Dell Precision 7670 & Dell Precision 7770 owner's thread

[PHVM_BR]

1 hour 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 prefer to wait another generation, hoping for a more mature and better resolved project.

My disappointment is not only with the undersized cooling system, I also didn't like having to choose CAMM memory to get more than 64gb...

I believe that the next generation will reuse the current design, but with necessary refinements, in addition to the gains with Raptor Lake and RTX 4000...

I love the 7540, it has served me very well for the last 3 years, but I made a mistake in choosing the configuration.

I opted for i7-9750H to reduce costs and only 6 cores are weighing on my activities. If I had opted for i9-9880H I believe I could have kept it for another 2 or 3 years...

[1610ftw]

13 hours ago, PHVM_BR said:

My disappointment is not only with the undersized cooling system, I also didn't like having to choose CAMM memory to get more than 64gb...

 

That is the reason why I was very sceptical of the value proposition of this generation - CAMM memory may catch on but until it does it can only be bought at Dell at their usual inflated prices for memory and storage. Try getting 128GB of normal memory for any other workstation from HP, Lenovo or MSI and then 128GB from Dell - big difference. You can get good aftermarket prices on regular modules that can be used for other manufacturers and therefore you can buy their workstations with minimum memory form the factory and save a lot. 

 

And when you sell the workstation you can sell off 2 or 4 of the modules you bought separately on the used market before selling your workstation as most people will be more than happy with less memory. Not so with Dell where you have to get one single module that is oversized for just about everybody else and that is very inflexible both when one is buying or selling as long as it is only available from them - bad deal until CAMM catches on.

[1610ftw]

13 hours ago, PHVM_BR said:

I love the 7540, it has served me very well for the last 3 years, but I made a mistake in choosing the configuration.

I opted for i7-9750H to reduce costs and only 6 cores are weighing on my activities. If I had opted for i9-9880H I believe I could have kept it for another 2 or 3 years...

 

 

I ran into this some time ago and had to switch from 6 cores to 8 cores - soldered CPU means buying a new laptop instead of getting a new CPU - no thanks to all the manufacturers of BGA books 😞

 

[DarginMahkum]

I think the problem is mainly for us, individual users. Dell most probably does bulk sales to companies that don't really care much about upgrading at some point, if it is CAMM or not. They don't care about squeezing the last bit of cycles out of it via undervolting or repasting. They just want a machine with X amount of memory, Y anount of disk space and most importantly good service options. They don't care about benchmarks or if you can play games on them.

[1610ftw]

4 hours ago, DarginMahkum said:

I think the problem is mainly for us, individual users. Dell most probably does bulk sales to companies that don't really care much about upgrading at some point, if it is CAMM or not. They don't care about squeezing the last bit of cycles out of it via undervolting or repasting. They just want a machine with X amount of memory, Y anount of disk space and most importantly good service options. They don't care about benchmarks or if you can play games on them.

 

As Dell has been relatively quiet through all of that it is possible that the performance issues do indeed fail to make waves where it counts - does not bode well for the next generation either.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

what defines a workstation?
what defines and distinguish a workstation from none workstation designation is the ability to chew through heavy loads fast, with ease, and the ability to sustain these heavy load for long durations all the while while being responsive using latest technology available to boost to max performance,

 

today the mantra seem to have changed, it is ok to slow down a workstation or cap them off just to make them work,
not to their full potential or workstation level but just working seem to be more then enough now days,
the word workstation and meaning behind the designation lost the value it used to represent.

 

[win32asmguy]

2 hours ago, 1610ftw said:

 

As Dell has been relatively quiet through all of that it is possible that the performance issues do indeed fail to make waves where it counts - does not bode well for the next generation either.

 

I wonder if running the system with the stock bios AC LLC values, and resulting load voltages of 1.5v+ at 3.2ghz will cause premature chip failure. Its a pretty dramatic difference compared to a properly tuned Alder Lake chip which can be around 1.0v at 4.2ghz. I think the XOC crowd generally says over 1.4v sustained is bad without very good cooling in place.

 

I thought last year's primary Gen4 drive slot deactivation switch flakyness was bad but this could be just as bad in terms of RMA headache.

[DarginMahkum]

3 hours ago, 1610ftw said:

 

As Dell has been relatively quiet through all of that it is possible that the performance issues do indeed fail to make waves where it counts - does not bode well for the next generation either.

