Aaron44126

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...

"Pro Plus" "Pro Premium" "Pro Max Plus" "Pro Rugged" Can't tell what's what yet. I wonder if they are dropping the Latitude branding too...? That could be what "Pro Premium" is, with "Pro Plus" being the XPS-like Precision 5000 systems. Or maybe "Pro Premium" is actually the replacement for the Precision 3000 line. The Weibo post calls it "DELL Pro Max 18 Plus". (So does that image with the specs, now that I look.) I missed the "Plus" part when looking at the Notebookcheck article. How many premium-sounding words can you slap on your product...?

OK, now that's interesting. If they are dropping the "Precision" branding altogether, then that is why nothing has shown up on my feeds... 16" and 18" 16:10? Three fans? Still with the same number of M.2 ports? 256GB CAMM2? New keyboard design? ([Edit] - New appearance with lighter color and keys more "squared off", but the layout appears to be exactly the same as before... with the possible exception of dropping either the right "alt" or "ctrl" key in favor of a "Co-pilot" key) Tandem OLED? @song_1118 is the source? MacBook Pro inspired design, it seems – at least the part that you see when it is open. (Seemingly all-metal palmrest – though it could be the same rubbery top material, just a lighter color – and curves and angles of the front, including that notch thing right in front of the trackpad...) "Pro Max" is a very Apple-like way to name something, too... Very creative things coming out of Dell marketing 😕 The sides and bottom look more like the previous-generation Precisions. It still has that Ethernet port with the piece that you have to move to insert a cable, too... Arrow Lake HX - 55W (not AMD). CES announcement? Not that far off. I mean, it's not making me want to switch back, but if this is "real" (and I think that is likely) then it is a bigger change than I was expecting. [Edit] No barrel power connector, so... USB-C charging only? Can't quite tell where the speakers are. I think they are on the front/bottom like Precision 7X70 and 7X80. Looks like you can't easily remove the keyboard, or take the display panel out of its enclosure; those changes are permanent, I guess. Hard to tell from the picture but it looks like it might have some vertical support at the back/bottom that is a little more substantial than before, to make it "stand up" at an angle a little bit and allow some air to more easily move in through the bottom, plus more surface area on the rear exhaust fins. I wonder if the Precision 5000 series will now just be called "Pro".

Ehhh. I'd love to see them offer an AMD version, but I feel like Dell is pretty set in their ways with the business systems, and I feel like they're going to want to continue supporting things like vPro in these systems, so I am not holding my breath. I'm also underwhelmed with Intel's offerings lately. And, I wrote about it before... The thermal and CPU/GPU power contention issues on the Precision 7770 (which I see as a combined fault of Dell, Intel, and NVIDIA) plus the overall situation with Windows 11 have pushed me over to the MacBook side, something that I would have thought me completely crazy to be considering a few years ago. And while there are some things about the MacBook that I wish were different (modular RAM and storage at the top), I can't deny that it is the best "laptop" that I have ever had. I could write about that more, but I already have in other threads. I'm looking to have my "work" Precision 7560 replaced by a M4 Max MacBook Pro next year. Back to Dell. I am still interested to see what they do with the high-end Precision systems. We're due for a chassis refresh, so hopefully they will beef up the cooling solution a bit, and hopefully switch back to the "hot chips in the center / fan on both sides" design. Since Precision XX90 systems have already released (in the 3000- and 5000- line with 14th-gen Intel CPUs), I think we're due for a branding shakeup as well or at least a change to how model numbers work. (Maybe they'll just start using 4000 / 6000 / 8000.) They've got to have the design finalized or nearly finalized by now, but I haven't seen anything new pop up on things like hardware certification sites yet. Other than throwing in the latest CPUs from Intel and the latest GPUs from NVIDIA ... will they switch the bigger system to a 16:10 display (18" maybe)? Or will they dump the 17" offering altogether like the competition has? Will they make everyone start using CAMM2 modules and ditch SODIMM? I'm not really thinking we'll get any answers at CES, but certainly in the next few months. CES should bring some details about the new laptop CPUs and GPUs, though.

First thought — Is it an older system? Could the battery be going out? Try disconnecting the battery and see if this problem goes away. Sounds crazy but I have seen issues like this happen if the battery is becoming suspect, even while the system is plugged into power.

