Aaron44126

Pretty sure they only use 2280 drives in these systems (even if you order low capacity). That's definitely been the case for every 7000-series system that I have seen. [Edit] Nevermind, I see that they specifically say 2230 for the 256GB in the Precision 7760 now. They must use an extender or something to have it fill the 2280 drive slot. (No idea if they use the same heatsink between the two. I would suspect so but that shouldn't be taken as a confirmation.) There's a "problem" that the primary SSD slot also uses a plastic caddy thing to hold the drive in place. If they have a different size caddy for the 2230 drive then that would be a tricky part to replace to install a 2280 drive. You could still install a 2280 drive in a different slot without issue... Unless you plan to order with 256GB/2230 and then intend to fill all of the slots with 2280 drives. Anyway. I'll see if I can find a better answer on this. [Edit 2] It looks like they only ship 2230 in one of the secondary slots, and they include an extender and full-size heatsink.

For Precision 7000 series, heatsinks and screws are included with the system for all drive slots, whether you order the system with a drive populating that slot or not. Empty slots will have the heatsink and a little foam spacer beneath it that you can easily remove. Also there is some plastic film covering a thermal pad on the drive side of the heatsink that you need to remove when actually installing a drive. I don't think this is necessarily the case with 5000 series. (At least 57X0 supports two drives, so there could be one empty slot when you receive the system.) 5000 series shares the chassis/design with XPS so it probably wouldn't be that hard to find the part on eBay. (Or you could use a third-party heatsink, as long as it fits.)

I think the fact that they chose to build Win10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 on Windows 10 and not Windows 11 speaks to how "ready" they think that Windows 11 is (or isn't) for enterprise / long-term support. (Windows 11 actually released before Win10 LTSC 2021 did.) There will be a LTSC version that is not based on Windows 10 in approx. 2.5 years (late 2024). That would presumably be Windows 11, but who knows if we'll be talking about Windows 12 by then... I've had multiple systems last through 5+ in-place upgrades without issues. (Windows 7 -> Windows 8 -> Windows 8.1 -> different versions of Windows 10.) I think as long as you keep the system pretty clean then there shouldn't be any issue with this. It was a bigger problem in the "old days" when Windows was changing a lot more (i.e. Win9x->XP->Vista).

New NVIDIA GPUs support only eDP, so if you have an LVDS panel, you do need Optimus to get any display output. ...However, QHD+ should be eDP, you couldn't run that off of LVDS. But, it's possible that the T1000 doesn't like the eDP setup in the M4800. @Trov got T2000 working but did mention that he is using Optimus.

Yeah, so from pictures we have seen, it does look like the CAMM module can be swapped out by removing the bottom cover (no need to take out the keyboard and such). And it also looks like they're going to sell the CAMM modules separately (...they have shown up as separate items on the Dell parts list). But with Dell being the only source of CAMMs, for now, I have a hard time believing it will really be much cheaper to buy them separately this time around. We'll see, soon... Though if you want to buy the system right at launch, I'm thinking that the individual CAMMs won't be available until maybe a few weeks later. Also, I am wondering how "finicky" the CAMM contact will be. Looks like it will require pretty precise alignment to get proper contact between the CAMM module and the motherboard. It doesn't snap in like a SODIMM, it's more like two boards that have to be pressed on top of each other just so. Hopefully there is something in the system to help with this physical alignment and make it reasonably foolproof.

Build 22621 is Windows 11 22H2 ("final"). https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/267597/microsoft-finalizes-windows-11-version-22h2

Dell U.S. can't quote these yet. [Edit] I was poking around the China site to see if they had listed 7X70 (they have not), and I noticed Precision 7X60 systems are not available for sale anymore there?