 

 

51 minutes ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

what defines a workstation?
what defines and distinguish a workstation from none workstation designation is the ability to chew through heavy loads fast, with ease, and the ability to sustain these heavy load for long durations all the while while being responsive using latest technology available to boost to max performance,

 

today the mantra seem to have changed, it is ok to slow down a workstation or cap them off just to make them work,
not to their full potential or workstation level but just working seem to be more then enough now days,
the word workstation and meaning behind the designation lost the value it used to represent.

 

 

If that Razer Blade 18 performance is real, it might be the workstation that we were all waiting for, both for the screen size and performance...though get ready for the horror tunnel of Razer support if anything goes wrong.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

23 minutes ago, DarginMahkum said:

get ready for the horror tunnel of Razer support if anything goes wrong

there's a workaround to circumvent Razer's lack of support, purchase via amazon!

[Bullit]

 

 

Quote

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

 

Always have been that way. Corporate laptops are made to not give problems so being very reliable, not to be top performant, to give status and protection from litigation. They are conservative products. 

 

Note that gaming is a multi billion dollar industry bigger than Hollywood. it is gaming that have been pushing GPU cards to these high levels. Now you have gaming cards doing AI calculations besides rendering and it will get mind-blowing in 10 years what can be achieved regarding the GPU.

This multi level shift is what increased the gaming laptop advantage: in one side the gaming growth, makes appear new updated  laptops every year, in another the consequence of modern games. Since games are now fully 3D it means the old advantage of specialist cards vanished.

You go to a video editing forum like of Blackmagic for Da Vinci Resolve and most  professionals there buys gaming cards. 

In the past they would have be buying some turnkey  +$50000 system to do not even 1/10 of what they can do now.

 

Alienware even before being bought by Dell made much more powerful products than Dell. It is not new that top gaming laptops are much more performant than a Dell laptop workstation at speed level.

In the past the professional 3D for laptop was mostly for  CAD, so performance as long as viewport displayed it correctly and reliably it was okay. rendering was done in desktop render farms.

But things changed, GPU rendering appeared,  market changed but corporate departments continued like if nothing changed.

 

For me, any powerful laptop system that do not have at least 4 exhausts are to be looked suspiciously 😊

 

[Bullit]

2 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

what defines a workstation?
what defines and distinguish a workstation from none workstation designation is the ability to chew through heavy loads fast, with ease, and the ability to sustain these heavy load for long durations all the while while being responsive using latest technology available to boost to max performance,

 

today the mantra seem to have changed, it is ok to slow down a workstation or cap them off just to make them work,
not to their full potential or workstation level but just working seem to be more then enough now days,
the word workstation and meaning behind the designation lost the value it used to represent.

 

 

That might have been true for a brief period in laptop era when they were pretty expensive and only corporations could buy them. That is not true since maybe last 10-15 years.

The market size and culture of performance in gaming makes what is now the gaming laptop.

Note that you have new laptop series evolution every year from Legions, Razer, Asus ROG, etc. because there is fierce competition for performance there. Lenovo legion from 2021 was updated to Legion of 2022 , the Legion of 2022 have new Intel CPU's, PCI Gen 4 x4 bus for faster NvME SSD's, DDR5 memory.  This fast turnaround do no happen in corporate market.

It is my opinion that this strong emphasis in performance have not been what corporate clients have been asking for.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

36 minutes ago, Bullit said:

Corporate laptops

that's a category for sales rep and marketing department not a real world performance class!

within corporate sales there are multitudes of sub categories from servers workstations to value productivity,
when a product carries the label of a workstation should comply to workstation standards regardless which environment its deployed in, a gaming station may not need expandability and port availability a workstation has, a workstation should be the culmination of everything in one station hence the keyword "workstation" it doesn't distinguish which type of work should be performed over it need to ace it all above every existing category including gaming, a gaming station should be a lower class than a workstation not higher imho,

[Bullit]

But it is the gaming community that is driving computer performance, so it is natural -also by the market size they have- to have the crown today.

You can argue for the almost aristocratic 😄 title of "workstation" privilege but that is not what market has been asking. It is not the workstation that is driving what is the laptop product.

