Dell Precision 7560 & Precision 7760 pre-release discussion

Hi @Dell-Mano_G thanks as always for your contributions here

Can i ask a few please

1. Can you share GPU power for the Precision 3561 running t1200, Precision 5560 running RTX A2000 and Precision 5760 running RTX A3000
2. Judging by the spec sheets Dell have not chosen to go with the option of running the CPU at 65W for higher base. e,g, i9-11980HK at 3.3GHz according to Anandtech https://www.anandtech.com/show/1666...tiger-lakeh-eight-core-10nm-mobile-processors
3. Related to the above for are you able to share PL1/PL2 limits for the 5760, 7560, 7760?
4. When you say pricing of RTX 4000 and 5000 will not carry over are you referring to the current reduction in cost between the RTX 3000 and RTX 4000 (currently only £92 difference on dell.co.uk) i would expect there to be a bigger gap in pricing between the new RTX A3000 and RTX A4000 and then the biggest jump as last generation to the RTX A5000?

 

This was discussed somewhat recently in the Precision 7X50 thread... Sometime since the systems launched, the price of upgrading a 7X50 system to a RTX 4000 or RTX 5000 GPU was drastically cut. I'm taking his comment as a sign that there will be a sort of "return to form" with premium prices for the high-end GPUs when the new 7X60 systems launch, and we will not see something resembling the current "discounted" price for the high-end GPUs in the 7X50.

Precision 7750 U.S. original prices at launch were...
Upgrade from base to RTX 3000 = $715.38
Upgrade from base to RTX 4000 = $1,135.25
Upgrade from base to RTX 5000 = $2,373.20
(The price might be even higher for the RTX A4000 and RTX A5000, because there has been a trend of the high-end GPU prices creeping upwards with each generation.)

 

Do the xx60 models still have DGFF?

 

Yeh it was quite a recent change our dell account manager set the expectation that its likely to go back to similar pricing levels as when the 7750 launched. Just wasn't 100% clear from the comment
I only noticed the reduction in price for rtx 4000 it around April time

 

It appears that they are using DGFF cards for the 7000-series; however, whether they will be "backwards compatible" with 7X50 systems remains to be seen. (You won't get a straight answer from Dell here. Cross-generation GPU upgrades are not officially supported.) We'll have a clue once we have a detailed look at the cards and motherboard layout, if we are able to confirm that the layout, screw positions, etc. are the same; but, we won't know for sure until someone actually tries it. I'd say that there's no chance that the new 7X60 RTX A-series DGFF cards from Dell would work in any system earlier than 7X50, since they changed the DGFF physical layout in last year's systems.

 

The specs for the new Precision 7760 look pretty intriguing. Jump to 10nm: Check. PCIe 4.0: Check. Until we see a block diagram, we won't really know how all the parts and PCIe lanes are arranged, but it's logical to assume the four NVMe drives share the same lanes like for the previous generations - that's still a doubling of bandwidth if the drives support the faster bus speeds. I tested the professional mobile workstation waters recently by purchasing a Lenovo P14 AMD Ryzen 8 Core, and it had many positive points to it - a fantastic keyboard, smooth 8 core goodness, but a squirrely trackpad (even on the replacement) meant that I had to return it. Now, though, I think my ideal setup would definitely need integrated graphics plus a dedicated GPU as well, which the P14 AMD lacked.

I recently arranged my desktop workstation PC into what I call an "Nerdvana" state, and I will likely investigate doing something similar on my Precision 7730 in the near future, with an eye to see how easy it would be to pull off on a possible 7760. Last weekend, I had two simultaneous Valheim sessions going on from my single desktop PC, side-by-side, with each session assigned a discrete GPU, monitor, keyboard and mouse, and it worked beautifully (took me a day to set up, months to learn enough about Proxmox/GPU Passthrough/etc. to pull it off...). The ability to do GPU-intensive things liking gaming from within a VM is actually very practical from a professional perspective. It sets up strong partitioning of work and play environments, but also enforces strong control over what's consuming power at any given moment. Getting the discrete GPU on a 7730 to stay fully off has been quite a party trick with a traditional Windows/Hyper-V environment. Also, native ZFS is nice. But, back to the topic at hand, a 7760 with Xe graphics could actually make the "Two Valheim sessions side-by-side" on a laptop feasible, one session with GPU to external monitor and one session with Xe graphics on the laptop itself.

Nvidia recently became much more lenient with allowing their drivers to be installed in virtualized environments, and I naturally see this class of laptops (with up to 128GB of RAM) as portable virtualization servers to really maximize their value to an organization. I will likely investigate this project on my 7730 in due time, but in the meantime, this Precision 7760 looks like the most interesting upgrade to the Precision laptop series in many years.

 

There is one PCIe4 NVMe slot, and the other three NVMe slots are PCIe3. The PCIe4 slot must be dedicated (Tiger Lake PCH doesn't support PCIe4) but the other three slots are presumably connected to the PCH, so they will have shared bandwidth like in past systems.

 

Good spot I hadn't realised that although it is the same on new desktops workstations like the new Precision 3650

One other question for @Dell-Mano_G is on Ssd class

In terms of what can be specified on the desktops there is a class 50 pcie gen 3 Ssd up to 1TB which Is usually the top performance class for Ssd. but currently the only pcie gen 4 Ssd are 2tb "Class 40" which suggests that despite being pcie gen 4 the Ssd they are using currently are lower performing. I am not sure if it will be the same for the new laptops initially

I am not sure if this will be the same on laptops but I imagine it will change over time anyway based on feedback I have had from dell more pcie 4 ssd are likely to come on stream in time.

It would also be nice to see some up to date definitions of class 40, class 50 used in Precision Laptops/Desktops I've seen some in the past but quite alot has changed in recent years for storage.

 

You might want to consider getting the cheapest available storage option so that you can buy the NVMEs separately. Especially considering that, thanks to @Aaron44126, we know that there will be two different bus speeds for the NVMe drives, PCIe 3.0 x 3 and PCIe 4.0 x 1.

 

Oh definately if I were buying for myself but generally buying 10+ at a time for work so between the warranty backup and hassle for the IT team fitting upgrades to each laptop as they configure them we stopped upgrading ram/storage ourselves a few years back as we grew bigger it wasn't worth the effort. It is even easier with the Ssd bottom door now though. We try to spec out of the factory with spare slots so we still have that option later, since the users are engineers they are happy and competent to fit upgrades that benefit them if they outgrow what we specified at the factory. Where as if I give the IT team 20 laptops and a load of ram and ssd to fit they won't look too pleased