Dell Inspiron 630m - Not bad.

[BillyBuerger]

My boss needed a new laptop and we picked him out a Dell 630m. I just read a recommedation for the 700m which actually probably would have been a better choice. Dote, oh well.

First impressions are good. Since it has a Pentium M, speed step keeps it quiet at idle. The fan doesn't appear to spin up at all during light with the room temperature around 23C. I did a run of CPU Burn-in. The fan kicked in within 5 seconds as the clock speed jumped up. But at the lowest setting, the fan doesn't sound bad. I haven't been able to use this thing in my living room or somewhere that really quite. So it's hard to judge. The sound is dominated by wind turbulance and the level is low enough. The biggest problem I've seen so far is that after I quite CPU burn-in, the fan stopped after a few seconds. But then it spun up again for a couple seconds.... Then stopped again. Then started up. You get the point. I didn't stick around to see how long it would do this before stabling out. But it appears the fan controller could use a little tweaking. Keep the fan on for a little longer to avoid it from having to start back up again.

The only thing I really have to compare it too is my Gateway 3018GZ. The gateway has a clicky fan that even at its low 5V setting is too loud. The Dell has the advantage of being slightly thicker that the gateway. This means there is room for a larger heat sink and better fan. I also picked the ultra-bright display and am glad I did. It looks grerat. It makes the gateway display look washed out and dull.

I can't say I really care for the way it looks. The bottom is black, the middle is silver, and it's got that pearly white around the edge. (I liked what Ralf said about the white in the Antec P150 review about it being "the new black") I personally don't like the white. And the three different colors going on is a big much for me.

[ggolub]

Hi

I've recently came across dell enviromental info. (look at my posting in this forum) It's said 630 is the second quitest of all dell notebooks in 14' and up for screen size category. First is latitude d610 with a very small difference.
What they do different and why - noone was able to tell me when I called to dell tech support.

Gene.

[jaganath]

I've recently came across dell enviromental info. (look at my posting in this forum) It's said 630 is the second quitest of all dell notebooks in 14' and up for screen size category. First is latitude d610 with a very small difference.

Are you sure you've read it correctly? The documentation states the following:

D610- 30.1 decibels (idle), 31 decibels (HD seek)
630M- 24.2 decibels (idle), 25.8 decibels (HD seek)

The 630M is clearly quieter. (it is the Sound Pressure Operator Position that you should actually be comparing with, as this is the level of sound that you will typically "experience")

This review would support that finding, as it mentions that the D610's fan is always on, which is unfavourable for noise.


D610 Environmental Spec

630M Env. Spec

[ggolub]

I think we have different views on that because we consider different characterics as the most contributing to noise.
I could be wrong but I beleive that energy consumption and noise dissipation are more important than noise pressure level.
Actually I do not know what exactly pressure level shows, do you?
But energy consumption and heat dissipation are not conflicting to each other and clearly support the idea of how much fan work is required.

I am expecting new d610 to come in a week. Right now I use d600 which I think is pretty good. It has 3 modes: not blowing air, medium intensity and the highest intensity.
Medium intensity is close to not noticable, you have to move your ear next to the side of notebook to notice it. High intensity is berely noticable and still very quiet.
Somehow I am getting feeling that while you keep with M processor, stay away from graphic card - any laptop model will do fine.
Most of the manufactures are using either ibm, fujitsu or hitachi drives which are all pretty good. I think one way to implicitly measure hardrive noise performance is to look at its cache size (some of them are 2 gb) and use at least 512 mgb memory so hardrive access will be minimal. Unfortunately nobody publishes model of hardrive to be used with this or another model. And anyway, only seagate publishes its noise performance for its drives.

[ggolub]

Sorry, I mentioned 2gb cache when I acutaly meant 2mgb as oppose to other drives with 8mgb (later in my opinion and from what I read is very beneficial for drive performance).