Corporate culture is very risk averse, no fail approach. That means also no performance edge and not being in the lead it means it is following.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

18 minutes ago, Bullit said:

But it is the gaming community that is driving computer performance

you are only focused on end user input, what are we the developers chop liver?
mind you we been on the scene longer than most new users and been pushing and leveraging technologies and performance, we require a workstation level performance above flat gaming needs because we develop and play on the same system, a gaming station doesn't need raid5/10 etc., it doesn't need 4 SSD bays or 128gb ram, some additional ports also not critical for gaming station, but are critical with all the performance bundled for a workstation level station not the other way around, performance are only emphasized on gaming station and you are right that gap has formed and exploited the past decade but not for the right reasons, most of Dell systems are built A-La-Cart, beside artificial limitations there is no real performance differences for the components themselves in either segments now days its the peripherals that distinguish a workstation from the rest, there is no confusion there,

[DarginMahkum]

I guess I give up for now for a single (laptop) only solution. We are just not there yet. I had my 3960X PC "workstation" ready for sale, but I changed my mind. Applied some big patch of PTM7950 on the Threadripper CPU and with a simple Noctua cooler and I get max 75°C @ 280W as it crunches the CB23 for a ~35000 score. That is without any undervolting and further tweaking and headache, with other tasks running in the foreground. I will just use a remote desktop with a simpler laptop when I am around the house.

Wake me up when we have 3nm CPUs and GPUs...

[Bullit]

13 minutes ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

you are only focused on end user input, what are we the developers chop liver?
mind you we been on the scene longer than most new users and been pushing and leveraging technologies and performance, we require a workstation level performance above flat gaming needs because we develop and play on the same system, a gaming station doesn't need raid5/10 etc., it doesn't need 4 SSD bays or 128gb ram, some additional ports also not critical for gaming station, but are critical with all the performance bundled for a workstation level station not the other way around, performance are only emphasized on gaming station and you are right that gap has formed and exploited the past decade but not for the right reasons, most of Dell systems are built A-La-Cart, beside artificial limitations there is no real performance differences for the components themselves in either segments now days its the peripherals that distinguish a workstation from the rest, there is no confusion there,

 

But a laptop is a much bigger exercise in engineering than a desktop due to its inherent physical limitations. If you want one thing like mobility then you can't have a big system with everything. If the corporate workers emphasis is mobility something is lost from performance, if they imply reliability than another notch is taken from performance budget.

Edit: then you have corporate timings. 4 or 5 years or more to buy new systems.

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

9 minutes ago, Bullit said:

But a laptop is a much bigger exercise in engineering

true but mainly beside the point, there's not one system fits all solution in corporate world,
they can choose from any other lines that are not a precision workstation that incudes everything,
there are budget mobile solutions, even in the workstation segment they have slim versions etc.,
when you splurge for their top of the line flagship loaded with top parts yes one is not expecting a slim station,

we are not there yet but one should be expecting unparalleled performance with top of the line components and expandability at his disposal, not a 30-40% lower overall performance then a generic mobile gaming station,
 

[Aaron44126]

47 minutes ago, Bullit said:

This fast turnaround do no happen in corporate market.

 

Huh?  I don't quite get this claim.  All three major mobile workstation vendors refresh their product every year and are currently offering the features that you mention.  Precision 7X70 appeared on the market within weeks of the Alder Lake HX gaming laptops.  (It generally makes sense that workstations would take a few weeks / months longer to get to market.  They have to go through certification, and ideally, more robust testing / QA.)

 

13 minutes ago, Bullit said:

Edit: then you have corporate timings. 4 or 5 years or more to buy new systems.

 

This too.  I'd argue that, as a whole, corporations tend to refresh more often than individual (home) users.  At least that's how it looks to me.  Big businesses will replace systems just to avoid running hardware that is outside of warranty coverage.  (A few days of downtime for an employee can easily cost more in lost productivity than a replacement system would.)  An individual needs a fair amount of disposable income to replace a high-end laptop on a regular basis.  Yes, there are some users that upgrade every two years or so, but more commonly (especially among the less technical folks) you can get by on a laptop easily for 5-7 years nowadays if it doesn't outright stop working.  Most of my family members are running systems that are at least five years old; there is just no pressing need to upgrade if the system has an SSD and decent amount of RAM.  I myself ran my last Precision laptop for ten years before replacing it.  Meanwhile, here at the office we are replacing workstations after three years of service whether an upgrade is "needed" or not.

