Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

Dell Command Update has tried to install "Intel(R) Thunderbolt(TM) 3 Firmware Update (532,3 kB, 01-07-2016) for a month now, says it's successfull, but when I recheck for updated, it reappears??

 

My observations about my 5510 are now published. If other 5510 owners can add anything, then please comment.

It's a strange headline for what is sold as a workstation but, from my perspective, it is a good summary. Excellent quality large screen (welcome for those with aging eyes), excellent battery time and in a package which doesn't take up too baggage space. At the moment it's running off a 65W PSU (with DC plug adapter - the L-shaped plug is much better than the straight plug on the 130W PSU as the cable gets tucked away behind the computer).

I have difficulty reconciling my 5510 with the XPS15 9550 which, if the posts in this forum are representative, is somewhat temperamental. At present it looks like I will be short of an excuse to buy another notebook for a while.

John

 

One comment on the review: you might want to mention that it uses the non-standard Torx screws (from the look of them, the same TX5 as the M3800, although I haven't tried opening mine.)

You may have gotten lucky with your image for the 5510; mine (although it's in Linux most of the time) which I installed Windows on myself has been pretty flawless when I reboot into Windows for SWTOR, but the folks on my team who run Windows day to day and who got a "Dell image, as munged by corporate IT" had all kind of driver problems. I think they've since found a combination of Intel + NVidia GPU drivers that wasn't getting blue screens a couple times a day, but they weren't happy for a while.

I should try mine with the 90W auto/air adapter; if it doesn't throttle horribly (as the later BIOS on the M3800 did, and it was never super) I might try traveling with this one rather than my personal E5470.

 

The CPU on my 5510 will happily run at full speed on a 65W PSU. wPrime running 8 threads gives a CPU package power of about 35W. There has to be a very heavy combined CPU + GPU load to exceed the 65W PSU capacity. Light usage plus battery charging is also viable with 65W.

When I first got my E5570 it throttled severely with a 65W PSU in spite of not having any dGPU. A BIOS update released at around the end of April fixed that problem. Perhaps Dell realised that, while they prudently supply the computer with a PSU good for the worst loading situation, not everyone imposes those conditions on their computer, particularly when travelling and having a smaller PSU would be welcome.

There's a lot more details I could have written about (and have done on previous reviews to discover that the editorial team has done some editing). Yes, they are T5 screws on the bottom, except for the two under the flap which are normal cross-head. This graph might be of interest to a few people:



John

 

It didn't complaint about the under power adapter on boot up?

 

My biggest issue with the 5510 is the touchpad. It is positioned at the center of the laptop, not centered to the spacebar - I often find myself running off the left side of the touchpad. I'm running Win10, and it uses the Microsoft driver for it - it's lacking a lot of the Synaptics options, and it skips a lot - maybe it has something to do with the 4K display.

 

Hi,

I just got my Dell 5510 today. It has been plugged in since I took it out of the box, and it has been idle or installing software the entire time (~8 hours). Now it is running on battery for the first time with the lowest screen brightness. The battery meter shows 1 hr and 27 min (70%). Is the battery life really that bad on this thing? Most reviews I read online say 4-5 hours using the 56Wh battery?!?!

I've installed all the dell recommended "critical" driver updates.

Specs:
Intel® Core™ Xeon E3-1505M v5
Windows 7 Professional,
Nvidia® Quadro® M1000M w/2GB GDDR5
15.6" UltraSharp™ FHD IPS (1920x1080), 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD,
3-cell (56Wh) battery
500 GB 2.5 inch SATA HD

Did I just get a bad battery?

Thanks

 

The battery should last much longer than that. Check task manager and make sure that no background task is running at high CPU. (With these things showing 8 logical CPU cores, even 12% CPU utilization is "high" because that is one whole core that is busy.)

 

Hello. I'm a heavy user of video editing and 3D rendering. Thought to buy the 5510 for my studio. My working setup is a Dell d3100 docking station combined with 2 Dell U2515H monitors. I plug this system to my current laptop which runs lid closed. My question, for you who own the 5510, is about heat disposal of this laptop. as I understand the vent openings are located at the back near the hings. Now, when the lid is open- everything is ok, but what happens when the lid is closed and the vent openings are actually closed too ?

thanks.

 

I currently have two tabs in chrome running, slack, and viber (chat app) running. CPU usage is averaging 13% under task manager under the performance tab.

Went to resource monitor under CPU and found that a process called svchost.exe (netsvcs) is in itself using ~13% of the CPU. Is there a way to remedy this? Image attached.

Thank you.