Dell Precision M6400 Covet review

No, the price at the top of this page isn’t a misprint. Dell’s high end mobile workstation – the Precision M6400 Covet – does, in fact, cost more than four grand; as much as a second hand hatchback, and considerably dearer than any laptop we’ve ever reviewed in the pages of PC Pro.

So why the high price? Just like the Lenovo W700ds, the M6400 is an ISV-certified workstation laptop. That means it’s been through rigorous testing to ensure that it will reliably run expensive CAD and design software such as Maya, Catia, SolidWorks and 3D Studio Max. When you’re spending hours rendering complex scenes or high definition videos with lots of effects, the last thing you want is for your computer to fall over halfway through.

Not that you’ll be waiting that long, because this is one seriously powerful machine. Under the hood you’ll find a 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad Core QX9300 mobile processor, a whopping 8GB of DDR3 RAM, plus a rapid 7,200rpm 320GB Western Digital hard disk – a recipe that resulted in a mind-boggling score of 1.64 in our application-based benchmarks. It’s the fastest laptop we’ve ever tested, and significantly faster than the Lenovo W700ds, which scored 1.39 in the same tests.

Of course this isn’t a laptop intended for office tasks alone; it’s aimed specifically at advanced applications such as professional video editing, 3D design and CAD, and boasts Nvidia’s workstation-grade Quadro FX 3700M graphics, with 1GB of its own dedicated RAM. So, to get a handle of that aspect of its performance we also downloaded and ran the SPECViewperf 10 benchmark suite. The results were stunning: in fact our rough and ready calculations put the M6400 ahead of the recent Workstation Specialists WS102LE desktop workstation by more than 50%.

That’s a hefty chunk of performance, but it can be faster if you want. The M6400 boasts twin hard disk bays, allowing you to increase performance using a RAID setup (incidentally, you don’t have to forsake the optical drive if you do). You can even specify two 256GB SSD drives if you’re feeling really flush.

More remarkable than this, though, is that the Covet is equipped with four DIMM slots where its rivals sport only two. That means adding large amounts of memory will be significantly cheaper, though you’ll still need to take out a small mortage to get right up to the 16GB maximum. Conversely, if the price above gives you palpitations, choosing the standard (non-“Covet”) M6400 allows you to downgrade several elements to save money.

But forget about the internals for a moment, cast your eye over the M6400 Covet’s fine figure, and you’ll fall in love with this machine. The chassis is wrapped in a tight-fitting aluminium jacket finished, in the case of the Covet, in eye-popping blood-orange.

It’s an immensely well-constructed chassis too, rigid as a drillmaster’s cane and extremely tough: there’s absolutely no give, no rattle, no flex anywhere; even the screen, with its metal latches, resisted our ham-fisted attentions.

It isn’t the world’s lightest laptop at 4.34kg, but if you need to transport this machine from office to office, or the oil rig for that matter, we’re confident it will cope.

Pop open the lid, and you’ll find more to adore. The edge-to-edge 17in 1,920 x 1,200 screen, though glossy and prone to reflections under office lights, is in every other way superb. It’s an RGB LED panel, and is capable of rendering 100% of the Adobe sRGB colour space – a feature more commonly found on high-end professional monitors. It’s bright and clear, with punchy colours and no hint of graininess, and its slight red push was easily adjusted out using Nvidia’s control panel. To reduce the bright display’s effect on battery life, there’s also an ambient light sensor to automatically control brightness.

The keyboard is equally accomplished. Each key has a soft, positive break and at the end of the keystroke, your finger meets a solid, yet slightly cushioned base. It’s supremely comfortable to type on. There’s room for a number pad on its right hand side, the keys are backlit (this can also be controlled by the ambient light sensor) and set into keyboard’s centre is a trackpoint for mousing – an option to the more standard touchpad below.

Don’t look away yet, though, as there’s more to drool over. The touchpad – as well as being sensitive, accurate, and boasting a set of buttons as comfortable as we’ve ever come across on any laptop – is backlit. Tap a small logo in its bottom left corner and it glows to life, with four customisable “buttons” along the top, and a timeline scrollbar along the bottom – ideal for video editing.

Elsewhere, there’s a fingerprint reader, dual-band draft-n wireless in the shape of Intel’s Wi-Fi Link 5300 chipset, Bluetooth, and a very good selection of connections arrayed around its edges. On the left there’s a full-size six-pin FireWire port, two USB sockets, a slot-loading DVD writer, 8-in-1 memory card slot, smartcard reader and PC Card reader. On the right you’ll find D-SUB and DisplayPort outputs, Gigabit Ethernet, ExpressCard/54, one USB port that will supply charge while the laptop is off, and a powered USB/eSATA combo port. To the right of the touchpad on the wristrest is also a touchless smartcard sensor.

This is an absolute beast of a laptop, make no mistake, whose only real weak spot is its battery life; despite its whopping nine-cell battery it lasted just 2hrs 15mins in our light use test. But this is no ultraportable, designed instead to be moved from base to base, rather than used intensively while out on-the-road, so it’s not a deal breaker.

It’s not particularly cheap, and neither can it boast the whizz-bang toys of the Lenovo W700ds. But if your company is in the market for a serious mobile workstation and money’s no object this machine is the one to beat. It’s incredibly fast, beautifully built and makes a statement like no other laptop in its category.

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