Aaron44126

@Reciever Could the posts have been back-to-back and then merged by a mod? I know that mods will sometimes merge back-to-back posts by the same user that occur in a short timeframe. In this case it is not the same user, but I guess @toastofman and @aldarxt have "default avatars" of similar colors so maybe someone was just not looking closely .......? Maybe @aldarxt actually did double post (I see another post from him right there) and a mod wanted to merge his two posts, but accidentally selected just one of his posts along with the post from @toastofman instead. (Otherwise, who knows.)

I think there is some degree of that going on. They have gotten to the point where they don't want to put out a date that they can't hit, so there not going to put out a date until they are sure that they can hit it. (Completely speculating but it would make sense.) If that is true, then: The date should still be "soon" (...again, they were delaying by just a few days at a time leading up until now, so they have to be close). We might have little or no notice between a date being given out and the actual system availability. ...Also possible that they hit a bigger snag of some sort and it will take them an indeterminate amount of time to work through. [Edit] Stuff is still happening. New full 7770 driver package released this morning. (There are some drivers in this package that are not yet available standalone / individually.) https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=P1HJG List of drivers: https://dl.dell.com/FOLDER08674506M/1/Dell-Precision-7770-P1HJG_Win10_1.0_A01.html [Edit 2] Got this today from a different source, identical wording to what I received on Sunday. I think that this must be the update that the reps get or are able to see from further up: Currently, we do not have a revised date to message out but will share this once available.

Yeah, I remember people also flipping out over Samsung QVO which had about half of the endurance as EVO at the time that it launched. "You shouldn't buy one of these drives, it will fail way too soon!" Think for a second and run some numbers... The Samsung 860 QVO 1TB model is rated for 360 TBW. To hit that within three years (the warranty period), you'd have to average 336 GB of writes per day every day for the entire three years. That's replacing about one third of the contents of the drive every day. That's something that an ordinary user will never do. Sure, there could be days when you download something large, do some data shuffling, or reinstall Windows and have a few hundreds of GB written. But sustaining that day after day after day? Crazy stuff. You can do a similar check with any SSD and the numbers will probably be even better than this QVO which has a relatively low TBW rating. My Samsung 860 EVO 1TB (160 TB written, according to the screenshot above) is rated for 600 TBW. Not even close to hitting it. The TBW rating is not a hard cutoff either, it's just what the manufacturer is willing to commit to for purposes of warranty. Testing has shown that drives normally last well beyond that.

I don't think so. Just, the guy who called me and left a voicemail, his message was along the lines of "This is in regards to your chat, Precision 7770 is not launched yet, we'll email you when we know something, chill out." The guy who called was someone that I have communicated with before, but not the same guy that I had just chatted with. There must be some kind of monitoring or sharing going on, on their end. ...I don't necessarily expect the "email when we know something" to be prompt, it was also the same guy who let me know on 6/26 that the 6/23 launch isn't happening. (And the same guy who told me on 6/20 that the launch date was still set for 6/21, after we already had skepticism on that.) Wouldn't be too surprised if notice has been taken that we are sharing dates that reps give us and either guidance has come down to stop handing out dates, or whoever actually makes the tentative RTO date available to the reps has stopped doing so. I still think that we are "a few days" away from launch and this week isn't out of the question, and hopefully next week if this week doesn't work out. If they were pushing the launch back by a few days at a time last week, they have to be close. Hopefully the next date is the "real" one, if we do actually get a date before the launch happens. (I wonder if @AL123 has heard anything ...?) I'll note that Dell likes Tuesday/Thursday launches. Next week Monday 7/4 is a U.S. holiday so that might make a 7/5 launch less likely. If we don't see a launch this week, we might be waiting until 7/7. (They could always break the Tuesday/Thursday "rule" though.) [Edit] I was poking around the ISV certification site and I see Precision 7X70 showing up in the list, so it seems that certifications have happened (or are in progress). Example: Adobe. I didn't check this before now so I don't know how recent they are. But, NVIDIA driver 512.78 is newer than the one currently posted by Dell for both 7X70 and prior systems. (NVIDIA posted it on their site in mid-May.) [Edit 2] Also in there for AutoCAD (with a much older NVIDIA driver, from November 2021).

