Dell Precision 7670 & Dell Precision 7770 owner's thread

[SvenC]

5 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Playing with Linux again.

 

Do you install Linux side by side with Windows with a boot loader to choose the OS or do you switch or enable/disable SSDs to have only one system bootable? I guess using the Windows boot loader with bitlocker and PIN enabled can make it difficult to multi boot Windows and Linux installations?

[Aaron44126]

4 hours ago, SvenC said:

Do you install Linux side by side with Windows with a boot loader to choose the OS or do you switch or enable/disable SSDs to have only one system bootable? I guess using the Windows boot loader with bitlocker and PIN enabled can make it difficult to multi boot Windows and Linux installations?

 

Side-by-side.  No issues with BitLocker, but I found that Ubuntu's installer didn't really know what to do and really wanted me to turn off BitLocker.  I shrank my Windows partition to free up 256 GB of space, then in Ubuntu at the partition part I did a "custom install", told it to use the 256 GB of space as the root "/" partition, and told it to install the boot loader on the EFI partition.  The result is, the system boots Grub first and there are options in the menu to boot Ubuntu or hop to the Windows bootloader.  BitLocker is not engaged unless you select the latter option.  BitLocker will be a bit freaked out because of the configuration change so you will have to enter your recovery key on first boot and then suspend/unsuspend it to get it to be OK with the new configuration.

 

If you do something like this and decide you don't want Linux anymore, you can go to BIOS setup boot configuration and set "Windows Boot Loader" as the default boot option and then it will just go to that directly, bypassing Grub.

 

——————————

 

There is a new BIOS update out today, 1.11.0.  (...I am still running 1.8.0, but the system has been stable lately so I'll probably be upgrading before too long.)

https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=8F4H3

 

- This release contains security updates as disclosed in the Dell Security Advisories DSA-2023-091, DSA-2023-095, and DSA-2023-099. For more information, see Dell Security Advisories and Notices.

[Aaron44126]

On 4/12/2023 at 8:59 PM, Aaron44126 said:

Before I could mess with that more, I did package updates (which included a kernel update) and also installed the proprietary NVIDIA driver (525).  After rebooting, the system was dead with just a black screen and blinking cursor.  (Note, graphics switching enabled so it should have been running off of the Intel GPU.)

 

It looks like the NVIDIA driver was the cause of the issue?  I did a new install and installing the Linux kernel headers package before installing the NVIDIA driver seemed to do the trick.

 

(I also tried Kubuntu without success.  After installing, when I got to the login screen at the first boot, I put my password in and hit "Enter" and it just got stuck there.  All of the options greyed out, but nothing happened.  I'm rolling with GNOME for the time being.)

 

[Edit]

Installed some apps... yuzu & RetroArch for games, KeePass password manager, and VMware Workstation to set up a Windows VM.  I am working on freeing up one of my 8TB drives so I can have some bulk space in Linux.  I'll try using it over Windows as much as possible this weekend and see how it goes.  (...I'll probably open up another thread in the Linux subforum.)

[Mark_Eu]

Hi all!

 

Is there any info about use in low load, or least charging a 7770 via usb-c?

I found a reddit entry, 100w can charge the battery when its power off, but when on its only said (W10) "unknown, device, cant work..."

Or the minimum specs on the round power plug?

 

I'm work in entertainmant industry, and travel a lot... mainly in trains without AC. So i was wondering to get some portable battery pack, but for that i need to know first whats the minimum affordable power in.

Im peace about like a few hour power off charging, or something like that, if its works.

 

Or any usable solutions?

 

Any thoughts?

Thx,

m

 

[Aaron44126]

My Linux experiment seems to have stuck.  I haven't booted my Windows install in about 48 hours and I don't think that I will need to except to maybe go grab some files from my user profile.  (I do have a Windows VM running in Linux that has access to my Windows data drive.)  I have made a separate thread about this transition but I wanted to note some things specific to this model laptop over here.

