Latitude vs Precision

There is a reason why there are so few 14'' or smaller laptops with normal voltage CPUs. Even Alienware 13 used ULV processors. Why? Because one cannot talk about performance and consistency and most importantly CPU lifespan without properly handling the heat, and to achieve that, a lot of work needs to be done in such a small chassis. If you check pictures of the insides of either e5470 or t460p you'll notice how weak their cooling systems are, and this is very blatantly reflected in their numbers under load. Obviously Dell just put the HQ processor in a system designed for ULV, down-configured the TDP and called it a day. And I have no idea what Lenovo was doing with T460p, considering how it's supposed to be an independent model designed for HQ with dGPU.

I've seen very few such models with legit (or at least close to legit) cooling solutions. Most of them are high end gaming laptops: GS30 and GS40 from MSI, for example, and they are still quite warm, because MSI had to trade off their surface temperatures for core temperatures.

Now although XPS 15 and Precision 5510 are supposed to be 15 inchers, thanks to infinity edge the only difference between them and 14 inchers is that they are 1.7cm wider. Google/Youtube their insides and you'll see they are equipped with much better cooling systems than e5470 and T460p. If you were looking for an HQ laptop without dGPU I'd say the latter two could still manage, but if you want an HQ processor, dGPU, sturdy chassis and compact size, IMHO you have to pay that extra 1.7cm in width for what you want.

 

Can a Mac tax the CPU and GPU simultaneously while plugged in without also draining the battery because the PSU is underpowered?

 

Unless something has changed in the latest models, a MacBook Pro will actually drain the battery while plugged in if both CPU and GPU are under high load. 85W is simply not enough to power everything at full load. If the battery is completely drained, speeds will be throttled.

Not sure why they don't at least offer a larger PSU to avoid this. Guess they don't want people complaining that

 

You're taking a more general point from what I said; I have no general point to make about "the creative field," just specifically about the case of Photoshop (although I have the second hand impression that the lack of HiDPI support was broadly across Adobe's lineup.) Adobe has been supporting "retina" for years on those, while it only officially got HiDPI support on Windows a little over a year ago (the 2014 release of Photoshop CC having an "experimental feature" not supported in half the plugins and which worked a bit "oddly" overall; the 2015 releases just work.)

You can calibrate the Dell IGZO screens, and they're very very good -- better than anything else Dell has offered, and the first-generation M3800/XPS 15 9530 one was a much cheaper upgrade than the prior premium-IPS screen upgrades on the Precision lines (the upgrade seems a bit dearer in the present generation. )

The availability of 16:10 screens is also a unique option on the Mac (barring the even better 3:2 screen on the otherwise rather useless Chromebook Pixel.)

It doesn't help that 14" machines are much thinner than they used to be. The E6420/E6430 were great machines, but they (and the E6400/E6410) were a little chunky even by the standards of 7-8 years ago when the E6400 was introduced (set one next to an D630!) and the E6420 got chunkier when everybody else was starting to slim down.

The other thing that has changes is that there are no longer any full-wattage dual core mobile CPUs, which were the standard up through Ivy Bridge (and which existed, but didn't sell much, on Haswell; Broadwell-H shipped so late I never paid any attention to what they released.)

The cooling system itself in the 5470 does not seem all that different from the E6420/E6430, and both of those had quad core CPUs with very little throttling on the E6420 and essentially none on the E6430. Greater heat dissipation from the larger chassis itself seems to be a bigger deal. That said, the amount of lower speed from the TDP-down configuration on the 5470 seems to be quite limited, and the speeds on the (Intel-specified) lower-TDP Haswell part in the M3800/XPS 9530 (i7-4702/4712HQ) was quite acceptable, and that was in a 15" machine to boot.

Granted, I've got the non-dGPU version; I'd have been buying non-dGPU as far back as the E6430 if they'd have sold me the quad core processor without it.

And just a touch heavier, and missing some of the business-facing features -- and quite a bit more expensive in many configurations (although it's hard to compare apples to apples on it.) The lack of built-in ethernet or real docking won't matter to most, but if you need them, you need them, and the keyboard differences also favor the Latitudes.

I also hope the Precision 5510 holds up physically better than the M3800 did. The M3800 seemed really nice when it was new, but I haven't hit a business laptop that fragile in a long time.

 

By weak cooling systems I meant a single, long, thin, unnaturally curved heatpipe, and a single small fan. It's particularly evident in e5470. I don't know if they will add a second heatpipe for dGPU version but according to the pic in the notebookcheck review there doesn't really seem to be enough space for that. And by "numbers" I meant the tendency of their cores to go straight up to ~95 degree celsius in stress tests. 5510 has two heatpipes leading to a fan on each end, and performed much better in similar tests. Although it's unlikely that these laptops will be used for gaming, I still believe a better cooling solution will help a lot regarding longevity.

 

To be fair, the 460p has a revised cooling system with dual heatpipes for the dGPU variant according to notebookcheck. In fact, their conclusion was that this is acceptable in a notebook.