It can vary in some cases. As I recall, @Ionising_Radiation got a 7560 with 1080p panel that had pretty bad PWM ... but then had the panel replaced under warranty and they swapped in a different model 1080p panel that was much better. But yes, if this is something that you are sensitive to then it would probably be best to wait for feedback from other users. (They often have multiple panel models that they are using in these systems for a given spec, but I imagine for the high-end panels like the OLED or 120Hz, they just have one. Also, Dell won't honor warranty requests to install a specific panel in the case that they have multiple in use. It's a "you get what you get" situation.) Dell does offer returns for a refund (within 30 days, I believe) but there's still the hassle of how long you have to wait between ordering and receiving a system... Very nice, in that case I will be calling up the sales office here in a bit.

I'm a believer in letting information flow to you, and not having to go and seek it out. In light of this... I'm scraping the Dell support/driver pages and using it to create an RSS feed. If you use a feed reader and one of these systems, you can use the feed to be informed of when new drivers drop. The feeds also include BIOS updates and some Dell software application updates. Right now I'm only grabbing drivers for Windows 10 and 11 (no Linux or older versions of Windows). If there are any other systems that you'd like to see a feed for, let me know and I will add it to the list. Dell Precision 13th gen / Raptor Lake (2023) Precision 7780 • Precision 7680 12th gen / Alder Lake (2022) Precision 7770 • Precision 7670 11th gen / Tiger Lake (2021) Precision 7760 • Precision 7560 10th gen / Comet Lake (2020) Precision 7750 • Precision 7550 9th gen / Coffee Lake refresh (2019) Precision 7740 • Precision 7540 8th gen / Coffee Lake (2018) Precision 7730 • Precision 7530 7th gen / Kaby Lake (2017) Precision 7720 • Precision 7520 6th gen / Skylake (2015) Precision 7710 • Precision 7510 4th gen / Haswell (2013) Precision M6800 • Precision M4800 3rd gen / Ivy Bridge (2012) Precision M6700 • Precision M4700 2nd gen / Sandy Bridge (2011) Precision M6600 • Precision M4600

Hmm, I wonder then. I was going off of this photo where you can see 2× double-stacked 2280 NVMe drives. https://www.hp.com/content/dam/sites/worldwide/personal-computers/commercial/workstations/z-workstation-new/zbook-fury/Keep Cool Under Any Workload - Desktop.png

I just saw an article and noticed that the Lenovo P16 only has two NVMe slots, which seems kind of lousy for a flagship mobile workstation. 😕 Dell Precision 7670 (16") has three NVMe slots, and Precision 7770 (17") has four. HP ZBook Fury G9 (16") actually has four as well... they stack two on top of each other sort of like you see sometimes with SODIMM modules.

You are right... Maybe they were just doing some server work or something and they were offline for a bit? It was definitely giving me a 404 error late yesterday. (Just checked using the same bookmark that I had before and it is working now.) Anyway. I just checked in with a rep to get an ETA on ordering. Last week they told me "in the coming 2-3 weeks", and the line today is "within the next 2 weeks", so I guess we are still progressing. COMPUTEX is this week. Some companies like AMD and NVIDIA are making announcements. I haven't seen anything indicating that Dell will have anything to say, but they could drop some sort of update. (2019 Precision systems were announced at COMPUTEX.)

OLED has great color and contrast ratio off the charts (compared to any type of LCD panel), with true blacks, and would be great if you do any sort of graphics work or photography or stuff like that. 120 Hz is more like a nicety, unless you are into gaming, I think. For regular desktop work it would just be allowing smoother scrolling and animations, which some people might not even notice. I'm still sticking with 17"; the panel is not making my decision so much as the slightly increased performance potential from a larger cooling system, and the extra NVMe drive slot. Though certainly not complaining, the 120 Hz panel was a nice surprise when it was introduced last year; I am into gaming so it'll get some use. Bonus points if it supports adaptive sync, which is unclear at the moment. If I was choosing based on the panel, I'd go with 16" OLED. (It's also 16:10 instead of 16:9, another plus.) Though one uncertainty with OLED is if image retention ("burn-in") will turn into a problem. It's been claimed that this is no longer an issue, but we don't have anyone who has used the panel for 5+ years to ask about it...

