AL123

Ah I hadn’t heard about that one, would be more aligned with the dominance NVIDIA have in that market along with partnership Dell have with them. perhaps the focus on AI will also mean we will see a mid life increase in graphics memory per ampere mobile where they doubled many of the capacities of the range IIRC. just not sure if the memory density will allow for that in such a small space to cram them in and cool the chips.

ah didn’t realise it was that old, perhaps the first gen might be a bit limited but hopefully a sign dell are looking to innovate. i think the NVIDIA spark / Dell Pro Max GB10 will make more sense, 128GB or 256 if you join two together https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/products/workstations/dgx-spark/ so small you could jsut pop in your bag,

I’d certainly like a better idea of how this stacking is arranged, not brave enough to take these apart any further though! I can try and take some more pictures around that area when I am back in the office though.

Just going on what was on their slide deck dell showed us on the new range, had an ~ 1 hour overview of the full range from technical contact at Dell, would hope it was put together by technical team rather than just marketing claims! that marketing video looks different to the images I saw with arrows for air flow , perhaps the video team didn’t know the details of how it was supposed to work, bit embarrassing if so! if you look at the picture of the base I sent you should also see the vent above the third fan is blocked off,I presume this is so it is forced to draw air from vents primarily at the bottom of the laptop by the Memory, SSD and battery

No worries this is mainly relying on what I have been told by dell proof will be as people test the laptops, they haven’t played it safe in my opinion both with cooling design and CAMM for higher speeds/ capacity vs 4 so-dimm slots RE Qualcomm ai chip From what I read it’s a case of choose that or graphics card, at some point post launch. not sure it will be popular, the NVIDIA spark platform looks like a more solid option for AI. mini desktop with more capacity and you can link 2 together. Dell will offer this too.

not to sure on the stacked cpu/GPU I’ve not studied it in any detail/ had it explained to me, but so far seems to be working well from limited testing performance seems good for our workflows and chassis temperature a lot better than the old gen, but it’s very early days in testing. It’s certainly a bold choice, let’s hope there is plenty of science and testing behind it, I was told several new patents around its design the other points I can probably explain some of the thinking from what I have been told by Dell re the wasted space, most of this is the area around the CAMM module, post launch the 256GB option will be two cards, I am assuming that will take up most of that space. and re the no fan to cool the nvme/memory the idea is the third than generates negative pressure, drawing air from remote vents down towards those components/ the battery. How well it works vs a fan right there time will tell!

Thought you all might appreciate a few photos I took from my own reference of the internals since it was my biggest interest on the redesign

For sure I’ll try to test with the docks as that is what will be used in office ideally, we currently use wd19dcs docks so think would have to plug the power supply into 1 usb c port first then plug the dock in. Hoping we will gradually swap out to these new docks as we get new laptops. Re the power supply it looks like it’s done just for the docks this time rather than jsut being an older model larger power supply, looks a bit more pro ill take a look at the memory speed also not so up on that in recent years as most of our applications aren’t hugely sensitive to memory speed. as far as the display I like the 18 inch QHD more than the 4K OLED, mainly because the OLED is a bit glossy which I am really conscious of even in an office environment I find it distracting, and also never a fan of 4K on laptops the scaling has to be set so high in windows some dialogs in our apps are a bit off, more a Microsoft/ other software developer issue which still doesn’t seem to be solved after 10+ years! I’m not too sensitive to refresh rate but IT colleague did say they noticed it was smoother straight away and asked if it was 120Hz, so I’d take that as an endorsement!

Ha battery is 96Whr I believe; impressed by how small it is, but not sure why they didn’t go the whole way to 99 Whr seems to be space particularly on the 18. on the RTX 4000 power limits I only saw 170W for short periods, this was a GPU rendering task that will use 100% of CUDA cores + Ray trace and Tensor cores (denoising) so it settled to around 150w for sustained loads. I think anything above 150W would be for bursty workloads. In terms of battery life, on the lower end Pro Max laptops the Intel Ultra H series CPUs seem a lot better for battery life and heat compared with the old i7/i9. 1st gen ultra series sacrificed a lot of performance even when plugged in but these seem much improved on both counts. but then the GPU tops out at the RTX 2000 Blackwell which draws a lot less power. Not sure about the Pro Max 16 &18 Plus with Intel HX, whigher end descrete graphics and up to an 18 inch screen I’m not holding out my hopes for much battery life. But then most of our team use these between office, customer site and home for hybrid working and for that use case 95% of the time it’s plugged in.

