have a technician come out to replace the CPU, heatsink and Video Card. The video card was overkill and I told them that. I knew what the problem was from day one.
@luggyman
so by video card you mean motherboard since the video solution on these are not add-in cards.
@(Unverified) Couldn't tell you, i didn't watch him work I was busy that day with inventory counts. he told me it was replaced, so I can assume he did replace the mobo.
are you absolutely sure that it is onboard? i chose the upgraded Quadro 160M. are they making multiple boards based on that option?
@luggyman
Well when my XPS m1330's motherboard was replaced, I found out there were two different motherboards - one with the Intel X3100 and one with the Nvidia 8400m GS. In either case the video cards were soldered on, so yes, it looks that is indeed what they do.
@Hex
guess so... well they're about to do it again too because it's happening again. it happens the most when watching HD movies, or the occasional WoW marathon :P
This is gonna hurt earnings and stock price, whence Wall Street catches wind of this post.
I'm using my E6500 now and have had no such issues.. We did opt to have them downgraded to XP due to restrictions on our corporate software suite. The biggest problem we've had with these is the awful comm manager dell includes, controlpoint. It's TERRIBLE and causes nothing but problems.
@slam We've started wiping our brand new system to get rid of ControlPoint and all the other garbage that's on their systems. It takes a little bit of time, but it's worth it in the end.
@DoubleSh0t I opted for the lazy way out and disabled the service and set it to manual. Glad we weren't the only ones having issues with it
@DoubleSh0t - Apparently the control Point issue is only with the Dell video cards.
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/en/document?docid=342250