Anyone have a Dell Precision 3520 yet?

Looking for practical feedback....

thanks

 

Nobody's posted about it on the http://forum.notebookreview.com/forums/dell-latitude-vostro-and-precision.1051/ forum yet except in passing; its predecessors, the M2800 and 3510 didn't get a lot of love, either. Usually the equivalent Latitude (essentially the same machine with a non-ISV-certified GPU or no GPU -- M2800->E6540, 3510->5570, 3520->5580) has ended up being a better deal; nobody's reported much on the Latitude 5580 yet but there is a moderately active discussion thread on the 5570 and a good deal of what's discussed there will apply to the 3510/3520/5580: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/dell-latitude-e5570.786060/

 

Appreciate the response. Based on the disaster that the 3510 rollout was, I'm not too keen on being a beta tester, no time for it. 4700 is plunking along, but I know I'm on limited time.

 

I just purchased one this week. However, I got the Ubuntu version (which I replaced with Linux Mint 18.1). I am also waiting on my 32 GB of RAM from Dell. Kingston HyperX 2400 MHz CL 14 do not work well in this computer. Once I get my NVME m.2 EVO, I plan on installing Windows 10 to run some benchmarks and reverting back to Linux. There are some things I love about this computer and there are some minor issues such as the mechanical HDD placement blocking the m.2 port. (I plan on moving the mechanical HDD a couple of inches). I can do a full review next weekend when the rest of my parts come in. For the record, here are the part numbers / item description.
210-AKNL Mobile Precision 3520 XCTO
490-BDNH Nvidia Quadro M620 w/2GB GDDR5
605-BBMN Ubuntu Linux 16.04
320-BCCL Non Touch WWAN/WLAN LCD Backco ver
631-ABEI No Out-of-Band Systems Managem ent
451-BBXX 68 Whr ExpressCharge Capable ( 4-cell) (polymer)
555-BDFW Intel Dual-Band Wireless-AC 82 65 Driver
389-BLSV Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 Label
370-ADHR 4GB (1x4GB) 2400MHz DDR4 Non-E CC SDRAM
405-AAMC HDD/SSD, Bracket for 7MM,BR15/ P
391-BCYP 15.6" FHD IPS Non Touch (1920x 1080) Wide View Anti-Glare LED -backlit
338-BKUI Intel Core i5-7440HQ with USB Thunderbolt Type C and NVIDIA Quadro Graphics
583-BDTR Dual Pointing, Backlit Keyboar d
400-AQLS 1TB 2.5" 7mm SATA (5400 RPM) H ard Drive
346-BCEW Dual Point Palmrest with Smart Card only TBT
555-BDGG Intel WiFi Link 8265 2x2 802.1 1ac+BT4.0
379-BCRP Intel Core i5-7440HQ Processor (Quad Core 2.80GHz, 3.80GHz Tu rbo, 6MB 35W, w/Intel HD Graph ics 630)

BTW; I paid $1050 after taxes. (10% military discount).

 

Practical review; Part 1: HARDWARE REVIEW
I haven't had time to install Windows for review yet, but I promised something this weekend. See previous post for HW description.
Some background: This computer replaced my nearly 8 year old i7-720QM (1st gen) HP Pavilion 3085DX that absolutely refuses to die. It is almost 8 lbs with (2) HDD and rather old 230M NVIDIA GPU, and it runs warm.
A) Removing the bottom cover revealed how easy it is to access the CPU fan, heatsink, RAM, HDD, mPCI-e ports and battery.
B) !BATTERY! Per Dell's manual, any work requires disconnecting the battery. The connector ribbon is fragile. Although not difficult to remove, be gentle. (Oops)

C) VisionTek 16GB x2, DDR4 2400 MHz CL-17 P/N 900945 installed without issue and passes PassMark's MEMTEST86. The RAM can be purchased for much cheaper from a third part source than from Dell.

D) Installing EVO 960 M.2 NVMe drive is not possible with a mechanical HDD installed. (Really, Dell? Really?)

E) OK, time to do a hack job and remove the HDD mounting enclose and use some double sided thermal conductive tape to re-locate the HDD. ... and NOPE! Had the battery been 1/8" shorter, the mPCI-e port a tad higher, or the SATA connecter a tad thinner, all would have been well. I know that for laptops, 'thin-is-in' but now you see the cost. Another total 'DERP' moment for Dell.

F) After removing the mechanical HDD, the NVMe can be installed. My choice for retention was high-density foam. and which seems to be more than adequate. If you elect to get the larger battery size, a proper gum-stick screw hole becomes available but the space for a mechanical HDD is lost. There is another micro-mPCI-e port for another M.2 SSD, but it would most likely revert to SATA operations vice NVMe. (Looking into this.)

