Kaby Lake Precision pre-release discussion (5520 / 7520 / 7720)

I see that Dell have gone for an Nvidia M620 (30W) instead of the AMD W5130M (??W). The notebook manufacturers have a perpetual dilemma: Support AMD in order to keep a little pressure on Nvidia but then lose notebook sales as people opt for other products with faster GPUs.

John

 

Didn't even realize that these were available until now.
But really, it looks like a 15" Latitude with options for higher CPUs, and an optional low-end NVIDIA Quadro GPU.

I'm actually glad to see NVIDIA in there instead of AMD, which kept me from seriously considering the 3510. And it looks like you will always get USB-C, even though Thunderbolt is still an add-on.

 

One of my grumbles about Skylake Thunderbolt is the 2.5W to 3W increase in system power drain which occurs once anything is plugged into the USB-C port. Having no Thunderbolt on board should avoid this, or perhaps Kaby Lake Thunderbolt has much better power management.

I once tried disabling Thunderbolt in the BIOS on the 5510 to see if I could have the USB-C without the Thunderbolt but it bricked the computer and I had to call for a replacement mainboard. I haven't had the courage to find out the hard way if Dell has fixed this in one of the subsequent BIOS updates.

John

 

Toggling a BIOS switch bricked the system - wow - what an unpleasant time robbery...

Besides those bugs, I still have troubles to understand why the boot time (bios, not OS) is so long. Read about 20 to 40s in the 5xxx and 7xxx Precision series. Almost every piece of hardware gets faster in each iteration of the Precisions and suddenly the BIOS startup time increases?

My m6800 has about 3 to 5s of BIOS time.
Why would that increase so much?

The only new connectors seem USB-C and thunderbolt. Do they cause slow bootup?

Still hope it is "just" a slow or too serialized algorithm which can be redesigned to old snappiness.
All the hope to get near instant startup with fast SSDs seems busted with that BIOS slowlyness :-(

 

This is another issue where I was inclined to blame Thunderbolt and the need for the BIOS to figure out what is connected with a time-out when it tries each possibility. However, I recently bought a Latitude 7370 (which also has Thunderbolt) and that takes 9 seconds from pressing the power button to get to the Dell logo on the BIOS screen and a further 7 seconds to get to the Windows lock screen. I'm sure that the Precision could boot faster if a load of the options are disabled but after my 5510 bricking problem I'm discouraged from experimenting ( I believe that I could fix the bricking myself by clearing the NVRAM which involves disconnecting the CMOS battery which Dell conveniently put on the wrong side of the mainboard).

John

 

When is the official release date for the 7720? I have 2 7710's I am about to order and would prefer a Pascal video option instead of the M4000M.

 

See very first post...
Feb 28

 

lol

 

Anyone have any good coupons for a precision 5520? I've got SAVE35FWC but that ends up being just 5%.

 

The Precision 5520 owner's manual is now available and include specs (which aren't quite the same as those here). Other than the CPU / GPU and higher capacity (97Whr) 6 cell battery (same dimensions as the 5510's 84Whr battery) the differences from the 5510 are hard to spot.

John