Dell Precision 7670 & Dell Precision 7770 owner's thread

[1610ftw]

On 11/23/2022 at 5:43 AM, MyPC8MyBrain said:

indeed i am, reason being is after being a loyal customer in my private life and though my professional life,

not to pull rank but just to put figures in prospective, one company i worked for a $350 million dollar were spent with Dell mainly because i insisted, that was the first and smallest budget working for that company, just to find out that the hard earned money directed toward Dell served to indulge executive resulting in poorer and poorer products through the years, 20 years ago no menial internal department couldn't dictate to the precision team which parts go in,

it was always the best bleeding edge component we would pay for, now we have gaming platform dictating restrictions on a flagship workstation in order to justify a new lucrative vertical they can milk on our expenses,

so we get the top end component we should have, but they are 30% castrated so it doesn't over shine Alienware gaming platform, gaming platform will get the 330W power supply, and the high refresh rate screens, with the best vapor chamber design they can come up with, and that will be only for the gaming stations, 

and for their flagship they will give most of the above just capped and circumcised so there are enough marketing differences,
flagship will only get 240W power supply, and only 120Mhz refresh (lower than gaming station) and they capped our expensive same GPU to 125/150w limits instead of 175W, and they don't think that workstation need or run long stressed workloads only gaming stations do, so we got the no vapor chamber design for cooling in the flagship workstation, just so marketing department can seemingly create a separate sales vertical that has enough differences, the whole thing is just pathetic and sad what became of Dell,

slowly but surely they have taken one system and split it in half restricting either new ends to their full capability, just so they can make sure that one system cant do everything perfectly as it should, this doesn't serve their customers it only serves Dell's sales department executives.

 

 

I think that it is a bit unfair to criticize these specific Dell workstations for limited power on the GPU - it has always been that way and relatively speaking they probably kept about the same relation between their TGP and what Nvidia allows between this and the last generation. Now sustained power to the CPU seems to have even regressed a little in a time when CPUs need more power and not less and that should definitely be addressed especially when considering that on the CPU side their classic workstation competition is doing better.

 

As for the power brick I am sure you could get a bigger one that is also used for the last 17" Alienware and it is not even that costly - keep the 330W version at home / in the office and use the smaller one for travel. Might be futile though when Dell has adjusted the power limits accordingly without a way to increase them.

 

The last two workstations that I could think of with maximum power and bios capabilities were both from MSI - it is ironic that only MSI seems to be able to turn one of their gaming chassis into a workstation but that is probably because they do not feel the need to offer socketed GPUs these days. Dell, Lenovo and HP still do and that requires a different design for workstations and ironically in all cases subpar GPU performance when it used to be the other way round in gaming laptops with a socketed GPU.

 

 

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

5 hours ago, vooze said:

We don't need something with a 320W power brick, and the 70-75W TPL2 is plenty for most people doing compiling etc.

than why is your company investing in flagship precision workstations?
Inspirion or any of the other light use portables would do too and cost much less (about half!), 

we are not discussing light gaming workloads, it is a workstation as expected i will leave my station running queries into a local 1TB db. then compiling raster's with the data for a week straight and that is an easy workload, i have a month-long loads too, no gaming station is running for a week straight over a job it need to complete, why are we paying through our nose for something that only appear capable on paper,

[MyPC8MyBrain]

5 hours ago, 1610ftw said:

it has always been that way

no it wasn't, it just slowly became highlighted over the years as they try to hide that change,
id say the past 6-7 years its been a slow decent into plucking precision feathers one by one,

 

5 hours ago, 1610ftw said:

relatively speaking they probably kept about the same relation between their TGP and what Nvidia allows

i think you're just remembering/factoring only the past few years since alienware came about as "gaming" thing for new millennial, and yes i agree there are way more kids now playing games on mobile computers than ever before, that doesn't nor should never change a portable workstation designation or class compromised just to highlight or give a new vertical edge,

for the record the 3080Ti in the 7670 is locked to 125W while we pay twice as much for the same GPU that are unrestricted 175w on other mobile platforms, so when you see ASUS SCAR performing better than Dell's flagship for allot less money and exact same component, what do you say to that?