 

Linux seems to handle idle power management differently.  I don't know if it is "better" but I know that there is a much lower level of background activity on Linux.  I have heard some odd electrical buzzing from my laptop when there is nothing really going on that I never heard while running Windows.  It doesn't seem to be coming from the fans because I can hear it when the fans are off (which also happens more often with Linux running); I can hear it coming from beneath the keyboard, so the CPU or something on the motherboard.  I tried disabling Intel Speed Shift and C-states in BIOS (following online advise from others noting this problem), and neither of those helped.  So, for now I have addressed this by running the Folding@Home client at the "light" power level to give the system something to do.  With turbo boost disabled, this does not cause the fans to rev up and CPU temperatures are in the mid 50's.

 

For other Dell/Linux users, you might find this useful.  Here are commands to change the "thermal mode" on the fly.

 

smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode=balanced

smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode=cool-botom

smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode=quiet

smbios-thermal-ctl --set-thermal-mode=performance

 

These must be run as root and you have to have the Dell SMBIOS support tools installed.  On Ubuntu, the package name is "smbios-utils".

 

There's no tools or commands that I have found to read the fan speed, but I should be able to come up with one.

 

[Edit]

Found a better way to kill the buzzing; I don't know if the Linux wasn't respecting the "no C states" rule from the BIOS, or if the BIOS implementation is just bad, but it seems like the system was still entering higher C states even with C states disabled in the BIOS setup.  I found a Linux solution to dynamically disable C states and I used that to block everything higher than C1.  We'll see if that kills the buzzing.  I still plan to come up with a solution that cycles Folding@Home on and off to prevent the fans from powering off.  (Better than a random junk background CPU job.)

 

[Edit 2]

C states is not the issue; I still hear it with C states disabled and with FAH running.  I think it might be something relating to Intel GPU power management?  Going to figure out how to disable that.

 

[Edit 3]

Solved buzzing.  It was either caused by the fingerprint reader or something to do with USB power management.  I added the fingerprint reader to the USB "autosuspend" blacklist so that the kernel will never try to power it off, and the buzzing stopped.

[Aaron44126]

Minimal Python snip to read the fan speed in Linux!

Pass "1" or "2" as a command line parameter to pick which fan to read.  Needs "smbios-utils" present.  (Maybe?  libsmbios might be included in the Linux kernel.)

#!/usr/bin/python3

import sys
from libsmbios_c import smi

if len(sys.argv) == 2:
	if sys.argv[1] == "1":
		res = smi.simple_ci_smi( 0, 0, 62976 )
		print(res[smi.cbRES2], end = "")
	if sys.argv[1] == "2":
		res = smi.simple_ci_smi( 0, 0, 62992 )
		print(res[smi.cbRES2], end = "")

 

[yslalan]

On 4/16/2023 at 4:04 AM, Mark_Eu said:

Is there any info about use in low load, or least charging a 7770 via usb-c?

Can confirm Precision 7670 can be charged with USB-C power adapter in system, and works fine.

[Joel]

Hello everyone,

I would like to express here my disappointment in having purchased a DELL 7770 Precision. Indeed, I have been using fixed PC's of different brands for years with professional sound cards such as external RME as a common point (everything works perfectly regardless of the machines with these sound cards) EXCEPT since I bought a DELL 7770 Precision laptop running Windows 11.
There, there are serious problems of drop out, click, clack, clok when playing audio files such as WAV or FLAC.

The issues are so severe that it's not possible to listen to music without having a serious drop out, click or other audio problem every couple of minutes.

I did everything, installed Windows 10 instead of the OS that came with the machine, the problems also occur (Less often), I even installed to try Linux Mint and there too I found problems jump in reading (But with another sound card) I therefore accuse the DELL 7770 of having a design problem and of not being able to process audio files correctly.

I use my PCs as audio recording machines and I find bitterly that DELL is not able to perform this essential task for me.

So, I bought a replacement Microsoft Surface Pro 9 tablet and there, everything works perfectly.

Finally DELL was my first machine, but it will be the only one, there will never be others and I will let it be known on all the forums I frequent.

