Hands on Dell Precision 7710

If you're talking about the generous "discount" they offer you compared to a "starting price" when you configure the machine... that's been there for all machines as long as I've been using Dell, you shouldn't pay attention to anything but the final price. I'm quite sure that the Thunderbolt option will carry a similar discount. I think its purpose (aside from making you think you're getting a better deal) is so that they can take it away when you apply some other sort of coupon or promotion (sorry, doesn't stack with other deals!) --- that makes the 35% off code they're offering on some PCs now more like 8% off in reality.

 

Yea, found that one out as well. Went to apply 10% military discount, and doesn't apply. But I've never seen this big of a discount, just shy of $1000 US.

Plus ship time is 4 days, I'm sure once thunderbolts come, it'll go back to the normal 1-2 months.

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@mr_handy @LouieAtienza
Thank you both guys for your answer.

"Sure" conclusions:

- yes for IGZO 4k panel. (I had doubts 'cause some users, in Italy, for 7510 15" panel, had some problems in visual angles, so I tought the 17" could be "poor" from this point of view)

- cpu. I understand i7 is ok for my purpose. The difference with the Xeon is only the 0,2 ghz of frequency. I believed Xeon has more advantages of dedicated instructions useful for software like lightroom and photoshop or video editing 4k software.

- RAM. Ok, no ECC.

- graphics. My sensation too is photoshop/lightroom does not take any advantage from Quadro vs consumer GPU...

- HDD. My idea too is to take after the purchase an M2 disk, saving money.


Ciao!

 

I used my military discount but I had to call them and give them a little grief about it. Saved me 350 dollars... Just make sure you have an ID.me acct and use this coupon: https://www.id.me/stores/508-dell
Add your laptop to the cart at DELL, use the Military discount code, but when it fails call them and complain

 

That's what I was thinking about doing, but I'm cheap. So if it worked for you, I will do the same. Thanks. And yes, signed up for. Id. It was a pain getting the service date to be accepted. Had to find the exact middle of service month, but it's good now.

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As far as I know, the Xeon on the CPU side has the exact same instruction set as the i7. The only differences are the clock tunings (aside from the 0.2ghz maximum speed, the turbo bins and/or extended TDP time may be slightly better) and the ability to use ECC RAM.

The iGPU on the Xeon may have slightly different support for double-precision and/or for OpenGL acceleration ("P530" vs "530" integrated graphics) which is very much like the GeForce vs. Quadro distinction, but on a machine like the 7710 you will have a big enough dGPU that it's kind of irrelevant.

 

It was my impression that the xeon didn't have or support integrated? Is this not the case.
I remember reading about Intel quick sync not being supported by xeon due to lack of integrated.

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Totally depends on which Xeon -- tl;dr below, the new mobile Xeons all have processor graphics.

For desktop Xeon E3 processors, some support integrated graphics, some don't:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/88177,88174

As far as I know, none of the desktop/server Xeon E5 processors support integrated graphics. ( http://ark.intel.com/products/82763/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-1620-v3-10M-Cache-3_50-GHz for example.)

Both of the currently-available Mobile Xeons support processor graphics:
http://ark.intel.com/compare/88970,89610,89608
There's also a not-formally-announced version with the P580 (Iris Pro/GT4e with 128MB eDRAM) which has been discussed enough to know that it's coming sometime fairly soon. Remains to be seen which machines if any Dell will use it in.

What the difference is, if any, between the regular Iris HD 530 (i7) and the Iris HD P530 (Xeon) graphics, I couldn't tell you. The distinction is new to this generation.

 

Ok, that's clear @mr_handy thank you!
so it's really not relevant to get Xeon instead of i7.

Question about storage: actually on my 6700 I can mount 4 hard disk: 2 x 2.5" bay sata3, 1 x 2.5" sata2 (removing cdrom unit), 1 x 1.8" mSata (sata2 !! :-( )
From 7710 manual I've downloaded, I can't understand exactly what I can do. (and in the 7510 ?)

thanks

Ciao

 

RMA'ing my second 7710... not good.
Both had uncontrollable BSOB with BAD_POOL_HEADER