I'm willing to take the slight performance hit for a quad core + dGPU HiDPI 14". Looks like the screen is great on the TP too. Thanks for the heads up Handy, I would've never found the 460p otherwise and would've probably bought a ULV Latitude. Honestly, it would probably be just as nice.

In terms of longevity, I can only speak from personal experience. The Pentium 4-M they stuffed inside the C640 had a reputation for heating up ridiculously. The temps on my Latitude regularly hovered around 80-90 when not doing much of anything, and went even higher when the graphics card (which has its own fan) starts up, even since new (and the fans are clean etc.) Computer still works fine after 14 hard years. Granted, I mostly used a current desktop for the heavier stuff back then, but the Latitude still did some complex work.

Interesting insights about Mac btw. The Retina display really was very nice for the time.

 

Apples555 - you're very welcome. If you end up posting a review in the T460p thread, consider dropping a link here; I'd be curious as to your thoughts without letting this thread drift too far. I was very interested in those, but I didn't need the GPU and the portability on the GPU-less E5470 ended up being the determining factor for me.

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FWIW, I finally brought my M5510 home from work, and weighed it and re-weighed the E5470 (given that it's a cruddy kitchen scale, figured better safe -- and it did vary by about a half ounce from last time):
E5470 - 4lb 1 3/8oz
M5510 - 4lb 3 3/8oz

Which for 2 more battery cells and a 1.6" larger screen (15.6 vs. 14.0) is pretty impressively small difference... especially as thus far it feels sturdier than my M3800 did. Then again, the fragility of the M3800 was not obvious initially.

I was running some very heavy parallel builds on the E5470 last night (among them LLVM upgrading itself from 3.7.x to 3.8.0), and it dipped down to about 2.8ghz -- interesting to see that on a modern machine that one of the tight-loop mathematical burn in programs actually was EASIER on the system then a big enough compilation.

It still finishes builds for work faster than my M3800 did (and not appreciably slower than the M5510) so I'm very happy.

 

...Even though the stress by Prime95 and FurMark is not that common in practice and represents a worst-case scenario, the results are still too high; there is hardly any headroom for a dusty fan or high ambient temperatures...

...We can also see high temperatures of the processor and the graphics card inside the notebook, because the sensors show core temperatures of up to 89 °C (GPU) and 98 °C (CPU), respectively...

...One point cannot be compensated for that easily: With aging thermal paste and dusty fans, there can be throttling as well as inconveniently warm surface temperatures even when you do not use synthetic stress tools. You might argue that this problem is much smaller in practice – but who buys a device like the T460p if you do not want to use the performance?...

...CPU temperatures close to 100 °C show what users can expect during the summer...

These are from their review of T460p with i7 and dGPU. It doesn't read very acceptable to me. And since T460p does seem to have a bigger fan than E5470 (the rest of their cooling systems are very similar, except that I don't know if E5470 also has room for the second heatpipe for dGPU; it probably does though), this gives an idea of the scenario with a fully equipped E5470.

Yes, at the end of the day longetivity is a dice-rolling game. It's certainly possible that a random i7-stuffed consumer grade model can outlast an M7710. My point all along was that stable performance and compactness are at different ends of the compromise scale, so there is no perfect machine for your needs. Eventually the balance point taken is up to the buyers themselves.

 

Peak performance and compactness certainly are; I'm not sure that it really has much impact today on stability or longevity. The quad core version of the E6430 ran quite hot with cooling that looks an awful lot like the E5470 -- and which had a dGPU, and a full 45W processor rather than a downrated one. Great machines; the larger E6530 did not run substantially cooler or show any improved performance.

I haven't checked, but how are the 1st-generation 14" Razer Blades holding up? THOSE were some scary-hot systems.

The cost difference between the Latitudes and Precisions (compounded by the relative rarity of decent configurations of the latter on the Outlet) is going to be a big issue for many folks, and even for those who can afford the difference, it may make more sense to spend more now and upgrade sooner. Especially with the crowd here; anyone comfortable swapping RAM or an SSD can vacuum out a fan, and many folks here can re-paste a CPU. Alternatively, if heat goes up and performance goes down over time, with better grades of service and the right magic words, you can get Dell support to dispatch someone send a new heat sink, fan, and re-paste it for you (and that higher support is nowhere near as expensive as the cost difference for moving up to the M5510.)

Granted, if you want the best possible everything, you can get it (M7510 or M7710, or Lenovo P, or Alienware or one of the other gaming systems on the consumer side) but the incremental difference in performance and durability comes at a high cost both in weight and dollars (or your local currency.)

 

Guys, on the power I have used the Dell 45W power block on my M3800 in aircraft and it MAINTAINS the charge....

I am considering the 3510... any reason to prefer the Xeon1505 over the 6820.... I do a lot of number crunching. It would at least be a change....

I have always gone with the M series rather than Latitudes as I think the build quality/reliability is better IMHO.... we still have 3 M2400s running.... not so good on Windows 10 though...