Aaron44126

Huh. Yeah, maybe, this makes sense. I do doubt that there would be a Precision 7000 system without vPro and ECC and such features. And yeah, NVIDIA doesn't have anything new to offer yet, and I doubt that you could get much more out of a 14th gen HX CPU than you could get out of a 13th gen given the power constraints in these systems. So it could be a good year to skip, and that could explain why there has been no mention of "7690"/"7790"/"7890" showing up on certification sites or in the Dell parts list.

About the same for my Precision 7560. I haven't measured it, but it definitely takes several seconds between pressing the power button and anything showing on the display.

I used M6700 as my primary for a full ten years. Amazing system. I never got the chance to see the M6700 with the RGB LED screen, but I heard that it was amazing. I chose the regular WLED screen when I got mine because I wanted Optimus support. I really am pinning my hopes on Framework to make modular/upgradeable laptops a thing again. I hope that they are able to offer more options for the Framework Laptop 16 available over the next few years.

The system wants to bring in cool air from the bottom and push hot air out the back. The "rubber foot" running the entire length of the system at the back creates a barrier that makes it hard for the hot air going out to be immediately re-absorbed by the cooling system drawing air in from the bottom. If you remove that tape, you might create a situation where hot air is going out the bottom of the system on the right side (as pictured) and then being sucked in by the fans on the left side again. Maybe with a cooling pad there would be so much air moving around that it wouldn't matter much... I don't see much benefit though, blowing air across the heat fins is the main thing that gets heat out of the system and those are only on the side with the fans.

OK, I guess I interpreted your post above wrong. The M6700 (what I built this for) had probably five or six different speed levels that the EC would select in automatic mode, and one of them was above "0" but below what "manual medium" would produce. It also had one higher than what "manual high" would produce so I ended up switching EC back to automatic mode when I was running intense workloads.

Yeah, there is where consistency mode could come into play. It might not be the behavior that you are looking for, but you could set the RPM threshold to 2500, and it should lock you in at the 2200 speed (when the EC selects it). It will "unlock" the speed and allow the fans to rev up if one of the temperatures exceeds the upper temperature threshold. I would normally set the upper temperature threshold pretty high, like 95 °C, so the fans only spun up when it was really necessary. I mostly implemented this because I hated the on again / off again behavior of the fans in the M6700. It makes a very obvious sound when the fans power on after being off. This way, the fans can be locked at a low speed but never turn off.

You could achieve this with Task Scheduler and see what happens. DellFanManagement.exe supports command line parameters so you can tell it to enable EC fan control, disable EC fan control, set a specific speed, and so on. (Run it from the terminal with a junk parameter like -? to see what the options are.) Running DellFanManagement.exe from Task Scheduler requires you to use the checkbox for "run with highest privileges" so that it can load the BZH driver. You should not run DellFanManagement from the command line while the GUI app is running. Running it from the command line will cause it to do its job and then unload the BZH driver while closing, which would then make the GUI app unable to issue any EC commands. You can also try using SpeedFan which allows you to set more complex fan behaviors based on temperatures. You could have it keep the fans off until the CPU reaches a certain temperature, for example. The requirements for using SpeedFan are: You have to check a box in SpeedFan config to enable Dell fan support. You have to have automatic EC fan control turned off, or SpeedFan's fan changes will keep getting overridden by the EC. (DellFanManagement can do this, from the GUI or from the command line.) Note also that while SpeedFan supports granular fan curves, when used on a Dell laptop you will still be limited to just three fan speeds ("off" / "medium" / "high"), so really you can just set the fan curves to 0% / 50% / 100%.

Consistency mode is there to allow you to select an RPM that the EC normally picks and "lock it in", if the EC sometimes picks something other than the manual choices that you would prefer. For instance, on my M6700, the manual "medium" set it to around 2200 RPM, but the EC in "automatic" would sometimes set the fans to around 1900 RPM which I would prefer. So I would put the RPM threshold at 2000 RPM. When the EC selected 1900 RPM, EC fan control would be disabled without actually changing the speed, so it would be locked at 1900 RPM.

Yeah .... AX211 is actually not a PCIe card, it is CNVi, and it relies on support from the PCH to work. I am not at all surprised if you can no longer use a generic mPCIe card in that slot. (AX210 is the generic mPCIe, version but that is not what Dell is using.) Intel should release a BE201 card as a replacement at some point, but it will probably not work in older systems, as it would also expect you to have a compatible PCH.

