Dell Latitude 5490 vs 5491 performance & cooling

Hello,

my general requirements were to have 8th-gen i7 CPU, 32GB RAM in 14-inch body under 2 kilograms. Mainly for JVM-on-Linux programming.

I consider one of those Latitudes:

• 5490 with i7-8650U
• 5491 with i7-8850H

Both with dedicated GeForce graphics (as this is the way to get Thunderbolt 3).

I am concerned with thermal issues and throttling. I've checked Dell's service manuals to look into cooling subsystem photos and to my eyes both 5490 and 5491 utilize the same design (single fan, single heat pipe). It seems obvious that 45W i7-8850H should have throttling problems. But I thought 15W i7-8650U is OK for such cooling design, yet I've read opinions that even 5490 throttles.

I have some hope that 6-core 8850H can be somehow limited in frequency to minimize throttling, and still perform better that 4-core 8650U.

I've also found that dedicated graphics adds another 20-30W. Probably not an issue, as programming does not render in 3D, and (light) gaming does not need hexa-core at 100%.

Conflicting facts about 5491 thermals in Dell's community forum: https://www.dell.com/community/Lati...-on-AC-Power-Seems-clock-related/td-p/6102760

Those Latitudes don't seem to get much attention in reviewers' community. I am looking for help and advice here as to which one is better. Thanks!

 

I've never gotten my wife's 7490 with the i7-8750U to throttle, but I don't know that it's the same cooling design.

For the 5491, I was literally just signing in to put some comments on the main 5491 thread ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/dell-latitude-5491-and-5591.816023/page-2 ) and encourage you to look over there.

Even with throttling 6 H cores will hugely outperform 4 U cores. I'm literally doing JVM-on-Linux programming (in a 2.5M line code base of relatively great antiquity) on the 5491 and even with throttling, it's pretty much exactly 50% faster on large maven builds and running unit tests than my 5470 was (i7-6820HQ, 35W cTDP, 32GB and a fairly similar non-barn-burning NVMe drive.) The fan was much quieter on the 5470, though.

One thought: have you looked at the 5480, or 7490?

The form factor is a bit nicer on the 7490 if you can deal with the slower processor (which is no different from the 5490), and you can get Thunderbolt + no dGPU. Some rather nice ones available on Outlet, especially if you're willing to upgrade the RAM to 32GB yourself.

The 5480 gets you an H-series quad core, 7th generation but I don't really see what 8th gets you unless you want to go to 6 cores. And they're available on outlet for a song if you're US-based.