  

5 hours ago, 1610ftw said:

As for the power brick I am sure you could get a bigger one

absolutely agree, i asked though Dell will not sell it bundled with the new laptop, i can buy it separately on my own, but we cant buy a vapor chamber and many other components they compromised and castrated in favor of highlighting a gaming platform, 

 

Edit:

our team workflow has fundamentally changed 2-3 years ago we had our code utilize compute power on the gpu which turned out cuts our processing times significantly, in a way dGpu became a very important tool Dell's executives most likely unaware, in their mind only gamer or coin pirates take advantage of high end GPU's compute power which is not the case anymore, for example same heavy raster compute load that used to run on the CPU for 24h straight now completes under 3h running off the GPU processor!
(for reference example above is with a Desktop running i9-9900ks and 2080Ti)

 

any of you running heavy/long workloads should give this a go and see how much faster your code/process runs with GPU processing, even if you cannot integrate this into your code one can still take advantage by assigning the process to run with GPU in NVidia panel,

[1610ftw]

3 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

no it wasn't, it just slowly became highlighted over the years as they try to hide that change,
id say the past 6-7 years its been a slow decent into plucking precision feathers one by one,

 

i think you're just remembering/factoring only the past few years since alienware came about as "gaming" thing for new millennial, and yes i agree there are way more kids now playing games on mobile computers than ever before, that doesn't nor should never change a portable workstation designation or class compromised just to highlight or give a new vertical edge,

 

I do not think it has ever been different for the 7 series. Before I am not even sure there were any mobile GPUs that would have needed that much power 🙂

 

I agree that a mobile workstation should always be the most powerful in every generation and when it isn't then something is wrong. Unfortunately something has been wrong for the big workstation manufacturers for a very long time.

 

 

3 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

for the record the 3080Ti in the 7670 is locked to 125W while we pay twice as much for the same GPU that are unrestricted 175w on other mobile platforms, so when you see ASUS SCAR performing better than Dell's flagship for allot less money and exact same component, what do you say to that?

 

It is rather embarrassing. The best example is the little MSI GE67HX that probably can be had for around 2000 with the 12800HX, the 3070Ti and a 240Hz OLED! Out of the box it will wipe the floor with every Precision in both GPU and CPU performance. It is small and it does not even have a vapor chamber but it has a big 330W power brick because it needs it 🙂

 

 

 

 

3 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

absolutely agree, i asked though Dell will not sell it bundled with the new laptop, i can buy it separately on my own, but we cant buy a vapor chamber and many other components they compromised and castrated in favor of highlighting a gaming platform, 

 

I do not think that they kept performance down because of that but because they never really thought it was needed that much. I am pretty sure that after this years' fiasco they will do better next year.

 

 

And that is a pretty cool use case you have for GPUs, Dell will hopefully take notice.

[Aaron44126]

1 hour ago, 1610ftw said:

I am pretty sure that after this years' fiasco they will do better next year.

Given their propensity to use the same chassis for two generations, and the fact that their workstation design process takes two years, I fully believe that they were too far along in the Precision 7X80 systems to make any serious changes in response to 7X70 feedback, and by now the design for those systems would be nearly final. We’ll be looking to (at least) 2024 for any big changes.

 

I’d love to be surprised, though…

 

That said, I’m still happy with the Precision 7770. I wish they’d have it performing better “out of the box” but there is still nothing else out there that would work for what I want. (Lenovo doesn’t have 4 NVMe slots, HP has an even lower dGPU power limit, neither offers 17”, and MSI’s business support isn’t something I’ve heard good stories about.)

[1610ftw]

6 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

Given their propensity to use the same chassis for two generations, and the fact that their workstation design process takes two years, I fully believe that they were too far along in the Precision 7X80 systems to make any serious changes in response to 7X70 feedback, and by now the design for those systems would be nearly final. We’ll be looking to (at least) 2024 for any big changes.

 

I’d love to be surprised, though…

 

Under normal circumstances I would agree but if they want to accommodate the upcoming new hardware they will have to do something about that cooling solution and total system power. I do not think that replacing the current heatsink design with a vapor chamber and allowing for higher power to CPU and GPU is out of the question even when coming from the current chassis!

[Aaron44126]

6 minutes ago, 1610ftw said:

I do not think that replacing the current heatsink design with a vapor chamber and allowing for higher power to CPU and GPU is out of the question even when coming from the current chassis!

