MyPC8MyBrain

no it wasn't, it just slowly became highlighted over the years as they try to hide that change, id say the past 6-7 years its been a slow decent into plucking precision feathers one by one, i think you're just remembering/factoring only the past few years since alienware came about as "gaming" thing for new millennial, and yes i agree there are way more kids now playing games on mobile computers than ever before, that doesn't nor should never change a portable workstation designation or class compromised just to highlight or give a new vertical edge, for the record the 3080Ti in the 7670 is locked to 125W while we pay twice as much for the same GPU that are unrestricted 175w on other mobile platforms, so when you see ASUS SCAR performing better than Dell's flagship for allot less money and exact same component, what do you say to that? absolutely agree, i asked though Dell will not sell it bundled with the new laptop, i can buy it separately on my own, but we cant buy a vapor chamber and many other components they compromised and castrated in favor of highlighting a gaming platform, Edit: our team workflow has fundamentally changed 2-3 years ago we had our code utilize compute power on the gpu which turned out cuts our processing times significantly, in a way dGpu became a very important tool Dell's executives most likely unaware, in their mind only gamer or coin pirates take advantage of high end GPU's compute power which is not the case anymore, for example same heavy raster compute load that used to run on the CPU for 24h straight now completes under 3h running off the GPU processor! (for reference example above is with a Desktop running i9-9900ks and 2080Ti) any of you running heavy/long workloads should give this a go and see how much faster your code/process runs with GPU processing, even if you cannot integrate this into your code one can still take advantage by assigning the process to run with GPU in NVidia panel,

than why is your company investing in flagship precision workstations? Inspirion or any of the other light use portables would do too and cost much less (about half!), we are not discussing light gaming workloads, it is a workstation as expected i will leave my station running queries into a local 1TB db. then compiling raster's with the data for a week straight and that is an easy workload, i have a month-long loads too, no gaming station is running for a week straight over a job it need to complete, why are we paying through our nose for something that only appear capable on paper,

indeed i am, reason being is after being a loyal customer in my private life and though my professional life, not to pull rank but just to put figures in prospective, one company i worked for a $350 million dollar were spent with Dell mainly because i insisted, that was the first and smallest budget working for that company, just to find out that the hard earned money directed toward Dell served to indulge executive resulting in poorer and poorer products through the years, 20 years ago no menial internal department couldn't dictate to the precision team which parts go in, it was always the best bleeding edge component we would pay for, now we have gaming platform dictating restrictions on a flagship workstation in order to justify a new lucrative vertical they can milk on our expenses, so we get the top end component we should have, but they are 30% castrated so it doesn't over shine Alienware gaming platform, gaming platform will get the 330W power supply, and the high refresh rate screens, with the best vapor chamber design they can come up with, and that will be only for the gaming stations, and for their flagship they will give most of the above just capped and circumcised so there are enough marketing differences, flagship will only get 240W power supply, and only 120Mhz refresh (lower than gaming station) and they capped our expensive same GPU to 125/150w limits instead of 175W, and they don't think that workstation need or run long stressed workloads only gaming stations do, so we got the no vapor chamber design for cooling in the flagship workstation, just so marketing department can seemingly create a separate sales vertical that has enough differences, the whole thing is just pathetic and sad what became of Dell, slowly but surely they have taken one system and split it in half restricting either new ends to their full capability, just so they can make sure that one system cant do everything perfectly as it should, this doesn't serve their customers it only serves Dell's sales department executives.

the easiest would been not to be greedy and try to corner RAM market in the first place with a proprietary lame module, than try to make up "marketing" stories why they had to go that route, everything else is not important as making ram traces shorter, makes complete sense, spending millions on false marketing in attempt to force feeding their customers BS why this had to be done, also makes sense, allowing internal department to dictate which feature will be available on their most expensive mobile flagship just so few filthy rich (other department) executive egos kept whole, also makes sense, if the joke above would get to the punch line we can all have lough together.