1. At startup, Dell Fan Management sets the configuration to whatever it was last time that you had it open, and it issues commands to the EC accordingly, even if those match what the EC is already set to. When doing this, the EC fan behavior is "reset" and that will sometimes cause it to turn off the fans for a while. You can also sometimes replicate this by changing the thermal mode in Dell's own tools (balanced to quiet and then immediately back to balanced, or something like that). 2. This isn't a surprise. Dell's fan tables don't necessarily make sense in all systems. I don't think that they put as much time into tuning these as they should. In my Precision 7560 I have observed that "Quiet" often runs the fans higher than "Balanced" for an idle workload, but I use it anyway because "Balanced" is more sensitive to changes in CPU load, and "Quiet" also runs the fans at a lower speed under an "intense" workload.

Wouldn't be surprised if there are select versions of the CPUs that do have the pro features (i.e. 14950HX) that just have not been announced yet. Or, they could brand them differently... Before 12th gen these CPUs were released under the "Xeon" brand. [Edit] Hunting for spec sheets. Example: Precision 5680 spec sheet https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/workstations/technical-support/precision-5680-spec-sheet.pdf Tweak the URL for 5690 and you get a page that asks you to sign in. It seems the file is there, just protected. https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/workstations/technical-support/precision-5690-spec-sheet.pdf Try Precision 7690, 7790, or 7890, and you just get a 404 error. [Edit 2] Just signing in with a normal account got me access to the spec sheets. AFAIK, these products have not been announced yet? [Edit 3] Looks like they have not "fixed" the keyboard layout yet... Home & End still share with F11 and F12. precision-3490-spec-sheet.pdf precision-3591-spec-sheet.pdf precision-5490-spec-sheet.pdf precision-5690-spec-sheet.pdf

How come the service is now officially called "X" but it still lives at twitter.com? (Musk does own x.com.) Confusing...

I still see articles on X/Twitter/Musk on tech sites like The Verge, Ars Technica, etc. The news is just not coming at as fast a pace as it did in the weeks and months immediately following Musk's Twitter takeover. My thoughts... I don't see how Twitter/X can survive, just financially. They have to pay about a billion dollars a year in interest to handle the $13 billion loan that Musk took out to buy them. (Twitter/X is on the hook to make those payments, not Musk himself.) Twitter is not typically profitable, they are certainly not doing better now since a lot of their advertising income has gone away, and adding a negative billion dollars per year certainly won't help. (We won't necessarily see these numbers for 2022/2023, as Twitter/X is now a private company, they don't have to report it.) So, I can really see three possible options. Musk throws in his own cash to keep Twitter/X afloat. (He'd probably have to sell Tesla shares or something, which could mess with things over there.) Musk tries to "renegotiate" the terms of the loans and lower the interest payments or otherwise somehow cut him a break. I'm not sure how well this could go, as banks have got to be now realizing that they made a bad bet, but I've seen crazier financial decisions made by banks. Twitter/X is forced to declare bankruptcy, which would probably result in Musk no longer being in charge of it. In the case of a bankruptcy, I'm wondering if Twitter/X will eventually shrink to something like Yahoo! or AOL, that used to be big names in the "social tech" space but now are a shadow of their former selves. Time will tell. As for Musk himself, my opinion of him used to be positive but has been heavily tainted by this whole thing, specifically with regards to how he has treated his Twitter employees (current and former) after taking over. I do think that he will be sticking around in the public space for many years to come... But if he tries any more new ventures, after seeing how Twitter went (I didn't even mention how he has been actively refusing to pay rent, legal bills, and several vendors) there are definitely many people/banks/businesses who will think twice about doing business with him.

And today, we have Precision 3490 showing up at DMTF. I think that is all of the models that we would expect, other than the 7000-series...

Dell Precision 3590 and 3591 have also appeared on the DMTF certification page.

Not necessarily suggesting that you get one. (I had a Precision 7770 which I was super excited about, but I dumped it in disgust after less than a year.) But a couple of points... Dell Precision 7000-series allows RAID-0 with as many drives as you can connect. Their web GUI might not allow it but once you have the system in hand you can configure it with whatever RAID configuration you want. (You should never buy drives from them anyway, the price is ridiculous. Precision 7000 line includes the hardware that you need to install additional drives whether you buy the drives from them or not.) I personally had three drives in RAID-0 in mine. You can pretty much always get a better price by going through a sales rep than you can get on the web. On my high-end config I saved about 20% over the web price by going through a sales rep.

This was the case in the Precision 7530/7540 so I think that it is a decent bet. I don't have specific recollection of anyone trying the same thing for 7730/7740. I think you could get a pretty good feel by finding some good photos of the heatsink (eBay?) and stacking them to make sure it looks like the screw positions are the same.

