Dell Pro Max 16/18 Plus (2025 model) pre-release discussion — MB16250, MB18250

[MyPC8MyBrain]

great info @AL123
 

11 minutes ago, win32asmguy said:

280W brick may not have enough overhead for 200W combined loads along with all other components

i believe at 280w even tough a proprietary USB-C power connector Dell already exceeding the limits for power delivery over USB-C as is.

[win32asmguy]

59 minutes ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

great info @AL123
 

i believe at 280w even tough a proprietary USB-C power connector Dell already exceeding the limits for power delivery over USB-C as is.

 

They also advertise 300W power delivery over their new TB5 dock. So I wonder with the dock it could prevent / slow any battery drain issues under load (if present).

[AL123]

7 hours ago, win32asmguy said:

 

They also advertise 300W power delivery over their new TB5 dock. So I wonder with the dock it could prevent / slow any battery drain issues under load (if present).

I have one of the docks too so will give it a go when I am in the office on both power supply and dock see if there is any performance difference / power draw from the battery 
 

I figured the 300W figure was more about future proofing but will be interesting to see.

The 330w power brick for this dock is a large rounded rectangle a bit bigger than the dock itself! But has some slots on the base so you could mount it under a desk to some screws.
 

Also screw holes on the bottom of the dock I guess to stop them going walkies from hot desks.

Big change for me is the power cable can now go left or right depending on where you want to place your laptop.

 

Feels strange having so much power over USB-C but not noticed any issues with heat etc, plus the 280W laptop power supply is barely bigger than the GaN ones with the 7780. 

 

I did notice a dynamic PL1 figure which starts at the same 98W as the fixed figure but forgot to check what that went to under heavy GPU load, my assumption would be the CPU power limit would be reduced perhaps to 50W or less.
 

Just happens that our workloads tend to be either CPU or GPU heavy nothing we do currently loads all cores on the CPU + GPU so it would be a synthetic worst case test really.

 

[win32asmguy]

4 hours ago, AL123 said:

I have one of the docks too so will give it a go when I am in the office on both power supply and dock see if there is any performance difference / power draw from the battery 
 

I figured the 300W figure was more about future proofing but will be interesting to see.

The 330w power brick for this dock is a large rounded rectangle a bit bigger than the dock itself! But has some slots on the base so you could mount it under a desk to some screws.
 

Also screw holes on the bottom of the dock I guess to stop them going walkies from hot desks.

Big change for me is the power cable can now go left or right depending on where you want to place your laptop.

 

Feels strange having so much power over USB-C but not noticed any issues with heat etc, plus the 280W laptop power supply is barely bigger than the GaN ones with the 7780. 

 

I did notice a dynamic PL1 figure which starts at the same 98W as the fixed figure but forgot to check what that went to under heavy GPU load, my assumption would be the CPU power limit would be reduced perhaps to 50W or less.
 

Just happens that our workloads tend to be either CPU or GPU heavy nothing we do currently loads all cores on the CPU + GPU so it would be a synthetic worst case test really.

 

Oh, tests with the dock will be great to have. They do usually ship them with the larger bricks as size is not as much a concern with something stationary.

 

To me the biggest issue would be if its power limits are not consistent. Its not very useful if it might be at 200W for five minutes but then drop to 150W for two minutes. It can also make work tasks take longer than estimated along with fan speeds not staying consistent as well if the throttling algorithm overshoots.

 

It would be great if it has some low latency memory options but they do not have all of the CAMM options available yet. I am guessing the CSODIMMs are probably just OEM 6400 CL52 1.1v. In the past Dell did support enabling XMP SODIMMs so that is another thing to test.

 

How is the 120hz QHD+ display? I am guessing it also supports 60hz to save some power on battery and maybe VRR in Optimus mode.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

8 hours ago, AL123 said:

I did notice a dynamic PL1 figure which starts at the same 98W as the fixed figure

they must be doing some advance "Dell marketing math",
isn't that just the overall battery capacity?

