Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

Thanks John. I guess, I should then order mine with a HDD to get the brackets for future upgradeability. I want to upgrade to a 1TB SSD (when I find one on sale). The pricing from DELL for this is quite expensive.

 

It's usually cheaper to get the minimum storage option from Dell and then do a DIY upgrade. You can get up to 1TB M.2 SATA drives which are similarly priced to the 2.5" SATA drives (I'm using a 1TB Sandisk X400). It's the NVMe drives which are expensive (the Samsung 960 EVO may be a bit more reasonably priced). The faster read / write speeds of NVMe only give noticeable benefits if reading/writing large quantities of data.

Have you looked for the M5510 in Dell Outlet? You stand to save about 40% off the list prices (more if you can find a coupon) but you may have to compromise on the specification. The warranty on the Outlet stock is the same as for new orders.

John

 

Thanks for the info about Dell Outlet deals.

Unfortunately, all the models I could find on Dell outlet were ones with a Quadro GPU. There are some coupons offering up to 35% OFF on the regular Build-it-yourself models. I'm trying to play around with few options to figure out which works best.

 

The question (which I cannot answer) is whether the presence of the dGPU creates a problem if you can actually save money by getting a dGPU-enabled version from the Outlet. I've checked in the BIOS of my 5510 and cannot see an option to disable the dGPU. However, the system info screen only lists Skylake graphics and doesn't mention the dGPU. Perhaps it only becomes available when the Nvidia driver is installed. I know from my own observations that, in Windows, the dGPU doesn't waste power by sitting in the background (the idle power consumption of my 5510 is in the same range as my previous non-dGPU Latitude E5570).

John

 

New member! Can I be in the club? My 5510 arrived last night! Xeon, 8gb RAM (in anticipation of future 32gb upgrade), 256gb PCIe SSD, 1080 screen, 6 cell-battery, Ubuntu 14.04 preinstalled.

I erased Ubuntu, installed Fedora 25 and everything is running great, haven't detected any bugs or glitches yet. The NVIDIA Quadro was undetected both in Ubuntu 14.04 and Fedora 25, but I got it running using these instructions: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bumblebee

Anyone with Linux questions, I'm happy to help.

@TuxDude, in my short experience with this laptop, it is fine to run solely from the Intel 530 and never use the Quadro 1000M.

 

As far as I'm aware, all 5510's will have quadro, I'm unsure if you're expecting to find a spec with geforce graphics instead like the XPS 15? Outlet is excellent, I think I saved around £600 and the laptop was brand new just as it would have non-outlet, identical 3 year on site warranty too, much better than the cover coming with the XPS of RTB

 

He was looking for one without any dGPU but the post above by @PrecisionBassed confirms that the physical presence of the dGPU won't be a problem is running Linux.

John

PS: I think I got an even better bargain with my 5510: £927 (incl VAT) for a spec which looks to be the same as yours except for the 6820HQ instead of the Xeon. I ordered on a day with a 15% coupon. I've just configured my spec on the Dell UK website and it came to £2111.

 

Disclaimer that I've only owned my Precision a short time. My early experiments suggest that:

1. Fedora 25 + Intel 530 + FHD screen (1920 x 1080) is a win. Perfectly capable for common tasks, with good battery life. For many users, this will be all you need.
   
2. Fedora 25 default "out of the box" configuration, only Intel appeared to be active. Nvidia Quadro had little-to-no load on the system, as far as I could tell based on my observation of noise, heat, fans, battery life, etc.
   
3. The Fedora Wiki instructions for installing Bumblebee were a success. 'optirun' lets me send graphics-intensive applications to the dGPU. For example, with 'optirun ./valley' I ran the Unigine Valley benchmark and saw approximately 2x frame rate increase.
4. It's easy to tell when the Nvidia dGPU is in use. Temperature, noise, fan speed, and battery life are all noticeably affected. Once 'optirun' is terminated, vital signs swiftly return to normal.

I hope that is helpful info for users considering Linux on the Precision, and whether or not the Nvidia Quadro is worth the upcharge.

 

You might have noticed already but, a note, the main Dell website usually bundles in a 30% discount (or thereabouts) — this is reflected in the scratched off "higher" price you see on all of the systems — and a 35% coupon sends you back to the higher price before it is applied. (So you aren't getting 35% off what you would pay buying the system without a coupon, but rather are increasing the stock discount from 30% to 35%.)

 

Yes I was looking for a config without a dGPU. I was able to get that with a custom build. Just to give you an idea of the prices I'm seeing, they are as follows (which include CA Sales Tax roughly 10%+):
6440HQ CPU - 8GB RAM - 1920x1080 FHD screen - 1TB HDD - 3 cell Battery - No dGPU - No Windows License - 1 year Basic Warranty - $1228.67
6440HQ CPU - 8GB RAM - 1920x1080 FHD screen - 256GB M2 SSD - 1TB HDD - 3 cell Battery - No dGPU - No Windows License - 1 year Basic Warranty - $1511.06

The cheapest M5510 I could find on outlet was for $1679 and this is before taxes. I'm still keeping a lookout everyday to see if anything comes up here.

These 2 are the configs of interest. I'm still undecided if I should get the M2 SSD from DELL or buy one separately outside. Any thoughts? If I buy and install separately, would the lack of a heat spreader (which DELL provides) be of any concern?

Thanks for the info. How many hours of battery life do you get on normal usage in Linux after installing Bumblebee? My current 3-4 year old laptop has a dGPU as well which supports Optimus and its Linux support was terrible a year ago in terms of battery life. I haven't used that laptop for a long time, so the Linux support could have improved with recent kernels.

I always thought that with Optimus based cards, it was never possible to turn off the dGPU's power consumption unless the driver supported it (the windows ones do). And I remember that the nVidia proprietary driver for Linux was really subpar on this aspect when compared to the Windows counterpart.

Yep, you're right. I noticed this too. I agree not big of a bump in terms of discount. I was looking for any other sellers as well if I could find a cheaper price.