Dell Precision 7770 review incoming — call for pre-feedback

[Aaron44126]

So, I'm going to be working on a "professional"-style review for the Precision 7770 after I get it.  I've been planning on doing this for a while, even before NBR died.  My intent is to publish it here on NotebookTalk.

 

I'm planning to have two parts to the review.  The first part will follow a normal laptop/notebook review format and in addition to some benchmarks, I'll be looking at things like available options, design & build, disk performance, fan behavior/noise, temperatures & max/average clock speeds, and so on.  I'm picking up a "Kill-a-Watt" power meter, IR temperature sensor, and dB meter to help out with this.  For the first part, I will specifically be looking at running tests with the system in its stock/default configuration and not taking any special steps to push the performance up.  The second part may be published a little bit later and it will be more of a less structured grab bag where I take a look at things like the impact of Dell's thermal settings, Optimus on vs off, Windows 10 vs 11, dock behavior, undervolting CPU & GPU, what Linux support looks like, and whatever else I can think of.

 

In terms of benchmarks for the first part, I am looking at:

• CPU
  • Cinebench
  • WPrime
• GPU
  • 3DMark (Fire Strike & Time Spy, and probably some others as well)
  • Unigine Superposition
  • GravityMark
  • Final Fantasy XIV benchmark
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark
  • (Not apt to include SPECviewperf ... I'm getting a GeForce configuration, so performance in many of those tests will be bad compared to what you'd get with a pro-RTX GPU)

It's my first time attempting something like this so I'm looking for feedback as to what sorts of things you guys would like to see in a laptop review, if there is anything specific that you think I should take a look at or if there are any benchmarks that you would like to see run that are not included above.

 

(The review will take some days/weeks to put together, so of course I will also be doing Q&A/AMA once the system comes in.  I imagine that some other users receiving systems would be happy to participate in this as well.)

 

Thanks!

[Ionising_Radiation]

On 7/11/2022 at 9:41 PM, Aaron44126 said:

what Linux support looks like

Any distros you're partial to? I foresee the following points of note on Arch Linux at least: 

• fingerprint sensor may/may not work (may require libfprint-tod-git patch)
• Optimus should work almost out of the box with Xorg, the Intel mode-setting driver, and the proprietary nvidia driver (zero configuration needed, especially with latest Xorg which even handles PRIME/reverse PRIME synchronisation)
• NFC and smart-card reader may be hit-or-miss
• All other peripherals should work with minimal/no configuration
• Backlight adjustment may need a desktop environment package (KDE's powerdevil provides this functionality, for instance)

Battery life should (in theory) exceed that on Windows; this is the same behaviour I've seen with my 7530 after the Turing upgrade, and on my 7560 now.

[Aaron44126]

17 minutes ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Any distros you're partial to?

 

Probably going to just stick with Ubuntu with my triple-boot (Win10/Win11/Linux); it's what Dell supports and it also happens to be what I am most familiar with.  I might dabble with some others if I can just boot them via "live USB".

[1610ftw]

Checking a few Linux distros would be nice other than that I think that you already got your plate quite full but it would be nice to hear how the 7770 performs in day to day operation with multiple monitors and a docking station if you are using one as that is where I found the 7670 a bit flaky with HDMI sound being an issue from time to time.

In the end I went back to getting more stable (still not perfect but a lot better) sound from directly outputting HDMI via the connector on the 7670.

 

As you treated yourself to the full 128GB I am also curious to hear if it behaves any different from the previous memory in the way it fills up.

With 4 memory sticks I always have an issue where it feels that the memory does not really like to be filled up to lets say 110 out of 128GB. It feels like maybe 15 to 20% of the memory not being in use works out better. Would be interesting to know if you also have noticed that in your use and if that changes with a single CAMM module.

[Aaron44126]

4 hours ago, 1610ftw said:

With 4 memory sticks I always have an issue where it feels that the memory does not really like to be filled up to lets say 110 out of 128GB. It feels like maybe 15 to 20% of the memory not being in use works out better. Would be interesting to know if you also have noticed that in your use and if that changes with a single CAMM module.

 

I can check on filling up the RAM.  What do you experience when you try to get close to the RAM limit?  Does the system start to misbehave, or is it just Windows wanting to start paging stuff out to disk so it never looks like more than ≈110GB is in active use?

[1610ftw]

1 hour ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

I can check on filling up the RAM.  What do you experience when you try to get close to the RAM limit?  Does the system start to misbehave, or is it just Windows wanting to start paging stuff out to disk so it never looks like more than ≈110GB is in active use?