 

[AL123]

50 minutes ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

they must be doing some advance "Dell marketing math",
isn't that just the overall battery capacity?

 

Ha battery is 96Whr I believe; impressed by how small it is, but not sure why they didn’t go the whole way to 99 Whr seems to be space particularly on the 18. 
 

on the RTX 4000 power limits I only saw 170W for short periods, this was a GPU rendering task that will use 100% of CUDA cores + Ray trace and Tensor cores (denoising) so it settled to around 150w for sustained loads. I think anything above 150W would be for bursty workloads. 

 

In terms of battery life, on the lower end Pro Max laptops the Intel Ultra H series CPUs seem a lot better for battery life and heat compared with the old i7/i9. 1st gen ultra series sacrificed a lot of performance even when plugged in but these seem much improved on both counts. but then the GPU tops out at the RTX 2000 Blackwell which draws a lot less power.

 

 

Not sure about the Pro Max 16 &18 Plus with Intel HX, whigher end descrete graphics and up to an 18 inch screen I’m not holding out my hopes for much battery life. But then most of our team use these between office, customer site and home for hybrid working and for that use case 95% of the time it’s plugged in. 
 

 

[AL123]

4 hours ago, win32asmguy said:

 

Oh, tests with the dock will be great to have. They do usually ship them with the larger bricks as size is not as much a concern with something stationary.

 

To me the biggest issue would be if its power limits are not consistent. Its not very useful if it might be at 200W for five minutes but then drop to 150W for two minutes. It can also make work tasks take longer than estimated along with fan speeds not staying consistent as well if the throttling algorithm overshoots.

 

It would be great if it has some low latency memory options but they do not have all of the CAMM options available yet. I am guessing the CSODIMMs are probably just OEM 6400 CL52 1.1v. In the past Dell did support enabling XMP SODIMMs so that is another thing to test.

 

How is the 120hz QHD+ display? I am guessing it also supports 60hz to save some power on battery and maybe VRR in Optimus mode.

For sure I’ll try to test with the docks as that is what will be used in office ideally, we currently use wd19dcs docks so think would have to plug the power supply into 1 usb c port first then plug the dock in. Hoping we will gradually swap out to these new docks as we get new laptops. 
 

Re the power supply it looks like it’s done just for the docks this time rather than jsut being an older model larger power supply, looks a bit more pro

 

ill take a look at the memory speed also not so up on that in recent years as most of our applications aren’t hugely sensitive to memory speed.

 

as far as the display I like the 18 inch QHD more than the 4K OLED, mainly because the OLED is a bit glossy which I am really conscious of even in an office environment I find it distracting, and also never a fan of 4K on laptops the scaling has to be set so high in windows some dialogs in our apps are a bit off, more a Microsoft/ other software developer issue which still doesn’t seem to be solved after 10+ years! 
 

I’m not too sensitive to refresh rate but IT colleague did say they noticed it was smoother straight away and asked if it was 120Hz, so I’d take that as an endorsement! 

[AL123]

Thought you all might appreciate a few photos I took from my own reference of the internals since it was my biggest interest on the redesign 

 

[KMikhail]

I wonder if nicely put information on upgrade paths could be a regular thing.

 

I.e. sometimes lower tier components can't be drop-in upgraded to top end ones. Often case this is discovered a hard way, or through digging the forum.

 

Like if I ultimately would like to upgrade to maxed out graphics card, what's the lowest card that will come with necessary motherboard, heat sink, etc.

 

Regards

[MyPC8MyBrain]

@AL123 Great images, thanks for sharing.
 

I’m honestly baffled by some of these design choices. The first glaring issue—among too many to list in one post—is thermal logic. Heat naturally rises, yet here it looks like the GPU is mounted upside-down, and possibly the CPU as well (hard to tell from the angle). That means both ‘hot plates’ are effectively facing the keyboard, while the thick vapor chamber sits below the heat source.
 

