the past 48h I've been hands on putting the 7670 to the test,
it became apparent through Aarons thread here that there's some thermal issues to deal with,
with my past experience this should be a walk in the park for me, or at least I thought it should,
before I dive in deeper a Thank you Aaron, I came across you fan tool and tried to run it here,
unfortunately it bugged out on my system for whatever reason,
I didn't dwell on it too much as I already formed my opinion,
I am an avid fan of Dell and in particular their mobile Precision line, i have been since my first M60,
stopped counting awhile back, this unit should be my 10th Precision mobile workstation by now,
started seeing diminishing quality and engineering efforts the past 7-8 years,
this pattern sadly gotten deeper instead of changing on its tracks,
the 7670 as much as i wanted to love it will unfortunately be going back to Dell,
this is just poor thermal design no matter what efforts one will take there is just no way to tame this beast,
the old heat pipe design just can’t keep up,
there's only two heat pipes one for the GPU and one for the CPU being shared between both,
when this thing fires up it’s just too small to handle the heat,
it needs a vapor chamber design to stand a chance with these powerful CPU's,
short of that this unit is unable to run at its full potential as its immediately capped off to crawling speeds to cope with heat that's dissipating over a short not meaty heat pipes,
as a comparison i recently tuned a Dell XPS 9710 with i9 11980HK which i was very happy with,
end results are very similar to what we are now getting with the 12950HX (see results here)
i ended up stripping all Dell pads and thermal application replacing it with proper grade paste and pads,
i also did a liquid metal application and pushed the system until I was able to (artificially) iron out 99% of thermal throttling,
even than the system is unable to push through, the best i was able to push (with allot of efforts) the system is to 20k on CB R23,
these are synthetic result artificially imposed to see if the system can still perform to its full potential removing heat any variable and still the system refuses to go any higher than 20k score, without means of further tuning the CPU aka undervolt etc. this unit is sadly keeping 50% of its capability off the table without the option to regain these resources back as these family CPU are further locked which makes no sense to me being high end workstation, while none high grade laptops are allowed to be tuned further,
here are some repaste pics