 

[dude123]

On 5/7/2023 at 6:23 AM, Joel said:

Hello everyone,

I would like to express here my disappointment in having purchased a DELL 7770 Precision. Indeed, I have been using fixed PC's of different brands for years with professional sound cards such as external RME as a common point (everything works perfectly regardless of the machines with these sound cards) EXCEPT since I bought a DELL 7770 Precision laptop running Windows 11.
There, there are serious problems of drop out, click, clack, clok when playing audio files such as WAV or FLAC.

The issues are so severe that it's not possible to listen to music without having a serious drop out, click or other audio problem every couple of minutes.

I did everything, installed Windows 10 instead of the OS that came with the machine, the problems also occur (Less often), I even installed to try Linux Mint and there too I found problems jump in reading (But with another sound card) I therefore accuse the DELL 7770 of having a design problem and of not being able to process audio files correctly.

I use my PCs as audio recording machines and I find bitterly that DELL is not able to perform this essential task for me.

So, I bought a replacement Microsoft Surface Pro 9 tablet and there, everything works perfectly.

Finally DELL was my first machine, but it will be the only one, there will never be others and I will let it be known on all the forums I frequent.

 

 

 

I also get sound stuttering here and there. Fortunately, it's not my job use case.

I feel sorry for you anyway.

 

Dell is a complete dead horse. Me also, never going to buy any of their systems, and I also regularly recommend our IT to stop the mandatory purchases from Dell. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[vooze]

5 hours ago, dude123 said:

and I also regularly recommend our IT to stop the mandatory purchases from Dell. 

 

What do you recommend then? If enterprise setting, you really only have 3 options in Windows-land, as I see it (because laptops without "Pro Support" or the like is out of the question) so Dell, HP and Lenovo.

[vooze]

Precision 7670: Anyone know why the screen part of the laptop is so thick?

 

Not a problem, simply curious what is in there besides the panel?

[Aaron44126]

39 minutes ago, vooze said:

Precision 7670: Anyone know why the screen part of the laptop is so thick?

 

Not a problem, simply curious what is in there besides the panel?

 

That "dark" part of the "lid part" of the laptop in the image above is the plastic bezel, which I guess maybe doesn't need to be quite that thick.  It has some slightly rubbery material around the edge which I would presume protects the lid if you slam it shut quickly, which also adds 1mm or so to the height.  The panel is recessed behind the bezel and only in the "light" part.  (And, it doesn't really seem to be as thick as the image shows in person, at least to me...)

[yslalan]

Has anyone tried the new RAM spec (48GB * 2) on their 7770/7670? I thought it needs some special support in BIOS, so not sure if ours support that.

[Aaron44126]

Well this is just whacked.

 

I went through a process to figure out how to make sure that the GPU is powering off when it is not needed in Linux.  Now that this is "working", I am finding that the fan speed goes up when the GPU is powered off.  If the GPU is on the fans will periodically turn off completely after dropping below 1000 RPM, but if the GPU is off then the fan speed floor is around 1150 RPM for "optimized" mode and 1300 RPM for "quiet" mode.  I reproduced it multiple times.  All that it takes to turn the GPU on and cause the fan speed to go down is to have something like a GPU temperature measurement going.

 

I guess I should use a power meter to figure out if the GPU is "really" powering off (lower total system power use).  But one way or another, it seems that something is off with Dell's implementation of either the GPU power cycle or fan curves when the GPU is off.

 

Maybe this also explains why I saw the fans stop cycling off a few months ago back when I was using Windows.

[Aaron44126]

Display panel issue.  Again!

 

No idea why this suddenly popped up.  (I'm sure I would have noticed it quickly so it hasn't been around for long.)

 

(Dark spot in the middle of the circle here, not quite centered.)

 

I think it's not stuck pixels but rather some kind of display defect.  It seems to be "behind" the pixel grid and moves around slightly if I change my viewing angle.

 

I was a bit bummed because the dark pixel guideline is more loose than the bright pixel guideline (I had a bright pixel last time), requiring six messed up pixels to qualify for an automatic replacement rather than just one.  So, I was prepared to get some grief about that from the tech.  But, I measured it and found that it does cover six pixels, so there should be no reason for them not to replace it.

 

 

Call me persnickety, but I do have sensorimotor OCD and this sort of thing is very bothersome once I notice it.

