Aaron44126

Just poking for information, it looks like Dell has made the announcement, and this is the first article I found. https://mashable.com/article/ces-2025-dell-ai-pc-rebrand-pro-max There are three classes of Dell PC in the rebrand: "Dell" "Dell Pro" "Dell Pro Max" (Err, there also seems to be some "Plus" and "Premium" tossed in for good measure.) Dell Pro laptops will be available imminently. Dell Pro Max 14/16 Intel version will be dropping in March or April. Dell Pro Max *AMD version* will also drop later in 1H 2025. (@Ionising_Radiation) (Dell Pro Max 18 is not mentioned here...?) [Edit] Realizing that none of this is "Pro Max Plus" which was the leaked Precision 7000 replacement. [Edit 2] Dell has a promo page up. https://www.dell.com/en-us/plcp/lp/dell-pro-max-pcs And a blog post. https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/dell-transforms-ai-pc-portfolio-for-anywhere-productivity/ The blog post mentions Dell Pro Max "Premium" and Dell Pro Max "Plus" coming "later this year". [Edit 3] Dell Pro Max (non-Premium/Plus) will apparently have RTX Ada Generation GPUs, not new Blackwell ones or whatever NVIDIA is about to reveal today. Pro Max = Precision 3000 Pro Max Premium = Precision 5000 Pro Max Plus = Precision 7000 Pro Premium = XPS Pro (base) = Latitude?

Doesn't look like it has been "officially announced" just yet... and the GameStar article linked as the source has been pulled. I bet we have to wait at least until after NVIDIA's announcement (this evening) before the flood of laptop announcements will arrive. CES doesn't "actually start" until tomorrow, anyway...

New HX CPUs announced as CES starts up. Still waiting to see if Dell actually announces anything.

Well, macOS does allow for more mucking around than some other Apple products. If you want to go that way, you can disable SIP and then make changes to the sealed system volume, basically "doing whatever you want" to the OS (at the tradeoff of losing certain system protections). I'm not sure what it would take to get rid of Siri, there are probably people who have looked into that, but deleting built-in applications like the Chess app would be trivial. ...Though, they would come back every time you install an OS update, since that basically drops a whole fresh sealed system volume down. I wasn't sure how I would feel about the "immutable" nature of the OS. I was turned off from that idea when I read about it when poking around different Linux distros, before I bought the Mac. However, I can appreciate how it prevents rogue third-party apps from doing any sort of muckery with the underlying OS, short of exploiting a security vulnerability to get in there. And I really do like how macOS comes down on not allowing third-party apps to install "background services" without telling you about it and giving you an easy way to turn them off. Like Windows, so many apps want to have their own update daemons running (Edge/Chrome, Zoom, Acrobat) or "licensing monitors" (MS Office, Adobe CC) or who knows what else. This is me coming from Windows, where systems tend to get so crufted up with background junk. I get that coming from Linux would be a different story, there's less of that going on. I do think the "stock" macOS experience leaves a fair bit to be desired but can be boosted by the raft of third-party tools that are available. Some that I found that I appreciate: Homebrew (sort of Linux-style package manager, can manage both UNIX-y terminal tools and macOS GUI apps) Rectangle (proper window snapping, very configurable) iTerm2 (much improved terminal app, also very configurable) LinearMouse (fix mouse scroll wheel behavior, which I find to be terrible on macOS if you're not using an Apple mouse; can adjust behavior on a per-app basis) BetterDisplay (if you need to mess with things like screen resolutions that the OS doesn't want to offer as choices... more for gaming) Karabiner-Elements (used this to get "compose key" shortcuts going) Ice (menu bar manager, hide some of those unnecessary icons) Itsycal (better calendar widget for the menu bar) Carbon Copy Cloner (for backups... Time Machine seems to be very brittle) XMenu (I basically use the "Custom folder" menu option and used that to set up my own quick-access drop-down list of apps to launch, with nested folders and everything, so I can have the "app menu" be organized just how I want) I still wish I could find a better file manager app. Finder is... passable, but I used Directory Opus on Windows and it was just so much more flexible. There are some third-party options but none of them really seemed better than Finder to me. ...And I wish there were more "power user" options for the dock, like the ability to add separators or to hide certain running apps in a pop-out "overflow area" so that they don't always have to be there taking up space. As for privacy, I do find Apple to be the most trustworthy in this area among the "big tech" companies (Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.) — but certainly not perfect, I can see how this would also seem like a step down from Linux.

I watched this LTT ( — mixed feelings over the "quality" of LTT but this one is not bad — ); seems like Valve might be making a push this year to get modern SteamOS on things other than Steam Deck. If they could make it a bit easier to install and support more hardware out of the box then I think there is a sizeable segment of people who might give it a shot.