Got a message from a rep via email this morning. The engineering and manufacturing teams have identified issues that will prevent us from hitting RTO (Ready to Order) on 6/23. Currently, we do not have a revised date to message out but will share this once available. Huh. 6/23 was a few days ago. Thanks, I guess... So, I went to ask a random chat rep and they've always been able to give me a date before, but today the person didn't seem to be able to get me a date. (Could have just been the rep. S/he seemed really interested in getting me to pick another system which is available now.) Anyway. All this to say, I won't be surprised if 6/28 comes and goes without release yet again... [Edit] Got a voicemail saying that they hope to have a date by the end of the week, we'll see..... Anyway, seems like I'm starting to get noticed for chatting in to ask about this semi-regularly :-\.

We'll see what it's actually like once the systems are in. Maybe it can go higher. I remember last year Mano quoted some numbers for the 7760 GPUs but it was something like 115W, he wasn't including the boost power which we didn't find out about until later. [Edit] Found it, #4.

Yes, the numbers that he gave were for CPU+GPU together. There seems to be reluctance to hand out the specific values (I asked for the CPU PL1/PL2 specifically and he said he wasn't sharing that). Though, I think you can assume that the values will be no lower than and possibly a little bit higher than they are for the prior-gen Precision 7X60 systems — which was already higher than the 80W GPU figure here for Lenovo's P16 and HP's Fury G9. Precision 7760 can boost the GPU up to 140W. 7770 could maybe go up to 150W? I don't think it would be any higher than that, and that would already leave only ≈17W for the CPU to stay in the total power budget.

Nice. Drives in my M6700, for some sort of comparison & indication as to how many host writes you need before the "health" starts to go down 😛 . M6700 is nearly ten years old but the drives are not as old as that. (Also I tend to leave them on 24/7, as indicated by my low "power on count" compared to yours.) QVO is the "youngest" at 3+ years and mSATA is the "oldest" at 5.5 years.

Be careful if you get used ones that might have been used for mining.

The difference between XPS 17 (current model) and Precision 5770 basically just lies in the GPUs. Precision 5770 offers pro GPUs and XPS 17 uses consumer/GeForce GPUs. I do not think GeForce vs. pro RTX will make any serious difference for the applications that you mention. The GeForce and pro RTX GPUs use the same chip, but there are some minor differences in their specs; the GeForce and pro RTX GPUs on offer don't line up exactly. (You can confirm the specs for any particular GPU at the TechPowerUp database. Type the name into the filter textbox and just look at the values that show in the table. Note to pay attention to mobile GPU specs when there is a desktop GPU with the same name.) Also, NVIDIA applies artificial limitations to the GeForce to keep it from performing as well with certain features that tend to be used by professional applications but not games. (Wireframing, double-sided polygons, ...) As such, the only reason to go out of the way to get a pro RTX card would be if you are using those sorts of applications (AutoCAD, SOLIDWORKS, Siemens NX, ...). You can search for things like "will (application) benefit from nvidia quadro" to see what people have to say on the matter. Even though NVIDIA does not brand these newer GPUs as "Quadro", that's basically what they are... Otherwise, you are looking at largely the same hardware and software setup — same chassis, same display, same keyboard, same port arrangement, same BIOS/drivers, and so on. So, pick whichever you can get a better deal on, for the configuration that suits your needs. You should also check out the warranty options as the stock offering may well be different between the XPS 17 and Precision 5770 (depending on how you purchase). You can get the XPS 17 from the Dell consumer store or business store, but Precision can only be purchased from the business store. (You can still purchase things from the business store as an individual.) It was not this way originally; I think that Dell has stopped stocking Gen3 drives. If you are at all comfortable with it, just buy the system with the cheapest drive available and replace it aftermarket with a drive of your choosing. Dell's SSD prices are crazy. For whatever Dell is offering for a particular SSD upgrade, you can normally find drives with double the capacity for less just off of Amazon. (Not talking about cheap-o drives either. Top-rated drives like Samsung Pro are still much cheaper than Dell's offering.) For pricing, contact a small business rep in your territory. They pretty much always beat the web price, and they might be able to be more flexible than the web site is with configuring an XPS or Precision 5000 system. (As an example, I ordered a couple of XPS 15's last year and the rep was able to select an SSD size that the web site was not allowing me to choose without changing other specs.)

