Precision 7550 & 7750 Owners' Thread

No issue with mine, the palmrest touches the lid lip all the way around. Could you post a picture?

 

Thanks @SlurpJug for your quick response and kind help. Here are the snapshot of the unit I received. Clearly the lid is not closing properly. Should I contact Dell?

 

I can't really tell from this angle but it seems like the chassis or screen is bent if the center of the edge of the lid is touching the base. Could you provide a photo of the entire front edge of the machine?

Yes, I would definitely contact Dell about this and if the machine is under 30 days old (from the date you took delivery of it) you can request for a system exchange for a brand new one.

 

@SlurpJug Sorry for the bad quality pics. I received it yesterday only. So definitely I can ask for an exchange. Here is the full front view of the unit.

 

I followed this thread for a few weeks, and a couple of days ago I received my 7750 (i7-10875 CPU, T1000 GPU, 8GB stock ram and 64 GB samsung ram, 256 GB stock M2 and 1 TB 970 evo+). Here are my impressions:

Build quality:
The whole body is sturdy with a decent finish. The overall keyboard typing experience is pretty good. I actually believe it's close to or maybe better than my thinkpad p51. But Dell why you make the up and down arrows so small? I can also hear some noise coming from the hinge when closing the lid like other reviewers here complained. After I installed rams, I found there were some deep scratches on the metal edge Not sure if it's me made it, but come on this is metal.

Noise and temperature:
Under regular use, it's quiet. I use "CPU burn-in" to stress the CPU in linux environment. The fan didn't turn on at the beginning and then ran at a speed of ~3000 rpm. Average cpu temperature was ~75 degree with max 86 degree. Unfortunately, in win10 pro environment, under cinebench 20 stress, it was much louder but I can still take it and the temperature went up to 98 degree and later on stabilized at ~85 degree (CPU freq dropped to 3.6 G, see below).
The keyboard region is very warm regardless which OS I use. The region close to the screen is super warm, or maybe I shall say hot. And don't put the laptop on your legs, it's going to burn your legs.

CPU performance:
I chose the best non Xeon processor at the time I placed the order and I don't care about GPU. So after receiving the laptop I first stressed and bench marked the CPU: cinebench can score ~4100 for the first run and then dropped to ~3800-3900 later on. At the beginning, CPU power can draw 115-125 W, but finally stabilized to 75 W with a frequency of ~3.6 G. That can explained why the temperature hit 98 degree first but stabilized at ~85 degree later on. Surprisingly, CPU burn-in test in linux environment, CPU can keep a frequency of ~4.2 G even after more than 20 min! What's more, the temperature was 10 degree lower than ~3.6 G in WIN10 pro! I can't tell how much power it drew in the linux. Well, obviously we can't directly compare different test tools in different OS. But still I wonder WIN10 just sucks.

Maintenance:
The very first time I opened the bottom case I broke a small piece of plastic. What a pain to remove the bottom case. Later I realized the trick is opening from the smartcard region first if you have one smartcard slot. But still you should be very careful. Personally feel 7750 is more complicated to dissemble than my thinkpad p51 though p51 itself is not easy to dissemble either.

User experience:
The win10 out of box is so buggy as some people described many times in this thread. For instances:
It freezes for a few seconds once a while. You get to change some service setting.
In default, the precision 7750/7550 is set to modern standby and there is no performance power mode. So there is minimal settings you can change. After you change the modern standby s0 to traditional S3 in prompt. You can now get the full version of power settings. Next, you can choose power performance.

PCH and Thunderbolt3:
I talked about this because it has been a long lasting severe issues since 7730/7530. I am very concerned about the PCH temperature given that I heard many people's motherboard got burned due to this. During my test, performance mode indeed increased 20 degree for the temperature 2 (it's assumed PCH, and there is no reading in PCH section) . Luckily it's ~65 degree which it's acceptable not like other people's laptop reaching more than 90 degree (I even read some people post he got 105 degree in his 7740).I connected my note10+ to 7750 using type c to type c, and I didn't find any further increase. I don't have any thunderbolt 3 equipment in hand so I can't say for sure the temperature won't increase further. I notice the region close to thunderbolt 3 became very hot probably because of power delivery to my note10+. So the rumor might be true that charging you precision workstation using dual thunderbolt 3 dock can be kind of risk.
So for now, even I bought ARCTIC thermo pad but I didn't apply to the PCH since the design makes it very hard to make a direct touch and the temperature is not extremely terrible.

Support:
My phone got hanged up twice consecutively by dell support agents when I tried to check my order status. What's wrong with those order support teams. But I hear many praises here about their warranty support. I purchased 5 years pro support. But I hope I don't need to use it.
I was told Dell supports linux better than hp and lenovo. It's partially true according to supported computers in ubuntu website. But Dell fails to provide driver support to IR camera and fingerprint even for factory installed version.

Last one: I hear people joke if your buy a dell display with a strong light leak you get a genuine dell display. It looks like true for the dell ultrasharp display I purchased before. But for the screen of my 7750, the very first time I powered on I noticed there is a half-egg size light leak just on the right middle edge. It's probably not considered as a quality issue but it makes me feel: it's a $3000 laptop! OK, accept the fact.

 

This is the key point. If you are achieving 4.2 GHz with a temperature of 85 °C, then your benchmark tool of choice (which you haven't mentioned) is not hitting the CPU hard enough. Intel 14 nm CPUs with 8 cores or more run really hot and draw plenty of power, so if you are seeing these results, it's not that 'Win 10 sucks' (it has its issues, but this is irrelevant), it's that you cannot use different benchmark tools to compare performance across OSes.

I suggest using mprime on Linux, and the equivalent Prime95 on Windows. Cinebench works well as well, especially R20, because it hits the AVX extensions on the CPU hard.

 

I actually mentioned the tool I used in linux: CPU burn-in. I am not an expert on this. But as far as I know it uses FPU to stress the CPU which is the same as in AID64. I am not sure if it uses AVX.

 

Not sure what this means. I don't know about the standalone monitors, but Dell doesn't produce any of the displays for their laptops, they are all sourced from third-parties (Sharp, LG, AUO, CMO). You can use Hwinfo64 or MonInfo to see some information about which panel you have.

 

My bad, I never realised this was the name of the benchmark itself. That said, it looks quite old—latest Windows versions supported is Win2K? Consider using modern Linux benchmarks—Phoronix has a great test suite that's regularly updated.

 

Right, dell doesn't produce any panel. But the panel dell choose for some reason tends to leak. This is a well known issue I learned from another forum.