PrecisionM4500
Latest
Dell ships Precision M6500 laptop with 32GB of RAM: drill, baby, drill
Nah, that's not us yelling to dig deeper into oceanic unknowns -- it's a megaphone originating from Dell's campus in Round Rock. As the story goes, Dell's "oil and gas" consumers have been clamoring for more system memory on their mobile workstations, with the revamped Precision M6500 -- which allows them to "review larger slices of the earth to find oil, enabling faster and more accurate drilling to find oil and gas reserves." We say all that to mention the 32GB of system RAM that's now shipping on fully loaded M6500s, but with four RAM slots, that's not as difficult to accomplish as you might expect. Still, having 32GB in a single laptop is a rare sight these days, and if you aren't into coughing up a fistful of Benjamins for that, Dell's Precision M4500 is now available with 16GB of memory. You know, for running Maya with less lag... or something.
Dell Precision M4500 now shipping with $1,549 starting price
With specs and prices easily reaching into the stratosphere, we weren't quite sure where Dell's new 15-inch Precision M4500 workstation would land -- the 17-inch M6500 has a starting price of $1,799, but that's only after $310 of "instant savings." Well, it looks like we're getting off (relatively) easy with the M4500, with a Core i5-520M 2.5GHz model running for $1,549 and still managing to pack in those NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M Graphics. Of course, we imagine you'll quickly be running up that bill -- 2GB of slow RAM, a 1366 x 768 LCD, and no WiFi just aren't going to cut it -- but with tempting options like a secondary 64GB SSD minicard drive and the ever-frivolous Precision ON, it's not like we were sticking near that base price anyway. Expect to spec out something truly delicious in the $2,500+ range. Our biggest disappointment? Backlit keyboard is optional, something that's standard even on the Vostro line these days.
Dell brings next-gen Precision performance to M4500 15.6-incher
The super-high-end 17-inch M6500 is all well and good for giant people, but we're glad Dell's finally giving us regular-sizers a shot with the new Precision M4500. Naturally, compromises have been made, but only just barely. The new 15.6-inch laptop rocks a 16:9, 1920 x 1080 display, backed up by NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M or 880M graphics (the 6500 supports the 3800M, 2800M and ATI M7740) and your choice of Core i5 or Core i7 processors, on up to the Core i7-920XM Quad Core Extreme Edition. This being Dell, there are plenty of tweaks and perks on offer, like a HD+ sRGB LED screen with 100 percent color gamut, a 64GB SSD mini card for dual drive configs without losing the optical drive, a 3 megapixel camera, backlit keyboard, multitouch trackpad, Precision ON, and a multi-carrier-friendly Gobi 2.0 wireless chip. Perhaps most excitingly for us on-the-go regular-sizers, you can supposedly squeeze out 7 hours and 40 minutes of battery with the 9 cell option, and there's a 12 cell battery slice option less than half an inch thick that should send it over the moon. On its own the laptop is 1.1-inches thick and weighs 6 pounds, and while exact pricing hasn't been ironed out yet, it should start at less than $1,700. Start counting out those regular-sized green dollars of yours, the laptop should be out in the "coming weeks." That not enough for you? Dell's also upgrading its Precision T7500, T5500 and T5300 workstations to Intel Xeon 5600 Westmere EP processors for you desk slaves within a similar timeframe. PR and another M4500 press shot are after the break.