Then there’s the wasted chassis space—large empty pockets that feel more like parts were jammed into place than thoughtfully laid out. Not a single fan appears to be positioned to push air directly over the NVMe drives or CAMM memory. Speaking of CAMM, that heat spreader has nowhere obvious to dissipate to—it seems more cosmetic than functional.
 

From what I’m seeing here, this doesn’t look like a ground-up redesign at all. More like a rushed parts shuffle in a new shell.

[AL123]

13 minutes ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

@AL123 Great images, thanks for sharing.
 

I’m honestly baffled by some of these design choices. The first glaring issue—among too many to list in one post—is thermal logic. Heat naturally rises, yet here it looks like the GPU is mounted upside-down, and possibly the CPU as well (hard to tell from the angle). That means both ‘hot plates’ are effectively facing the keyboard, while the thick vapor chamber sits below the heat source.
 

Then there’s the wasted chassis space—large empty pockets that feel more like parts were jammed into place than thoughtfully laid out. Not a single fan appears to be positioned to push air directly over the NVMe drives or CAMM memory. Speaking of CAMM, that heat spreader has nowhere obvious to dissipate to—it seems more cosmetic than functional.
 

From what I’m seeing here, this doesn’t look like a ground-up redesign at all. More like a rushed parts shuffle in a new shell.

not to sure on the stacked cpu/GPU I’ve not studied it in any detail/ had it explained to me, but so far seems to be working well from limited testing performance seems good for our workflows and chassis temperature a lot better than the old gen, but it’s very early days in testing. It’s certainly a bold choice, let’s hope there is plenty of science and testing behind it, I was told several new patents around its design 

 

the other points I can probably explain some of the thinking from what I have been told by Dell

 

re the wasted space, most of this is the area around the CAMM module, post launch the 256GB option will be two cards, I am assuming that will take up most of that space.

 

and re the no fan to cool the nvme/memory the idea is the third than generates negative pressure, drawing air from remote vents down towards those components/ the battery. How well it works vs a fan right there time will tell! 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

Thank you for the clarification @AL123
i do see the traces now for the negative fan airflow, it seem to me that under load it would be scrubbing hot air over the GPU? what ever happened to the discrete GPU with AI integration etc. where is that hiding?

[AL123]

8 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

Thank you for the clarification @AL123
i do see the traces now for the negative fan airflow, it seem to me that under load it would be scrubbing hot air over the GPU? what ever happened to the discrete GPU with AI integration etc. where is that hiding?

No worries this is mainly relying on what I have been told by dell proof will be as people test the laptops, they haven’t played it safe in my opinion both with cooling design and CAMM for higher speeds/ capacity vs 4 so-dimm slots 
 

RE Qualcomm ai chip From what I read it’s a case of choose that or graphics card, at some point post launch. 
 

not sure it will be popular, the NVIDIA spark platform looks like a more solid option for AI. mini desktop with more capacity and you can link 2 together. Dell will offer this too. 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

10 minutes ago, AL123 said:

Qualcomm ai chip From what I read it’s a case of choose that or graphics card

im confused... there's no dGPU solution under the hood, just 1 full tilt GPU?

[David55]

"...im confused... there's no dGPU solution under the hood, just 1 full tilt GPU?"

 

I know less about this than you. But I'm pretty sure that there is not supposed to be any discrete GPU with AI integration (as we have understand dgpu in terms of quadro, geforce, or rtx cards). The qualcomm ai chip will be very good for ai but not designed to function in many of the ways that traditional gpu's function (though of course tensor cores and even cuda cores can also perform ai work).

[Aaron44126]

The GPU card fits in the top-right area (viewing from the bottom), a custom form factor DGFF card like they've been doing for several years now. It can be seen in the manual. (Tossed some pictures from the manual in the spoiler block below.)