I have one of the docks too so will give it a go when I am in the office on both power supply and dock see if there is any performance difference / power draw from the battery I figured the 300W figure was more about future proofing but will be interesting to see. The 330w power brick for this dock is a large rounded rectangle a bit bigger than the dock itself! But has some slots on the base so you could mount it under a desk to some screws. Also screw holes on the bottom of the dock I guess to stop them going walkies from hot desks. Big change for me is the power cable can now go left or right depending on where you want to place your laptop. Feels strange having so much power over USB-C but not noticed any issues with heat etc, plus the 280W laptop power supply is barely bigger than the GaN ones with the 7780. I did notice a dynamic PL1 figure which starts at the same 98W as the fixed figure but forgot to check what that went to under heavy GPU load, my assumption would be the CPU power limit would be reduced perhaps to 50W or less. Just happens that our workloads tend to be either CPU or GPU heavy nothing we do currently loads all cores on the CPU + GPU so it would be a synthetic worst case test really.

In Europe atleast everyone’s on holiday! Worst time to launch a new product. I had about half a day to test a Pro Max 16 and 18,last Firday with view to replacing a bunch of 7760s including my own! on leave myself now but so far pretty promising particularly on the Pro Max 18, surprisingly similar size to the old 7780 and even not that much heavier for a big upgrade in screen size. It’s still portable enough for me. Pro Max 18 has got and ultra 9 and PL1 98 watts PL2 160W IIRC. Heavy multithreaded load it averaged around the 100w mark. Seems a bit conservative but performance in real world was very good similar to the desktops we have with Ultra 9 285K running at up to 250Watts for heavy multithreaded tasks (80-100% load over a 30 min simulation) for graphics if has the RTX 4000 Blackwell and under heavy GPU compute load I was seeing 150-170W settling to around the 150 mark longer term, perhaps the intel max limits are more about the chips thermals/ optimum power window. Didn’t get to combined CPU/ GPU load yet. took the base off and the new layout is very impressive packaging, the 3 fan layout is interesting with 2 dedicated to normal cooling and the third being slightly lower and separated from the others, counter intuitively the grill above this third fan is blocked off. I believe this is designed to draw air from the intakes at the bottom of the chassis instead, pulling cool air over the ram/ ssds etc. oh and I didn’t realise one of the ssds was on the other side of the battery now rather than stacked with the other 3, wonder if this will be better or worse than the stacked slot. CAMM module also has its own thermal spreader/ heat sink, CSO-DIMM with interposer does not ( got one of each memory type) didn’t test the Pro Max 16 as much but certainly was louder under heavy load which means I’m leaning toward the pro max 18 for my own new laptop

I’ve been shown this In dell presentations was sure I’ve seen it in articles elsewhere but can only find HP claims. Spec sheet links are broken currently also. looking forward to seeing the reality and also how loud they are under heavy load!

I guess the new stacked cooling design complicates things also, easier to only offer the RTX Pro cards even if the physical design is the same, I suspect they would be cautious of adding a card with different vbios, drivers, support etc

Yeh our account manager said no GeForce this time but could be wrong, makes sense as the line up looks pretty similar in terms of specs for RTX PRO mobile and GeForce mobile at the high end but still could be proved wrong! &nbsp leas gap in price between consumer and pro cards now also

Worth looking at some RTX 5080 vs 5090 mobile reviews I think most have said the 5090 wasn’t worth the extra money so you might be better off with the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell 16GB which I think is equivalent to the 5080 mobile. From what I have heard there won’t be any GeForce options on Pro Max Laptops, weirdly they added them to Pro Max Desktops though. For me it would be clearer if gaming cards were only in consumer/Alienware systems but I guess more choice isn’t bad so long as you know what you are choosing!