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

[1610ftw]

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

AFAIK, there is still no manual fan control option for Dell systems released on 2021 or later.

 

It is a sorry state of things that the big three workstation laptop manufacturers Dell, HP and Lenovo seem to have no way to manually control their fans. At least Dell used to be decent when it comes too keeping fans quiet most of the time while not reducing power. HP seems to have an issue going back to the early Zbooks and to a lesser degree Lenovo, too.

[win32asmguy]

21 minutes ago, 1610ftw said:

It is a sorry state of things that the big three workstation laptop manufacturers Dell, HP and Lenovo seem to have no way to manually control their fans. At least Dell used to be decent when it comes too keeping fans quiet most of the time while not reducing power. HP seems to have an issue going back to the early Zbooks and to a lesser degree Lenovo, too.

 

I think they might consider exposing manual fan control a security concern at this point. To be completely honest I was surprised that the Pro Max 18 Plus does not yet have its EFI variables write protected yet like the Zbook and Thinkpad.

 

The fan noise is better than the previous Precision 7780 and also Thinkpad P16 G2.

 

I spent a bunch of time over the weekend trying to find a way to prevent the power adapter performance locking issue. It seems like it will always eventually happen if the system is in performance mode and under any kind of high load scenario where the battery is draining down while plugged in. I have to box it up and send it back as their support said it was "operating as designed".

[1610ftw]

5 minutes ago, win32asmguy said:

 

I think they might consider exposing manual fan control a security concern at this point. To be completely honest I was surprised that the Pro Max 18 Plus does not yet have its EFI variables write protected yet like the Zbook and Thinkpad.

 

The fan noise is better than the previous Precision 7780 and also Thinkpad P16 G2.

 

I spent a bunch of time over the weekend trying to find a way to prevent the power adapter performance locking issue. It seems like it will always eventually happen if the system is in performance mode and under any kind of high load scenario where the battery is draining down while plugged in. I have to box it up and send it back as their support said it was "operating as designed".

 

Yes that is possibly true about the manual fan control and I guess that I could live with fans that are as well behaved as the ones in that I had in the 7760.

 

Sorry to hear that you could not get the locking issue fixed. It inspires little confidence to see all of that happening with the workstation that potentially is the most powerful between the big three manufacturers.

[Aaron44126]

2 hours ago, 1610ftw said:

It is a sorry state of things that the big three workstation laptop manufacturers Dell, HP and Lenovo seem to have no way to manually control their fans.

 

Seems like there should be potential for manual fan control. The BIOS system diagnostics includes a test that manipulates the fan speed. If someone could reverse engineer that and figure out what commands that it is sending to the embedded controller, then you'd have a starting point.

 

(The manual fan control solution that existed for earlier systems, used in many tools like SpeedFan, HWiNFO64, and the Linux kernel, was also reverse engineered from a Dell support tool.)

 

I actually spent a good amount of time fighting with embedded controller commands to figure it out. I ended up discovering some endpoints for reading the fan speed (and system temperatures) that no one else had figured out yet. But I couldn't find a control mechanism. My investigation was pretty brute force, not really based on reverse engineering anything, I don't have the skills for that.

 

Fan behavior in the Precision 7770 is a part of what turned me off from this line of systems altogether. There are a lot of things about my MacBook that I wish were different, but fan behavior is not one of them.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

Wooohat... manual fan control, did the world gone mad?  that is so pedestrian in an era of self driving cars,
solid and basic working technology belongs in the 2000 and prior when things didn't have hidden agendas and corner cutting in mind just so a bunch of deadbeat exec's can buy another weekend house. 
and don't anyone dear to say they didn't do something in their time.

[Easa]

24 hours with this machine. My feelings and findings so far:

1. The body is really sturdy with amazing torsion strength, does not twist, just acts like an ingot. One screw (front right corner) was loose from the factory. I have not opened the device, yet. As for the problem with the bottom door, well, in the 3D Visualisation on the Dell´s website, the laptop is pictured with some sort of a halved, sliding bottom door (the one that I have posted prior to this post). I do not have this, I have normal bottom cover that is one piece. Anybody here has a PMP18 with this sliding door? 
    
2. Keyboard is...well, its not a ThinkPad but it is not that HP abomination as well. Its quite good. No complaints except for the arrow keys. 
    
3. The 2560x1600 120Hz panel looks amazing color-wise, almost like IPS Black from the new Ultrasharps, but its slow AF. Ghosting is just there. Lenovo had way better panel in the P16G2 regarding this. I miss that screen, it was really good. 
    
4. Touchpad is very pleasant to work with, both its surface and the click feedback are good. 
    
5. Fan behavior is very good, at least during office work and basic multitasking its like passive or just very quiet, have not had a chance to try out some proper loads except benchmarks. Surface temperatures are pleasant. 
    
6. Sound coming from the speakers is nice. Not MacBook Pro level nice, but usable for both movies and some background music. 
    

7. Weirdly bugged Optimus. I have installed iGPU drivers from Dell. They install as a driver only, without the control panel. If I install the control panel for the Intel iGPU manually from MS Store, it results in bugged Optimus, with the dGPU (RTX 4000) running at 8W idle basically non-stop. Have you encountered this as well? 
    

8. The battery life is all over the place, ranging from 2 to 6 hours in idle with no apparent causes. The total system consumption is very wild, going from basically zero to 50W, again, without doing anything other than web browser with a few tabs (brightness at 7 out of 10)
    

9. Fingerprint reader dropped once in 24 hours, was missing in device manager with no apparent cause, was fixed by a reboot. I hope that I wont have to RMA this week after the delivery. 
    