The spec sheet links are all broken now. This includes previous generation spec sheets like for Precision 7760. You can find specs information in the "Setup and Specifications" documents, found on the support page for each system/model. However, the Precision 7X70 support pages are not live yet.

Yes, this is normal. Dell's SSD prices are absurd, generally costing more than what it would cost to order a best-in-class drive with double the capacity just off of Amazon. And memory prices are also generally way higher than what you can find on the open market. I always recommend that you order the system with the base SSD and then replace it with one of your own choosing, if you are at all comfortable with doing that sort of thing. (You can imagine that a big business IT department buying tens or hundreds of a system would not be excited about having to do a manual drive upgrade in each one. I think that might be part of how Dell is able to get away with this.) Memory is a bit trickier, as you have to be more careful about compatibility. "Usually" it is fine if you get a regular brand (Crucial, Kingston, etc.). Gaming brands (Corsair, G.SKILL, etc.) can be more hit-and-miss, especially if XMP profiles are in play. For a compatibility guarantee you can purchase modules directly from Dell, which is still more expensive than buying them separately elsewhere, but still cheaper than ordering them with the system for some reason. (I remember a guy last saying he bought a Precision 7X60, plus memory modules separately, from Dell, on the same purchase order, because it was cheaper to get the modules separate than configure them with the system.) Sometimes, you have to get memory from Dell for certain configurations. For a while, it was hard to find 32GB ECC SODIMM modules aftermarket, but Dell had them. The upcoming Precision 7X70 systems use CAMM modules which may not be available elsewhere for a good while (if ever). Fortunately, Dell is pretty generous with the warranty. Aftermarket upgrades do not void the warranty... but they do have the option to request that you return the system to its original configuration before performing service, if there is a suspicion that your upgrade could be causing the issue, so keep your original drives/modules around if that is a concern for you.

Same for me, but just 2TB for the OS/system drive. (I prefer Samsung when available and have a Samsung 980 Pro standing by for this as well. I don't have enough apps and stuff to even fill up 1TB.) The 8TB drives will go into a RAID 0 array for one giant volume. [Edit] Noticed that Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 8TB will be available at Amazon on June 6. If you want one, consider buying it now. Even though it says that these drives are available for pre-order, they did sell a batch through Amazon, on the exact same page, back in early April. They were out of stock after a week or two. I don't think that Sabrent is producing these in large volume. Granted, compatibility with Precision 7X70 is not yet assured, so buying one now does incur some risk that you'll have to offload it after the return window is closed, if it doesn't end up working for some reason. (Store4PC is Sabrent's storefront on Amazon. The drives shipped to me straight from a Sabrent facility in California. They even have sequential serial numbers...)

The bottom of the system gets quite warm. I use mine on the couch often, but with a folding tray table, not right on my lap.

Planning on it. I have an 8TB (SATA) running in a Precision 7510 with no issues. Never heard of an NVMe drive that did not work in 7000-series Precision…. But we don’t know for sure until someone tries. I have three Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 8TB (PCIe4) drives ready to go in the 7770. (Bought them at launch in April because I was afraid that the price would inflate and they’d go out of stock… which is exactly what happened.)

Track point is also missing from 7760 (and 7750). The way that Dell handles pricing is a long-time obnoxious thing about them. Pretty sure it's been like this the whole time that I've been using them (20+ years). You never know what anything really costs, exactly... Also, the web prices fluctuate (for both the base system and the various upgrades you can do), changing a bit every week or two.

