Dell Precision 7670 & Dell Precision 7770 owner's thread

[MyPC8MyBrain]

14 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

I think it's almost time to spin up a Precision 7X80 pre-release thread

you don't think they will change the 7x prefix to 8x with a new vapor chamber design? (pls no bubble buts)
 

14 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

laid out a similar timeline for Precision 7X70 a

hmm... i donno you were way off on the 7570 there 

[Aaron44126]

11 minutes ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

you don't think they will change the 7x prefix to 8x with a new vapor chamber design? (pls no bubble buts)

 

They tend to use the same chassis for (at least) two iterations so I think it will be 2024 before we see that refreshed.  (They'll likely change up the naming scheme too, because the 3000/5000/7000 lines are running out of numbers...)  It's possible that the cooler/heatsink could see some tweaks, though.

 

Again...  Just my speculation.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

having a hard time seeing this heat pipe design running HX CPU with additional 8 cores,
something has to change,

[serpro69]

1 hour ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

i will be waiting for the upcoming 8x80 line with the hope they design it with proper vapor chamber that can manage demanding thermals

 

Seeing how they just re-designed the thermals, I don't know, I kind of doubt they would make something new again next year... One can always hope, I know I do :) But as faithful as I always was to Dell, I'm kind of loosing my faith and unwillingly exploring other options lately. Dunno if I'll wait for the 7x80 models (kind of a "forever waiting for the next thing around the corner" game), but nevertheless I think that the success/failure of the next year's models will decide it for me if I'm going to stick with them or not in the foreseeable future.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

12 minutes ago, serpro69 said:

Seeing how they just re-designed the thermals

Dell as far as i remember always had top notch engineering and always ahead of the curve when it comes to design, whoever signed off on this designed should be fired along with similar creepy minded executive concerned with cutting corners for their personal bonuses, that is not the good old Dell spirit I know and remember, that newly spreading mentality the past few years should be nipped at the bud.

[serpro69]

1 minute ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

Dell as far as i remember always had top notch engineering and always ahead of the curve when it comes to design,
whoever signed off on this designed should be fired along with similar creepy minded executive concerned with cutting corners for their personal bonuses, that is not the good old Dell spirit I know and remember and should be nipped at the bud.

 

Totally agree. 

But I think there's a chance they just might get away with it. These are business-oriented workstations. How much of the target audience going to even run benchmarks or try to push this system to the limit to even find out there's something wrong with it? At best a lot of businesses will just blindly replace outright faulty units and won't even notice anything wrong with the rest.

[TwistedAndy]

1 hour ago, serpro69 said:

Seeing how they just re-designed the thermals, I don't know, I kind of doubt they would make something new again next year... One can always hope, I know I do 🙂 But as faithful as I always was to Dell, I'm kind of loosing my faith and unwillingly exploring other options lately. Dunno if I'll wait for the 7x80 models (kind of a "forever waiting for the next thing around the corner" game), but nevertheless I think that the success/failure of the next year's models will decide it for me if I'm going to stick with them or not in the foreseeable future.

 

Yes, Dell won't dramatically change the Precision thermal design nor next year, neither 2024. Maybe, we will see some updates in 2025.

 

At the same time, we may see some updates to the XPS 15/17 lineup next year.

 

In term of performance, Raptor Lake H will use mostly the same design as Alder Lake H with the same cache configuration. It will be 2-7% faster. Maybe, there will be some power management improvements allowing it run on slightly lower voltage to compensate higher clocks.

 

As for the Raptor Lake HX, maybe, we will see the full 8 + 16 configuration, but on the mobile devices the performance improvement will be limited due to the case and power restrictions. That's why Intel will use the 6+8 configuration both for Raptor Lake H and Meteor Lake H with 45W base power.

 

I think, the next good time to upgrade will be 2025 with Intel Arrow Lake.

[1610ftw]

1 hour ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

Dell as far as i remember always had top notch engineering and always ahead of the curve when it comes to design, whoever signed off on this designed should be fired along with similar creepy minded executive concerned with cutting corners for their personal bonuses, that is not the good old Dell spirit I know and remember, that newly spreading mentality the past few years should be nipped at the bud.

 

It seems that for both Dell and MSI in this generation the more sophisticated vapor chamber designs are relegated to thinner laptops with lesser specs where apparently manufacturers feel they are really needed due to these models being thinner and more compact.