What settings are you referring to? I basically can't find time to work on it but I do have plans to tidy it up some later this summer and release a proper version 3.0 with documentation and everything. But I doubt that new features will be coming any time soon. (It's also lower priority for me now since manual fan control isn't possible with newer Dell laptops anyway.)

BIOS update 1.12.1 is posted. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=P8F69 Fixes: - Firmware updates to address security vulnerabilities including (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures - CVE) such as CVE-2022-0004, and CVE-2022-24410. - Fixed the issue where the system stops responding when clicking the icons in Enhanced Pre-Boot System Assessment (ePSA) advanced test. - Fixed the issue where the Alt Gr key on the keyboard does not work in BIOS Setup Menu. ...I noticed that 7X50, 7X40, and 7X30 also got BIOS updates this morning. [Edit] Living on the edge! Updated with no issue.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/thinkpad-p16-16-intel/21d6004sus "Ships in 4+ months" 👀 Maybe that's placeholder (but it certainly won't be making them look good vs. competitors either way).

Tidbits from going through the drivers. The BIOS says it was posted on June 20, but the file has a digital signature date of March 21 — they've had the initial 1.0.0 BIOS prepared for a while now. (There will probably be a BIOS update pushed out around shipping time.) The NVIDIA driver is version 511.79, which is a bit older than the past two NVIDIA driver updates that Dell has published for the Precision 7X10-7X60 systems, which also support the 7X70 GPUs (according to the drivers' INF files). The date on this driver is February 10, and it also supports all Precision GPUs back through 7X10. (It's probably the one that they are using for certification; I suspect that it will be updated within the first few weeks after the systems are out — especially with Windows 11 version 22H2 coming down soon, they'll want to get a WDDM 3.1 version out.) Not all of the drivers are posted yet. No audio driver for example, except the USB one for docks, and the Intel Rapid Storage / RAID driver isn't there either.

I checked with a rep and was given Monday 6/27 as the tentative ready to order date for both systems. (I'm skeptical, 6/28 seems more likely.) It does seem like 7770 has slipped beyond this week though. At this point, grain of salt all around, it seems like we're just stuck "a few days before launch" until it's ready. Anyway, progress is happening somewhere. Someone made the support pages live. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/precision-16-7670-laptop/ https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/precision-17-7770-laptop/ Not everything is filled in yet but it will probably be coming over the next hours/days. You can check the driver list, it is populated with some stuff. [Edit] BIOS file name is "CinnamonBayAdl_1.0.0.exe"... I wonder if "Cinnamon Bay" is an internal codename for these systems or something.

Using pro RTX card instead of GeForce probably also gets around NVIDIA's mining limiter, huh...? (Second thought — Don't think it applies to the Turing generation anyway...)

23rd makes more sense than 24th. (Maybe 24th launch in Japan is just due to time zone difference, or maybe they typically have systems launch one day later.) Anyway, each time they delay it, the delay is less, so it seems like they have to be narrowing down on the real date. (7th -> 16th -> 21st -> 23rd...) I would triple-check to make sure that your order is good if it was placed before launch. I've seen stories of orders that get stuck and don't make progress if something odd happened to them. And even if it is good, I would expect that it might not advance to "in production" status for a few days after the launch yet. (That's just going from my past experience with launch orders.)

At this point, I think that their primary objective is to avoid soldering the GPU to the motherboard, and that's all. Since the CPU is already soldered, they have to make a different mobo version for each different CPU that they want to offer. Soldering the GPU as well would mean multiplying the number of mobo versions for each possible CPU/GPU combination, and/or limiting the CPU/GPU pairings allowed. This is avoided by keeping the GPU separate. They couldn't care less if this card doesn't work in older systems, so if it's "cheaper" for them to design & build a janky MXM card like this (rather than try to fit a modern high-power GPU onto standard MXM), no surprise that its what they do. It looks like this particular one was also designed with the "shape" of the system in mind (curved bit at the top is probably where a fan goes). You can also look at HP's Quadro RTX 5000, which is pretty easy to find and is "almost" in the standard shape. But it has the GPU core in the wrong place so a heatsink mod would be necessary in any system to attach it.