The original launch price for the base Precision 7760 (no upgrades) last year was $1,809 USD. It actually costs more now, at $2,029. The discount presented on Dell's web site is rather misleading. The systems are always shown as discounted by 30% or so. Look at the Precision 3470 or Precision 5770 (systems that just launched... 3470 was yesterday!). The built-in discount serves multiple purposes. It makes it look like you're getting a good deal all of the time. (Better jump on that while it's available!) It also means that a coupon that offers, say, 35% off won't save you as much as it seems, because it will just replace and not stack against the built-in 30ish% discount. For the best price, you can look at coupon sites for Dell business coupons and see if you can find one that beats the "built-in" discount. But the best thing to do is phone up a sales rep. They're usually able to beat the web price by a little bit, even if there are other coupons/promos active. ... I've been ready to replace my Precision M6700 (personal system nearing 10 years old) for a couple of years now, but I've held off specifically waiting for the Alder Lake hybrid architecture. (Mostly, it's just really interesting to me. I plan for this system to be long-lived and I didn't want to miss this by just one or two years.) Benchmarks show a ≈60% performance boost over Tiger Lake in multi-threaded loads. (That's way higher than the typical year-over-year gain that we've been getting from Intel lately.) That's with Alder Lake H, not Alder Lake HX, to boot. Also, booting background tasks to the E cores should save power / battery life / heat / noise all around. The main issue with Alder Lake is low priority threads that do actual work getting "inadvertently" assigned to E cores. Video encoding jobs seem to be a good example of this. It can also apply to running VMs, compiling software, and other things that do real computing work in processes other than the active/focused one. Software will be updated in due course to account for this, but in the meantime, as long as you are aware of the potential issues then you can make adjustments to bump processes that need the extra performance over to the P cores. There was some good discussion on this in earlier pages of the Precision 7X70 pre-release thread. Here you can see how "bad" performance can be in a case like this. This article is interesting and has some information on workarounds, and I think that @AL123 can weigh in, he's had the chance to do some Alder Lake testing already. I'm planning to use Process Lasso to help manage pinning certain processes to certain types of cores. Windows 11 handles this better than Windows 10, but still has some pitfalls. Though, it's quite possible that your software workload won't be running low priority or out-of-band compute jobs, and this won't be an issue for you at all. We will have to see what pricing is like for the GPUs to see how much of an upgrade that will be. I'm not expecting RTX A5500 and GeForce RTX 3080 Ti to be a significant upgrade over their predecessors, due to power constraints... maybe we will see a 10-15% gain from them in ideal circumstances. (Next year's Lovelace GPUs will do way better than this.) RTX A4500 could be a really good deal, though, if it is priced around the same as the RTX A4000 in the Precision 7X60 (it has double the vRAM, and a CUDA core count close to that of the RTX A5000). I would say to wait until the Precision 7770 launch before deciding what to do, since we are so close to the launch window (perhaps 1-3 weeks). Precision 7760 will still be available for some weeks after 7770 launches and then you will be able to do a direct price comparison. (Maybe 7760 will even get a little bit cheaper as they try to clear out inventory.)

We were chatting about this yesterday in the Dell Precision subforum, looking at new mobile workstations from other manufacturers. Dell is offering 17" Precision 5770 (16:10) and 7770 (16:9), but both Lenovo and HP have opted to go with 16" for the Alder Lake generation with Lenovo P16 and HP ZBook Fury G9 / Studio G9 — and they're offering just one model at 16", instead of having separate 15" and 17" versions. I think that the market for these larger laptops is not that great (...especially on the business side...) so it's hard for them to justify new models. Both companies are pitching 16" as a compromise between "performance" of a 17" and "portability" of a 15" for their workstation laptops. (Since the 16" panels are 16:10, they can fit into the footprint of a 15.6" system more-or-less. I don't think a claim that it can perform as well at a good 17" will pan out.) Looks like they are going 16" with their upcoming Legion Alder Lake systems as well. These are also 16:10. (You'd think gaming laptops could be a realm where 16:9 might actually still be preferred.) https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-Legion-7i-and-Legion-7-Gen-7-based-on-Intel-Alder-Lake-HX-and-Ryzen-6000HX-bring-a-series-of-firsts-to-the-16-inch-form-factor.618386.0.html 16" laptops weren't something that you really saw much of before but it looks like the form factor is gaining a lot of momentum this year. (...I can't remember ever seeing one of these before Apple put out the 16" MBP, which I think was late 2020?)

