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. This Latitude E6520 features:
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.
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.
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.
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. 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, 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.
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.
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