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Aaron44126

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Everything posted by Aaron44126

  1. Aaron44126
    Doubt we'll ever have a high-end GPU running externally at the same speed that it would internally. While Thunderbolt might get faster, internal PCI Express is also getting faster. Still, if a desktop 3080 can achieve 80%+ performance attached externally in most cases, it's probably still faster than a laptop 3080. (Source) ...Plus, running with an eGPU would remove power contention from the CPU, allowing that to run faster as well.
  2. Aaron44126
    I haven't heard of anyone trying this, so maybe? When I looked at comparison photos of the GPU it seemed like there was enough of a small difference (screw positions maybe) that would rule it out. Don't remember exactly, would have to pull the photos and look again. There is also the fact that 7X60 GPUs are PCIe4 and use one fewer DGFF connector than 7X50 GPUs so that throws cross-compatibility into question as well. ———— Today is the day that my 7770 order is supposed to hit "shipped" status. (Supposedly it has been making its way from the factory in China to the FedEx hand-off point in Chicago over the course of the past week; no way to track that progress.) It did not ship early and there is now definitely a chance that it will ship late. It's still pretty early in the morning here. I know shipment notices sometimes don't arrive until evening. We'll see.....
  3. Aaron44126
    There is a chance that 7X80 cards (NVIDIA Lovelace) will work in 7X70 if they keep the same chassis and don’t mess with the GPU card layout (very much). Wouldn’t plan on that being the case, and any upgrades beyond that would not be likely to work at all. 😕
  4. Aaron44126
    DGFF cards have generally not been compatible between different laptop models. The only potential working upgrades that I am aware of are what they offered officially for the Alienware 51m, and a Pascal->Turing option for Precision 7X30 systems using Precision 7X40 cards. You can look at the Precision 7X70 cards (service manual pics) and see that both the physical layout and data connectors are different than any previous DGFF implementation. Dell has typically not offered the cards stand-alone. Don’t really blame them — despite the interest from users on sites like this, the overall market for an upgrade like this would be quite small and it would be extra hassle for Dell to figure out how to support them for warranty purposes and so forth. However, you can’t even get them through the spare parts dept. if you know the part number (in most regions) — I wish they’d make that possible. Have to rely on eBay or other sites for stuff to show up, maybe several months after the system launch.
  5. Aaron44126
    Do you have a page that shows a good photo of the RTX 3080 card that you bought? (Someone can probably point out the vBIOS chip on the card itself, if it is present.)
  6. Aaron44126
    Haswell CPU layout is like this. Memory controller is on the edge on one side. There are CPU cores bordering the opposite edge. (Not sure "which end is which" compared to your CPU photo above.) CPUs do not heat up uniformly. The CPU cores will be where the bulk of the heat comes from. It "might" be OK to leave certain areas uncovered but you'd want to have a pretty good idea of why that's OK. I wouldn't chance it. Best to make sure the whole thing is covered with some sort of thermal transfer material so that the heat can spread evenly over the top as best it can. (GPUs heat up much more uniformly if only because most of the die space is taken up by "cloned" GPU core blocks that operate in parallel.)
  7. Aaron44126
    Saw this a few days ago and finally sat down to watch it. This is the coolest bit of hackery I've seen in a while. I don't want to say that much; for anyone who is familiar with Ocarina of Time, there are just a string of fun surprises that build on each other throughout the video all of the way to the end. It was done on real Nintendo 64 with an unmodified OOT cartridge to boot. Here's another one that explains how the whole thing works.
  8. Aaron44126
    Interesting, I wonder if this is NVIDIA Dynamic Boost at work. I know that it can coordinate with the BIOS to "steal" power from the CPU but I wasn't necessarily expecting to see the PL1/PL2 values actually change as a result...
  9. Aaron44126
    Precision 7670 4K panel is OLED, 60 Hz, 16:10. Precision 7770 4K panel is LCD/WLED, 120 Hz, 16:9. (Yet another trade-off.)
  10. Aaron44126
    ...Did the tech take the heatsink out to replace the display? You should just have to take off the display bezel and take out a few screws to remove the panel. The display cable detaches from the back of the panel. ...Or did you have your whole display enclosure replaced?
  11. Aaron44126
    Touchpad firmware update... That's sort of unusual. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=J7FDY
  12. Aaron44126
    I was wondering about that. I'm planning to "collect" the 7770 vBIOS images as users stop by with the various GPUs. We'll see if anyone wants to try it. (7670 is "officially offered" with 240W PSU as well, indicating there are situations where the system might want to draw more than 180W; seems like it might be possible to push the power envelope up.) Curious what your CPU+GPU power draw looks like compared to before. When I put a GPU in my M6700 that was more power hungry than the stock ones, it caused the CPU to become power-starved and throttle in situations where both were loaded. (Dynamic Boost 2.0 in the 7560 might handle that better.)