10. The internal, factory 1TB Gen5 (Samsung PM9E1) drive tops out at +- 8400/4000 R/W and I do not know why.
     

11. Eventlog keeps getting spammed with "Smart Card Reader 'Microsoft UICC ISO Reader rejected IOCTL TRANSMIT: Parameter is incorrect" - seems like a SIM/eSIM issue, I do not use WWAN currently. Anyone getting these errors on their machine?
     

12. Same thing with PCI Express Endpoint / PCI Express Legacy Endpoint WHEA Corrected errors. I am unable to find the source of these. Laptop seems to be working fine. 
     

13. Score in Passmark seems okay, getting about 62k / 4.8k MT/ST ratings, which are quite higher than the median for the 285HX. 

 

This is just some basic rambling about the machine, I will do a proper review once I feel "at home" with it. That feeling aint coming yet. 

[win32asmguy]

@Easa nice post! If you happen to run some combined load stress tests could you monitor if it periodically trips the ia: rapl/psyspl2 throttle flag reducing the CPU to around 15w until the power supply is disconnected and reconnected?

 

Oh and for Optimus make sure advanced Optimus is not enabled as it is pretty buggy.

[Aaron44126]

2 hours ago, Easa said:

This is just some basic rambling about the machine, I will do a proper review once I feel "at home" with it. That feeling aint coming yet. 

 

Feedback on some of your questions.

 

7 — Optimus / ongoing power draw from the dGPU

I have had issues like this with every Dell Precision system that I have used. I am not sure if it is just an issue with these things, or with Optimus in general. The dGPU tends to get stuck "on" even when nothing is using it. It might be drawing power even when the NVIDIA system tray thing says that it is off.

 

The fix for this is — after booting the system and logging in, wait a minute or two, then go to Device Manager and disable / re-enable the dGPU. After that, it seems to behave properly for the remainder of the session. (At least for me.)

 

I actually have a script that fires at login and uses DevManView to do this automatically. (DevManView supports command line arguments to do things like disable or enable a device without bringing up the GUI.)

 

Also note that tools that monitor the GPU (like GPU-Z) may keep the GPU awake. So if you're "watching" to see if it is behaving, that might be what is causing the problem.

 

9 — Fingerprint reader dropped

I have experienced this occasionally with multiple Precision systems. (I'm talking on the order of maybe 3-4 times a year.) Hopefully it was just a fluke for you. If it is something that happens every now and then, I don't have hope that replacing any component would fix it.

 

11 — SmartCard reader errors

The SmartCard reader is the long, skinny slot on the side, and doesn't have anything to do with the WWAN card or SIM slot. It's for inserting SmartCards which can be used for authentication or I don't know what else. (I have a family member who works for the VA and she always has a SmartCard inserted in her laptop...)

[Easa]

6 hours ago, win32asmguy said:

@Easa nice post! If you happen to run some combined load stress tests could you monitor if it periodically trips the ia: rapl/psyspl2 throttle flag reducing the CPU to around 15w until the power supply is disconnected and reconnected?

 

Oh and for Optimus make sure advanced Optimus is not enabled as it is pretty buggy.

 

I will certainly try to observe such behavior, once Ill be able to spend more time with the laptop. Could be during this weekend. 

 

5 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

Feedback on some of your questions.

 

7 — Optimus / ongoing power draw from the dGPU

I have had issues like this with every Dell Precision system that I have used. I am not sure if it is just an issue with these things, or with Optimus in general. The dGPU tends to get stuck "on" even when nothing is using it. It might be drawing power even when the NVIDIA system tray thing says that it is off.

 

The fix for this is — after booting the system and logging in, wait a minute or two, then go to Device Manager and disable / re-enable the dGPU. After that, it seems to behave properly for the remainder of the session. (At least for me.)

 

I actually have a script that fires at login and uses DevManView to do this automatically. (DevManView supports command line arguments to do things like disable or enable a device without bringing up the GUI.)

 

Also note that tools that monitor the GPU (like GPU-Z) may keep the GPU awake. So if you're "watching" to see if it is behaving, that might be what is causing the problem.

 

9 — Fingerprint reader dropped

I have experienced this occasionally with multiple Precision systems. (I'm talking on the order of maybe 3-4 times a year.) Hopefully it was just a fluke for you. If it is something that happens every now and then, I don't have hope that replacing any component would fix it.

 

11 — SmartCard reader errors

The SmartCard reader is the long, skinny slot on the side, and doesn't have anything to do with the WWAN card or SIM slot. It's for inserting SmartCards which can be used for authentication or I don't know what else. (I have a family member who works for the VA and she always has a SmartCard inserted in her laptop...)

 

7 - Yes, exactly this. Nvidia tray monitor says that the GPU is inactive, but it keeps getting active. Once I got rid of the Intel control panel, it is almost always off, but the corellation with the monitoring software is a spot on! Each time that I open HWInfo from tray, the GPU comes alive for a split second. So no hardware monitoring in the background when I want to maximize the battery, okay.
 

9 - I do not see any eventlog entries for connecting or reconnecting the FP Reader device. It seems like it only becomes active about 3 second after the login screen appears. First, there is only PIN option, but after a few seconds the fingerprint option appears. It is a FIPS reader, so I get that its a slowpoke.
 

11 - I know where you are aiming at, but I perfectly understand what is the SC slot - I use Smart Card reader for our Govt application. However, I have done my research regarding this issue, and everything points me to the WWAN.

 

The actual SmartCard reader is called "Broadcom Corp Contacted Smart Card 0" and shows under Software Devices in the Device Manager. This SC Reader is also detected by our Govt software that works directly with the SC Readers. It also registers the Contactless one, and then the third one - Microsoft UICC ISO Reader. I believe that it handles the SIM / Virtual eSIM slot as a SmartCard. 

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000200467/inspiron-latitude-and-precision-wwan-with-esim-causes-login-issues-for-smart-cards