 

I called Dell tech support and the tech agreed to replace the display.  (...I had to talk him out of replacing the graphics card instead???)  I asked for parts only this time so I'll do the replacement myself and won't have to worry about scheduling a tech.  (I'm going to be traveling soon, so if there is a parts delay that could lead to a scheduling headache like I ran into when having the panel replaced last year.)

 

My last two parts for this laptop faced weeks-long shortages.  I wonder if I will actually get this one to me tomorrow...

 

@Ionising_Radiation

Have you been liking the Honeywell PTM7950 pad thing?  Since I have to take off the heatsink to replace the display enclosure, I'll have to repaste so I'm thinking about trying this if it actually works decently...

 

[Edit]
(One hour later) At this moment, it is looking like both the display and the PTM7950 pad will be here tomorrow.

 

[Edit 2]

(Seven hours later) It's on the way, FedEx has picked up the display panel with estimated delivery of tomorrow.

[Ionising_Radiation]

12 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Have you been liking the Honeywell PTM7950 pad thing?

It's... Okay; honestly not very different from before.

 

I haven't really been monitoring temperatures much, but it seems the 300 MHz throttling went away when I enabled both GPU C-states in the firmware, and the platform controller framework, in Device Manager. 

 

The firmware update to 1.22 also got rid of undervolting, which I am in half a mind to keep, because up till now I've had a pretty unstable system with at least one hang a day, and gut feeling tells me it's the undervolting.

 

Finally, ambient temperatures are 35 –36 °C, which is terrible for anything, really.

[Aaron44126]

12 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

I haven't really been monitoring temperatures much, but it seems the 300 MHz throttling went away when I enabled both GPU C-states in the firmware, and the platform controller framework, in Device Manager.

 

Huh, maybe I will give GPU C-states another try.

[Aaron44126]

Sigh.

 

Very disappointed in the lack of "precision" with regards to this new display enclosure + panel that I received.

 

It is a refurbished part — clearly labeled as such on the packaging.  That made me nervous out of the gate.

 

First off, it was completely covered with very sticky plastic stuff that I had to pull off.  I was worried that I was going to damage the display just by doing that.

 

I fire it up and the first thing I noticed were visible bits of adhesive glue stuff sticking up from inside of the bottom bezel edge.  Now, I was wondering about the attention to detail given by whoever put this refurb together.  I removed the bezel and pulled those off without much trouble.

 

The next thing that I noticed was that the bottom few rows of pixels are covered up by the plastic bezel.  The screen is mounted too low in the enclosure.  It was also slightly worse on the right side.  I could scoot the mouse cursor along the bottom of the screen — on Linux, at least with my cursor, maybe six pixels stick up out of the bottom when I do this — on the left edge, I could only see two pixels of the cursor, and it would "disappear" as I moved it over towards the right.  Pulling up the corner of the bezel, I could see what I expected in the corner of the screen, and it would be covered up as soon as I snapped the bezel back on.

 

I pulled the bezel off entirely to see if anything could be done about that.  Unlike previously, this one does not have visible adhesive pull-tabs so I couldn't try to remount it even if I wanted to (...which I don't...), without some prying or heating that might damage the display.  I tried to see if I could nudge the display panel up slightly but it would not budge.

 

There was also a substantial backlight bleed / pressure issue in one spot along the top but that was resolved after removing the bezel and snapping it back on, like last time.  I also spotted backlight spilling out of the bottom of the enclosure and shining on the bottom left hinge.  That was resolved by pulling up that bit of the bezel and putting some black electrical tape in place to stop the bleed.

 

Despite the issues, after doing the work described above I ended up completely satisfied with the panel, other than the issue with the bottom rows of pixels being covered by the plastic bezel ... which I would treat as a deal-breaker.  Before calling Dell to complain, I decided to check and see if I could manipulate the bezel into snapping on in a different way.  I started by bending the bezel's plastic tabs a little so that it could mount in a slightly lower position, and I had some success fixing the bottom corners in this way.