If they do keep the chassis but offer a substantial upgrade to the cooler for 7X80, it would be fun if it fits in 7X70 systems as well. 🙂

[vooze]

4 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

than why is your company investing in flagship precision workstations?
Inspirion or any of the other light use portables would do too and cost much less (about half!), 

Because like I said, we want something that is powerful enough, while still being somewhat portable, have a better port selection than the 5570 and other USB-c only laptops.

Also, all these thin laptops do 45-55W TPL2, this still does 75W, so it's still much more powerful than those thin ones.

For our really heavy workloads we have servers and full desktops with dual GPUs etc... These are laptops, not 1000W desktops.


With that said, It really sounds like you should move on. I don't understand why you want to spent so much time on this thread if you hate the laptop, have returned it and all you want to do is not understand why some people actually like their purchase, even though you don't.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

38 minutes ago, vooze said:

all you want to do is not understand why some people actually like their purchase

it seems that you and i are not on the same page not even the same book when it comes to what a mobile workstation can and should do, not what your needs are or a low spec'd unit with no dGpu just for the prestige of the product line, for what you described you have no need for precision mobile powerhouse whatsoever,
you have a low spec system with no dGpu which you are not putting to the paces,

which leg are you standing on arguing this?

 

for the record i am waiting for a 7770 i reordered to replace the 7670.

 

 

[1610ftw]

2 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

it seems that you and i are not on the same page not even the same book when it comes to what a mobile workstation can and should do, not what your needs are or a low spec'd unit with no dGpu just for the prestige of the product line, for what you described you have no need for precision mobile powerhouse whatsoever,
you have a low spec system with no dGpu which you are not putting to the paces,

which leg are you standing on arguing this?

 

for the record i am waiting for a 7770 i reordered to replace the 7670.

 

 

 

There are other things one may want the Precision line for:

 

up to 4 SSD slots

up to 128 GB of memory

lots of i/o

 

and this is exotic but it may be important:

 

easy to access SSD door for potentially adding an eGPU

 

 

 

 

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

@1610ftw
one could argue that the extra 2 SSD slots can be circumvented to some extent with external storage,

I/O ports can mostly be circumvented with dongle life over thunderbolt,
still not sure what's the use case for the SSD door to be honest,
egpu runs over thunderbolt, what's the SSD door has to do with egpu is beyond me,

RAM is the only component that cannot be circumvented,

[1610ftw]

58 minutes ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

@1610ftw
one could argue that the extra 2 SSD slots can be circumvented to some extent with external storage,

I/O ports can mostly be circumvented with dongle life over thunderbolt,
still not sure what's the use case for the SSD door to be honest,
egpu runs over thunderbolt, what's the SSD door has to do with egpu is beyond me,

RAM is the only component that cannot be circumvented,

 

Obviously a workstation can be different things for different people, it is not all about max performance.

 

Also we have to put the performance aspect into perspective. Out of the box benchmarks do seem to look horrible but with some tweaks performance can increase substantially as has been demonstrated by you and others in this thread. At that level many people will be reasonably happy even if it is not all that it could be.

 

Here is an example of an eGPU solution that you can connect to the bottom SSD-slot, seems to work well up to the RTX 4090 that apparently reaches over 30000 in TimeSpy in such a configuration:

 

 

 

[win32asmguy]

9 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

for the record the 3080Ti in the 7670 is locked to 125W while we pay twice as much for the same GPU that are unrestricted 175w on other mobile platforms, so when you see ASUS SCAR performing better than Dell's flagship for allot less money and exact same component, what do you say to that?

 

Were you actually able to get 125W out of the 3080Ti in the 7670? I have found that dynamic boost 2.0 in general has not worked at all with the Precision 7770. The 3080Ti that should be 150W only pulled 120W, and the A3000 that should be 130W only pulls 115W, regardless of bios settings, performance mode, driver used, Nvidia PCF sourced from Dell drivers, plenty of thermal headroom.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

56 minutes ago, 1610ftw said:

with some tweaks performance can increase substantially as has been demonstrated by you and others in this threa

true, but still it is allot of hands on work when it could and should be this way out of the box,
most of us on here happen to be comfortable with tinkering around, this is not for the faint of hearts or anyone who's not comfortable messing around with hardware,

 

56 minutes ago, 1610ftw said:

Here is an example of an eGPU solution

huh... look at that, pretty cool, 
i am guessing the platform this was initially created for didn't have thunderbolt?
 

