I am planning to buy Dell E6530 with Full HD display, i5 Ivy Bridge processor and Intel HD 4000 (without dedicated graphic card). I will buy it with Ubuntu 12.04 installed by Dell.
Does somebody have this configuration (i5, HD4000, Full HD) and is Ubuntu stable on it, silent and cool?
If I do a clean install (I plan to upgrade for SSD drive), how do I install HD 4000 graphics driver and software to reduce/control fan use?
Thank you.
Your machine will work perfectly fine right out of the box with Ubuntu!
For Intel graphics you don't have to install anything, all is in kernel. Just make sure you install a recent Ubuntu release (12.04.3+ or 13.04+).
Fan control is done fully by an embedded controller as far as I can see with nothing to tweak. But it's really really silent in idle. I'm getting 11W idle power usage (with screen on) and 7W with screen off. That's about as low as you will get with this platform.
I've got a E6530 with Nvidia+Intel in Optimus, but I have the Nvidia card disabled (because I'm not using any graphic applications).
