Precision 7550 & 7750 Owners' Thread

This appears to be due to a massive discount applied on the pre-built model: it’s nearly US$6000 without said discounts.

I agree though, this looks like a fairly sweet deal. Still, I wouldn’t recommend anyone purchase these: best to get a previous-gen workstation and get a steep discount, because next year we have Quadro Ampere, (possibly) Ryzen Pro, DDR5, PCIe 5.0, etc etc...

 

Lenovo is one of the top-tier workstation manufacturers (along with Dell and HP) so definitely someone to keep an eye on for this sort of laptop. In the past they have generally had poorer cooling performance compared to Dell but maybe they have improved that. I often hear people who are especially security conscious often recommend against Lenovo because of their ties to China, and they've also been caught bundling SSL MITM injection stuff before. I have no feel for how good their support is... And I can't get over how they like to put the Fn key in the very bottom-left corner of the keyboard instead of the Ctrl key (though apparently there is a BIOS option to swap these keys).

DDR5 will not appear in mobile workstations until 2022 most likely — Intel's 11th-gen Tiger Lake / Rocket Lake will not support DDR5 and there is no indication that the immediate next-gen Ryzen CPUs will either. (Tiger Lake does support LPDDR5 but you don't see that in mobile workstations, it's soldered on so no one would want to put it in a system like this.) PCIe 5 might be even further out than that — we don't even have PCIe 4 in laptops yet... AMD is not supporting it on their current mobile platform even though their desktop platform does support it, and implementing PCIe 4 in laptops is reportedly already a little bit tricky.

Tiger Lake H will give a big boost to CPU performance/efficiency on the Intel side (not clear when Ryzen Pro will make it to the top-end mobile workstation space), and Ampere Quadros seem like a sure thing, so 2021 could be a good year to buy a new system. I'm very intrigued by Alder Lake (not only for DDR5 support, but the big/little hybrid architecture is very interesting) so I'm thinking that I'll be waiting one more year...

 

Agreed: Lenovo is a high-volume business supplier. My peers in the education and healthcare industries have all been provided with ThinkPads.

At least as far as Singapore goes, not great. We received a lemon ThinkPad X13 (with the Ryzen 4750U) a week ago, and the display developed a crack about 3 days after delivery (laptop was on a desk throughout, and not mishandled in any way): support said that because it worked fine the first three days, this would not be covered under warranty. We asked again anyway, and a technician turned up at our doorstep (practically unannounced), and replaced the display. The new display also developed a crack at precisely the same spot when the technician was still working on the laptop. Calling support after hours didn't help, because there is no 24/7 line, unlike Dell.

This is a concern I tend to have.

Pardon me, I meant PCIe 4.0. At the very least we will be getting a GPU upgrade next year. However, I am apprehensive: given how power-guzzling the desktop RTX 3000-series cards are, I think the notebook chips will return to the days of M-prefixed GPUs, or maybe NVidia will pull a fast one: put 10000 cores in a GPU, call it the 8000-series Quadro, but put a power limit of 80 W, and it hence performs no better than an RTX 2070 desktop (a good leap, yes, but not comparable to the RTX 3080 or 3090).

 

I liked it better when NVIDIA clearly differentiated the mobile and desktop GPUs with the "M" at the end of the model name but I don't really expect for them to return to this; I think that they like pretending that they are offering desktop-level performance to end users who don't dig deep enough to realize the difference.

Ampere should be an automatic boost in performance over Turing just because of the process shrink (7/8nm vs 12nm) which means each core will be consuming less power while doing the same amount of work, and thus they can cram on some more cores while staying in the same power limit. The improvements to the RT architecture will also be helpful for anyone actually using the ray tracing features. I'm really curious to see what chips that they will stick on the next round of mobile Quadros, though. I don't expect to see anything better than a GA104 chip (GeForce RTX 3070 / 5888 cores, or maybe 6144 cores which is what the rumored 3070 Ti has). In Turing they never put anything better than a TU104 chip on a mobile Quadro (except for that crazy RTX 6000 that basically no one offered).

[Edit]
I was a little bit surprised to see that the GeForce 3000 cards are using Samsung's 8nm process and not TSMC's 7nm process. The data center Ampere GPUs are coming from TSMC. NVIDIA reportedly reserved a decent amount of 7nm manufacturing capacity from TSMC this year (and 5nm for next year)... what are they building over there? Will the Quadros come from Samsung or TSMC? If the latter then it would be an interesting difference between Quadro and GeForce for this generation.

 

Lenovo is a very difficult proposition even if you are a wee bit concerned about security.

 

There always were competitors to Dell's Precisions, however the major reason I picked it was because it came with Ubuntu preinstalled. The hardware is fully supported on Linux (with few minor exceptions). Dell started and spearheaded the Linux on laptops initiative and only later the likes of Lenovo started paying attention when they saw Dell's success.