G) What does work well is removing a SATA SDD from it's enclosure, then mounting the 'guts' in the free-space. Cannibalizing some thin PCB insulating plastic from another laptop to ensure that the NVMe SSD and SATA SSD exposed runs do not short would be a good idea. (Not shown). I'm waiting for a new SATA SSD prior to making the final installation. The picture only depicts a 'fitting'.

Hardware final thoughts. The finish attracts oil from your fingers, but is easy to clean. Because the surface is matte, I feel more confident that the laptop will not slip out of my hands. The keyboard feel, trackpad, and mouse-sick work well in Linux. The trackpad (also matte finish) requires ever so slightly more force to operate than my HP's old smooth pad. All Fn keys are obedient . (Good job on this on Dell!) The case feels well-made and rigid. Very little to no flex when opening-closing the screen and while typing.

Part 2: BIOS
-Most of my testing was with the v. 1.1.1 BIOS. Last night, I upgraded to v. 1.2.10. All one must do is download the (BIOS version).exe file, copy to USB drive, perform sha or md5 sum (good job Dell for posting checksums!), reboot, press F12, and select BIOS update and the .exe you wish to update to. There is no OS dependency. This is a MAJOR win in my book!

Part 3: UBUNTU 16.04.2.
A) Everything works perfectly with the exception of the smart-card reader. I am military, so we use our ID cards with embedded certificates. pcsc_tools does not recognize the reader. Eventually I will get Windows installed and see what driver is used.

B) acpi_rev_override is passed on to the kernel via GRUB. It may have to to with the Ethernet controller, but I haven't dug into this yet.

C) $ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 5910 (rev 05)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sky Lake PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 05)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 591b (rev 04)
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Skylake Processor Thermal Subsystem (rev 05)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H USB 3.0 xHCI Controller (rev 31)
00:14.2 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H Thermal subsystem (rev 31)
00:15.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H LPSS I2C Controller #0 (rev 31)
00:15.1 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H LPSS I2C Controller #1 (rev 31)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H CSME HECI #1 (rev 31)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H SATA controller [AHCI mode] (rev 31)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #2 (rev f1)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #3 (rev f1)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #5 (rev f1)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #9 (rev f1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H LPC Controller (rev 31)
00:1f.2 Memory controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PMC (rev 31)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device a171 (rev 31)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H SMBus (rev 31)
00:1f.6 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (5) I219-LM (rev 31)
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 13b4 (rev ff)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Device 24fd (rev 78)
03:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS525A PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
3d:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device a804

D) $ lsusb (Including my external mouse) and thinking that my Broadcom device is most likely the smart card reader.
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 8087:0a2b Intel Corp.
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 3938:1031
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0a5c:5832 Broadcom Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

E) $ sensors (Also, way to go Dell!)
acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +25.0°C (crit = +107.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0: +43.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0: +40.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1: +42.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2: +41.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3: +40.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

dell_smm-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
Processor Fan: 2711 RPM
CPU: +42.0°C
Ambient: +37.0°C
SODIMM: +42.0°C
Other: +34.0°C

iwlwifi-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +37.0°C

F) The open-sauce nouveau pre-installed driver is slow, but works well. Swapping between PRIME profiles (Intel, NVIDIA) works perfectly. Even suspend and resume functions are flawless. After installing the closed source binaries from NVIDIA (375.39) performance skyrocketed (as expected). Here is the bad-part when running 375.39:
1) Switching profiles from Intel, to NVIDIA back to Intel causes issues such as poor video performance. Rebooting solves the issue.
2) Waking from suspend while the Quadro 620 is in use causes GPU rendering issues.

G) Cached disk read benchmarks on the EVO SSD at 2.6 GB/s I thought to be rather slow. After installing the 4.10 kernel, cached reads shot up to 3.5 GB/s (900 MB/s increase). However, the bluetooth module will only load on occasion in the 4.10 kernel. After doing some research, there appears to be a regression that may be resolved by the 4.10.5. As data are made available, I will make updates.

H) tlp is installed by Dell. Idle power is about 7 w/h with screen illumination at 50%. Watching any videos that the 7th gen core nativly supports is amazing at 10 - 13 w/h. Surfing internet is about 13 - 15 w/h. I'm still trying to pick apart all of the power tweaks that Dell has performed to that I may transfer the settings to Linux Mint (best idle power was just over 10 w/h).

I) Canonical / Dell has a cron job named poke in /etc/cron.daily. A brief description: "
# Send an "I am alive" ping to Canonical. This is used for surveying how many
# original OEM installs are still existing on real machines. Note that this
# does not send any user specific data; it only transmits the operating system
# version (/var/lib/ubuntu_dist_channel), the machine product name, and a
# counter how many pings were sent."

