Digital Archaeology: Dell Latitude E6520

Dell's Latitude line was designed for business users. They tended to have more solid construction and be a little more subdued in their looks than the more consumer oriented Inspiron line. In general, they seem to be of higher quality than Inspirons, at least in terms of construction. This Latitude E6520 features:

• CPU: i7-2760QM @ 2.4 GHz
• Video: nVidia NVS 4200M
• RAM: 8 GB DDR3 (PC3-10700)
• Screen: 1920x1080

For more complete hardware specs, check out the output from CPU-Z, HWiNFO, or HardInfo.

This appears to be the highest end configuration that was available for this model. It has an i7 processor though this model was also available with an i3 or i5. The included 8 GB is the the maximum officially supported and the most this model would have shipped with. However, people have successfully upgraded this model to 16 GB.

There were two choices as far as graphics were concerned. Either this model came with only the Intel HD 3000 graphics of the CPU or it came with the discreet nVidia NVS4200M. Fortunately, mine includes the nVidia chip. The NVS4200M was essentially the same as the GT 520M. While the NVS4200M is tuned more for professional applications than for gaming, it should still give you roughly the same performance as the 520m which would make this laptop ok for gaming. Not gaming laptop great but good enough for casual gaming and playing contemporary games on lower settings.

The one part in this laptop that is clearly an upgrade is the hard drive. This machine likely shipped with a 500 GB hard drive. It currently has a much smaller but MUCH faster SSD. You really can't overstate how big of a difference an SSD makes on older (or newer for that matter) computers, especially with Windows 10+ which seems to always be thrashing the disk for indexing or updates or whatever the hell it always seems to be doing in the background.

This laptop originally shipped with Windows 7 but was also available with Windows Vista and Linux Ubuntu 10.10. Originally, I had a newer version of Xubuntu installed but I was having problems with the display. During a video driver update it stopped displaying in GUI mode. No amount of uninstalling or reinstalling drivers, either nVidia or open source seemed to resolve the issue. I decided to install Windows 10 instead and everything is working well.

While the Latitude E6520 is definitely not thin and light by today's standards (or really even for the time), it's sturdy metal chassis construction, nice full-size backlit keyboard, and 1080p display still make it a nice machine even by today's standards. With the i7 processor that is in this one and maxed out on RAM, and with an SSD it still has plenty of power and speed for typical tasks. It's only if your doing really CPU intensive stuff like transcoding video or if you want to play modern games that you would really need anything more.

Like all of the hardware I operate, this one has BOINC installed and is crunching tasks whenever it is turned on. It is connected to all of the projects I usually participate in including Einstein@home, Milkyway@home, Rosetta@home, Asteroids@home, Universe@home and World Community Grid. You can see how it is doing overall at FreeDC.