 

As if an HX CPU with a top of the line GPU wasn't reason enough to implement a vapor chamber!

[1610ftw]

2 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

@1610ftw 
i worked at getting that score it didn't just fall out of the sky,
its a fun habit of mine to see how far a certain pc can be pushed,
there's allot more that goes into this, undervolting is the least and last tweaking element in my setup,

i recently had 11900HK XPS 17 i also dialed in to the highest score on 3DMARK,
you can check you will see my handle name with highest score next to it for that cpu,

i returned that unit and got this instead, initially i got a great deal on a refurbished XPS 17 unit,
when it arrived there were allot of scuffs and dings all over and the worst part the screen had a wobble,
i could fit my fingernail between the screen back shell and the screen itself, 
 

cosmetics aside i did my thing with that unit too just to see what its potential is,

i have to admit i loved that unit and would have kept it if it wasn't botched or if Dell offered an exact replacement,

 

long story short i was always eyeballing the 7670 upcoming line as soon as they were out i was ready to order,

but they didn't have the sodimm module available so i waited until it finally became available and placed my order,

two weeks into me waiting for my order to be built with top of the line specs,
NVidia comes out with Lovelace architecture showing effectively twice the performance from previous generation,
followed by Intel announcing and releasing Raptor Lake architecture with additional 8 E-Cores and faster DDR5 support,

i just specked a brand new system with top of the line components and two weeks later before i even get to enjoy it its already old news hardware wise, i usually commit 5-10 years with each personal laptop driver i don't like switching,

 

if this machine didn't have issues i would have kept it, but it does have issue,

the high CB score comes with unmanaged heat premium that throttles,
i am not fully comfortable committing the next 10 years to this unit,

i don't feel thermal design in this unit is sufficient or robust enough to host the HX CPU line,
i will be waiting for the upcoming 8x80 line with the hope they design it with proper vapor chamber that can manage demanding thermals, if they keep this flimsy heat pipe design for the new Intel Raptor lake CPU's i will reluctantly look into a Razer Blade solution instead,

to be fair and to DELL's credit and true fashion...
before i started tinkering with this unit i already called them to complain about idling at 76c and few other anomalies i observed with this particular unit, they immediately offered a complete brand new replacement which i agreed too, its one of the reasons i am addicted to DELL for over 22 years now,
and why i bought and supported hundred of thousands of their machines over the years, 
a replacement is on its way, i have not yet fully walked away from the 7670,

we will see.

 

 

It's all good, I thought it was kind of cool to get those benchmarks and then walk away as you want more sustained performance.

 

Best sustained performance seems to be with the Asus 17" Strix vapor chamber model this year although I am not so sure how much of the performance is due to the vapor chamber and how much due to the completely unified heeatsink and liquid metal application. MSI GT77 and CreatorPro X17 seem to have at least similar overall cooling capability it seems but their heatsink is much less unified with much of their cooling capacity not used to the fullest degree for CPU heavy workloads and they do not have liquid metal either. So Asus is ticking all the boxes this generation with regard to cooling:

 

- big enough cooling solution with vapor chamber

- fully unified design for maximum performance of either CPU or GPU

- liquid metal application from the factory

- fans positioned at the two corners of the chassis for maximum air exchange with the outside

 

About that 3DMark score: Which score, processor and benchmark? Couldn't find you there.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

51 minutes ago, 1610ftw said:

the more sophisticated vapor chamber designs are relegated to thinner laptops with lesser specs

the amount of cooper used is significant and makes this part relatively expensive,

apparently thermals is the only corner left to cut in the already pricy Precision line,

 

  

30 minutes ago, 1610ftw said:

About that 3DMark score: Which score, processor and benchmark?

@1610ftw i think i mentioned the cpu  (sorry i messed up the model earlier),
i did the generic benchmark everyone runs, i think it was time spy,

it was XPS 9710 with i9 11980HK RTX 3060 on Win11

 

undervolt settings for that unit were shared on Linus tech Tips forums here

[1610ftw]

Just now, MyPC8MyBrain said:

the amount of cooper used is significant and makes this part relatively expensive,

apparently thermals is the only corner left to cut in the already expensive Precision line,

 

Possibly cost savings play a role but making these savings in the most expensive models that both Dell and MSI offer seems misguided. It is also possible that there is a certain arrogance where engineers think they can do what they always do and that a vapor chamber is not really needed in a bigger and/or thicker chassis. Whatever it is hopefully this will change.