 

Thanks, curious if you find anything different. What I experience is that the system seems to stall when for example I open up another browser window or an excel worksheet. If a video is running I might also get stuttering. Closing memory hogs like Chrome, Thunderbird or a virtual machine reduces the memory usage enough to get things up to speed again.

[Pultzar]

Please include opening the case to swap out the SSD drives, and reveal if your 8TB Sabrent drives work properly.

[Aaron44126]

9 hours ago, Pultzar said:

Please include opening the case to swap out the SSD drives, and reveal if your 8TB Sabrent drives work properly.

 

This won't have to wait until the review, I'll be trying it first thing 😄

[drnoob13]

On 7/11/2022 at 6:41 AM, Aaron44126 said:

what Linux support looks like, and whatever else I can think of.

Try Pop!OS. It'd give much better experience, esp. with their system76-power to switch the nVidia GPU completely off on battery.

[Ionising_Radiation]

18 hours ago, drnoob13 said:

esp. with their system76-power to switch the nVidia GPU completely off on battery

I haven't heard of this, needs investigating.

That said, power management with Optimus on Linux with Turing and later architectures doesn't need any intervention at all (bumblebee, optimus-manager, etc); the nvidia driver and the Linux kernel together is sufficient, now that runtime D3 power management and (reverse) PRIME rendering offload has been fully implemented. 

 

Only caveat is that (I think) Wayland support is still lacking; Xorg, on the other hand, works perfectly.

[AL123]

On 7/11/2022 at 2:41 PM, Aaron44126 said:

So, I'm going to be working on a "professional"-style review for the Precision 7770 after I get it.  I've been planning on doing this for a while, even before NBR died.  My intent is to publish it here on NotebookTalk.

 

I'm planning to have two parts to the review.  The first part will follow a normal laptop/notebook review format and in addition to some benchmarks, I'll be looking at things like available options, design & build, disk performance, fan behavior/noise, temperatures & max/average clock speeds, and so on.  I'm picking up a "Kill-a-Watt" power meter, IR temperature sensor, and dB meter to help out with this.  For the first part, I will specifically be looking at running tests with the system in its stock/default configuration and not taking any special steps to push the performance up.  The second part may be published a little bit later and it will be more of a less structured grab bag where I take a look at things like the impact of Dell's thermal settings, Optimus on vs off, Windows 10 vs 11, dock behavior, undervolting CPU & GPU, what Linux support looks like, and whatever else I can think of.

 

In terms of benchmarks for the first part, I am looking at:

• CPU
  • Cinebench
  • WPrime
• GPU
  • 3DMark (Fire Strike & Time Spy, and probably some others as well)
  • Unigine Superposition
  • GravityMark
  • Final Fantasy XIV benchmark
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark
  • (Not apt to include SPECviewperf ... I'm getting a GeForce configuration, so performance in many of those tests will be bad compared to what you'd get with a pro-RTX GPU)

It's my first time attempting something like this so I'm looking for feedback as to what sorts of things you guys would like to see in a laptop review, if there is anything specific that you think I should take a look at or if there are any benchmarks that you would like to see run that are not included above.

 

(The review will take some days/weeks to put together, so of course I will also be doing Q&A/AMA once the system comes in.  I imagine that some other users receiving systems would be happy to participate in this as well.)

 

Thanks!

Excellent while I’m more focused on professional engineering workflows it will be great to se me your feedback on the new chassis, performance and thermals.

 

I would like to see the PL1 and PL2 values, through hwinfo although I’ve noted them Change depending on workflow on my 7760 if the GPU is also running intensively it seems to dynamically drop the power limits. So it would be nice to see maximum power values for cpu and GPU when running mainly cpu and purely GPU based tasks.

 

we won’t get our first 7670 and 7770 units with pro cards (a2000, a3000 and a4500) until august

 

thanks again for all the info you post and this review I advance! 

[Aaron44126]

48 minutes ago, AL123 said:

I would like to see the PL1 and PL2 values, through hwinfo although I’ve noted them Change depending on workflow on my 7760 if the GPU is also running intensively it seems to dynamically drop the power limits. So it would be nice to see maximum power values for cpu and GPU when running mainly cpu and purely GPU based tasks.

 

Interesting, I wonder if this is NVIDIA Dynamic Boost at work.  I know that it can coordinate with the BIOS to "steal" power from the CPU but I wasn't necessarily expecting to see the PL1/PL2 values actually change as a result...