 

...As I was working towards fixing the bottom-center, messing with the bezel too much eventually did me in.  The display stopped working.  I must have jostled the display-side of the eDP cable in the wrong way when pulling off the bottom edge — there is a lot of adhesive there and it tends to get stuck to the silver tape stuff that is on the bottom of the panel and the eDP cable runs right behind that.  I put the old display back in and it works, but it still looks like there is a tiny bug stuck in the screen.

 

So, Dell is sending a replacement display panel again.  A shame, because this panel doesn't appear to have any pixel issues or actual defects on the display itself, and once I pulled the bezel off and snapped it on again once it had pretty uniform backlight with no bleed or pressure spots on the edges that I could see.  It was a good one.

 

I feel a little bad about messing with it to the point of breaking it and then having Dell replace it a second time at their expense ... but not too much, really, since I wasn't going to keep a panel with the bottom portion covered by the bezel anyway, and because I don't at all mind taking Dell to task for issues caused by what I believe to be a bad design choice in this system.  If I could swap out the panel only as in past Precision systems then I would probably have ordered a replacement panel myself rather than going through warranty support to replace it over a "minor" display issue.  I was already considering buying my own mini-LED panel to try out before I found out that the panel alone is a non-replaceable part because of the adhesive.

 

They won't let me do a "parts only dispatch" a second time for the same issue, so I'll be having a tech install it this time.  I will be sure to have him stay until I do a full examination of the display and have him document any issues that I spot, with a copy of Dell's pixel policy on hand.

 

At least, I didn't have much trouble installing the PTM7950 stuff.  I watched a couple of videos ahead of time and I did stick it in the fridge for a while.  I ordered a 8×4cm pad.  I cut off a 2×4cm strip and that was enough to cover both the CPU and GPU, so I have enough here for four total attempts.  I didn't have time to do temperature testing but at least I could tell that the system was not trying harder than normal to cool itself off.  Since I had to repaste again to put the old display panel back on, I'm just using the ordinary paste that Dell provided for now.  (...Looking back, I should have done a quick job with the Dell paste and only applied the PTM7950 after I was sure that I liked the display.)

 

[Edit]

Looks like the panel will be available to ship today, so hopefully a tech can come out on Monday.

[ATAN]

Hey does anyone have time to pull a fan or two? Im looking to buy two of the sunnons for a project and I returned my 7770.

I cant seem to find anything but packaging dimensions for either one. I roughly remember them being square and no bigger than 50mmish either way. Thickness I dont recall...

[heikkuri]

New BIOS 1.14.1, release date 17 Aug 2023

 

Fixes & Enhancements

• This release contains security updates as disclosed in the Dell Security Advisories DSA-2023-152, DSA-2023-180, and DSA-2023-190. For more information, see Dell Security Advisories and Notices.
• Fixed the issue where a small logo screen is displayed first and later switches to the full screen logo. This issue occurs when the Full Screen Logo option is enabled and you boot the system with a custom logo.

 

Breaks & Problems

• Device is stuck to Dell logo after successful BIOS update, waited more than five minutes.
• Rotating circle does not appear under Dell start logo. Power button still works.
• Access to BIOS settings with F2 takes three minutes. To view BIOS settings does not help in this case.
• Start the device without laptop charger running on battery and PC is up in seconds.
• Following  starts up with laptop charger connected are just fine like always with Dell laptops.

I hope you have better experience.

[SvenC]

The slow startups when a charger is plugged seems similar to the behavior I noticed when using a power adapter with less power then recommended. I tried using 90w and130w adapters with my previous 6xxx and the current 7xxx and IIRC they throttled down to 400 Mhz. Booting with a lower wattage adapter took "forever" when throttled that much.

 

Maybe the new BIOS has a bug in determining the connected power adapter?

[unnoticed]

On 8/21/2023 at 9:19 AM, SvenC said:

The slow startups when a charger is plugged seems similar to the behavior I noticed when using a power adapter with less power then recommended. I tried using 90w and130w adapters with my previous 6xxx and the current 7xxx and IIRC they throttled down to 400 Mhz. Booting with a lower wattage adapter took "forever" when throttled that much.

 

Maybe the new BIOS has a bug in determining the connected power adapter?

