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

Why is the UHD screen not compatible with a single DIMM of memory? That seems odd.


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7720 is up on the US site as well.
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-17-7720-laptop/pd?oc=xctop772017_us_sapp&ref=PD_Family

And that starting price is quite high. It was supposed to be $1,699...
It sort of looks like that the "default discount" of around 30% that is usually applied has not been applied to this model yet.
[Edit] - The discount has been applied, it is $1,699 now.

It sounds like DP 1.4 is only supported with NVIDIA Pascal GPUs, not the Maxwell ones. 7520 only comes with Maxwell GPUs. I don't think that you will see DP 1.4 until the next generation, next year... Dell does not typically refresh the GPUs available mid-cycle.

 

OK... the ~$1350 starting price on the 7520 is a little more reasonable now that an instant savings that just appeared. It was like $1900 this morning with an i5.

Where is the BT 4.2 option? Only 4.1.

 

I just noticed that the 7720 comes with the bottom-end Quadro M1200 GPU by default, the same one that is available in the 7520. This is a first, usually the 15" and 17" systems have a fully separate set of available GPUs.

 

No Win 7 option for the 7720?

 

This is expected. You can't run Windows 7 on the Intel 7th gen CPUs. (Well you can, but Microsoft is not supporting it and they will soon be actively blocking updates.) Dell will make 6th gen CPUs available with the Windows 7 option, sometime next quarter.

 

I (currently) like that nvidia is the cheapest base option: my m6800 was bought with the cheapest dGPU which was AMD m6100 at that time as I don't care much about dGPU for my dev work cases. But going from Win 8.x to 10 was a nightmare when GPU (d and i) drivers got auto installed from Windows Update. Some broke "only" multi monitor support, some left me with a black laptop display. IIRC I could attach an old VGA monitor to get some output or use save mode to replace drivers with older Win 8.x versions (some old Intel and AMD combinations partly worked) and fiddle to block WU from auto updating those drivers again. Final solution was to go from AMD to nvidia. Nice side effect was longer battery time. Seems Optimus works better in the m6800 than AMD PowerPlay.

Not saying that nvidia drivers cannot cause those bad effects either. So I am eagerly watching for reviews how the dGPUs behave when used with enabled iGPU for hybrid graphics

 

I had similar issues with my 7710 AMD dGPU; switching didn't work properly in Win 7 and had other issues as well. Swapped out the unit for an Nvidia m5000 and haven't looked back. IMHO AMD is unreliable.

 

Did you try Win 10 with AMD dGPU before the switch to Nvidia?

I can partly understand the troubles to fix GPU drivers for Win10 for an m6800 which came tested against Win 7 first.

But 7710 and now 7720 come with Win 10. So it would be interesting to hear if anybody has troubles with hybrid graphics based on Intel+AMD or Intel+Nvidia on Windows 10.

Is Win7 a Dell supported version for 7710 and/or 7720?
New 7720 config sites show only Win10 and Ubuntu 16.04.

 

Windows 7 is supported on the 7710. It will only be supported on the 7720 with Intel 6th gen (Skylake) CPUs, which won't be available as a choice until sometime in Q2. Microsoft is trying hard to boot people up to Windows 10, and as I mentioned above, they will soon be disabling Windows Update for Kaby Lake users on Windows 7.

Side note, I've always had trouble with ATI/AMD graphics whenever I went with them, so I go NVIDIA whenever possible. (However, I also know people who have had the opposite experience.)