I received my new Dell on Wednesday of last week. Unfortunately, it came with a broken LCD panel. I called up Dell support and got an english speaking person, who ordered a new screen and a tech to come out to my office the next day, Thursday. Thursday afternoon, I received a phone call from a tech who said he could be over in about 15 minutes. The tech arrived in 15 minutes, and it took all of 5 minutes to replace the screen. Done.
Now for the real adventure. I managed to load almost all of my apps in a matter of a few hours because we have a really fast internet connection in the office. I wanted to test the speed of this new computer, compared to my old computer, a Dell Latitude E6510. Here are the specs of both:
| M4800 | E6510 |
| Intel Core i7-4800MQ (quad-core 2.8ghz, 3.8ghz turbo) | Intel Core i7-720QM (quad-core 1.6ghz, 2.2ghz turbo) |
| 8GB RAM (1600mhz) | 16GB RAM (1033mhz) |
| 750GB 7200 RPM hard drive | 480GB SSD + 500GB Hybrid hard drive |
| Nvidia Quadro K2100M with 2GB gDDR5 RAM | Nvidia NVS 3100M with 512MB gDDR3 RAM |
| 3200×1800 resolution | 1920×1080 resolution |
With the above specs in mind, I thought that the new computer would be around 5 times faster for certain applications, namely video conversion. I decided to take this to the test. I loaded up a 3 minute 6 second video in Sony Vegas Movie Studio 11 on both computers and ran the rendering process. The old computer was running the export process with CUDA support. That means the computer actually uses the GPU to assist in the rendering process. That computer exported that video in 734 seconds (12:14). Try as I did, I could not get the new computer to render with CUDA. So I ran the test without CUDA. The new machine came in at 229 seconds (3:49). This is approximately 3 times faster.
But I really wanted to try this test with CUDA on the new computer. So I downloaded the newer version of Sony Vegas Movie Studio 12, and installed it on my computer. This version could use the newer CUDA api on the newer video card. The test ran at 186 seconds (3:06). This is approximately 4x faster than the older computer. What is really interesting is that this is faster than real time.
While I didn’t achieve the 5x faster that I was hoping for, this computer is a dream to work on. It’s very fast, and I’ll have no trouble exporting videos for a while.
I had a Latitude 6410 and just got a Prec M4800. I’m just beginning to test the new laptop, but I alreay miss the keyboard lighting up that I had on the Latitude.
My M4800 has a backlight keyboard. I love it.
Hey, thanks for the comparison. It makes me feel better choosing the 4800 for my new laptop, as I have the same Latitude as you with the same slow quad-core and it is slow as molasses! GIS only runs on one 32-bit core, so having eight slow cores does not do me much good…
There is nothing faster than real time. Real time by definition is speed of light