afaik the SATA bracket can still be removed to accommodate a larger battery if present,

lol, i cant help but wonder why LTT choose to only review the CAMM module while the "most important laptop of 2022" is sitting right there? is that the only (though far fetched) positive element they could find under the hood of the "most important laptop of 2022" to review?

lmao "the 7670 is the most important laptop in 2022" who else is on the bandwagon that Dell went the CAMM route because they are after squeezing every bit of performance from the chassis and the memory traces are the last stone left unturned to gain performance, wow LTT is business that bad you are now selling your integrity? anyone picked up on their Subliminal stimuli? (subconscious messaging) "this monster gaming laptop is not for you" "most of you will not need all the power this has to offer" "it is too expensive for you, let your boss buy it" they also try to blur lines with dual channel functionality and ECC, which is apparently no longer important or needed in favor of (LTT bank account) short traces and larger single memory bank, and oh by the way... only dell sells CAMM memory modules atm but "everyone else will catch up" in few years.

here we go...

@DarginMahkum if you can wait a new Razer 18 surfaced few days ago prancing its 13900 raptor lake cpu (no gpu info yet),

they have no choice with the puny 240w power supply, these systems on 3DMARK all equipped with 330w power supply and a vapor chamber that can withhold high stress temps for long durations as any glorified workstation should, I strongly suspect you are right if I could get the 7770 with 3080Ti to score roughly 10% lower then these top score i would keep it, seeing your scores with external gpu I'm having second thoughts now, maybe i should just go external 4090 route, though that would defeat the whole point of having a true mobile workstation with gpu powerhouse onboard

indeed i have it sorted by overall highest score, then i examine individual cpu/gpu scores in each overall score, if i sort by highest graphics score highest is 14526, if i sort by highest cpu score highest is 17513,

i returned my 7670 and awaiting a 7770 replacement with hopes it has a better thermal overhead, in my case the entire system was underperforming as soon as a load is introduced everything is almost instantly ramped down to crawling speeds natively to contain the heat, which result in extremely hot and slow system that cant really utilize its hardware, if you tinker deeper into these top 3DMARK results you will find they are running the same model gaming laptop from ASUS, same hardware specs as our cpu and gpu, only they are able to get these results without external gpu support, the 3080Ti alone is priced over $2k in Dell's configuration (that's less than external 4090 with enclosure and a chunk change left), to not be able to fully use it even with its 125/150w cap (7670/7770) is just not good business imho, all due to poor thermal design which clearly working on other less expensive less presumptuous platforms when implemented properly and without cutting corners,

interesting, i am showing 14526 for gpu score and 16850 for cpu score for 3080Ti (notebook) with 12950HX top score, note score 4 showing over 17.5k on the cpu score, top 5 are all pushing almost 15k,

if that's the case then raid on mobile precision is another sad marketing department joke, and shouldn't be used to increase but rather slowdown performance in favor of data replication priorities, there is already a built-in function for software raid in windows and in either cases when cpu is doing the striping, parity, and encryption overhead on the fly is huge performance hit on the cpu and defeats the point of having a powerful mobile workstation, just another pointless case of "lets put it in there it makes us look good, our customers don't know the difference or better" eye candy, just as they did with this poor example of thermal solution... "ahh they will buy it anyway" the "gotcha" is not my breakdown, the way i described Raid is fundamentally the basics of how raid operates to this day, this thin down version of "Intel soft raid" implementation is the "gotcha" pawning raid functionality secretly on cpu instead of a traditional more expensive separate integrated raid controller to govern the overhead, not the other way around 😉 impressive results! are you aware that the Asus Scar 17 SE with a proper vapor chamber scores higher with its 3080Ti dGpu and 12950HX CPU? GPU score is around 15k and cpu score around 17k on 3DMARK, comes to show how bad the CPU thermal bottleneck is in this chassis if external 3090 barely able to perform similar to a 3080Ti dGpu,

you also have an option to create a live image of the system from within windows with something like acronis true image before you break raid, save it to external drive and deploy it after you switch to AHCi, there is one caveat to this method, you will need to set your volume boot record manually, you can easily do this with a third party tool like AOMEI Partition Assistant off PE environment/USB boot, you could also just install a clean new windows and let windows setup recreate your volume and boot records etc., than just deploy your backup image back in without overwriting existing boot records,