AFAIK, WD19DC(S) supports 210W PD and not 240W. (Doesn't really matter for Precision 7560 which just expects 180W.) There have been a few reports of 77X0 systems working better under high load if you plug the AC adapter in directly, even with a dual-cable dock. You'll definitely want a dual-cable dock if you don't want a separate AC adapter plugged in. A single-cable dock will be capped at 130W and you will get throttling. (Also, that means that third-party docks are out.) I seriously doubt that Precision 7560 will ever be able to support 240W PD over USB-C (single-cable), as @SvenC says. Even if the standard supports it now, this system was not designed with that level of PD in mind. It might work in future systems. If you need more USB ports, you could just get a simple USB hub (or a display with a USB hub built in). The 7560 already supports four display outputs... Possibly more if you have any monitors that support DisplayPort daisy-chaining. In my case, I have a Dell monitor with built-in four-port USB hub and I just connect it to the USB-A port on the right side (with a right-angle adapter so the cable goes straight back and doesn't stick out into the "mouse" area).

Hmm. Dell's fiscal quarter actually ends at the end of July. (Their announcement said that they'd have these systems out during FY2Q, and they have a whole month to go to hit that.) They've been reasonably upfront about the challenges getting validation systems out on time in light of the China COVID from some weeks back. (...As upfront as you could expect Dell to be, anyway.) Even if they are sitting on the parts inventory to start building (which I believe that they are), they can't actually start selling the systems until they pass ISV validation/certification — something that is not required for the gaming Alder Lake HX systems that are starting to drop.

I went to chat with a Japanese rep (...because Japan is the "earliest" time zone I could think of, it's already June 21 business hours over there). I got this update on Precision 7770 availability. 大変お待たせいたしました。Precision 7770は本日発売予定でしたが、大変申し訳ございませんが延期となり、6/24に発売開始となります。 Sorry to keep you waiting. Precision 7770 was scheduled to be released today, but we are very sorry but it has been postponed and will be released on June 24th. Friday release? Interesting. (Not a sure thing that it will release on exactly the same day in every market.)

I agree. S3 is nice because the system doesn't consume much power (...could last on battery for multiple days...) and yet it wakes in a few seconds with everything still running where it left off. This modern/S0 kind of sits at a "what's the point?" level to me.

So, it is "modern standby" and not S3 sleep like prior systems have. Do the fans operate while it is "asleep"? Does it look like the system is still doing things in the background (i.e. generating Windows event log entries)? I have not messed with "modern standby" myself, I always use hibernate in the odd case that I need to drive somewhere with the laptop. But I have heard a lot of complaints about "modern standby" and wishes that S3 sleep would also be supported...

One of my reps just wrote me back and says that the Precision 7770 launch is still set for tomorrow, June 21. (I have not asked anyone about 7670.) Hmmmmmm. "I'll believe it when I see it" is what I want to say at this point, but tentative "good news" I suppose. @operator You are looking at Precision 7670, right? (I saw your post earlier about trying to configure it with WWAN+OLED.) We may well be looking at the systems launching on two different days.

Looking at the Precision 7670 service manual, which seems to be available to browse again. Let's compare 7670 and 7770 GPU cards! Clearly they are different, but it looks like there is potential that you could install a 7670 GPU card in a 7770. The screw positions and DGFF connector positions appear to be the same. The heatsink attachment points are not the same, though... so there would have to be a version of the 7770 heatsink that accepts the smaller GPU card. Also. It looks like the reason that you lose an NVMe slot in the Precision 7670 "thin chassis" is because the battery actually takes up the space of one of the NVMe slots on the bottom. (The NVMe connector is still present on the board, you just can't fit a drive there.)