Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

thats bad design specially high performance laptop which is likely to be used on the desk connected to a monitor

if Kaby XPS 13 is any indication, i dont expect dell to change this :/

 

While Dell could have used a different hinge design which would have let the hot air blow out the back, they may well have found that this results in greater recirculation of hot air (with consequent reduced cooling efficiency) than if the hot air is blown out in front of the screen which deflects it upwards.

John

 

I am running Gentoo, which is about as far from Ubuntu as you can get. That said, several of my coworkers have the same machine (three running Linux, 2 running Windows) and nobody chose to run the stock Dell 14.04 -- two who use Ubuntu are on clean installs of 16.04 and a third on Arch.

The hardware compatibility when my machine shipped in umm, April (I was the guinea pig; my coworkers got theirs in May or June?) was fine in general except for basically being broken with the USB-C/Thunderbolt (the TB15 dock is still useless -- I've passed that off to one of the Windows guys -- the WD15 dock works great except for our Arch user, and mostly works for him.)

16.04 worked better as of when my coworkers got theirs, and I've had things working better with each kernel release still (I'm on 4.7.4; I can post the kernel config I use somewhere.) I'm fairly sure that you'd do better with 16.04 (or waiting on 16.10) than the Dell release.

That said, I kept a tar file of the Linux image somewhere, if I can find it I can probably extract their kernel .config file and maybe the kernel binary or sources and post them to a google drive or something.

 

The rear "foot" is rubber strip that runs all the way across the bottom of the machine. It should stop cool intake air from mixing with the warm exhaust air.

Here is a shot after the system was running at 130 watts (full load) for 45 minutes. Lid was open. Will repeat with lid closed.

 

Retested with the lid closed. Ran Furmark to fully load the dGPU. Ran Prime95 with 2 threads to get the cpu up to around 40% total use. Hoping this is close to what Phineas was seeing in Autocad. Max CPU temp seen was 67C.

All temps below are in Fahrenheit.


Pic above is the left rear of the machine. As expected, there is heat under the rear of the machine. Plumes are extending further from the back of the machine than expected, so the air is going away from the machine, not just down. Air under the machine quickly is cooler as you go towards the middle and front of the machine.


Pic above is a top view of the rear of the machine. Clear and defined exhaust plumes. Some heating of the screen lid can be seen.


System from the back.


Lid closed temps on the bottom. System is sitting straight up. Temps lower that previous testing. Previous test was ~130W, this dGPU-heavy test was pulling ~105 watts to simulate user's use case. Note that the heat pattern is asymmetrical with a dGPU-heavy use case.


The bottom rubber foot can be seen clearly. I take this to mean it was separating intake and exhaust air across the width of the system.

 

That's a very valid point. I had assumed that the long "foot" was primarily to stiffen the base (and hence the overall machine) but providing a barrier against air recirculation is another useful function.

Thank you the very useful set of thermal images. The hot air evidently can squeeze out at the bottom back when the display is closed but a little hinge modification would enlarge that pathway and improve the cooling system efficiency.

John

 

Can anyone confirm what version of PCI-E the M.2 runs from on the 5510? I'm guessing gen.3 with drive speeds of 2500MB/s im getting in DiskMark

I'm looking at getting a 1TB M.2 SSD (I'm quickly running out of space and haven't even begun putting files on) , and wouldn't want to unnecessarily spend more on a "super fast" one if I'll not be noticing much difference to warrant big price differences. I am coming from a 2.5" 5400rpm spinner so any M.2 SSD is going to be so much faster anyway.

Having used it for a few days and disabling all the spying! I'm quite happy to stay on Win 10 Pro, I'm hoping that will simplify installing the OS to a new M.2 SSD. My 256GB Toshiba runs in NVMe I think (mode in bios was set to RAID from the factory) and this seems to be where the hickups come from especially for Win7 installs?. Its great having this lounge thread as a resource but there's just so many pages, so apologies if I'm one of many asking the same questions over and again.

 

I believe the troubles installing 7 relates to USB 3 and NVMe drivers, not RAID vs AHCI mode.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I think this is really just like the half sized arrow keys, and lack of page up/down buttons in the empty spaces above the L/R arrows.

Is there a group of people who care about performance with the notebook closed?
Yes

Is there a group of people who desperately want full sized arrow keys and page up/down?
Yes

How big are these groups?
Probably in the low thousands.

Will most people in those groups literally not buy the XPS/Precision OR another dell laptop because of their gripe?
No

Even if these buyers would actually turn elsewhere, they represent a tiny section of the intended customer-base. Catering to their desires would come at some expense to the aesthetics of the machine. Given the number of units sold and the demographics of buyers, a small change to please the described minorities would risk turning away many more customers who are drawn to the notebook primarily for its aesthetics.

Look at the MacBook Pro - it is probably the most widely used laptop among software developers, creative professionals, and engineers. It is not ideally designed for any of these tasks. There are laptops that are better suited to any of these tasks available for substantially less money, yet many professionals flock to the MacBook Pro. Why? Because it's sexy looking and because in their mind, usually for irrational reasons, Apple products are inherently the best and better than all other products, even those specialized to their professional needs. They make due with inconveniences on a daily basis to use the sexy looking status symbol Apple product.

I would like the two aforementioned features on my 5510, but the reality is that the number of people for whom that is a deal breaker is insignificant to Dell and risks compromising the proven strategy of aestetics above all else.

 

RAID vs AHCI does play in to the Windows 7 install.
If RAID is on, you have to load the Intel Rapid Storage drivers before you can see the NVMe drive.
If AHCI is on, you have to load Samsung's NVMe drivers before you can see the NVMe drive.