if you have a another similar system running there you could prob image it over in matter of minutes 😉

if you are not too invested in the the current OS install, it would be wise to start clean now before you start accumulating precious data, you could prob backup your current user profile folder (copy paste to external drive) then move it later to the new install to save some reinstall/config time,

be advised... you cannot just switch RAID on/off (you technically can), doing so will brick your OS and you will need to reinstall from scratch! when you break a raid array (even if its one drive) the logical volume will technically mark deleted, you also cannot "switch" back and forth between AHCI and Raid without losing your data from either direction, you usually set Raid or AHCi and only than deploy your OS not after, there is no going back and forth or auto conversion between the two schema's, you also cannot switch raid back on after bricking it or switching it off expecting it to work, a new random key will be generated for encrypting the new volume data stripes, i don't believe the information or procedure contained in the article Aaron found is accurate.

precision workstation i believe are equipped with an actual raid controller chip not a software based raid, you activate raid mode in bios which in turns activates separate raid menu post boot allowing one to configure raid 0/1/5/10, the main reason i believe it is a hardware/chip based raid vs. software raid is due to the raid option available, raid above 0/1 (or JBOD) usually deployed with hardware raid not software raid mainly to offload parity calculations overhead from the cpu, I could be wrong i have not fully researched this,

@Kataphract new drives will not be automatically added after raid is initiated/activated, it is possible that additional bays are disabled in bios for safety if raid was initiated with empty slots,

@TwistedAndy that's more like it 😉 Dell 7770 i9-12950HX vs. Razer 18 i9-13900HX below we can see clearly how the top 7770 with 12950HX score fairs against the new 13900HX score, overall a 20% increase in performance (assuming that single 13900HX score is the highest it can go), if this is the 13900HX average score than performance increase in comparison is more like +45%, (average scores for the 7770 with 12950HX is about 14k on geekbench) Intel Core i9-12950HX @ 2.49 GHz 16 Cores, 24 Threads (8E+8P) Intel Core i9-13900HX @ 1.80 GHz 24 Cores, 32 Threads (16E+8P)

indeed, tough still valid it is also 50 years old and steams from days of magnetic tapes being the main backup media, taking tapes physically offsite to ones home at least once a week if not daily were the practice back in the days, today private sector has the privilege of "cloud backups", these were also normal practice back in the day, but back than it was your own private storage hardware hosted in an offsite data center,

interesting... that CPU is already on Dell's price list, with 6 more open/unknown HX sku's (2 x i5 & 4 x i7 variants) the i9-13900HX appears to be the highest upcoming i-9 Raptor Lake sku,

@TwistedAndy how do these scores fair? (not familiar with geekbench bench scores)

interesting, I've never heard of it before (i too notices the bloat ware Acronis been adding over the years i guess to stay relevant even though they don't need any of it), for my backup routine i only ever need Acronis bootable media with nothing ever installed in windows, my practice for my personal pc backup ever since XP came out, as soon as i complete installing the system initially, i activate full administrators account, before i login for the first time there's a reg key one can change to move users folder to another drive, i do the above than login to my profile which will be created on another physical or logical drive (usually root of D:\users\...), from there on my system drive "C:\..." can be backed up then recovered 1000 times without me ever losing my personal data, heck if i leave a new txt on my desktop after full drive recovery even its position will retain when i boot back in, whenever a recovery is needed its usually system side files never user data, i also have another "program files" folder in the root of D where i install most of my software, so its never lost after recovery as well, i can even install a brand new system with new SID and relocate the content of my user folder to the new system and everything works almost flawlessly (usually some reg keys might be missing or some files in program data folder but its easy to restore), the only real threat remains physical drive corruption, for that i will have 2-3 separate media where i save an image of my entire D drive with my personal user data, i also keep my C system image backup inside a systems folder under "D:\System\Backup\" drive, its a different technical approach to personal backup that worked for me many years without fail,