Dell Updates High-End Precision Notebook Lineup

Dell said its high-end Precision systems target professional users who require desktop-like performance in a mobile form factor, along with scalability and ISV certification. The 15.6-inch Dell Precision M4600 and 17.3-inch M6600 laptops run on Intel’s high-end dual-cores and quad-cores i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge chips, as well as Sandy Bridge Extreme edition processors, which bring the chipmaker’s integrated graphics platform to the enthusiast market.

Dell’s new Precision workstations also offer a choice between AMD’s FIrepro and Nvidia’s Quadro discrete GPUs for supplementary automated and user-switchable visualization capability. As a result, Dell said, the M4600 and M6600 are the “world’s most powerful” 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch mobile workstation.

In an interview with CRN, Mano Gialusis, senior product manager for Dell Precision Mobile Workstations, said Dell’s updated Precision workstations including computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing for entertainment and transportation, and seismic data analysis for the oil-and-gas industry.

“Dell’s Precision workstations are designed for use in production environments,” Gialusis said. “They can do different things on site and scale with no compromises with regard to design or specifications.”

Gialusis said Dell received customer feedback for its Precision workstations, which it directly incorporated into these updated systems, including requests for additional ports – the new Precision offer two USB 3.0 and three USB 2.0 ports, one of which is an ESATA port --and features, and a ground-up chassis re-design on its 15.6-inch Precision M4600 model. Those feedback-based adjustments allow Dell to meet the various specific needs of its Precision customers, whose costly applications handle compute-intensive workloads that require high-performance mobile hardware.

“Everything you see around you these days was pretty much designed on mobile workstations,” Gialusis said. “When you’re talking spending north of $100,000 on an application, spending a bit more to get Precision workstation to certify and run that properly is simple logic for Precision customers.”

Gialusis said Dell added four memory slots on the updated Precision mobile workstations, as well as some new capacity points and two new unique memory speeds: 1333 MHz and 1600 MHz. He also said Nvidia’s discrete 5010M graphics cards include 4 gigs of on-board VDI5 memory and are being offered for the first time on a notebook. The Dell Precision workstations also include multiple resolution displays and different technologies, and a Dell premier color IGS RGB panel with an ultra-wide viewing angle that Increases the color options from 16 million to 1 billion colors on the next-generation.

Along with additional USB ports, Dell’s Precision M4600 and M6600 mobile workstations offer multiple storage locations, including a one 128 GB solid state mini-card that allows users to load their operating system and applications and for security purposes.

In addition, Dell said its Precision M4600 workstation offers a keyboard with a number pad, increased maximum memory capacity of 32GB and increased hard disk drive (HDD) of up to 750GB. The Dell Precision M6600 includes an optional second hard drive disk and 128GB solid state drive (SSD) mini card with RAID 5 support.