I seem to remember that this drive ran at a lower speed than the others. I think it is still PCIe3, but two lanes instead of four. [Edit] I think that is what the "4X" and "2X" mean in the table that you have embedded above.

This was fun. I remember bumping into Hector Martin (marcan42)'s work when hacking homebrew software onto my Nintendo Wii back in like 2008. That guy sure gets around the reverse engineering space.

Pretty sure the keyboard is the exact same part as the one used in 15" Latitudes of the day. If it "looks the same" then it will probably fit and work fine.

Moving this thread from the Dell section to the Clevo section...

Desktop 5000 Ada is AD102. Laptop is AD103. They don’t use the same chip.

Pretty sure ExpressCard is one lane PCIe 2. Maybe two lanes? I remember looking into it for an eGPU solution and it looked like the bandwidth was going to be quite limited. (Edit -- Wikipedia says one lane.) This system has SATA3 for the mSATA slot, so it should be a fair bit faster than USB2. It would be on par with other (2.5") SATA SSDs. I think the other mPCIe slots available are PCIe2 (up to four lanes), except for the MXM slot which is PCIe3 (16 lanes). I have not tried installing an NVMe drive into one of these systems, but I did install a NGFF M.2 Wi-Fi card into one of the mPCIe slots using an adapter. There is vertical clearance even with the bottom case on, but you have to be careful because the adapter can push down and scratch the motherboard. Put some electrical tape or something underneath. You can fudge a NVMe card into this system (using other PCIe slots with an adapter, as you have noted) but it won't be directly bootable. (The BIOS doesn't know to look for it.) You can boot it by chainloading with the OS on the NVMe drive, but the boot loader on another drive that the BIOS will check. I have not heard of someone using an NVMe drive in the MXM slot on this system, but I've seen it done in Alienware systems. There can be battery/power issues with the NVMe drive drawing power even when the system is powered off.

That's a good thought I hadn't considered. It could be concern if you have a high-end GPU. I've only had one Precision with a beefy enough GPU for this to be a concern (Precision 7770 + GeForce 3080 Ti) but it would occasionally dip into battery for extra power if I was playing a game. It wasn't consistent behavior, it probably happened less than 10 times during the year that I used that system. In this case I think you would probably just see some modest GPU throttling.

Every Dell laptop that I have ever tried has been able to run fine with no battery installed. In fact, several times I have forgotten to reconnect the battery-motherboard cable after performing service on the system, and didn't notice until I got to the Windows desktop and saw the "X" in the taskbar.

To my knowledge, this is not occurring on LTSC setups.

I watched the video presentation when the Asahi Linux Vulkan drivers were announced (about a month ago?). They've been working on that for a while now, but M3+M4 support is pretty much next on the hit list. Hopefully sometime next year... You're right. The cost is not trivial. But I don't regret what I paid... quite a laptop. 😄 I am already setting money aside for the next one (probably upgrading in 2028 ... M8, if they stick to the yearly cadence). (You can also look at education pricing. I understand that they're not very strict about who can get those...)

Do you know what Wi-Fi card it has installed presently? Most cards should work out-of-the-box on Linux. In any case, you can find an Intel 802.11ac mPCIe card for cheap (if that's not what it came with) and that will definitely work fine in Linux (Intel contributes drivers for their cards to the kernel). You can even install a newer NGFF Wi-Fi card in the WWAN slot with an adapter, if you don't want to put a mSATA drive there. If you can get NVIDIA Optimus working properly, this thing should have respectable battery life. (That would be Windows only. You need newer GPUs to use Optimus on Linux.)

Well look at that. You can finally download a Windows 11 ARM ISO directly from Microsoft. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11arm64

Eh, I don't see any real chance that Apple would buy Intel. What would they even do with that? They seem to be doing well enough on their own since they cut ties.