 

The only new thing here to me is that it appears to be double-stacked over part of the motherboard (but not directly above the CPU). You can see the double-stacking best in the second-to-last image in @AL123's post above. Stacking the dGPU card on top of the motherboard is not that new, it was standard design when Dell was using MXM cards (2017 systems and earlier), but this is the first time that I have seen it since they switched to DGFF.

 

When the Qualcomm AI thing is available, my understanding is that it will also be a DGFF card fitting in the same space, so you'll have to pick between it or an NVIDIA GPU.

 

Spoiler

 

 

[yslalan]

7 hours ago, AL123 said:

not sure it will be popular

Well, it’s kind of hard to say. Those AI Chips are not a new model (advertised as dNPUs). In the Pro Max-Plus series, Dell is using the solution from Qualcomm shipped in H1 2021 (a pair of AI 100 Pro chips), but four years have already passed, and there hasn’t been much presence in industrial usage.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

ooh wow... i need a minuted to collect the few pieces i have left from my brain after it just exploded.
for some reason i was sure the CPU is buried under the fans somewhere i just realized where they placed it.
 

[win32asmguy]

10 minutes ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

ooh wow... i need a minuted to collect the few pieces i have left from my brain after it just exploded.
for some reason i was sure the CPU is buried under the fans somewhere i just realized where they placed it.

 

A good telltale sign of the CPU location is usually an inch or less than from the memory slots for optimal signal integrity. Granted, the service manual photos do not really do justice showing how everything is designed and component locations!

[MyPC8MyBrain]

10 hours ago, AL123 said:

No worries this is mainly relying on what I have been told by dell

ive examined the board and components closer, it doesn't look like they are doing negative pressure,
i think your sales rep sold you a nice story from the 8 second video below
 

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

9 minutes ago, win32asmguy said:

A good telltale sign of the CPU location is usually an inch or less than from the memory slots for optimal signal integrity.

That’s generally true for desktop boards, but in laptops I’ve rarely seen it followed this closely. My guess is Dell’s doing some channel tuning for the CAMM layout—even though, in practice, CAMM performance is still mostly theoretical right now. In these mobile Precisions, CAMM is still just running dual-channel like a standard SoDIMM.

[Aaron44126]

Not sure what you meant to label as "dGPU" in that image. That term usually means "discrete GPU" which would reference the NVIDIA chip on a standalone card. The integrated GPU (iGPU) is actually in the CPU die. What you have labeled "dGPU" is actually the PCH chip.

 

In every CAMM design so far, Dell has put the CPU right up against the CAMM slot.

 

This board layout actually is really similar to what they had in the Precision 7X70 and 7X80 systems. They just sort of ... flipped the DGFF GPU card over so that they had room for the third fan, and some other components have been moved around slightly.

[AL123]

1 hour ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

ive examined the board and components closer, it doesn't look like they are doing negative pressure,
i think your sales rep sold you a nice story from the 8 second video below
 

 

Just going on what was on their slide deck dell showed us on the new range, had an ~ 1 hour overview of the full range from technical contact at Dell, would hope it was put together by technical team rather than just marketing claims! 
 

that marketing video looks different to the images I saw with arrows for air flow , perhaps the video team didn’t know the details of how it was supposed to work, bit embarrassing  if so! 
 

if you look at the picture of the base I sent you should also see the vent above the third fan is blocked off,I presume this is so it is forced to draw air from vents primarily at the bottom of the laptop by the Memory, SSD and battery
 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

45 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

Not sure what you meant to label as "dGPU" in that image

 

good catch there, thats a typo i meant iGPU.

[win32asmguy]

59 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

This board layout actually is really similar to what they had in the Precision 7X70 and 7X80 systems. They just sort of ... flipped the DGFF GPU card over so that they had room for the third fan, and some other components have been moved around slightly.

 

I appreciate this choice because they made a decision of function over form here. I doubt any engineers or users actually cared about how thick their mobile workstations were (within reason). Are we going back to M6800 sized systems? No. But it can at least be as thick as needed to sustain advertised performance in reasonable conditions.