[AL123]

1 hour ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

Interesting, I wonder if this is NVIDIA Dynamic Boost at work.  I know that it can coordinate with the BIOS to "steal" power from the CPU but I wasn't necessarily expecting to see the PL1/PL2 values actually change as a result...

yeh I’ll have to do some testing again but definitely saw the reported values in hwinfo atleast one of the change when I hammered the GPU with a ray tracing workload (NVIDIA iRay) on one of the systems I was testing recently, pretty sure it was my 7760. This corresponded to a cpu speed reduction also but that could have been thermal related also. Generally for that particular workflow as it doesn’t hugely benefit from cpu cores I tend to run it solely on the GPU as performance gains are usually marginal and if you have cpu cores free you can work on other things. I some systems I’ve actually found it slower or perhaps more prone to errors due to software balancing between the two types of cores. 

 

I also noted an article on notebook check saying Lenovo posted GPU TGP for the P16 it would be good if Dell produced info for like this for comparison. @Dell-Mano_G Hp also tend to post more power info on their specs. However I tend to find for the most part Dell still outperform both historically.
 

See 

 

https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_P16_Gen_1/ThinkPad_P16_Gen_1_Spec.html?ver=48dd0cb9-2a22-49b9-8196-88dd94aa5784

 

not much on the CPUs However

[drnoob13]

On 7/18/2022 at 6:26 PM, Ionising_Radiation said:

I haven't heard of this, needs investigating.

That said, power management with Optimus on Linux with Turing and later architectures doesn't need any intervention at all (bumblebee, optimus-manager, etc); the nvidia driver and the Linux kernel together is sufficient, now that runtime D3 power management and (reverse) PRIME rendering offload has been fully implemented. 

 

Only caveat is that (I think) Wayland support is still lacking; Xorg, on the other hand, works perfectly.

Just out of personal curiosity, did you do a systematic test to see the power efficiency using bumblebee vs system76-power (on Pop!OS or a Ubuntu-based distro)? If you did, would you mind sharing your comparison data for power consumption on battery between the two? To be honest, bumblebee is so out-dated and it never seems to work properly for me when I tested it on my personal pc. For my mobile workstation, I only used system76-power because I have been using it for a very long time, and it has worked very well for me.

 

I wrote a short summary of my findings regarding power consumption below:

https://github.com/drNoob13/batteryimprove

 

p/s: my apologies for the late response.

[Aaron44126]

On 7/15/2022 at 9:24 PM, Pultzar said:

Please include opening the case to swap out the SSD drives, and reveal if your 8TB Sabrent drives work properly.

 

[slimpower]

WOW - I am only jealous, but three M.2 PCIe of 8TB in one laptop. THAT IS NUTS!! I love it, want it but wow.....

 

I wonder what our children will find nuts when they are our age....

[Aaron44126]

On 7/28/2022 at 7:34 AM, slimpower said:

three M.2 PCIe of 8TB in one laptop

 

Also seems happy to throw them in one big RAID array.

 

[SvenC]

21TB of SSD space - not so long ago that 20GB of HDD was a thing 🙂

 

What speeds do you get with benchmark tools like AS SSD, ATTO and crystal and how about copying stuff between your 980 PRO and the raid?

Do 3 PCIe 3 SSDs in RAID0 go above 3.5GB/s when copying data?

 

Looks like a cool setup to store and run a bunch of VMs on.

[Aaron44126]

27 minutes ago, SvenC said:

What speeds do you get with benchmark tools like AS SSD, ATTO and crystal and how about copying stuff between your 980 PRO and the raid?

 

Do 3 PCIe 3 SSDs in RAID0 go above 3.5GB/s when copying data?

 

I ran CrystalDiskMark on the RAID0 array.  These are all PCIe4 drives.  Haven't confirmed the drive architecture/layout in the 7770 yet but I believe that these are all behind the PCH.  The speed goes a little higher than what you would expect from a single PCIe4 drive in some circumstances (first write speed listed here) but not anywhere near 2× PCIe4 bandwidth.  Currently copying my old data over to the array but that's coming in from USB-attached SATA drives so I'm not really expecting that to be "fast".

 

[Conan11]

On 7/12/2022 at 9:33 AM, Aaron44126 said:

triple-boot (Win10/Win11/Linux)

Do you need to buy two Windows licenses to have two parallel Windows installations these days?

[Aaron44126]

8 minutes ago, Conan11 said:

Do you need to buy two Windows licenses to have two parallel Windows installations these days?

 

Pretty sure it will be happy to activate multiple parallel instances on the same hardware with the same product key, as long as you install the same Windows "edition".  (Windows 10 and Windows 11 can be activated with the same product key.)  I believe you can install Windows in VMs on the same hardware using the same product key as well without license grief.

 

...In my case here, Windows 11 Pro was provided by Dell with the system, but the Windows 10 install is Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC and I brought that license along myself.