Dell Precision 7560 & Precision 7760 pre-release discussion

No, I've not noticed any difference but admittedly, I don't have a good reference as I'm coming from a 7710 with 960 Pro drives so everything I'm doing on the new 7760 is significantly faster by comparison. ...and yes, this is more future proofing but frankly, I managed to snag them at a nice discount via an Amazon Prime deal so from a cost perspective, it was almost a wash over optimizing the drives (using Gen 3s) to the 7760's capabilities.

 

Interesting.

I got my new 7760 but I hadn't noticed in the specs that there was only one PCIe4 NVMe slot and three PCIe3 NVMe slots.

I have two samsung 980 pro ssds on order. One for OS drive and one for photos.

I just looked at the service manual, and am curious. It appears the PCIe4 slot is labeled the "M.2 2280 PCIe 4 secondary Solid-state drive (slot 6)"

And the PCIe3 slots are labeled "M.2 2280 primary Solid-state drive (slot 3, slot 4 and slot 5)"

Why is the fastest slot labeled the "secondary" solid state drive slot?

 

Dunno why they labeled it this way in the manual. Now that I have a system, I can say that in the BIOS the PCIe4 slot shows up as drive 0 and the others show up as drives 1 and 2.

 

I'm planning to put my windows os drive in the pcie4 slot and my photo editing drive in the pcie3 slot. Would there be a reason to reverse this and run the os drive in the pcie3 slot and the data drive in the pcie4 slot?

 

I think you're good. Photo editing isn't that storage heavy (compared to say video editing) so you'd probably benefit more from a faster OS/program drive.

 

Thanks! It looks like the 980 pro will still perform at 3,500MB/s read and up to 3,450MB/s write speed in the three PCIe3 slots which is pretty respectable. I have a couple days to ponder it before they arrive, but that is probably the way I'll go. Thanks!

 

I ordered a 7560 with Xeon and UHD on 7/6. It has an estimated ship date of 8/12. It is still not in the production phase. I chatted with order support and they noted it is waiting on the UHD but should still ship 8/12. Sales rep does not have any better information that what is on the order page. Based on the time from entering production to shipping on my 7760 (7/5 to 7/21), I do not believe this 7560 will ship by 8/12, although I am hoping.

Anyone else with an order before 7/6 that is confirmed but still not in production?

thanks.

 

The answer partly depends on your photo editing workflow and the specific tools you use. I suggest you benchmark both configurations using an important long running process.

I set my camera to save raw files. I edit in Lightroom. This results in an early workflow step that builds full size JPEG previews for all newly imported raw files, a potentially lengthy process that keeps a drive busy. I benchmarked my desktop (8TB rotating drive, I9 at 3.6GHz, GeForce GTX 670 video card) against my 7560 (I9-11950H at 5GHz, the A2000 video card, and a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro in the PCIe4 position) by importing a collection of about 300 20 megapixel (5472x3648) raw files into a new catalog on each machine. The desktop needed 5 minutes to generate the preview files, but the laptop needed only 3.

 

I ordered my 7760 with just one drive (bought the other three separately). Does that mean the one it came with (with the OS on) will be in the PCIe4 slot? If so, I guess I wasted it as I only ordered a PCIe3 drive:
"M.2 2280 1 TB, Gen 3 PCIe x4 NVMe, SSD"

Oh well.

 

It will most likely be in the PCIe4 slot. Nothing stopping you from moving it to a different slot and installing a PCIe4 drive, though.