 

I’ll start by saying thank you all for providing the information in this thread! Buying a workstation laptop is a large investment, so having all the dirty details is super important! I pulled the trigger a month ago, and received my computer in about 2 weeks.

Full disclosure: I was planning to buy a Lenovo p73. I even ordered one… Initially, it was supposed to be shipped within 10 days, then it changed to 30 days, then 60, then 6 months. I canceled my order (for which they still charged me) and waited for the 7750 to come out instead. Best decision I’ve made recently, I think!

7750 CTO BASE
Windows 10 (dual-booted with Ubuntu)
i9-10885H Processor
Nvidia Quadro T1000 Graphics
17.3” 4k display (WiFi only, no wireless)
8Gb 2933Mhz RAM
256Gb M.2 NVMe Drive
Backlit Keyboard
95 Whr Battery

The very first thing I did when this arrived was to pop it open and start upgrading. My immediate upgrades included 3 NVMe drives and new RAM.
1x 500Gb Samsung 970 evo plus
1x 1Tb Samsung 970 evo plus
1x 2Tb Samsung 970 evo plus
4x 32Gb HyperX Impact CL17 2933MHz (128Gb total)

I performed a clean install of windows on the 500Gb drive, split it down the middle, and dual-booted Ubuntu 20.04 on the new partition. Then I moved all of my storage locations to the 1Tb drive, and set up the 2Tb drive for use as bioinformatics working storage.

My first impressions of this beast of a laptop are really good! My last laptop was an MSI GE70 (i7, 16G Ram, 2x500Gb ssd). That computer was good and did everything I needed it to. This one is great, and exceeds my expectations for a laptop! I am a biologist, and wanted something that would be able to run some of the less resource intensive jobs so that I don’t have to constantly rent time on a server. For the money, I could have bought a better workstation in a desktop form factor, but portability is an essential quality for me, and fits my needs perfectly.

Within a week, my display started to flicker on the right side. The right 2-3in of the display intermittently became extremely bright and then dark. I have Pro Support, so I contacted Dell, and after some time talking to a service rep, they arranged for a tech to come replace my display. He came and worked on it while I cringed at him inexpertly ripping apart my brand-new laptop. He only broke one plastic tab, so I consider myself lucky, but next time, I’m doing the work myself. End result: My display is fine now, and I would never have noticed the broken tab (but I know it’s there).

Getting down to business!

After doing lots and lots of stress-tests in Linux and watching the CPU temps, it looks like the cooling leaves something to be desired, but it will do for light work.
Running all 16 threads with a constant 75% load, the temps stay around 80-90C – Acceptable.

Slamming all 16 threads with a constant 100% load, several cores hit 99C, and thermal throttling kicked in hard.

Looks like I can run about 10 threads at constant 100% without much throttling. Even with throttling, this CPU is faster than most on the server machines that I normally use, and the SSDs and RAM are much faster. This computer is intended for light work, so I can work with the thermal issues.

So far, I have run several jobs requiring in excess of 60Gb of memory and all 16 threads for more than 30 minutes. It performs just fine, nothing melted, and it’s QUICK!

 

If there's a tab broken off of the plastic bezel around the display, and it bothers you, just call Pro Support and have them replace it. Ask for the part only and they will send it to you without also sending a tech along. They'll be happy to do this for parts that are pretty simple to replace. And I especially don't think that they'll give you any grief if you tell them that it broke when their tech was out replacing the display.

I do SQL database work on my Precision 7530 and I'm always a little sad because jobs generally run faster on my laptop (dev environment) than they do on our production server.

 

Currently waiting for my Dell 7750 in New Zealand,

• Intel Xeon W-10885M
• 17.3-inch, UHD, 3840 x 2160 screen
• 128GB, 4X32GB, DDR4 2933Mhz Non-ECC Memory
  
• 1TB PCIe NVMe Class 50 Solid State Drive
  
• Additional 2TB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD Class 40
  
• NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 w/16GB GDDR6

This is my 5th Precision system. I am currently using a 7710. Had a 6800 Covet (red) before that which is still going strong, and a 6400 before that, which is still going with a replacement video card.
The 7710 is 4 years old with another year under maintenance.

I had some thermal shutdown issues, a pillow battery and screen issue a month or so ago.

• Talked to Dell on a Wednesday afternoon 4pm.
• New screen, camera, replacement battery installed next day on site by lunchtime.
• The heating issue persisted, they were back a week later with a replacement heat/fan assembly.
• All now back to normal

The system is used every day for heavy Revit, AutoCAD and Max Design applications. I have been very happy with these systems.

 

Expensive machine since everything is configured via Dell. Super Powerful machine nevertheless


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