  13. Aaron44126
    Eh. Dell's SSD prices are always high. Just look at price comparisons to Samsung Pro (on capacities where they match offerings); Dell charges around twice as much and I think most people would agree that Samsung is a leader when it comes to both speed and reliability. There is a place for QLC (when capacity & price matter more than speed). I also have a Samsung 8TB QLC drive that I use for bulk storage and it is fine for that purpose. I wouldn't use it for an OS/VM drive or something. Sabrent is less familiar to me as well. I've been using a 4TB Sabrent drive in my Precision 7560 for about a year and it's been fine. They've been pushing the boundaries of the NVMe 2280 SSD space for a couple of years now. They were the first to offer an 8TB drive (in 2020, starting with QLC). I think they have the only PCIe4 8TB drive on the market, and I know they have the only TLC 8TB drive on the market (and it's the same drive, Rocket 4 Plus 8TB).
  14. Aaron44126
    UHD+ will not be offered in the 7770. 7770 is a 16:9 chassis and 7670 is 16:10. It's a trade-off 😕. I'd hazard a guess that the same will be true for next year's "7780" and "7680" systems. (Dell likes to use the same chassis for at least two iterations.)
  15. Aaron44126
    7560 last year. Ordered & confirmed 6/17 (two days after launch) Production 7/4 "Shipped" 7/19 Tendered in Chicago 7/23 (...a Friday...) FedEx had it at a local facility by 7/24 and it was delivered 7/26. ...About 5.5 weeks end-to-end. What is missing is the "build complete" step, which isn't logged on the order status page for U.S. orders, if you don't happen to catch it when it happens. Can't really tell how long it took for them to get it from China to the U.S. after assembly was complete. (I don't think the "Shipped" step can be pegged down to a specific point in the process. Reading timelines on Reddit, I see that sometimes this happens on the same day that they get the package to FedEx, and sometimes it happens several days before that. I even saw a few reports where the laptop showed up at the doorstep before Dell marked it "Shipped".) Coincidentally, that one was delivered on 7/26, which is the same as the expected delivery date for my 7770, one year later. Looks like your 7760 from last year was more like 7.5 weeks. I know some others went on for over two months. I was hoping that things would move along a little quicker this year because the supply chain situation is somewhat relieved (but not all of the way back to normal). Previous launch Precisions I have been involved with (M6700 and 7530) arrived in about 2.5 weeks. Mine appears to be on track for that but I haven't heard of anyone else's moving to production yet...
  16. Aaron44126
    These four keys are what I hate most about Dell's modern keyboard layouts... This is your keyboard? It's even worse than the current Precisions (which have Home/End up at the top sharing with F11 and F12). I use SharpKeys to remap some of the keys and make it more usable. I have mapped "Right Alt" to PgUp and "Right Ctrl" to PgDn, for example, so those can be used without a press of the Fn key. (You can also use MS PowerToys which has a key remapping function.) You could "cross-map" the arrow keys and PgUp/PgDn/Home/End to effectively reverse which ones you need to press "Fn" for. (Map "Left arrow" to "Home" and then map "Home" to "Left arrow". Repeat for the other keys.) I imagine that'd be a pain whenever you want to use the actual arrow functions, though. ...Bit of a pain if you switch between using the laptop keyboard and an external/USB keyboard. The mappings will apply to the external keyboard as well.
  17. Aaron44126
    TL;DR: Well, I don't think so, but it could be "any day now". I was a bit optimistic about that when I first saw it, but have since learned more about the tail end of the order/shipping process... FedEx tracking does still say that the package will be delivered tomorrow, but they don't have the package in hand yet. I think that it was a default/garbage date that was generated when the shipping label was created. They will surely update it when Dell hands over the package. I was poking around Reddit threads yesterday, getting an idea for "how long between build complete and package handoff" or "how long between shipping label created and package handoff", and it is anywhere from a few days to a about week. (Even though the "build complete" step happened this past Saturday, I don't know if the package would have had any real movement during the weekend. If it has been flown out of China by now then it seems like a delivery within the next 1-3 days is possible.) The ambiguity here isn't really Dell's fault. I'm not supposed to "know" the tracking number yet (Dell has not provided it, I found it through FedEx Delivery Manager). Dell creates the FedEx label when the system build is done (presumably they go ahead and slap it on the box) but the anticipated ship date that FedEx is showing is not accurate, the system still needs to make its way over from China. I might have only about 18 hours "warning" between when the physical package makes its way into the FedEx system and when it shows up at my house. Both Precision 7530 and 7560 systems we got had the first scan into the FedEx system in Chicago happening late in the day (7-8 PM) and then the systems were delivered the following business day (FedEx stops by my house at around 1 PM). ...Hoping the handoff happens by Thursday evening so that I can have this weekend to play with it and get stuff set up. (FedEx will not deliver during the weekend.) But I'd settle for just knowing where the package is. Dell is still saying "shipping" will happen on July 24 (Sunday) and delivery by July 26 (a week from now). I'll just be checking every evening and wondering if today is the day...