These systems come with two different lids (display enclosures) depending on whether or not you have WWAN antennas. The non-WWAN version has an all-aluminum lid. The metal would not be helpful for connectivity if you try to put antennas in there. The WWAN version has a separate (visible) plastic strip at the top where the antennas go. The WWAN version looks like this, note the separate piece with a line across the back/top of the display enclosure. That part is plastic, and the rest is aluminum. If you have the non-WWAN version then I am not sure where you will put the antennas, but if you can find a spot (either in the display enclosure or in the lower chassis) that allows for connectivity then you should be able to just drop in a WWAN card and SIM card and be good to go. You could replace the display enclosure with the WWAN version (Precision 7670 version would probably fit as well), but the display panel is held in by adhesive, not screws. So, getting the display panel aligned in your new display enclosure would require careful measurements and steady hands, or be an exercise in tedium. 😕 If you have the OLED panel, they might not offer that with a WWAN version...?

I spent a fair amount of time with both MS-DOS and Windows 3.x back in the early 90's, but I've never so much as seen a running instance of OS/2. I did notice this article from the other day, a major OS/2 software archive will be going offline. I'm sure there will be mirrors hosted elsewhere, but I went ahead and downloaded the whole thing (...stuffing it right next to my archive of Apple II software that I never use). I am curious to try standing one of these up at some point just to poke around with it and see what it is like. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/after-32-years-one-of-the-nets-oldest-software-archives-is-shutting-down/ I also read that Parallels exists because some bank needed to be able to virtualize OS/2 and VMware couldn't do it at the time. Though I doubt that I can run OS/2 in Parallels on an ARM system... Maybe it is possible to run it in DOSBox-X?

I ran Linux for a few months on the Precision 7770 (Alder Lake 12950HX + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti), with Optimus enabled, and no real issues running emulators or Windows games through Steam+Proton ... other than the dGPU sometimes not wanting to actually power off, or the CPU and dGPU fighting for power causing performance inconsistencies — both problems that I also had on Windows with that system. I think that with Turing and later, NVIDIA support for graphics switching on Linux has improved a good bit. So, try it out if you want, it might be just fine. I don't think there are 64GB SODIMMs out yet, but there are 48GB, so you could probably install two to get 96GB in this thing if you wanted to.

If you want a lower-powered CPU, you need to avoid HX CPUs. These are repackaged desktop CPU dies and even the low-end ones will run to the thermal limit in a laptop. You could look at a system with H series CPUs which are actually designed for laptops (XPS 17, Precision 5680)... or maybe even U series. Honestly, if your workload isn't CPU demanding and you don't need a high-end dGPU, there are a lot of options and maybe you don't need the absolute fastest laptop CPU? Note — HX CPUs were only a thing starting with 12th gen. Before that, "H" was the top laptop CPU available (like the one you have in your 10th-gen system). They basically rebranded 45W H to HX starting with 12th gen, and the 12th/13th-gen H CPUs are lower tier similar to the 35W H from prior generations. Unfortunately I am not able to point to or provide feedback on what the fan behavior is like on any specific models, including AMD systems; I have been using exclusively Precision 7000-series systems for the last many years, until just recently when I got the MacBook Pro. (I've posted elsewhere about my reasoning for switching but I am largely fed up with the PC/laptop ecosystem, both because of the direction Microsoft is going with Windows 11 and because of the overall direction that laptop hardware is going in general... and your complaints about "idle workload" noise here definitely play into what pushed me off as well.)

Precision 5490 has been certified by DMTF, confirming another model.

Dell has been selling these with an integrated GPU option for a while now, since Precision 7X30... dGPU is no longer a requirement. If the web site won't let it spec it out how you like, try going through a sales rep, they have a bit more flexibility sometimes. You can probably get it cheaper that way, anyway. I saved around 20% off of the web price of my (high-spec) Precision 7770 by going through a sales rep. You can always order the system, check it out, and then return it if you find it unsatisfactory. I believe there is a 30-day return window. I get the worrying about the fans. Probably buying a system with an HX-class 55W CPU is not the best if you want it to be quiet. (And this is one thing I love about my MacBook Pro... I never hear a peep from the fans unless I am doing gaming or video encoding or something intense like that.)

I had a Precision 7770 and I never thought it was that loud with an "idle" or "office" workload. I cared more about the very noticeable noise that the CPU fan made when cycling on after having the fan off for a while. (On an "idle" workload it does tend to cycle the fan off and on periodically.) I am not sure if Precision 7780 fans still make this noise. Anyway, for years I have been limiting the CPU speed of my laptops to keep the fan speed and thermals under control when I am not using them for serious work. See the link in my signature about options for quick ways to toggle turbo boost on and off. You do not need the CPU to be in turbo boost if you are just doing light work or watching videos, and you can just turn it on if you want to use the system for gaming (ideally with ANC headphones!).

As stated above, this only works with 10th-gen (2020) systems and earlier. Dell has changed how fan control works and 11th-gen (2021) systems and later cannot be manipulated at this time, by any software that I know of.