You are right that these CPUs use the same "socket" — though "socket" is a bit of a misnomer because the chips aren't removable from the motherboard without microsoldering work. You'd need someone who knows what they're doing to make the chip swap. You're also right that Precision 7750 boards won't fit in a 7720. At this time Dell was doing an "every other generation" chassis refresh — so you can use (most) 7710 components in a 7720 (and vice versa), and 7730/7740, and 7750/7760, and 7770/7780, but if you go outside of those pairings then things get a lot more hairy. But the CPU socket is the same still. Would it work if you swapped them? Wish I could say. I've seen chatter about "attempting" this sort of thing before but I've never heard from anyone who actually tried it. Drivers shouldn't be a problem, the only "driver" that would really be different would be the Intel integrated GPU driver and you could grab that one from the Precision 7750 support site (or, Windows Update would probably pull it down automatically). There could be other reasons that this would not work. Will the Precision 7720 BIOS throw up if it encounters an Intel 10th-gen CPU? Will the 10th-gen Xeon be happy to talk to the older PCH in the 7720? Are there actually changes or additions to the CPU pinout between these different generations that we don't know about? On desktops you can generally assume that any CPU that "fits" into a socket will be compatible with whatever motherboard. (Sometimes a BIOS update is necessary to fully support new CPUs in an old motherboard.) On the laptop side, the engineers are able to assume that you'll only ever use the system in the configurations that they ship out of the factory, so they probably didn't take any steps to support and definitely did not test "new CPUs in an old system". And because of the physical difficulty in making the chip swap, it's not a common thing to mess around with even for us tinkerers.

I’ve been poking around BlueSky and it keeps serving me up discussions on this. Lots of people switching to Linux and figuring it out… but also lots of people pushing back on that. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/tpm-2-0-–-a-necessity-for-a-secure-and-future-proof-windows-11/4339066 Microsoft is apparently doubling down on the requirements, or at least the TPM one. It is easy enough to bypass the requirements and run Windows 11 anyway. However, with so many PCs still on Windows 10… There will be some that move to 11 (supported hardware or not), or to Linux, or that just get chucked, but I think the most likely scenario is that… the biggest share of them will just stay on Windows 10 even after MS support expires. (Moved my “home server” from Windows 10 to Linux over the “holiday break”. Wasn’t even hard, just had to commit the time to actually do it, which also involved finding temporary holding space for 20ish TB of stuff so that I could switch my disk pool from Storage Spaces to MDRAID. Just my work PC remains running Windows, and that will hopefully be addressed later this year…)

You can turn Optimus back on by resetting the BIOS to default settings (just yank the coin cell battery).

eDP bypasses the mux and is connected directly to the dGPU. You can’t use it with the iGPU. So, you can’t use Optimus, but also it shouldn’t be “required” if the dGPU supports eDP. I think the only eDP panel sold in the M6600 was the 10-bit IPS display? They didn’t use it for the “regular” displays. An easy way to check would be to see if there is an Optimus toggle present in BIOS setup. The option is removed if an eDP display is installed.

The best you can probably do is install the vBIOS from the Precision 7740 or maybe the Precision 7750 version of the card. It will have a higher power limit, higher than your 7530 will likely be able to deliver to the GPU on a continuous basis. I don't recommend installing a vBIOS from a non-Dell system. (I believe @Ionising_Radiation did exactly this when he was first messing around with Precision 7530 GPU upgrades.) I wouldn't worry too much about what the clock speed given on the vBIOS is. These GPUs already boost above the stock clock until they hit the power or thermal ceiling. The power limit given in the vBIOS is the limiting factor — it will be strictly observed by the GPU, and you can't raise it with third-party tools. If you can raise the power limit by flashing on a different vBIOS, performance will go up (assuming that your system can actually deliver that power and the cooling system can dissipate the resulting heat).

I was able to use Quadro M5000M with the internal display without Optimus (note: LVDS display). I think most first-gen Maxwell GPUs would work (Quadro MX000M, or any GeForce 900 series). M2200 is a second-gen Maxwell GPU and I don’t know if they made any VBIOS changes that would mess that up.

Eh, normally the "3D" cable is the one that you want, unless you are trying to put the original 10-bit IPS panel in. The "3D" cable will work with other eDP panels as long as the panel connector is the same. I used the "3D" cable and was able to hook it up to a 1080p 120Hz eDP display panel in the laptop. I didn't end up keeping it because it was a glossy panel. @JadeRover I believe you can use a MXM-A board in there and it will fit but it has been a long time since I saw someone try that... Can't remember if it was M6600 or M6700 or M6800. You are right, though, if the system doesn't like the GPU card then you won't get any display at all. Well, sometimes in cases like this you can get an external display to work even if the built-in laptop display will not. GeForce 980M is probably the "easiest" good GPU upgrade to slap in this laptop, but it looks like that is a bit over your budget.