Saw this yesterday. Looks promising. (Not using Win11 myself so I haven't tried it.) https://www.neowin.net/news/force-widgets-in-windows-11-or-10-to-use-default-browser-instead-of-edge/

Not quite sure what you mean here... But you can upgrade from Windows 10 Pro to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC in-place and thus avoid having to deal with reinstalling drivers, programs, etc.. I did this on four systems that I am currently running and a few coworker systems as well. I also explain how to do this in the OP. Look for the section "Upgrading from "ordinary" Windows to Windows LTSC". While it worked out well each time that I tried it, something funny can always happen with a Windows in-place upgrade. Do a system image backup first. When upgrading in-place you will end up with MS Store and stock UWP apps that you already have still installed. If you don't want those, you will have to manually remove them afterwards (or, just do a fresh install). To upgrade, you will need Windows 10 (IoT?) Enterprise LTSC install media (ISO file / DVD / USB) and a valid product key to activate afterwards. In the OP I also have everything that I could dig up on where you might be able to get a license from. Note that product keys are tied to a specific version of Windows 10 (IoT?) Enterprise LTSC; you can't upgrade freely without a new product key like you can with "regular" Windows 10. Windows 10 Enterprise (non-LTSC) product keys will not work either. https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10LTSC/ is a decent resource, there are a lot of people there discussing Windows 10 LTSC and that will answer questions.

New NVIDIA driver posted by Dell for Precision 7X10 and up. Version 512.18. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=f8yn2 (Cool that they're still supporting the full range of systems. Precision systems older than 7X10 have Kepler GPUs [or older], which NVIDIA doesn't offer updates for anymore.) We have some lines here showing support for NVIDIA GPUs in the Precision 7670 and 7770. Here, we have subsystem ID 0B2A = Precision 7670 and subsystem ID 0B2B = Precision 7770. This re-confirms that GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is coming to both systems (or at least it was planned to). NVIDIA_DEV.2420.0B2A.1028 = "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU" NVIDIA_DEV.2420.0B2B.1028 = "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Laptop GPU" NVIDIA_DEV.2438.0B2A.1028 = "NVIDIA RTX A5500 Laptop GPU" NVIDIA_DEV.2438.0B2B.1028 = "NVIDIA RTX A5500 Laptop GPU" NVIDIA_DEV.24B9.0B2A.1028 = "NVIDIA RTX A3000 12GB Laptop GPU" NVIDIA_DEV.24B9.0B2B.1028 = "NVIDIA RTX A3000 12GB Laptop GPU" NVIDIA_DEV.24BA.0B2A.1028 = "NVIDIA RTX A4500 Laptop GPU" NVIDIA_DEV.24BA.0B2B.1028 = "NVIDIA RTX A4500 Laptop GPU" NVIDIA_DEV.25B9.0B2A.1028 = "NVIDIA RTX A1000 Laptop GPU" NVIDIA_DEV.25B9.0B2B.1028 = "NVIDIA RTX A1000 Laptop GPU" NVIDIA_DEV.25BA.0B2A.1028 = "NVIDIA RTX A2000 8GB Laptop GPU" (I guess this is interesting to me because I used to do INF mods.) Current drivers posted on NVIDIA's site do not support the 7X70, but I expect that will likely change with the next release.

Where is that coming from? Does HP have a 17" workstation for this generation? The ZBook Fury G9 and ZBook Studio G9 are both 16" only (same screen size as Precision 7670 which is also 16:10). At least Dell is offering 17" 16:10 Precision 5770. Looks like Lenovo is also dropping 17", with P16 being available in 16" only.