Dell Precision 7560 & Precision 7760 pre-release discussion

I ordered my 7760 with a single 256GB Gen 3 PCIe drive. It was delivered as a Kioxia 2230 drive in the middle PCIe 3.0 M.2 location. I did order my machine with the M.2 SSD door. Not sure if that influences the location where the included drive is installed.

 

Thanks.

No, but I already had the other 3 drives which are all gen 3.

I wouldn't have thought gen 3 vs gen 4 makes too much difference in real world usage does it? I only occasionally move large amounts of data, so I'm thinking that for any general working (I do a lot of CAD and 3D scan processing) the GPU and CPU limit the general working speed?

 

It really just depends on your workload. You'd be able to load large batches of data into memory more quickly, but PCIe3 is not exactly slow, so you might not even notice unless you're dealing with very large files or data sets. I think database work or video editing are places where you might see it? Moving data between drives obviously wouldn't be any faster unless you had two PCIe4 drives.

 

Per the manual, the Gen 4 Slot does not support the 2230 so that is probably why it is in one of the other slots. I believe if you order any 2280 it will come in the Gen 4 Slot.

Here is from the manuals

7560

Slot 3 Primary
Slot 4 Secondary
Slot 5 Primary

"Slot 3 and slot 5 supports PCIe Gen3, Optane, and SATA Solid-state drive."

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"

7760

Slot 3 Primary
Slot 4 Primary
Slot 5 Primary
Slot 6 Secondary

“Slot 3, slot 4, and slot 5 supports PCIe Gen3, Optane, and SATA Solid-state drive.”

Slot 6 “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.”

 

Huh, why would a 2230 drive not work? The only difference is the physical size. The system shouldn't care what size the card is if its communication is the same.

 

Maybe the Gen 4 slot does not have a screw hole for the shorter 2230? Looking at the service manual for the installation of the 2230, there is a screw at the end of the shorter 2230.

 

The 2230 drive comes installed in an adapter for 2280 length installations. It can just as easily fit in the Gen 4 slot as it does the Gen 3 slot.

 

I was thinking that in general read speeds are faster than their write speeds, so Gen3 >> Gen4 might be faster than Gen3 >> Gen3, but only if the Gen4 write was faster than the Gen3 read.

I only do a bit of very light video editing. Most of the work I do with large files is 3D scan/point cloud processing. During the processing the GPU or CPU (depending on the stage of processing) is generally maxed out to 100%, so I wouldn't have thought the speed of a Gen3 drive is restricting anything...?

 

Yeah, probably not, if you have a clear CPU/GPU bottleneck then a faster drive won't help much.

 

It looks like the 7760 just went on sale today for almost $1500 CDN off. This might be the time to upgrade from my 7730.

Does anyone have advice about the screen options? I'm a full time photographer but I use an external monitor 90% of the time. The other 10% is when I'm on the road, and that's pretty much the only time I use the laptop panel.