Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

Thanks for your input, which is very helpful to read. I still see two UHD options available for the 7760 on the Dell website - I will try to post a link below. If anyone else can share their experiences, please do. Be well...
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/sho...rationid=71d35876-c216-4115-ae1e-7dcf394bec60

 

Running the UHD display at 1080p doesn't really have more of a resource utilization than running a native 1080p panel. The display itself uses a bit more power and that has a bit of an impact on battery life, but not on extra heat from the CPU/GPU.

...But I'd argue that you don't really need to run a 4K display at 1080p to get larger text. The scaling ratio in Windows matters more (and you can change it whenever you like). If you run the UHD display at 200% scaling then you'll have the same working space and same size text as running a native 1080p display (the additional pixels are used to make the text clearer/sharper). You can go higher than 200% if you need to, even; I know some people who run at 225% or 250% to get larger text. If you have specific software that does not behave well with high-DPI then you can set its scaling method to "System" and it will run at low resolution even with the display set to UHD. (This is done by right-clicking on the application's shortcut and going to Properties → Compatibility → Change high DPI settings → Override high DPI scaling behavior.)

 

"Running the UHD display at 1080p doesn't really have more of a resource utilization than running a native 1080p panel" - I am very happy to read this. I thought the CPU or GPU would have to work extra hard to render 4K at 1080p - though perhaps the computations are similar enough that they roughly utilize the same resources. Is something like that right?

I now run a 1080p at 175%. I was worried that either setting a 4k resolution to so much less than the native (or setting the text too high) would result in too much blurring/distortion (of text/images) or force too many calculations from the CPU/GPU. Perhaps the CPU/GPU are designed to do so much more than this, that the 1080p screen rendering is just tiny drop of/in their output bucket?

I was really thinking that I need to go with the 1080p to run it natively. But the two posts of very helpful feedback above are helping me maybe feel okay with the better 4k display. Thank you. (Keep anymore input on this or related matters coming!)

 

If you set the 4K panel's resolution to 1080p, then the system will just render everything at 1080p. There is no "rendering at 4K and then scale down". The 1080p output will have to be scaled up to present on the 4K panel... this will most likely be done by the GPU driver (quite minor load).

You can run a 4K panel at 4K resolution and 350% to get the same sized text as 1080p at 175%. If you're already running at higher than 100% then you have a feel for what types of application scaling issues that you might run into. The computation overhead of the scaling is rather low, a "drop in the bucket" as you say.

 

Thanks for correcting me and pointing out that the 1080p output will have to be scaled up. I was worried about how minor the quite minor load would be for that scaling, and/or the computational overhead of 4k at something like 350%. Maybe I never recovered from the heat problems with my M6300 and I should try to forget about it already. Many thanks for your input!

 

1) Does the IR webcam just add an IR sensor to the same webcam that comes without the IR option? Is the webcam without the IR option different apart from an IR sensor?
2) Good or bad fingerprint reader experiences with or without the FIPS option?

 

1. I don't know the differences with the non-IR, but I have the IR option which works well with Windows Hello.
2. Really good quick fingerprint WITHOUT the FIPS - my previous machine (a 7520) had the FIPS option and it was terribly slow and often didn't unlock the machine. I'm told FIPS is more secure, but I found it more irritating and less useful.

 

Agreed, get NON-FIPS unless you have specific need for FIPS (i.e. workplace security requirement), non-FIPS is way faster.

Not sure about the webcam. I have the IR webcam in my 7560 and it "works" but it is not great, pretty fuzzy picture unless in a very well-lit room. (...Not that this is unusual for laptop webcams in general. You'd think that someone could come up with something better, given the quality of front-facing cameras on phones these days.) The viewing angle is a bit wider than the webcam in my previous 7530 (which was not IR).

 

I have the non-FIPS fingerprint reader and I find it the quickest and most accurate I've ever used.

The 7560 specifications document I saved says both webcams support video at 1280 x 720 (HD) at 30 fps. However, the non-IR camera produces 0.92 megapixel stills while the IR camera produces 0.30 megapixel stills. The IR camera's viewing angle is slightly narrower at 70 degrees vs 74.9 degrees.

 

The regular camera module is different from the IR camera module. If your goal is to use Windows Hello to login, the IR camera is required.