 

I agree that businesses are generally looking for "stability" and things generally getting better from one generation to the next, but not necessarily "absolutely top performance".  I'd actually include myself in that camp as well.  The main issue that I have with this round of Precision laptops is how much performance Dell left on the table that is within easy reach.  (Just a repaste and AC/DC loadline fix can get you most of the way there.)

[MyPC8MyBrain]

12 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

how much performance Dell left on the table that is within easy reach.

that id categorize as ridicules "human error" which they don't even bother addressing let alone design new engineering feats 

[Bullit]

MyPC8MyBrain

That implies a bigger weight, size etc than a gaming laptop to have all that including reliability. 

Your nice looking Dell would not be anymore nice looking, it implies more exhaust, more noise.  It would also mean a culture of performance that not exists in corporate world.

 

Aaron44126

My example was not the best because Dell and others usually follow CPU generational upgrades. It is in the between that they stand still.

 

There several fold more gaming individual users than corporate clients for top workstations. 

I agree that Dell is lacking in this case. But i also see same dumbness in some gaming laptops, or mixed systems.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

16 minutes ago, Bullit said:

That implies a bigger weight, size etc than a gaming laptop to have all that including reliability. 

for a mobile workstation that's ok and acceptable if they delivered on bottom line performance,
its not like the 7x70 in performance chassis is slim or light, yet there's room for a full vapor chamber, and top of the line screen with high refresh available to us too not only Alienware,
we are also pushing high end gpu each for his own needs which may differ from gaming it doesn't mean we don't need a 330w as a power option, everything is castrated on a workstation class 
high end/power gpu's now days used and required in many development environment for processing code faster than cpu not just useful in gaming.

[Aaron44126]

10 minutes ago, Bullit said:

My example was not the best because Dell and others usually follow CPU generational upgrades. It is in the between that they stand still.

 

There several fold more gaming individual users than corporate clients for top workstations. 

 

Fair enough.  Dell doesn't, for example, stick new workstation GPUs in an existing Precision laptop if something new becomes available "between" generations.  I don't consider this to be a big issue.  The yearly refresh means that you won't be waiting for that long.  (Also, Intel and NVIDIA have recently sort-of aligned laptop CPU/GPU upgrades for "mid-winter", at least if you don't need "HX" CPUs; so CPUs and GPUs upgrading separately might be taking a break for the next few years.)

 

I also agree that there are more gaming laptop users than mobile workstation users out there.  I wish gaming laptop makers would offer laptops with a broader feature set (i.e. 4 NVMe slots! numeric keypad!) and a more "normal laptop" appearance — I think they'd find a market for individuals (like us) who want a high-spec laptop not necessarily just for gaming, and tend to gravitate to business-focused mobile workstations because there aren't really any other choices.

[Bullit]

33 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

 

Fair enough.  Dell doesn't, for example, stick new workstation GPUs in an existing Precision laptop if something new becomes available "between" generations.  I don't consider this to be a big issue.  The yearly refresh means that you won't be waiting for that long.  (Also, Intel and NVIDIA have recently sort-of aligned laptop CPU/GPU upgrades for "mid-winter", at least if you don't need "HX" CPUs; so CPUs and GPUs upgrading separately might be taking a break for the next few years.)

 

I also agree that there are more gaming laptop users than mobile workstation users out there.  I wish gaming laptop makers would offer laptops with a broader feature set (i.e. 4 NVMe slots! numeric keypad!) and a more "normal laptop" appearance — I think they'd find a market for individuals (like us) who want a high-spec laptop not necessarily just for gaming, and tend to gravitate to business-focused mobile workstations because there aren't really any other choices.

 

I am one of those people, i use my Legion 5(2021)  17.3" for 3D work not gaming, it has numeric keypad and looks like business laptop but it is far from aesthetically pleasing as the  Dell in this page.

it also don't appear internally to have space for  4xNVme , i have only 2 - but have a metal heatsink for each of them. Lots of space is also taken for the cooling system with 4 exhausts.  https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-Legion-5-17-with-RTX-3060-in-review-Strong-gaming-laptop-with-current-gen-AMD-Ryzen-CPU.603198.0.html

[MyPC8MyBrain]

PTM7950 Thermal Pad testing, results are good but LM TIM is still the king,

 

 

[brunooo84]

has anyone update their bios to the latest one yet? does it revert the custom setup_var thing? is it ok to update? thanks