Thats by design, you can at least you could on older models disable C states and speedstep force it to run at nominal frequency.
Otherwise use a power adapter with 180w minimum or more like a 230w, 240w, 260w adapter and you are in the safe zone or whatever the cpu and gpu specifies you need for your configuration.
For you it will be the 240w adapter that is standard.

[Joel]

As already denounced in a post here above, I see that this laptop is real junk. A real scam even! I chose this machine for its ability to insert several SSDs. (Up to 4) ERROR, upon delivery of the machine I noticed that a port was occupied because of the size of the battery. Something that of course Dell hid before the sale. In addition, this machine causes drops out on the playback of all audio files. I changed the OS back to Windows 10 (For a machine shipped with Windows 11 Pro) This happens less often. (I finally went back to the original OS) I thought I could use this machine being a Professional sound engineer, it is obviously impossible with this Dell 7770. I also tested the SD card reader delivered with the machine and there the results are clear. A Lexar reader connected via USB is 2 to 3 times faster than the reader originally supplied in this Dell 7770. (I can provide screenshots proving my tests) So I'm reusing an old six-year-old ASUS laptop running Windows 10 which doesn't give me ANY problems like the ones this Dell 7770 gives me. Having browsed a number of Dell forums, I noticed that many people were complaining about audio problems on many of their machines. So this problem is not unknown to Dell, but of course these people would rather ignore the problems than fix them. This behavior is despicable especially for a machine over $3500

[Aaron44126]

2 hours ago, Joel said:

ERROR, upon delivery of the machine I noticed that a port was occupied because of the size of the battery.

 

It is, unfortunately, poorly documented that the battery will gobble up one of the NVMe slots in the Precision 7670 unless you get an RTX A3000 or better GPU, which will get you a slightly "thicker" chassis that can hold the battery off to the side.

  

2 hours ago, Joel said:

As already denounced in a post here above, I see that this laptop is real junk.

 

Realized I never really followed up on the post above about the display panel.

 

Man, I really wanted to like this laptop and I was very excited during the lead-up to purchase, and upon receiving it, coming off of 10 years on my Precision M6700.  But ongoing mounting issues just made me turn sour to it and the direction that Dell is taking with this line in general.

 

Don't get me wrong.  It is great that they are offering a 17" system (...no other workstation vendors are...) with high-spec parts, up to 128 GB of RAM, and 4 NVMe slots.  But...

 

The audio situation is crap.  I think most of the blame here falls on the Realtek driver so I don't know how much you can blame Dell (other than that they insist on continuing to use a Realtek audio chip in their laptops).  It's not just this laptop, I have the same issue with my Precision 7560 and other Precisions that I have used.  It has a long delay on switching to 3.5mm/headphones and sometimes it just stops working with 3.5mm until I reboot.  Sometimes, there is a "popping sound" when the audio system turns on and off (poor power management?), which you can hear before and after a Windows alert noise.  It tries really hard to make the experience better with "audio enhancements" that just make things sound weird and echo-y on VOIP calls (i.e. WebEx).  Audio dropouts under certain types of load are not uncommon and work must be done to make other system-level components in the system behave well with minimal DPC latency.  (None of these problems existed under Linux.  I am mostly blaming the Windows driver from Realtek.)

 

The cooling system needs work, as detailed numerous times in this thread.  Maybe Intel CPU power management is at fault here too.  Why is the system running hot when it is sitting idle, at <3% CPU usage?  I was afraid to run it for long periods with the lid shut because the entire top lid enclosure got toasty.

 

Fan noise on top of that.  The system makes a very audible whir-up sound when the fans turn on.  They run higher than needed for a second or two before settling into the normal run speed.  Since the system wants to cycle the fans on and off on a regular basis when the system is running an idle workload, I had to run a program to measure the fan speed and run an artificial CPU load to keep the fans from powering off when the fan speed got too low.  (My sensorimotor OCD can't handle that fan-power-up noise occurring randomly.)