[DoC]

Got my heatsink assembly replaced under warranty by Dell. Now I get 16500 in Cinebench, which is about 10% improvement just from the switch. Old assembly was with Delta fans, don't know about the new one. I suppose it's the Sunon one because of the upgrade. Old assembly didn't have any missing pads.

Time to learn about undervolting 🙂 Any recommendations about guides or something? @MyPC8MyBrain, your CB score looks awesome, I am aiming at atleast 20k (10min run) for reliable daily workflow. Can you please provide some places for good information what to do? I am with 7770 so I don't think it is viable to just copy/paste your settings.

[Aaron44126]

26 minutes ago, DoC said:

Got my heatsink assembly replaced under warranty by Dell. Now I get 16500 in Cinebench, which is about 10% improvement just from the switch. Old assembly was with Delta fans, don't know about the new one. I suppose it's the Sunon one because of the upgrade. Old assembly didn't have any missing pads.

 

Do the IA AC/DC loadline fix if you haven't yet (that added almost 20% my Cinebench score).

Can you hear any noise when your new fans power on (i.e. when first turning on the laptop)?

[DoC]

1 hour ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

Do the IA AC/DC loadline fix if you haven't yet (that added almost 20% my Cinebench score).

Can you hear any noise when your new fans power on (i.e. when first turning on the laptop)?

I know what you're talking about, I don't know how to do it.
As for the noise - no, I can't hear anything different than with the older one.

[ATAN]

Got mine today, installing windows 11 currently. I hate myself for putting windows on a new system as arch/Manjaro or fedora would've been a better fit, even steam os 3.3 is a better fit. But I'm here to test CPU performance so my dual boot will have to wait until tomorrow.

 

[brunooo84]

10 hours ago, TwistedAndy said:

 

You need to disable VBS in Windows (Virtualization-Based Security), You can keep the virtualization and Hyper-V enabled.

 

The setting is called Memory integrity:

didn't work for me... only if I disable virtualization it works

[Aaron44126]

3 hours ago, DoC said:

I know what you're talking about, I don't know how to do it.
As for the noise - no, I can't hear anything different than with the older one.

 

The IA AC/DC loadline fix:

setup_var CpuSetup 0x132 0xAA # set IA AC LoadLine LSB to 170 (1.7mOhms)
setup_var CpuSetup 0x133 0x0  # set IA AC LoadLine MSB to 0

 

To get to the prompt to enter these commands, visit this tutorial and hop down to step 5.  I had never done this before, but I was done in less than ten minutes.

https://brendangreenley.com/undervolting-2020-dell-laptops-like-the-vostro-7500-and-more-tips-to-improve-thermals-battery-life-and-speed/#cpu-undervolt

 

You'll have to do something similar to enable undervolting anyway.  (@MyPC8MyBrain posted the specific commands somewhere in here...)

 

Regarding the fans, I was more asking if you can hear any noise at all when they power on.  (My Precision 7560 fans are completely silent when turning on and at low RPM.  I really like that.  My Delta fans make an obvious sound when they power on.)  Most people are reporting that they make some power on noise.  ...Really, I just need to actually call Dell and get my own replacement heatsink.  Haven't made the time.

[brunooo84]

11 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

Oh, if you have the "Cool" thermal profile set...  Try with "Ultra performance" instead.  I wonder if Dell is further limiting the NVIDIA GPU power level like they are with the "Quiet" profile.

 

You could check with NVIDIA Inspector and just looking at the P-State.  P8 is the lowest performance and P0 is the highest.  In the "Quiet" profile it will not go to a higher performance state than P3 and that is definitely noticeable in games.

 

I didn't know that! I just ran hitman's benchmark with "Cool", it gets less than 70k, with "Optmized" it gets 140k and with "Ultra Performance" it gets 143k! Now Hitman at 4k gets 70fps! I love this game.

 

I was feeling terrible to see my old desktop RTX 2080 beat it, but now the rtx 3080 ti beats it by more than 70%!

 

My PTM7950 just got delivered! I think I will give it a try later and compare the tests...

