Dell Precision 7690/7790 Pre-release Thread

[Ionising_Radiation]

Interesting; thanks for that, @PHVM_BR. I agree with @Aaron44126—absolutely uninspired naming by Dell; the Precision and Latitude brands have been around for ~25+ years, and they are throwing away all that for... what exactly? I'm not sure. No AMD, which is sad. Although the design is definitely more MacBook-inspired, which can be a good or bad thing depending on perspective. The standing poster says 'CRU: battery, memory, storage, bottom door' which I suppose stands for 'customer-replaceable unit'; it remains to be seen if the DGFF hangs on.
 

7 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Looks like you can't easily remove the keyboard, or take the display panel out of its enclosure; those changes are permanent, I guess.

Technically speaking the display and keyboard were never really 'CRU' even on previous Precisions; they were just 'easier to remove'. But frankly the 7530 was a massive pain to disassemble, having to pull apart essentially the _entire_ notebook for a simple thermal paste change etc. Let's see hiow the Dell Pro Max 16/18 Plus (yikes, what a mouthful) look like. 
 

13 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

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.

I have an M2 MacBook Air at work too, but I have somewhat different opinions. I agree that Apple has always had top-notch hardware quality control barring some high-profile mis-steps, and this is the same. But for me the deal-breaker is macOS itself; I've been using it for more than a year now and I cannot get behind some of Apple's design decisions for it (and sadly it seems Windows 11 has adopted many of the same decisions). I despise just how annoying it is to build and ship macOS software—requiring a whole host of signing, notarising, disallowing kernel extensions, etc etc. 

And honestly I feel like Windows 11 has gotten less annoying over the past few years and now presents legitimate improvements over 10—things like Dev Drive, tabbed Explorer, performance improvements for NUMA-ish memory layouts like in the 7950X3D, and more; so by the time I install it around mid-next year I expect to see it get better still. Naturally I will GPO the hell out of it so I don't have any weird privacy settings. But I don't see myself leaving Windows for the foreseeable future. I had a brief exploration of Linux and it still presented enough issues for me to go back.

 

7 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

USB-C charging only?

Not entirely unexpected; I mentioned this in the OP. This is probably to comply with EU rulings on the matter. USB-C PD now supports 240 W, which is fairly sufficient power for these mobile workstations. And chances are the 16-inch model will come with an 80-90 W VBIOS for the GPU as it has historically done, massively nerfing any performance of RTX 5090-levels CUDA cores. 

[PHVM_BR]

9 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

And chances are the 16-inch model will come with an 80-90 W VBIOS for the GPU as it has historically done, massively nerfing any performance of RTX 5090-levels CUDA cores

The 7670/7680 already have a TGP +100W.

 

For the claimed 170W of CPU + GPU consumption I would bet on 55W + 115W with around 130/140W with Dynamic Boost.

[Aaron44126]

17 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

The standing poster says 'CRU: battery, memory, storage, bottom door' which I suppose stands for 'customer-replaceable unit'; it remains to be seen if the DGFF hangs on.

 

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.

 

17 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Technically speaking the display and keyboard were never really 'CRU' even on previous Precisions; they were just 'easier to remove'. But frankly the 7530 was a massive pain to disassemble, having to pull apart essentially the _entire_ notebook for a simple thermal paste change etc.

 

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).

 

17 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Dell Pro Max 16/18 Plus (yikes, what a mouthful)

 

...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.

 

17 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

...massively nerfing any performance of RTX 5090-levels CUDA cores. 

 

Sigh.  What else is new...

 

17 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

I despise just how annoying it is to build and ship macOS software—requiring a whole host of signing, notarising, disallowing kernel extensions, etc etc.

 

(Off-topic-ish macOS thoughts for the rest of this post...)

 

Spoiler

I've heard about the signing/notarization hassle from other people but haven't experienced it myself; I'm not in a situation where I am "shipping macOS software".  I have run into some third-party apps that aren't fully notarized or whatever and pop an alert that you have to deal with the first time that you try to run them.  (macOS Sequoia made that more annoying, now having to dig into Settings to allow these apps.)  I am largely ignoring this problem by using Homebrew (casks) to manage my third-party apps and updates, and the --no-quarantine flag which will just disable Gatekeeper for a specific app.