42 minutes ago, win32asmguy said:

Were you actually able to get 125W out of the 3080Ti in the 7670

i didn't pay close attentions to the gpu draw,
just noted the hard limit stated in system setting and the low test results,
i was mainly focused on undervolting the cpu, i think we can maybe deduce that in hindsight off my 3DMARK test graphs,

[mmcengineer]

Has anyone seen this video seems like a pretty poor effort on DELLs part it seems 

 

[1610ftw]

4 hours ago, mmcengineer said:

Has anyone seen this video seems like a pretty poor effort on DELLs part it seems 

 

 

I think it has been posted here before. 

The funny thing is that they sent him two and both performed miserably.

 

I think that the MSI laptops he had were about 50% faster and he probably hoped for similar performance but with an all around more businesslike approach from Dell - can't have it all as it turns out.

[Ionising_Radiation]

Can't believe my innocuous question/comment sparked off one-and-a-half pages of discussion. 

Honestly, I don't know who to agree with. @MyPC8MyBrain has a very good point that Dell neutered the performance of these laptops; most users here were able to improve the performance of the notebook by more than 50% with nary a mod but a repaste and some firmware/configuration tweaks. This is not a good look on Dell. The cooling solution is sub-par for the sort of hardware that the Precisions offer. There are annoying edge use cases that the notebooks don't cover—nice high-refresh-rate displays, USB-C charging (even throttling while charging at lower power ratings would be nice), weird keyboard changes (7530/7730 generation had the best keyboard layout; why Dell messed with it, I do not understand), firmware shenanigans (the dGPU does not properly pass through the display to external monitors—this is really stupid), etc. 

 

At the same time, the support for these notebooks (when you want some hardware thing replaced) is pretty phenomenal. The build quality is also decent, and most of the components (despite the manual claiming otherwise) can be user-replaced. Dell was dealt bad cards by Intel + NVIDIA with extremely power-hungry components, and it has had to make do.

[alittleteapot]

36 minutes ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

At the same time, the support for these notebooks (when you want some hardware thing replaced) is pretty phenomenal. The build quality is also decent, and most of the components (despite the manual claiming otherwise) can be user-replaced. Dell was dealt bad cards by Intel + NVIDIA with extremely power-hungry components, and it has had to make do.

 

I think overall, there's a very strong argument for the Apple MacBook Way of Doing Things and just solder everything in except for the NVME drives.  Something's gotta give here - Support, Performance, Upgradability - of these three, which can many businesses do without?  It really looks like the engineering solutions to the problems on the table seem to succeed at satisfying pretty much no one except for Joe Average Business Consumer who looks pretty much at the logo and brand and that's it.

My proposal - reduce the possible SKUs by dramatically simplifying the high-end Precision lineup.  If you think about it, the Dell XPS line caters to every dimension of the consumer crowd, so ignore them - but only  the Precision line is for the prosumer / heavy-duty power user crowd.  So RAM?  64GB or 128GB.  GPU?  Integrated GPU, A4500, A5500.  CPU?  Maximum and a not-so maximum - two tiers.  Two choices of display panels, keep the 4 NVME bays exactly as they are (or better yet, allocate a GEN5 PCI lane to each and multiplex it to GEN4 lane, just sayin').  We now have 24 total possible mobo SKUs that need to be manufactured, not counting overpriced NVME drives.  Solder that stuff down, shorten the traces, vapor chamber the whole business, and profit.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

1 hour ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Dell was dealt bad cards by Intel + NVIDIA with extremely power-hungry components, and it has had to make do.

hint... these components in other Dell as well as other platforms doing very well aka Alienware and Asus,
330w Brick, higher refresh, same cpu class, 3080Ti, on the flip side Dell castrated these high gaming platform with less ports and internal storage expandability, while the flagship workstation gets a 240w brick only 120Mhz, with hard wattage limit on the 3080Ti, there is no real reason beside greedy marketing to segment components this way, 

 

one system is artificially restricted so it cant really shine in gaming but has all workstation components while the other lacks most of the workstation components and expandability but can shine in gaming, as if one who has the needs for a leg in both world would will actually buy two of their high end system to do their work properly,

 

the bottom line is there is no real reason or limit for these component beside Dells marketing executives pushing for this segregation,