  18. Aaron44126
    Obtained my service tag but any attempt to pull the parts list is kicking out an error, I guess it is still a bit too early...
  19. Aaron44126
    I went for Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus for 8TB drives. (Hope there's no issue with them in the 7770, either with capacity or with the fact that these are "double-sided" drives. We'll find out soon.) Sabrent drives have a five-year warranty if you register them. They also have Sabrent Rocket (not plus) which would be a bit cheaper but is just PCIe3, and Sabrent Rocket Q which would be a bit cheaper yet because it is QLC. PNY also makes some high-capacity drives with five-year warranty. There definitely have been improvements to the whole scaling situation since Windows 10 & Precision 7510 were first released (they came in the same year). I think the 2016 and 2017 updates ("Anniversary Update" / "Creators Update") in particular added some notable improvements. (Plus, developers have been improving their apps for high-DPI displays over time.) I do not think you will be disappointed... I've been gaming on a Quadro for ten years (K5000M and M5000M in Precision M6700) and it never seemed like I was missing out compared to GeForce of the same spec. ...For "work", I do some resource-heavy stuff (VMs & SQL database) but nothing that really stresses the GPU; I went with GeForce in the 7770 because I really just want it for gaming. Regarding what apps have been tested, you can search at http://precisionworkstations.com/software-certification-lookup, they have Precision 7X70 results that have not been published in the "final documentation" PDF files yet.
  20. Aaron44126
    Even when DTR's were more of a thing, it seemed like the market for "professional" high-end business systems (Precision/ZBook/Lenovo P&W series, maybe "rugged" systems in certain situations) and more gaming-focused DTR's (Alienware/ASUS ROG/MSI/Clevo/etc.) were pretty separate. There are cases of overlap for sure, but I think it mostly goes in the direction of "ordinary consumers" buying "business" systems. (I bought a Precision for personal use, and there are number of "prosumer"/non-business Precision laptop users active here.) I've never heard of a company buying a bunch of Alienware or ASUS systems for a professional engineering job. You might see systems like this used in small business situations where the IT department is not fully developed. But larger businesses will want business-class warranty & support and that is not offered on all lines of business. Internal modularity would matter less to larger businesses (where the big money is for these types of systems), if they're just going to refresh the things after 3-4 years anyway. I've seen this myself. We also use Precision systems at work (software engineering) and there have been a few occasions where IT is chomping at the bit to keep their three-year refresh cycle going and replace my team's systems, and I have to almost "beg" them to wait a few months so that we can get a new model and not a year-old one. And they'd rather pay Dell to configure the systems appropriately out-of-the-box rather than shop around for SSDs and RAM modules to save a few bucks, both for purposes of simplifying their own jobs getting systems up and running, and also simplifying the complexity on what is covered under warranty and what is not. It all boils down to the same thing. The consumer DTR market as it was is gone and unlikely to return; the money is not there. There is little reason for laptop makers to collaborate on new standards to replace things like MXM. Seems obvious that users on a forum like this who like to tinker, tune, and upgrade would want a DTR revival, but if we are something like 0.2% of the market, then what's the point... 😕 (I hate being all negative about it but it's just how I see the situation.) If there is any silver lining, it is that the need to upgrade your PC every few years has been going down over time, so you can stick with a system for longer even without upgrades. 5+ year old PCs that were high-end at purchase time are still quite capable at this point. Even a laptop GeForce 1080 system (hit the market about six years ago) should be able to run current games at 1080p/60 and reasonably high settings. (...Enter Microsoft, with their new artificial OS system requirement hikes.)
