Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

I weighed the E5470 (4-cell, 2x M.2 one of them in a M.2-to-2.5" adapter, FHD) at 4lb 2oz (rounding up to the next ounce; it's a kitchen scale) against the M5510 (6-cell, NVMe M.2, dGPU, FHD) at 4lb 4oz (ditto). For the metric folks, Google tells me the latter is 1.92kg (rounding up to the nearest 10g.)

Original measurements posted here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/latitude-vs-precision.791373/page-4#post-10256545

I think I weighed a bunch of the power supplies in that thread; if not it was another one around the same time. I think Bokeh posted weights for a few I didn't have in followup (e.g. the new slim 90w)

 

It could be all the ads on these sites. I do get lags with Edge because all the ads, and it doesn't have an ad blocker available, ok maybe a free one.

 

It would seem that in chrome, with all updates apart from BIOS applied (on 1.2.10, I'll leave 1.2.14 for now) that the stuttering has become almost non existent.

I can agree that the UHD model XPS15 did feel fairly heavier than the 5510 FHD I have now. The 5510 matches the weight I expect from looking at it, whereas I remember being a bit surprised at the XPS.

 

I just got a 5510 from the business outlet. It came configured with a "4R80W 512GB PCIe M.2 NVMe Class 40 Solid State Drive"

I pulled my Samsung 850 EVO - 1TB - mSATA Internal SSD (MZ-M5E1T0BW) from my old laptop. Am I right in thinking the m.2 that shipped with the laptop is not taking up the optional 2.5" inch spot? I have the mSATA in a 2.5 adapter. Can someone comfirm that it will work if I order the parts discussed here? http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19664692

• XDYGX x1
• 3XYT5 x2
• 3FDY3

I see these parts are available on ebay in sets. Is there a better route to purchase? Would like to confirm before spending money or opening the computer to install (does adding a second HD effect the warranty?)

Full System config: http://pastebin.com/BSUCUiik

 

It all depends on your battery config moosefit. 6-cell and the 2.5" bay is occupied by the extra cells, 3-cell though and youre good to go (though apologies, I can't help in what adapters, etc you'll need). I need to upgrade to 512/1TB M.2 very soon, just popping on one game and a few updates and there's already less than 100GB left

 

Damn - I have the 6 cell battery so I guess I cannot fit the second drive. I guess it'll just have to stay in my external enclosure.

 

I would initially only get the XDYGX which should be enough to get the mSATA SSD in 2.5" adapter functional and see it it is possible to improvise arrangements for holding it in the bay - those other parts are needed to hold a 2.5" mechanical drive in place.

Dell are very tolerant on warranty issues - their warranty covers what they supplied and as long as you avoid damaging anything while inside then there's no problem. If in doubt, should you need service then remove your parts and put back the Dell parts.

I'm interested to see that your parts list includes "Intel Core 6th Generation i7-6820HK Processor (Quad-Core, 8MB Cache, Dynamically Overclocked up to 4.1GHz)". How fast does that actually go (run HWiNFO, enable sensors to see the CPU performance details, then run wPrime with different numbers of threads. If you want to explore this further then also disable hyperthreading in the BIOS and run 1 to 4 threads).

Does someone make an mSATA to USB-C adapter so you can get the full mSATA speed?

John

 

I agree it is/would be very careless, but sadly the approach with a large percentage of internet-connected computing products has become "let's get it working reasonably well and ship it ASAP. We'll squash bugs and optimize things later through an update." That should be less of the case with enterprise focused products, and the 5510 does actually seem to have far fewer issues than the XPS15 if the forums are any indication. Regardless, in any use case, low level firmware should be the most thoroughly tested since bugs could potentially damage the hardware. Anyway, I think the "fix it later though an update" attitude, which consumers have been conditioned into begrudgingly accepting, has some influence on all software that ships these days.

The situation with the 5510 battery charging is similar to the iOS10 update temporarily bricking some iPhones. They did fix it, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. The problem is that people aren't voting with their dollar to discourage these things, and that especially goes for Apple products with the lock-in and mindless devotion of many fans. Dell is on thinner ice, especially with enterprise products, but they're still only going to do just enough to keep their customers.

 

DO NOT get the PM951 - the one that Dell is shipping in most 5510's. It's one of the slowest new drives on the market. It's the connection interface is NVME, but the drive his cheaper lower bandwidth memory than today's fastest drives, so even with NVME, it's only about as fast as a good SATA SSD. The PM951s memory is too slow to really take advantage of the high bandwidth NMVE interface.

The SM951 however is a completely different drive! The "SM" drives are the retail drives sold directly to consumers for upgrades. IIRC they are nearly twice as fast in benchmarks. The "PM" drives are sold directly to OEMs to include in shipping notebooks and tablets, but watch out because some vendors are selling them direct to consumers. The PM drives use a variety of flash memory that is cheaper to manufacture to cut costs.

As far as the 950 vs 951 goes, I actually don't know. I'd check out some benchmarks to see what the speed difference is. You also might want to check whether one or both supports eDrive drive encryption. That'll allow you to use bitlocker without having the encryption add processing overhead to your system, as it's hardware based encryption. Anandtech or tomshardware probably has benchmarks of these drives.

 

Yea, you're right. I've been much more involved in the mobile OS world until recently, and there you do have bugs on both iOS and Android, and if you're a regular user you are often stuck with the bugs until the vendor decides to admit they exist and/or fix them. Apple signs iOS for each individual iPhones hardware and with a random replay value, so they forcibly prevent you from downgrading of the new OS has bugs or screws up your existing workflows. With Android if you're a power user, you can generally downgrade or install mods or third party software to correct issues introduced by the OEM, but OEMs like Samsung will go out of their way to make it difficult, so it's not as simple just installing like any other update.

So while I did have some minor issues with my 5510, I barely consider them issues at all because they could be corrected so easily - installing an older BIOS version and a different SSD driver was no different than installing any new update. So, I suppose it's a matter of POV.