J) Additional software sources:
http://dell.archive.canonical.com/updates/

Closing thoughts.
This laptop is pretty fast. The Intel 8265 Dual-Band AC WiFi was a great choice and constantly connects at 866 Mb/s without any hints of drop-outs. The system runs cool and the fan often shuts off whilst doing most every-day tasks. Sustained gaming or video encoding does cause the fan ramp up to 5000 rpm making the left corner of my living room sound like a model jet engine that is spooling for take-off. I was able hard lock the system by running (3) instances of burnP6 and Kerbal Space Program (just because).
The minor performance issues with the 4.04 default kernel (NVMe SSD) and bluetooth (4.10) I'm sure will be ironed out in time. I think Dell was kind of ballsy and did a decent job pumping out this laptop so quickly after the 7th gen release.
Overall, I give this laptop a 7/10 mostly due to the lack of ability to modify RAM timing in the BIOS, poor storage placement, and delicate connector ribbon cables. Once Linux matures for the Kaby Lake architecture, I expect my rating to go up to 8/10.

-I hope this review helps you in your decisions. I do love this laptop and would absolutely recommend it for Linux. As time progresses, I will continue to update this forum. If there is something that you would like to know about, please ask.

One last note: I was unable to install Dell's Ubuntu recovery image to a USB flash drive from Linux. Both dd if=/name_of_image.iso of=/dev/sd[x] and unetbootin would not create bootable images. The solution was to virtualize Windows, use Dell's proprietary image writer tool and send it to the flash drive.

 

Update: Tonight Ubuntu 17.04 (beta) Mate found it's way on my NVMe. Everything seems to work perfectly now (listed below);
$ uname -a
Precision-3520 4.10.0-15-generic #17-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 24 17:51:38 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

A) Replaced default window manager with compiz.

B) No more GPU accelerated issues when reviving from sleep with NVIDIA proprietary drivers (same version as previous post). There is still some page-tearing that I'm working on. (Typical NVIDIA).

C) Bluetooth works perfectly. Issues seemed to be resolved with the 4.10.0-15.

D) Cached reads from my EVO NVMe tops out close to 3500 MB/s vice 2600 MB/s on Ubuntu 16.04.2.

E) Installed tlp, idle power down to 6.5 w/h at 50% screen brightness. When screen was set to lowest illumination, power occasionally dipped into the high 4 w/h. (Better than Ubuntu 16.04.2).

F) CAC, Common Access Card or SMART Card now works!

My overall rating has gone from 7/10 to 8/10.

 

FLAG: Ubuntu 16.04 CAC, Common Access Card, SMART CARD, DELL, 3520, 3000, 5000, 7000 doesn't work [SOLVED]
Update: I changed my focus a little due to (Windows) reviews and benchmarks on the Internet for this laptop have been cropping up. I did revert back to the original OEM Ubuntu installation. Ubuntu 17.04 MATE still has some stability issues. For example, one day my audio hardware would not recognize. I had to boot the OEM Ubuntu 16.04 from USB drive to re-initialize my sound card. Then I booted back into 17.04 and it just worked. The next day, my bluetooth did the same thing so I took the same corrective actions. This lead me to re-installing the OEM version and making an effort to get everything perfect.
Some tips:
-I was able to get the CAC reader to work. Turns out that the libccid 1.4.24 that comes packaged does not support this particular Broadcom brand. The good news is that libccid 1.4.26 does and can be downloaded/installed without dependency issues from the Ubuntu 17.04 repo. Here is the link: http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/amd64/libccid/download . Perhaps I should inform Dell that they need to backport this particular library.
-I installed Intel Graphics Tool for Linux v 2.0.2 https://download.01.org/gfx/ubuntu/...ol/intel-graphics-update-tool_2.0.2_amd64.deb without incident. Running several GPU benchmarks whilst PRIME was selected to Intel showed minor improvements. I did notice that some web-pages with flash adds started to flicker. Adding i915.nuclear_pageflip=1 to /etc/default/grub seems to have resolved the issue. (Without quotes, your DEFAULT line should look like this) "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.nuclear_pageflip=1". Then of course run "sudo update-grub2". Of note, updating the Intel drivers did increase my battery consumption from about 6 w/h to about 8 w/h while typing this with the screen at it's dimmest setting.
-Adding the NVIDIA PPA (without quotes)
"sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa" and updating to the 378.13 closed source driver from NVIDIA solved my corruption from suspend issues when using the NVIDIA GPU.
Lastly, I am starting to get spoiled by the clarity of this screen. I do not have another 3520 with the default screen for comparison, but the FHD IPS Non Touch (1920x 1080) option was well worth the additional $$$. Looking at any other computer screen is almost torture.

 

I ordered a 3520 from the outlet today with i7-7820HQ, 32GB RAM, Quadro M620, 1TB M.2 PCI-e SSD, 1080p touchscreen, 92whr battery, Dell 1820 wireless card. It cost me $1200 after taxes with a 10% off coupon.
I wanted a 5520 but if you configure one with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD the price did not make sense for me.
I will report back after I receive it and have spent some time with it.

 

I removed the back cover and snapped a couple of pictures.

 

You mean spend $1080 , so cheap ?