Dell Precision M6700 review

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.

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.

Graphics grunt is supplied by a FirePro M6000 – AMD’s top mobile workstation card. This is based on the consumer Radeon HD 7870M, and has a 750MHz core clock and 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. That translates to 33fps in the 1,920 x 1,080 High quality Crysis benchmark: faster than the Sony VAIO Z Series, but not as quick as the older, pricier Precision, which came with a FirePro M7740 chip.

For a machine of this size, the M6700 delivered highly respectable battery life. The nine-cell lasted 5hrs 27mins in our light-use test, and a touch over two hours in the heavy-use benchmark. To put this into perspective, the 2010 Precision lasted just short of three hours.

The rest of the specification is modest, with 4GB of 1,600MHz RAM, a 320GB Hitachi hard disk and a slot-loading DVD writer. Connectivity is handled by a single Gigabit Ethernet port and single-band 802.11n wireless.

Dell’s software bundle covers backup, data encryption and wireless access, but there isn’t the wealth of options that ThinkPads offer. Professional users, however, will be glad to see the machine is ISV certified, and MIL-STD-810G approval ensures that when you do feel strong enough to lug it about, dust, humidity and extreme temperatures shouldn’t pose too much of a problem. Even the fingerprint reader adheres to the US government’s FIPS encryption certification.

You don’t have to stick with the low-end specification of our review model. There are five alternative processors to choose from, with the Core i7-3520M adding £155 to the price and the mighty i7-3920XM putting £883 on the bottom line. Speeding up the 4GB of RAM to 1,866MHz costs £25, doubling that to 8GB costs £139, and you can fit a staggering 32GB of RAM, although that adds £614 onto the price.

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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