Dell Precision 7560 & Precision 7760 pre-release discussion

It's a shame they took away the easy bottom cover removal. Unscrewing the bottom cover isn't hard; it's just tedious

 

Alder Lake has the hybrid architecture which I'm pretty interested in (up to 8 performance cores + 8 efficiency cores, CPU TDP increase to 55W), and DDR5. New chassis is likely, hopefully they'll fix the keyboard (dedicated Home/End buttons). They "might" change to 16:10, doesn't matter that much to me either way but I'd be happy with the change; even though it might be a bit strange for games that use only 16:9, it would be more working space for actual "work". I'm a bit bummed that refreshed NVIDIA GPUs for next year are unlikely (Lovelace won't be ready in time for a summer Precision launch), but we will see PCIe5 dropping so who knows, they might do a minor refresh.

 

Will the hybrid architecture increase performance significantly or will it just be mainly for power consumption? Because if it's for the latter, it won't be a huge improvement upgrade since the GPU takes up the majority of the system power. I don't think the increased TDP would affect the precision since the CPU PL's set by Dell are already very high.
And will pcie gen 5 have any actual benefits other than faster ssd speeds? Such as more eGPU bandwidth (is pcie gen 4 a bottleneck for thunderbolt bandwidth?)

I could wait out another year for the new model but I really don't know if it will be worth it, considering that the difference prob won't be as big as the 7750 to 7760.... Things are now rapidly changing after some stagnant and uninteresting years.

 

Looking at the 7560 Service Manual, it show two primary drives in slots 3 and 5 and the secondary drive in slot 4. Per the manual:

Primary Slot 3 and slot 5 supports PCIe Gen3, Optane, and SATA Solid-state drive (2230 or 2280)
Secondary Slot 4: This slot supports only M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 Solid-state drive and does not support any Optane, SATA, or M.2 2230
Solid-state drive

Are there any performance differences on the slots? If someone has a drive in Primary Slot 3 and adds a drive to Secondary Slot 5, can you boot from the drive in slot 5? Just curios. I recall with my 7710 when I added a drive, I (think) just switched which slot to boot from in the bios.

Also, does the Primary not support the Gen 4?

 

I am keeping a close eye on the 7760 but I need some help as I fear the specs(i7-11800H, RTX A3000, 32GB RAM) are perhaps overkill for what I intend to use it for.

I'm after a 17" 4K, desk use machine to browse the net, watch 4K movies and gaming, when I say gaming I'm not looking at Crysis or anything like that but games that are better played on a PC with a keyboard and mouse, strategy stuff like Age of Empires, etc.

Here comes the funny part, one of the reasons why I identified the 7760 as a potential buy is connectivity, I noticed that other machines like the XPS have no USB 3.2 and RJ45 ports and I prefer to avoid dongles or anything like that.

Problem is that the 7760 forces me to go for the Nvidia A3000 in order to have the 3840x2160 display as the T1200 is not compatible with the UHD LCD and the Intel UHD Graphics might not be powerful enough for the gaming needs I need.

So if I am to summarize my requirements I would say that I'm after a 17" laptop with old school connectivity, strong enough to play 4K Movies and basic to high (not high end/ultra) games.

Are there are alternatives? Names only please, I'll do my own research as I don't want to hijack this thread with personal requests.

 

Unclear at the moment because no one has had a chance to test with the systems or anything. Intel is pushing it as both a power management and performance improvement. One idea is you can offload background tasks to the low-power cores while keeping your major work on the high-power cores without interference. (A "background task" could even be something somewhat substantial like capturing and streaming system video while playing a game.) These systems will have an extra eight threads (24 total) which could maybe help with highly multi-threaded applications. Anyway... Mainly, I am "interested" in the hybrid architecture just because it is interesting and I just want to mess around with it. This sort of "big/little" architecture is the way that things will be moving towards going forwards; Apple already has it in place with their M1 systems, and there are indications that AMD is seriously looking into it as well.

Regarding PCIe5, the Alder Lake systems will only support 16 lanes of PCIe5 so I imagine that they will be given to the dGPU and that's it. Everything else in the system will be PCIe4 or lower. There will be PCIe4 support at the PCH so it's possible that all of the NVMe drive slots will support it, as opposed to the 7X60 systems which only support PCIe4 on one NVMe slot.

Only one slot supports PCIe4. Surprised if it is not the "primary" slot, but it is what it is. You can boot the OS from a drive in any slot. (I think that it should work with PCIe3 drives even if the manual says that it supports "only PCIe4". It just won't support other types of drives like M.2 SATA.)

I'm not that up on all of the different laptop models, but I keep an eye on Alienware laptops and often notice that they simply don't offer a 4K option a lot of the time for some reason. If you're OK with the cost, the 7760 would be a solid system for you I think. It's a pretty "regular" (non-flashy) laptop, with a really solid build, and being a bit "overkill" with the specs just means that it should last you for a good long time. I do think that it's sad that they're not allowing 4K with the T1200; I have a Precision 7530 with 4K and NVIDIA Quadro P1000 (a good bit less powerful than T1200) and that works fine......

 

I ordered just one drive that was the 1TB PCIe3. I guess we will see where they put it. I am assuming in the primary slot.


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Do to think it is worthy to buy i9-11950H, instead of i7-11850H?
I think the main differences are TurboMax 3.0 (only for 2 cores???) and a little extra 0.1-0.2 GHz in clock.

 

It's really interesting (and unexpected) that the 4K panel on the 7760 is 120Hz !

 

Considering that the CPU is the only thing that you can't upgrade, if you have the money, go for the i9. If you don't really care about CPU performance or if you are going to get a new laptop in a few years, get the i7.