 

i am a gaming developer, personally i don't do gaming per say, i do often need to push the platform we work on with new data for that we run simulated gaming session for few hours to see if anything gets a "brain farts" before we wrap it up, the next day I will be processing data that can take days running nonstop with 100% load, next few days i may just brows the web respond to emails etc., that is what a proper flagship mobile workstation cycles should be able to endure without compromising or neutering performance in my view,

[1610ftw]

11 minutes ago, alittleteapot said:

 

I think overall, there's a very strong argument for the Apple MacBook Way of Doing Things and just solder everything in except for the NVME drives.  Something's gotta give here - Support, Performance, Upgradability - of these three, which can many businesses do without?  It really looks like the engineering solutions to the problems on the table seem to succeed at satisfying pretty much no one except for Joe Average Business Consumer who looks pretty much at the logo and brand and that's it.

My proposal - reduce the possible SKUs by dramatically simplifying the high-end Precision lineup.  If you think about it, the Dell XPS line caters to every dimension of the consumer crowd, so ignore them - but only  the Precision line is for the prosumer / heavy-duty power user crowd.  So RAM?  64GB or 128GB.  GPU?  Integrated GPU, A4500, A5500.  CPU?  Maximum and a not-so maximum - two tiers.  Two choices of display panels, keep the 4 NVME bays exactly as they are (or better yet, allocate a GEN5 PCI lane to each and multiplex it to GEN4 lane, just sayin').  We now have 24 total possible mobo SKUs that need to be manufactured, not counting overpriced NVME drives.  Solder that stuff down, shorten the traces, vapor chamber the whole business, and profit.

 

How about having only one motherboard and then attach everything and be done?

Doesn't get any simpler than that and users could do it themselves. We used to have this but not any more.

 

As for the vapor chamber I completely agree that they should have it and I will go one further and suggest that the user can select the cooling solution he prefers for lower tier product in order to get maximum cooling.

 

And excessive soldering is really horrible and producing needless e-waste, it also leads to hideously overpriced spare parts like a 2000$ vs a 500$ motherboard.

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

22 minutes ago, 1610ftw said:

We used to have this but not any more.

very true, A-La-Cart was always Dells way and why we loved the brand so much, everything is tailored down to ones specific likes and needs, it is to some extent still the same just with few new marketing executives working hard to justify their position by artificially restricting/segregating same components capabilities off Dell's flagship workstation in favor of millennial gaming trend, if you think about it the Precision is too prestige to buy for a young kid, but an Alienware directly marketed towards kids is another story regardless of how much they charge for it in the end, which is still in the same price range as Precision but it doesn't come across as presumptuous/irresponsible as buying a young kid who wants to game a precision workstation, 
 

[DarginMahkum]

The last generation of workstations are just underwhelming. Dell lacks proper tuning and vapor chamber, Lenovo lacks the extra nvme slots and HP lacks proper thermal tuning. The displays are also fail: Dell is 17" but 16:9, the others are 16:10 but 16". I sent the HP Fury G9 back due to constantly running fans (I think it was better in the beginning), and I hate sending stuff back. So silly. That thing has a vapor chamber inside with bulky fans. It is a new design, so do it right this time! If it is the thermal paste, use the best one, like Lenovo. You are charging kidney money for them. But no... Don't they learn anything from the gamestations? Maybe they are afraid of having battery bloats with all metal case (like Razer), but then compromise and build real workstations, not half cooked posers.

[PHVM_BR]

I planned to buy a 7670 to replace my Precision 7540 this holiday season. I gave up....

So I researched about P16 and Fury 16 G9...

I'll wait another year!

[MyPC8MyBrain]

@PHVM_BR
the same 7670 I returned was resold within hours the day posted for $2100 (i paid well over twice that $4400),
at $2100 a 12950HX with 3080Ti and 4K Oled is not a bad deal, it wont perform to its full potential but at that price with its bundled hardware its not the worst deal out there,

[Redrider]

7 minutes ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

@PHVM_BR
the same 7670 I returned was resold within hours the day posted for $2100 (i paid well over twice that $4400),
at $2100 a 12950HX with 3080Ti and 4K Oled is not a bad deal, it wont perform to its full potential but at that price with its bundled hardware its not the worst deal out there,

I need to replace my older Precision but even used with the discounts I most likely wont take the bate.