 

The dev work that I have done is still mostly .NET/C# and not macOS-specific, and that will continue to be the case if I pick up a MacBook for "work".  Though I have done a little bit of "hobby" macOS-specific stuff in C#, like figuring out how to hook into the HID stuff and send custom commands to my DualSense controller, to change the light color, read the battery level, and such.

 

I am hoping to start learning Xcode and Swift when I have some downtime over the holidays coming up... we'll see if I stick with that or not.  I do have a "system management" process that I wrote which addresses some things about the system behavior — like changing the keyboard backlight behavior depending on what I am doing ("work", watching a video, or gaming), or changing the priority of the processes running Parallels VMs to shove them over to E cores only if I am not actively using the VM, or addressing how macOS insists on dimming the display when I disconnect from power and it is set to run in "low power" mode on battery.  Right now, this is basically just a bash shell script that runs in an infinite loop, checking for things to "worry about" every few seconds.  I think this could be done more effectively if I made it more "native".

 

I do actually really like third-party kernel extensions being disallowed.  One thing I fought with under Windows was the cruft of background stuff, including any third-party app being able to drop a "driver" in and potentially cause issues with things like DPC latency — causing audio pops during gaming, for example, or never mind issues like what happened with Crowdstrike.  Something I just don't really have to worry about anymore.  System level tools (i.e. TG Pro) seem to be possible without a kernel-mode driver.  I also like how much more "strict" macOS is with third-party apps being able to drop in (non-kernel) programs that run in the background.  There's only a couple of ways to do this, and you get a pop-up alert when an app adds a silent background task.

There are certainly some things that I wish were different... but it is handily my preferred OS out of the three main options for now.

[win32asmguy]

On 12/9/2024 at 7:48 PM, Ionising_Radiation said:

Might be a good time to resurrect this thread... We are probably going to see a 7690/7790 next year given the Blackwell micro architecture release. And given Arrow Lake's extremely lacklustre performance I would not rule out AMD CPUs this time around. 

 

But I doubt I'll be in the market for a new workstation laptop although I'm still interested in seeing where the market is headed.

 

I intend to sell my current 7560 and upgrade to a self-built desktop workstation with a 9950X3D CPU and an RTX 5090 GPU. I might get one of the fancy Surfaces or slim-line notebooks for on-the-go work by remoting into the desktop at home. 

 

The desktop workstation route is a pretty good option. I think even a low end Threadripper build is still cheaper than most comparable mobile workstations unless you get a very good refurbished discount. I went with Xeon just because I wanted a high P-core count monolithic chip but with desktop systems you can pick and choose pretty much whatever you want without being locked into the rest of the system components.

 

For laptops I have finally found an excellent option from System76 / Clevo. The PE60 has a vapor chamber, offers good on-the-go performance as a 14900HX + 4070 mobile combo. 2x SSD and 2x RAM is obviously less than what a Precision 7680 can do. It also still has a modular keyboard. The 1920x1200 165hz display is perfect for Linux and W10 use. It has a single TB4 port wired to the iGPU so I can hook up an external dock without waking the Nvidia GPU just like on any Precision. I have the open source bios and EC from System76 modified so I have undervolting, a custom fan curve and microcode 0x12B applied. The 4070 mobile is obviously going to not be as good as a 4090 mobile with more VRAM but it performs well enough for on the go use. Clevo's heatsink for their 4090 flagship model, X370, had issues keeping the system cool so it is basically inferior compared to the PE60.

[Aaron44126]

On 12/10/2024 at 1:56 PM, Aaron44126 said:

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

 

I hadn't been paying attention... but this is from another laptop maker... it looks like dropping the right Ctrl key is a normal thing to do, I guess...  *sigh*

 

[AL123]

On 12/10/2024 at 7:48 PM, yslalan said:

That would be a disaster if Dell does so using a 240-watt PD 3.1 adapter. I suffered using the Precision 5760/5770 models because the battery would drain quickly under heavy load, even when plugged in with the adapter.

Dell went to 165W over a single USB C for the 5680 and 5690 which sorted that issue, and for everything else they have done 130W over USB-C for many years well before the new USB 4 /PD3.1 standard than allows 240W. Nothing to say Dell won’t push it beyond 240W over a single USB-C connector 😉

[yslalan]

On 12/13/2024 at 11:15 AM, Aaron44126 said:

 

I hadn't been paying attention... but this is from another laptop maker... it looks like dropping the right Ctrl key is a normal thing to do, I guess...  *sigh*

 

Off-topic: This shift key is way too long.