I would say, from an end-user perspective, the jump from LTSC 2019 to LTSC 2021 is pretty negligible, if you aren't running into blocks of software that doesn't want to run. Going to LTSC 2024 (Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC), you obviously get the "Windows 11 experience" which has some pros and cons. I personally prefer Windows 10 over Windows 11 and would hold out if I could. (I am still using Windows 10 LTSC on my work PC. It might never go to Windows 11; I am hoping to ditch Windows altogether next year, as the main OS anyway, just using it in a VM for a handful of apps that I can't do without.) You can try it and see, I think there is a "free trial" of Windows 11 LTSC which you can download and use for 60 days or something; throw it on a test system or test partition and see how you like it before committing to upgrading your main OS.

Doesn’t have to be OneDrive; anything that allows public sharing of images will work. I checked just copying image URLs from your Chinese post but it looks like they add timestamps and authentication tokens to the image URLs, that site probably took steps to prevent this sort of thing…

Just saw another post with someone running a Pascal GPU in the M6600. Maybe this problem is only with Kepler and Maxwell GPUs. (Actually don’t remember what exactly happens with Maxwell but I want to say it won’t boot.)

M6600 for some reason doesn't like newer NVIDIA GPUs (some BIOS bug prevents it from working), but doesn't have a problem with newer AMD GPUs.

This image shows a smaller third fan in the little "infographic", so I am expecting something similar here...

Note that you can post images from another site, you just have to drop the image URL in when writing the post and it will convert to an in-line image automatically. (I personally upload them to OneDrive and use the "embed" button in OneDrive to get an image URL that I can paste here.)

I think we will see new graphics cards announced at CES, with workstation versions following in spring, so a GPU refresh for this model is likely. Regarding the power supply being "only" 240W, I think that is likely to be the case (as has been with Dell workstations for over a decade). Power use over 240W will be possible, but it will just drain from the battery to achieve that. (Precision 7770 + 7780 already do this.) Plus, as far as I know, 240W is the max for USB-C for now. Maybe Dell will allow multiple USB-C adapters attached to combine power, but I wouldn't hold my breath... Regarding the hinges not being visible from the back, I think they are using a very similar design to the current MacBook Pro here, except the hinges are "wider". You might be able to see them from the back (barely) only when the system is shut. This also means that the system probably can't open to a full 180°.

I hadn't been paying attention... but this is from another laptop maker... it looks like dropping the right Ctrl key is a normal thing to do, I guess... *sigh*

I think this at least will make sense when we see the inside. Where there are no ports, it is probably because the motherboard does not extend there, because the space is used by the cooling system or the battery. They really are trying to use every bit of space inside these things because they feel pressure to reduce the size by a few mm every iteration…

Not sure how the "bottom door" works exactly but hopefully it is better than the SSD bottom door that they've had in the last few iterations (just allows access to the primary SSD), and allows easier access to the system without taking off the entire bottom (including the part that wraps around the sides and covers the USB ports and so on). I have found that a bit finicky to take on and off, and miss the old days (7X40 and earlier) when it was just the bottom panel and not the sides that came off. Or especially 7X20 and earlier, when removing the bottom panel just required taking out two screws. What I loved about the Precision systems when I first got into them was how modular and serviceable they are. The keyboard is a part that may reasonably need to be removed during the life of the system. (I replaced my Precision 7560 keyboard just a few months ago.) You should be able to take it out from the top. ...This serviceability has just been getting a little bit worse each time they refresh the chassis. In the "old days" (i.e. Precision M6600-M6800) you could just take off the bottom panel (two screws) and easily access everything that you needed, and even take the fans out for cleaning without bothering the heatsink (two more screws). ...A veritable alphabet soup of premium-sounding buzzwords. I can just imagine the marketing people in a conference room coming up with the "logic" for adding each of these words to the product name, which I am sure totally made sense in their heads. Sigh. What else is new... (Off-topic-ish macOS thoughts for the rest of this post...)

They might be using USB PD 3.1 which can take up to 240W. That's the same amount of power that they used with the barrel connector in previous generations. (I think in Europe, they are going to start requiring USB-C charging for laptops that use up to 240W. I'm not sure when that regulation takes effect.)

Thanks for posting. We spotted your post on a Chinese site and were chatting about it another thread. I'll bring over a couple of points that I noticed. It does not appear to have a barrel charging port. USB-C charging only? The keyboard layout looks the same, but it looks like they might have dropped either right alt or ctrl and put a "Co-pilot" key in its place. In the one photo that shows the bottom of the system, it is hard to tell but it looks to me like the back is "too tall" compared to the rest of the laptop — like they added some kind of vertical support to allow for increased airflow and larger exhaust fins. (Really interested to see the inside so we can see what this three-fan cooling system actually looks like.) As soon as these things are officially announced, I will suggest that we change the subforum name... I don't really like this new naming scheme they're going with, though 😕

Well. Ran today's Patch Tuesday patch on my Windows 11 ARM VM. It is running Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC. After the patch, I had new weather and news stuff on the lock screen, at the bottom, that was not there before. (Four rectangular tiles.) I had to go find the toggle in settings to disable it. So much for unexpected new stuff not being added if you are on LTSC...