new Dell Precision 5510 (Twin of XPS15)

I'd suggest wait for the thunderbolt docking station, it will come with a power adapter. That's what I planned.

 

keyboard seems to be XPS 15 / P5510 's achilles heal. its idiotic that dont have dedicated hope and end buttons for a professional laptop. how much did Dell save with the crappy keyboard $2 per laptop ?

not to mention both Surface's ultrathin type cover and 15" Laptop's keyboard have the same 1.3 mm travel :/

 

Where did you order it from in Europe? I am struggling to find a distributer. The only one I found is mtx-computer.eu and the minimum configuration is around 1800€...

 

You can order from Dell

 

Can any of the owners confirm that if I go with 500GB HDD route I will be able to switch to M2 SSD as main disk space + add additional SSD?

 

yeah, I feel like I got fleeced paying extra for 5510 over xps15. hardly any difference at all. Xeon is just a branding trick for stupid people like me. and the keyboard sucks rocks--double keys frequently and the space bar squeaks all the time like a $300 laptop. can't believe I am thinking of returning a $5000 laptop but sheesh.

 

You paid $5,000? That is crazy

 

Well I won't say the Xeon is a gimmick... But it's really only beneficial if your application demands it, and Precision is only beneficial if you need discrete graphics with ISV certification or you run only OpenGL apps. It's not a branding trick really; if you MUST have 100% data integrity for data critical apps, maximum protection from system crashes during intense computations, or very high accuracy visuals and renderings for certain industries, then you would likely get the Xeon. The Xeon is only 100MHz faster than the i7-6920, and you incur a (very slight) penalty for using ECC DRAM. The memory bandwidth on both are the same IIRC. The Xeon name would infer multi-CPU support but I highly doubt we'll see that in a 5510 (or even a 7710) at least not in the near future. On gaming and multimedia notebooks the occasional crash or such is "tolerated" in exchange for higher performance.

For some applications, one incorrect bit in a block can spell disaster. For Fallout4 it may mean a slight glitch in gameplay or graphics. In that sense, if all you're doing is programming (unless you're developing high-end graphics software) it doesn't make sense to get the Precision, as you won't need ECC memory, nor need the double-precision FPU of the Quadro graphics (unless you're developing applications utilizing OpenCL and the Cuda cores.)

So maybe not fleeced, but maybe there isn't as much explanation concerning the two machines. If you do not benefit from the utilization of the features of the Precision, then I don't think there's any difference at all. Heck even the P530 integrated graphics of the Xeon has the same exact specs as the 530 of the i7. Also the memory controller (for a couple generations already) resides in the CPU so you should be able to use 16GB SODIMM on either machine, as I believe some people have done so already.

 

Just FYI the Dell rep posted earlier, mentioning that they do not support ECC RAM on the 5510 with Xeon.

 

Yes I did not forget about that debacle.... IIRC the ECC SODIMM is 260-pin, same as non-ECC SODIMM. The memory controller is on-chip in the Xeon, and DISABLED in the i7. I'm not guaranteeing functionality, but I would bet that it would. I bet they'd tell you the 950 PRO NVMe is not supported as well. Heck, they might even tell a new customer right now that 16GB is the max supported on the XPS15; I just checked right now and you can't even configure one with more than 8GB. We all know that 16GB SODIMMs are around and installed, though officially "not supported."

Regardless, it's pretty much useless for the majority of us, which in turn makes Xeon useless. I did make a mistake in saying the Xeon has a 100MHz speed advantage, as it actually is 200MHz. Maybe that alone may be a benefit for some, but a 23% premium on the CPU for 5% speed gain that you may or may not see, with the added benefit of no "official" support for ECC?! What?!