Latitude 7470 Owners' Thread

I've also looked at the E5470 with quad core CPU, but I would like a lighter and sleeker laptop to be easier to carry. Unfortunately my employer does not provide laptops for developers, only desktops at the office. Currently I do only occasional development at home, mostly small J2EE learning projects so I hope a low voltage CPU will be enough for these needs as I haven't seen any ultra-book with quad core CPUs. I also have an I5 Skylake desktop at home if something bigger comes along.

Does anyone have any recent experiences of buying a refurbished laptop from Dell Outlet website? Would you recommend buying a refurbished laptop from them ? Could it have display defects like dead or stuck pixels ? If it happens, would it be covered by the warranty ? I know that many manufacturers would not cover a display replacement if it has only 1 or 2 dead pixels.

 

Is the Java compilation multi-threaded? If it is then the extra cores will make much more difference than a nominally faster CPU. And if it isn't then many of the quad core CPUs will out-run the dual core CPUs when running one or two threads. That's the case with my new E5570 with the i5-6440HQ.

While the E7470 is thinner and a bit lighter than the E5470 one feature which had me considering the latter (until I decided to get a bigger screen) was that the E5470 has a much better quality fan than the E7470. I spend much of my time working at home and have become very sensitive to fan noise which is why the E7440 was replaced by the dGPU version of the E7450.

My E7450 and the E5570 both came from Dell Outlet (and several others in years before them). The former has behaved impeccably. The latter was sold as scratch and dent and, while the scratches were barely visible, the computer had a seriously problem of it freezing and the display gradually changing from a light purple tint to black. I also established that an external display lost its signal when the problem occurred (the computer would run again for a while after a restart) and then had a fairly long chat with Dell support which resulted in a technician coming to change the mainboard, display and display cable.

Bad pixels are now a rarity and it's several years since I last had one to look at and I think it took me several months to realise that a small black dot was not a speck of dust. Dell's business support is good and, in the unlikely event that you get a bad pixel or more in a place which annoys you then they will arrange for a screen replacement.

John

 

Last year, I've returned 3 new Asus multimedia laptops with IPS displays (N551 series) that all had bad pixels and/or backlight bleeding, that's why I'm a bit concerned about this aspect, but I hope display quality control is more strict at Dell business laptops.

 

Makes sense; the difference in thickness and weight between the E7470 and the E5470 isn't huge in absolute terms (about a half to 3/4 of a pound) but as relative weights it's a pretty big difference. A fairly average quad core desktop -- assuming it's got enough memory and an SSD -- is still going to do better than even a high end laptop.

I've generally had a better experience with Outlet refurbished machines than brand new ones; they are checked over very carefully, whereas two of the recent machines I bought

Java compilation is multi-threaded by default on the two more common modern build systems (Maven, Gradle) but until your projects get big the actual multi-threaded compilation time will be dwarfed by artifact-related overhead (downloading, packaging and deploying things.) Ditto running tests (although you can often set those to run in parallel.)

OTOH, IntelliJ runs multithreaded and between UI, index rebuilds, compiles, probably a local DB server (for J2EE), and debugging applications themselves it's pretty easy to take advantage of a quad core. (Even worse with Android, where you're running code in an emulator.)

 

Hi (and sorry for my english - not my native language),

I consider to have a 7470 (i5-6300U, FHD non-touch, 1x8GB, 256GB SATA SSD, W7 Pro & W10, 5Y NBD).
After talking to a Dell reseller here in Greece I got the information that 7440 is offered with SATA SSD only. Mvalpreda said that he got his Latitude with NVMe SSD, which I prefer for obvious reasons.
So how someone could order such a machine? (I think that Dell's US site is also offering 7470 solely with SATA SSD).

Thanks!

 

Premier shows the following NVMe options for drives
[*] M.2 256GB PCIe NVMe Class 40 Solid State Drive
[*] M.2 512GB PCIe NVMe Class 40 Solid State Drive
(among quite a few others)

Dell's public (US) web site shows the following options for drives:

[*] M.2 256GB SATA Class 20 Solid State Drive [add $105.00]
[*] M.2 256GB PCIe NVMe Class 40 Solid State Drive [add $189.00]
[*] M.2 512GB PCIe NVMe Class 40 Solid State Drive [add $385.00]
[*] M.2 512GB SATA Class 20 Solid State Drive [add $329.00]
[*] M.2 128GB SATA Class 20 Solid State Drive [Included in Price]
(the list on premier was longer, notably including self-encrypting drives)

Unfortunately, unless you want to order a US machine to a forwarding service (and pay in dollars to Dell, plus their shipping costs, plus almost certainly some level of EU VAT or duty on your end -- and end up with a US keyboard) I have no idea how to get those customization options in any other country.

 

I managed to order a refurbished Dell 7470 from the Dell Outlet US through a family member that lives in the US (I live in Eastern Europe). He will visit me next month and bring the laptop to me.

When I check the order status and show the configuration of the laptop, it appears that it's equipped with the AUO display variant.

From your experience, is the AUO display better or worse than the LG one ?

Too bad that the E7470 doesn't come with a USB-C port. Even cheap home user laptops start to come with such ports. This will be more and more a disadvantage in the following years as more and more smartphones will ship with USB-C connectors. Didn't really think about this aspect before ordering, so I will have to live with it.

 

The AUO panel has slightly better colour rendering but the panel I had in my E7440 had an over-generous anti glare coating which resulted in a slightly sparkly image. Consequently, the LG panel, with its less agressive anti-glare coating is better to look at in spite of slightly works colour rendering. Maybe AUO have now adjusted the coating - I've no complaints about quality of the AUO panel in my E5570.

However, you may find that the component list isn't completely accurate in this respect. The configuration list for my E7450 said AUO but I received LG while the list for my E5570 said Legend and the panel was AUO (and the list said a Samsung SSD but the one in the computer was a Liteon).

John

 

Seems that if I want NVMe I have to find a way to ship it to Greece or I have to suffice to SATA.

Anyway, thanks for your time and effort. Really appreciated!

 

Hey guys, I have one question for 7470. I guess it has this Alps touchpad and it makes me some trouble. How do you go back while sufing web? For me the two finger swipe back does not work so I use Backspace key which is lame. Do you have same problem?