Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

I'm now a proper member of the 5510's owner's club - it arrived just before 9am this morning and weighed in at 1.93kg (with the 84Whr battery). In fact, the weight with 130W PSU and the mains cable is 2.38kg so only slightly more than the Latitude E5570's weight without PSU and cable.

The component list said it had a Samsung SSD but it's actually the Toshiba (I had the same difference in SSD make on the E5570). I'm currently busy updating it. The BIOS was at 1.02 before I updated it. I've also updated the Thunderbolt firmware.

John

 

Some further observations (i7-6820 CPU and FHD panel):
(a) HWiNFO reports maximum CPU package power 38W when running wPrime 1024 (8 threads). Disabling hyperthreading drops the maximum CPU power down to 29W (wPrime 1024 running 4 threads).
(b) I'm currently doing some video playback to test battery drain. With display at half brightness the power drain is about 8.5W.
(c) On idle with the display on 30% the power drain went as low as 3.2W which is lower than I've seen on the E5570. 10+ hours of light usage on a full charge looks to be feasible.
(d) The fan noise under full load is more than the E5570 but with hyperthreading disabled and no dGPU it's acceptably quiet.
(e) It doesn't throttle the CPU when running on a 65W PSU and the dGPU is idle.
(f) The touchpad is enormous.
(g) Very visible backlight flicker at minimum brightness and still visible at 10% brightness.

Dell must be losing some sales by not offering a lower hardware spec version in the same chassis for those who want a big screen and all day battery.

John

 

I have been using the 45w version with my M3800 for exactly this reason. Will run but not charge on airplane. You can get non-dell copies cheap.

 

Hey John,

About ready to pull the trigger on one of these. Looks like you have no deal breakers. Have you tried to run a 4K display with it?

 

I haven't yet tried my 45W Latitude XT PSU with the 5510. The E5570 would run from it OK but if the battery needed to be charged then the BIOS would manage the charge to run the PSU at its design limit and the PSU warmed up somewhat.

I haven't got a 4K display to try. The graphics capability will handle it without difficult although more pixels means more effort. I consciously avoided the UHD internal panel because it uses more power (panel itself + extra processing) and I'm worried about scaling issues with old programs.

It's by no means a perfect machine (eg more navigation keys needed for better usability) but it hasn't failed in areas where I wasn't sure (eg massively over the indicated weight, severe throttling with lower rated PSUs). The keyboard travel is noticeably less than on the E5570 but this is easy to adjust to and status lights are in very short supply.

I was suprised to see that the size of the 5510 is almost the same as my 4 year old Samsung NP900X4C which had a 15.0" display and Samsung claimed that it was the size of a 14" notebook.

Anyway, a question for other 5510 owners: There is a status light on the front: Under what circumstances does it illuminate? So far, mine shows no signs of life.

John

 

Think mine is on, when it sleeps. It turns off, when I power it on connected to the tb15 dock. Only way I can see, if I did hit the power button with the lid closed.

 

John, thanks for the comments. I will go ahead. I returned a 3515 because of the AMD card which would not run my display. I do a lot of graphics processing...

The 3515 was heavy but had the Xeon processor and I had 32GB of RAM. It processed very very well. So, I think I will go with the same configuration. I am thinking I will get the HD screen because of the better color gamut, but seems a bit heavier? I compared the size of my M3800 (14.06x9.27x0.45-0.66)" to that of the M5510 (14.65x10.00x0.31-71)" and they were remarkably similar. This is costly but it is a professional machine.

Oh, did you get a dock? I have two Dell D3000s for the M3800, suspect they will work.

Again, I appreciate the comments of a new owner.

 

My perception is that AMD graphics aren't the best (they were more competitive when they were ATI) but notebook manufacturers have to use the AMD hardware in some of their products in order to keep the company in business and a little competition between the GPU manufacturers.

I believe that the 5510 doesn't support ECC memory which would be a potential benefit of the Xeon. Otherwise there's no significant difference in performance between the Xeon and the i7-6820HQ. The UHD display has better gamut if the colour rendering is a critical aspect of your work but it is a glossy touchscreen which adds to the weight and also increases the power consumption, even on idle (all those extra pixels to be calculated and switched).

I didn't get a dock and it's not currently on the shopping list. I can't see why the D3000 would not work although Thunderbolt is the way forward when it's fully debugged and prices are more reasonable. Yyou can have that as an upgrade path in due course. At the moment I've bought some cheap USB C adapters (normal USB, VGA port) so the USB C port can be put to use.

John

 

The XPS 15 is almost completely identical to the 5510, and IIRC, it's base configuration is a Core i3, FHD display, and no dedicated graphics. So the option does exist, just under different branding.

I have never seen anything definitively stating this, but the XPS 15 and the Precision 5510 may even share the same motherboard. The key difference is that the 5510 features the Nvidia Quadro M1000M instead of the Nvidia GTX GPU offered in the XPS. Quadro cards are ISV certified for profession applications like Solidworks and Inventor. The Precision 5510 itself is also ISV certified for most of the mainstream engineering and design software suites, while the XPS is not. Outside of some additional flexibility with configurations and support, people choose the Precision largely for the Quadro card and ISV certification.

Consumer graphics cards are generally not great at running professional software, as they are geared at playing games. I believe professional software trends to use OpenGL, while games use DirectX. The drivers for each card are optimized for the intended use case. The enterprise cards are overpriced compared with similar consumer hardware, but buying one is the best (and possibly only) way to get stable drivers for your applications. I believe the Quadro M1000M is actually marginally less powerful than the GTX card in the XPS, but it's OpenGL benchmarks are better.

If you don't need an ISV certified GPU, chances are you could get what you want in an XPS for significantly less money.

 

I now recall - the only other difference I know of is that the Precision 5510 uses an Intel card for WiFi and BT, while the XPS uses a Dell card. I think the Intel card has much better Linux support. People have had lots of difficulty getting the Dell card to operate reliably with Linux.

The Dell card has 3 spatial streams / antennas while the Intel card has only 2, so in theory if both cards worked perfectly, you'd want the Dell one as it supports a significant higher throughput on an AC network.

A max throughput of 866Mbps is still acceptable though. I suppose...

 

You are correct! It's possible that a BIOS update could add support down the line, but it is NOT currently supported, and it seems unlikely that it will be implemented through an update at this point.

I personally sprung for the Xenon largely because it has "HD Graphics P530" as opposed to "HD Graphics 530" in the i7. The "P" signifies that the integrated GPU is ISV certified by a large array of mainstream profession software benefits. Effectively it probably makes no difference as the GPU hardware specs are identical, but like with graphics cards, it's entirely possible that it uses different drivers than the until in the i7. On top of that it had slightly better performance with a higher clock speed and more importantly an 8MB cache vs 6MB with the i7.

When I ordered, the price difference from the i7 was $80. After the 35℅ coupon and 15% cash back, it was $45 extra. For $45, it wasn't worth my time to verify that it was in fact substantially better, and you can't go wrong with a larger cache anyway.

jerryyyyyy John is right, the UHD screen apparently adds significant weight, as it has a glass screen cover while the FHD does not. In a review for the XPS 13, I read that the UHD model weighs 100g more, the difference will be larger for the 15. (fyi Precision 5510 = XPS 15 and XPS 13 is smaller with the same chassis design)

Personally, I've been spoiled by high res AMOLED phone displays, and now when I look at an FHD laptop screen the pixels look huge. Text definitely looks much clearer on the UHD display. Whether it matters to you is personal preference. Being that it's 4k, you can run Windows at 1920x1080 natively, and that would probably result in some power savings and look no worse than the FHD display. I don't see myself trying that though.