I'm still skeptical myself too, but I keep seeing more and more bad news about Intel, so I do wonder if they will be able to turn it around. Just today, news about AMD's market share spiking up in the face of the 13th/14th gen CPU crashing issues. If Intel can't reverse their current downward trajectory, they may well end up being acquired eventually. The most interesting thing to me is what the landscape is going to look like in another year or so once the Microsoft/Qualcomm ARM exclusivity agreement expires. In addition to Microsoft's (and others') general work making the ARM version of Windows 11 less painful to use, NVIDIA is going to enter the space, making ARM SOCs for Windows consumer systems, with a launch probably in fall 2025. Yet another option for people buying midrange systems. Intel might remain king of the high end, but they can't live off of that alone.

You should be able to do this with MDRAID on pretty much any distro. Set up the drives in a single RAID 0 pool. Requires a bit of terminal work to get it set up. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-raid-arrays-with-mdadm-on-ubuntu

Hello, this is me... Sort of. I've written about this in other threads. But I've been on macOS for a year and a half now and I love it. My migration wasn't exactly from Linux though. I wanted to dump Windows, and I spent a few months on Linux, determined that it wasn't cutting it for me, and then switched to macOS. I would say that while I may not be an expert, I am definitely not a Linux novice; I use it a lot for work, I normally have a Linux VM running in the background for various odd jobs, and I have been a server admin in the past as well; but, my attempts to use it as my personal "daily driver" have never managed to stick. I found Linux to be fine for games, but less so for productivity apps. I found myself just spending a lot of time in a Windows VM to use specific apps, which seemed to defeat the purpose of the switch. The Mac sort of flipped this, with almost all of the productivity apps that I use having Mac versions, but the gaming situation being not at good. Still, on macOS, I've been able to run most games that I'd like to play either with native versions, an emulator, or CrossOver, and there are definitely interesting things happening in the run-Windows-games-on-Mac space (constant iteration from CodeWeavers, Apple getting in themselves with Game Porting Toolkit + D3DMetal, and new open-source projects like DXMT). The other thing about Linux was, I was never able to find a desktop environment that I am fully happy with. The closest was KDE Plasma, which offers a huge raft of options for customization, but is really rough around the edges in some ways, with longstanding bugs that are easily reproducible but the devs don't really seem interested in addressing (or maybe it is a manpower problem). Other DEs either weren't customizable to the point where I felt comfortable using them, or just had some behaviors about them that I didn't like. Now, macOS itself is also lacking as a desktop environment but there are very many well-supported third-party additions or "helper apps" out there, and I have used some of those to bridge the gap. ...I did have to go through an adjustment period of getting used to new keyboard shortcuts and sort of the "Apple way" of doing things. So, I did buy a Mac for the OS, and it wasn't until afterwards that I fully realized what a good laptop the MacBook Pro is (Apple Silicon models in particular) — solid build quality, best-in-class touchpad, best-in-class display, and you don't have to choose between "good battery life + no heat/noise" and "high performance" — you can get both in the same machine (just depending on what you are running). Hardware-wise, there are definitely things that I wish were there that aren't, like a numeric keypad, and some degree of modularity (for storage/SSD in particular). There are also some behaviors of macOS itself that I would prefer be different, but I have mostly been able to work around those with third-party apps or my own scripting, which has satisfied my own need to "tinker" with the system. I also have a pretty Linux-like way of dealing with software installation/updates on the Mac, almost exclusively using Homebrew to manage third-party software installation and updates (both terminal stuff and GUI stuff). Oh, and Asahi Linux is there if you want to be able to dual-boot into a real Linux environment. You can run your regular Linux programs, and they've recently released a version of a GPU driver with Vulkan support, so it is possible to play Windows games using Steam+Proton. Work is still in progress around getting the rough edges smoothed out... and currently it only works with M1 and M2 chips, though M3+M4 should be added in the near future. You mentioned your phone. I was previously an iPhone user before getting a Mac, so I don't know what the Android situation would be like. I will say that the iPhone and the MacBook Pro get along very well together and I appreciate that as well. Photos sync pretty quickly, being able to handle messaging on the Mac is nice as well, and files can be transferred to the phone without even having to plug it in. If you have any specific areas of concern then I would be happy to share my experience. [Edit] Looking at what little bit of M4 Max performance numbers we have so far, whew, seems to be toppling even high-end desktop CPUs. Should have more info available later this week once the systems ship. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apples-m4-max-is-the-single-core-performance-king-in-geekbench-6-m4-max-beats-the-core-ultra-9-285k-and-ryzen-9-9950x