Ron Schenone

Are Dell Latitude E6500 And E6400 Notebooks Suffering From Performance Problems?

Posted by on Dec 3, 2009 | 2 Comments

What some are describing as ‘throttlegate’, involves the Dell E6500 and E6400 [and other model] notebooks from performing properly. According to some reports the notebooks are running at 95% below their stated cpu speed. It is unknown if the issue is an overheating problem or not. Dell appears to be investigating the matter according to a comment left over at Engadget which stated:

Dell’s Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca dropped the following in comments, which is something of a positive step:

We’re aware of concerns raised in this post and others like it. At this point, our teams are looking into the details. When we have more information to share, we’ll update customers via a post on Dell’s blog, Direct2Dell.
Here is the latest on the Dell blog:

Throttling is a power management methodology used throughout the industry to balance system performance, component temperature and user experience. Throttling optimizes performance, regulates component temperatures and skin temperature (the amount of heat you feel at external touch points) while using a laptop.

Under normal conditions and use (i.e. a typical office environment and running a typical set of applications), customers won’t see any issue at all. At this point, we’ve only heard from a small number of customers who have reported issues related to throttling. Those issues arose under more extreme thermal and usage models. These customers report more throttling than expected, plus they tend to experience a prolonged recovery time that sometimes requires a reboot to recover from the throttled state. In those scenarios, users may see slower system performance.

What we learned from the customers we’ve talked to is that we could improve thermal algorithms that dictate throttling thresholds on our mainstream business-class product line. Previous BIOS revisions for some platforms were not optimized for certain extreme operating conditions.

They have listed all models which are having issues and have released revised BIOS updates to correct the problem. Here is a list of models that may need an updated BIOS:

Comments welcome.

SiliconIndia source

Engadget source

  • imc

    They never fixed the problem, they replace my motherboard + cooling system + cpu four times now (once the motherboard was even older than what they replaced, and always had older bios versions)

    BIOS updates never fixed a damn thing.

    I’m calling tomorrow for a complete replace, i will keep asking for replacements each two working days, until this is really fixed (i.e. never, if they don’t give me another model as a replacement).

  • http://www.wizonesolutions.com kkaland

    I’m also experiencing this problem, I believe. I’m trying the new BIOS, and if that doesn’t resolve the issue, I’ll get in touch with Dell. Good thing I bought a good warranty.