Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

Good to know. I had somewhat frequent crashes with Solidworks and a mid-tier consumer consumer Nvidia laptop dGPU 5 or 6 years ago, but that's an anecdotal experience and the tech could well have changed enough that it's a different ball game now.

Do you use registry hacks on the machines you manage to activate the Solidworks features that are only activated when an approved GPU is detected? Or your organization has no need for those features?

I personally went with the Precision over the XPS for the same reason I bought a Nexus 6P over a Samsung Galaxy S7 or Note 5. As much as I like to tinker, in the case of the Samsung phones, to run custom ROMs or even root, you are not just tinkering, you're playing a never ending game of cat and mouse with Samsung. Samsung is trying to lock you out with every update, and they sure as hell aren't offering any sort of support for a custom configuration. While Samsung makes great hardware, it's just not worth having that over my head. With a Nexus I can tinker as much as I want and always bring it back to a clean factory state without hassle or losing my warranty. I see getting an approved GPU as something similar. If you start out with an unsupported configuration, there's much more potential for problems whether you tinker or not. You could get lucky and never have any problems, but I don't have the time or money to burn to test it out personally, so well played Nvidia and Solidworks.

Have you compared actual Solidworks performance or benchmarks between equivalent Quadro and GTX cards? I recall seeing the Quadro scoring substantially higher on OpenGL benchmarks, but I don't know if that translates into real world performance, and I don't even remember if that test was on the M1000M.

Did you do a price vs Solidworks performance comparison between Quadro and GTX cards to make your decision? If so I'm very curious about your results! I went with the Quadro for the reasons above, but to add in some confirmation bias, price/performance on a laptop could stack up differently due to power efficiency. You might get equal OpenGL performance with a cheaper, yet more powerful GTX card over a Quadro, but the GTX cards could use much more battery in the process. I didn't want to research all of this myself haha, but I'd be very interested if someone else has.

Actually thinking back to my purchase decision, for actually building 3D models, Solidworks is largely CPU-constrained, and single threaded at that due to the dependencies in the feature tree. You want the highest possible single core clock speed to get the fastest rebuild times. I now recall that this was a reason why I sprung a few extra bucks for the Xeon even though the difference from the i7 is marginal. When actually building models, the GPU only comes into play in the viewport after the model is already built. Rendering models for product photos with RealView effects and other stuff I never use is more constrained by your GPU, as it can be divided up into a multi-threaded workload.

 

Can anyone verify for certain that this flicker issue was not present on the UHD display with the previous BIOS?

Latest BIOS: 1.02.10
Previous BIOS: 1.02.00

I might revert to the previous BIOS if that is in fact the case. I don't have a TB dock and it looks like most of the issues addressed in the update are related to TB. They do list "Fixed LCD flickering when in lowest brightness" as a fix with the 1.02.10 update. Clearly that didn't work, but was it a problem for you guys before the update? I barely used my 5510 at all before the update, so I don't know.

 

I am using 4K screen, returning to 1.02 Bios did solve the problem

 

New owner 5510 xeon 32G m.2 512 toshiba nvme. Machine did well for 2 weeks. Updated firmware and driver today. Battery fully charged.

In the middle of changing a folder name in Explorer, laptop when blank screen and seems to cut power. Cannot startup since then. As this model have no removable battery, I cannot reset by taking battery out. Any idea what I should do?

 

The battery is easy to get out once you remove the bottom panel, but that requires a screwdriver for those T5 torx screws...
Is the power button light up? I've had a few instances with these things refusing to shut off, seeming to be off but with the power button lit. Holding the power button down for a long time may do the trick if this is your situation.
Otherwise, time to get Dell on the phone...

 

Power indication front of machine is off. If I am pluged in, then it with lightup for a second when I press power button. Tried long press not use.
I don't have T5 screw driver, so I can't open it up. Dell support only answer phone 9-5 weekdays in Australia. That's why I post this here on this Friday night.

 

Did you unplug the mains before holding down the power button for a minute? That might be enough to do the reset. Then briefly press the power button to see if it starts. Otherwise you need that T5 screwdriver. I've got a spare one but you are a bit far away.

If you do get it running and are using Windows 10 then I suggest making sure that the Fast Startup option is not selected. This feature can cause problems.

John

 

What features specifically are you referring to? I'm only aware of "Real View Graphics" which I'm not a fan of and would never use anyway.

I personally have a Precision M4800 w/ a quadro card, but only because I wanted an easy to work on powerful machine that would last 4 years - this pushed me to business notebooks and I landed on the Precision, which only has Quadro/FirePro graphics choices.

I have not done any performance benchmarking, as we didn't have the budget to put Quadros in ~50 PCs, so compromises were made.

We used to have 6 custom built by us PCs with quadros that gave me more trouble than the AMD card in my personal laptop for the same work. I never had any issues with SW on that machine, so when it came time to invest in a large number of new computers, we spec'd a consumer card and asked Dell to provide one tower early for testing purposes, and I put that through it's paces to make sure SW and other software would run fine. That was about 4 years ago, and we haven't had any issues since, if that helps.

FWIW, some CAD software like Altium actually recommends a GTX over a quadro, oddly enough.

 

As I wrote previously I've always have had flicker on lowest brightness, as everyone else on 4Ks - afaik. But the latest bios or gfx driver update (updated both) has caused the first level of brightness not to increase brightness at all - so the flicker is now visible on step 0 and 1. I'll measure how brightness levels have been affected later on.

 

I have T5 this morning. Opened it up, unpluged battery and power adapter, hold power for 10 sec, plug battery and adapter bac. I hit power button it light up but off as soon as i release my fingers. The front LED light up a second then it stay dead. Can't even get into Bios. firmware not flashed properly? Need to wait til monday to call dell.