 

I just tried to build an apk in release mode of my app in android studio and it throtled soooo badly... omg!

 

Thank you!

[microdou]

On 10/7/2022 at 3:50 AM, Ionising_Radiation said:

ibt=off

Just installed Arch Linux (kernel 6.0.2) on 7770. "ibt=off" is the trick needed to boot to GUI 😃

Detailed explanation can be found here.

[brunooo84]

I used my lunch time to apply the new pad, here's the before and after...

 

I have only the IA AC/DC loadline fix, didn't undervolt.

 

My unit also came with Delta fans...

 

Geekbench also reported 148k for the gpu test.

 

Don't know why the single core in geekbench dropped tho...

[Leopurd]

I just received my Precision 7670 a few days ago, to replace my 7730.

 

The spec I got:

i9-12950HX

64GB RAM

1TB SSD

RTX A4500

4K OLED

 

It has been interesting to see so much talk about performance / cooling / cinebench results this 7x70 generation. I have never before run cinebench, but thought I'd share my results from a 10 minute run:

Multi-Core: 13432 (at about 2.25GHz sustained)

Single-Core: 1839 (at about 4.35GHz sustained)

 

It obviously isn't great compared to what others are able to achieve. But as this computer is issued through work I will have to accept it and will not be tinkering with it in any way.

 

To compare I ran CB on my 7730 as well (Xeon E-2186M - 6c/12t):

Multi-Core: 5961 (3.20 GHz sustained)

Single-Core: 1095 (4.30 GHz sustained)

 

Not sure if that's good or bad for that generation of Precision, but going from 7730 to 7670 I'm seeing a nice enough performance increase I suppose, and in a significantly smaller chassis!

[brunooo84]

Just adding some more cool info about performance...

 

I have an android app, this app takes ~3m40s to build on my desktop Threadripper 2950X (16c, 32t).

 

This same app takes ~2m33s to build on my 7770 in Optmized and just 1m23s in Ultra Performance. This is what matters to me and I'm very happy with the machine.

 

I think I noticed some benefits from applying the PTM7950 to it, I wasn't sure about the size needed so it turns out I still have enough to apply it to 2 or 3 more machines.

 

Anyone in Australia? I could ship it if you want, just pay for postage, or anywhere really...

 

Thanks!

[ATAN]

Had long post but deletoed

Edited October 22, 2022 by ATAN
Numbers are cap, brb

[ZN_lucky]

7 hours ago, Leopurd said:

I just received my Precision 7670 a few days ago, to replace my 7730.

 

The spec I got:

i9-12950HX

64GB RAM

1TB SSD

RTX A4500

4K OLED

 

It has been interesting to see so much talk about performance / cooling / cinebench results this 7x70 generation. I have never before run cinebench, but thought I'd share my results from a 10 minute run:

Multi-Core: 13432 (at about 2.25GHz sustained)

Single-Core: 1839 (at about 4.35GHz sustained)

 

It obviously isn't great compared to what others are able to achieve. But as this computer is issued through work I will have to accept it and will not be tinkering with it in any way.

 

To compare I ran CB on my 7730 as well (Xeon E-2186M - 6c/12t):

Multi-Core: 5961 (3.20 GHz sustained)

Single-Core: 1095 (4.30 GHz sustained)

 

Not sure if that's good or bad for that generation of Precision, but going from 7730 to 7670 I'm seeing a nice enough performance increase I suppose, and in a significantly smaller chassis!

 

How much do you like the 4K OLED? Looking at youtube videos, it seems quite glossy. Does it compensate for that with high enough brightness? Are you able to use it outside or if there is some light behind your back? Is the touchscreen working with linux?

 

Thank you for any insights on this.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

"you take the good you take the bad and there you have the facts of life"
 

out of curiosity i run 3DMARK bench on the 7670
to my surprise despite the high CB scores the system is scoring very low in real world tests,
so low it is having a hard time even reaching the 60% performance mark other same cpu score show, despite my efforts the system score on 3DMARK remains poor and cannot reach even the average score,

for this cpu family 3DMARK is reporting a score of roughly 14k as the highest, 13k is average, my system can barely reach a 9k score atm, it doesn't seem to matter which power plan is in play nor any undervolt settings seem to make any difference nudging the score there,

these results basically summarizes everything we all been reporting on this thread,
thermals on this unit are not great to say the least,