  21. Aaron44126
    (Devil's advocate / laptop company perspective) ...How would revenue be higher if we make it easier for people to not replace their whole laptop every few years? 😕
  22. Aaron44126
    If you haven't used a high-DPI panel before, welcome to the world of Windows scaling issues... In Settings -> Display under "Scale and layout" you can set the scaling ratio for your display, which would normally be 100% on FHD. 200% on 4K will give you the same amount of working space as 100% on FHD (but with four times the level of detail/sharpness in images and text). If your eyes can tolerate it then you could try stepping down to 175% for a bit more working space and a bit less detail. ...Not all apps handle scaling properly. Many of them will need to be restarted if you change the scaling level in order for them to render properly at the new scaling level. Some apps improperly "claim" to support high-DPI but do not implement it properly, resulting in them being rendered with very tiny text/UI, or just having broken layouts. Using multiple monitors at different scaling levels adds another complication — some apps support per-monitor scaling, some support scaling but only off of whatever the primary monitor is set up (they will be bitmap-scaled up or down from there for secondary monitors, making them appear slightly blurry), and some don't support scaling at all and will just run scaled up from 100%. Sometimes there is a strange mixed bag. (I.e., Microsoft Outlook supports per-monitor scaling but Microsoft OneNote does not, both installed from the same MS Office 365 package...) This compatibility setting is your friend. If an app is misbehaving, then it almost always makes it work. (It will cause the app to always be run at 100% scaling level and then bitmap-scaled up for your display.) If you have the display set to 200% scaling, then an app that only supports 100% scaling will be rendered with pixel doubling and not a blur filter, which is nice. (You can actually play with it now on a FHD screen. Set the scaling level to 125% or 150%. You will lose working space, but you can see how your apps behave with scaling.) ... I probably made it sound a bit more scary than it is. Most up-to-date apps work fine on a high-DPI panel with no extra configuration required. I really run into issues only with older apps, obscure business apps where the developer just doesn't care to address this, and basically anything Java-related.
  23. Aaron44126
    Just got this email from Dell (approx. 48 hours after the order status page was already showing "build complete"). Also watching the FedEx tracking page for movement. (Dell hasn't provided the FedEx tracking number yet. I found it through FedEx Delivery Manager, also two days ago.) Final bit of waiting might be the worst part. But, at least they are beating the original August 5 EDD. Did some poking around Reddit, seems like it is "normal" for them to miss the estimated delivery date shown when the FedEx label is generated (July 20 in my case). Still, arrival this week is not out of the question. I am close enough to the Chicago origination location shown on the FedEx label that I should get it just one (business) day after it is handed over to FedEx. I wonder how much business days matter to Dell from the production standpoint. (All of my order status changes have happened during the weekend.) ———— NVIDIA's "naming" of their products doesn't line up between desktop and mobile anymore. Laptop A5500 (7424 CUDA cores) is closest to desktop A4500 (7168 CUDA cores / 200W TDP). On the GeForce side, laptop 3080 Ti slots between desktop 3070 Ti (6144 CUDA cores / 290W TDP) and 3080 (8704 CUDA cores / 320W TDP). ...But with the tight power limit on the mobile side, you'll see the similar desktop GPUs trounce the mobile ones just by operating at a much higher power level — especially given that the desktop GPUs can boost over TDP, but the laptop GPUs will have a hard power limit of probably 150W or less. Lower power levels are more efficient, so the performance difference with regards to power is not a linear relationship.
  24. Aaron44126
    The A5500 and 3080Ti have the same specs (same number & types of cores, and same amount of VRAM). The difference comes down to the feature set. NVIDIA blocks some "professional-only" features on the GeForce line, like wireframing, double-sided polygons, and even some lower-level stuff like allowing your GPU to be attached to a VM. For gaming, it will not make a difference, but for professional apps that utilize the GPU, it might. Check your apps and see if there is any benefit to having a Quadro or "enterprise" NVIDIA GPU. (Look at documentation, or maybe forum/web posts from users of that app.) I think some CAD apps will benefit from this. But, if there is no benefit, then there is no reason to spend that money. The cost to go form 3080Ti to A5500 is about $800 USD. (...Also, A5500 has ECC vRAM but 3080Ti does not.) [Edit] Another thing. These high-end GPUs will be very much power-throttled, especially on the 7670 which will have a lower power limit than the 7770. (These GPU chips are also used in desktop cards at over 2× the power level.) Still waiting for benchmarks, but I suspect that the performance difference between A4500 and A5500 in the 7670 will be less than 5% on almost all workloads.
  25. Aaron44126
    All of these systems will "throttle" in the sense that you won't be able to run them at the maximum turbo speed indefinitely. You will always hit the thermal ceiling and/or the PL1 power limit if you run the system with a high CPU load for an extended period of time. So basically: 7770 will have the best performance of the three, with the biggest thermal solution and the highest power limits. While you will experience "throttling", you will not likely experience "excessive throttling" with any of the systems. ...Each of them would be a big step up from the Precision 7510. As for the relative maximum performance between Precision 7770, 7670, and 5770, it is too early to say. We need some systems out there so people can take measurements. (Biggest issues to me with Precision 5770 are lack of a numeric keypad with the keyboard, and only two NVMe slots...) ———— Dell re-posted the 7670 unboxing video (but it's not any more of an unboxing video than before).
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