 

I had issues with inconsistent GPU performance and it randomly throttling the discrete GPU while gaming.  Not just me, @Ionising_Radiation reported similar behavior on the Precision 7560.  It seems like it has to do with NVIDIA Dynamic Boost and generally the CPU and GPU stealing power from each other, and it can be "worked around" with a specific configuration, but who should have to spend time figuring this out?  (Also, never mind the fact that Optimus never seemed to work right and fully power off the dGPU consistently when it was not in use.)

 

And then, then there is the OS.  I have railed about the direction that Microsoft is taking with Windows 11 already (link in sig).  Ongoing performance issues that "should not be there" are part of what prompted me to dump it for Linux back in April.  And ongoing things like nagging pop-up windows asking you to switch to Bing bring me back to the notion of "Whose computer is this, anyway?" and really put me off from using Windows.

 

Back to the display panel replacement...

A Dell tech did show up with a second display panel replacement, and the new display panel was "fine".

 

The whole experience was kind of the last straw for me, though.  I really stopped using the system after that.  I did some research and ended up buying a max-spec MacBook Pro later that week.  I've been happily using it since then.  A learning curve, sure, even coming off of previous professional Mac experience this is my first time using one as a daily driver.  But, performance is "fine".  (Even for gaming — I just finished playing through Shadow of the Tomb Raider and it ran fine at 1510p/60FPS with the "highest" graphics preset.  Gaming performance is there, just getting games that you want to run is the issue sometimes.)  GPTK has opened new doors for bringing newer DX11/12 Windows games to macOS (along with things like CXPatcher), and Apple has continued to refine it since the first beta release only 2.5 months ago, with each new version squeezing out more FPS.  The battery life is easily triple what the Precision 7770 could provide, it is cool and silent when doing office-type work but can offer high performance when needed (and full performance on battery power to boot), the screen is wonderful, speakers are great as well, it has a giant trackpad that works great with gestures, and the OS is performing great even with two dozen apps open and a Windows VM running.

On the negative side, I will complain about the keyboard layout.  I miss the numeric keypad and I'm getting used to a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts.  And of course, the there's the general lack of modularity or upgrade potential, and the lack of removeable storage in particular is a bummer (I just configured it with the max 8TB, which will work for now, and I have moved the drives from my Precision 7770 to work as NAS storage).  Granted, Dell (and other vendors) have already been generally moving in this direction.  Even in these newer Precision systems, just look at how painful it is to replace the keyboard, or the fact that the display panel is attached with adhesive rather than screws.

 

Definitely something I would throw out to consider if your workload can tolerate it.  Performance might not be quite as high as the latest Intel-based mobile workstations, but as a laptop the MacBook Pro is really the system to beat these days, not requiring you to "decide" between a cool/quiet system and a high-performance system but being able to offer both.  (This is all I will say about the MacBook in this thread for now.  For more discussion about a possible Mac transition I would ask to not side-rail this thread but look at my thread over in the macOS/iOS section of this forum.)  Really, though, in the end everything is a compromise in the end and you have to decide what is the least annoying tradeoff for your particular situation.

[Ionising_Radiation]

On 9/1/2023 at 7:19 PM, Aaron44126 said:

The whole experience was kind of the last straw for me, though.  I really stopped using the system after that.  I did some research and ended up buying a max-spec MacBook Pro later that week.  I've been happily using it since then.

Damn, I never noticed your signature. That's a big change, given you've been with Dell Precisions for more than a decade. 

I am also planning to ditch my 7560 when it can no longer play the latest games at 4K 60 FPS (I can still do A Plague Tale: Requiem with DLSS at that resolution and framerate, which is amazing) and, in fact, ditch laptops altogether. I already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse; it's not much more to add a fairly compact microATX tower. 

Then I'd probably get a thin-and-light that has a 13+ hour battery life, nice 1600p+ display, and an AMD GPU—probably a ThinkPad or Precision 5XXX (with no dGPU) for work-ish purposes or to do things on the move. I have a MacBook Air for work, and while the battery is phenomenal, I could not dislike macOS more. I am too used to the Windows workflow to bother learning everything again. 

Laptops are just far more painful than they are useful. I've had laptops for 13+ years and they are nothing but a massive pain in the neck when it comes to upgradeability, servicing, and maintenance.