Dell announced today a powerful mobile workstation — the Dell Precision M6500. Shown publicly for the first time today at Autodesk University, the Dell Precision M6500 is designed to liberate professionals, designers, animators, engineers and research scientists from their desk without sacrificing performance.

The M6500 also supports security features including authentication and data encryption, when in the field. Available for order now, the Dell Precision M6500 mobile workstation has a starting price of $2,749.

The M6500 enables memory scalability of up to 16GB with its four DIMM slots and it is also the first mobile workstation that supports DDR3 1600MHz memory.

Other product highlights include:

- Optional Intel Core i7-920XM Quad Core Extreme Edition processor linked with fast 1066MHz, 1333MHz and 1600MHz memory;
- Support for the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, XP, along with Red Hat Linux 5.3 64-bit;
- Optional RGB LED edge-to-edge 17-inch screen with 100 percent user selectable color gamut support;
- More internal storage devices than mobile workstations from HP, Lenovo and Apple; and,
- The first to offer the option for three internal storage drives; and optional 2MP camera, multi-touch touchpad with jog shuttle, for greater user flexibility.

The Dell Precision M6500 is also the first mobile workstation to offer the new NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M graphics solution featuring:

- 128 NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing cores;
- Optimization for OpenGL 3.2 / Shader Model 4.0 / DirectX 10.1 / Direct Compute / OpenCL professional applications;
- A 256-bit memory interface;
- 1GB G-DDR3 graphics memory;
- Ultra-fast 64 GB/sec graphics bandwidth; and,
- NVIDIA’s PowerMizer 9.0 power management solution.

Other graphics options include the NVIDIA Quadro FX 2800M and the ATI FireProM7740.