Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

Trade-off. Basically the upside is you have lower power usage and thus higher battery life (— if you can keep the NVIDIA GPU powered off, which might not be the case if you use external displays and/or 3D applications). The downside is you have to deal with Optimus, which is the NVIDIA GPU doing the rendering and then flushing the output over to the Intel GPU for display. This is supposed to be "seamless", but in some applications it behaves strangely and also for some lesser-used applications you might have to visit the NVIDIA control panel and manually switch that app over to dGPU rendering.

Performance impact should be negligible for most applications. The bigger issue for me is just behavior oddities for some apps and games.

 

Weird... I don't see the option in Nvidia control panel on my XPS 15 7590 (1650 which is Turing)

 

Yep, but this is the first Dell/HP/Lenovo business laptop I know of shipping with a refresh rate over 60hz and good response times. In the past the only way to get a display like this was to go with a consumer model which had worse build quality, lots of bling in the aesthetics, and horrible control software.

Technically you could always swap the panel for a high refresh rate variant, but compatibility was not always guaranteed and if you were upgrading from a 30-pin display it was a lot of work getting a 40-pin display cable and associated parts (camera module and correct screen bezel).

 

XPS requires Optimus on at all times, correct? The Intel GPU would be driving the internal display.

 

The biggest difference isn't the refresh rate (60hz is enough for regular use), what I noticed the most was the pixel response time. There is almost no blur when moving around the cursor on a dark background or when scrolling through text.

 

Oh, that makes sense. Non-integer scaling with 1080p drove me crazy.

 

So glad I decided to go with a business laptop (was thinking about a gaming laptop for the lower price and slightly better performance). So far, I'm extremely happy with my Precision and hopefully it will save me enough time and frustration to make up for the cost

 

GPU wattages:
First ~4 minutes: FurMark saw a max GPU wattage of 118.5W on Ultra Performance mode (iGPU disabled). It's very stable at 115W after the first few seconds at a temperature of 75.5C. Fans are pretty quiet even after 2 minutes.
After ~4 minutes: Fans ramped up to be still pretty quiet and GPU took advantage of that and went to 128W max, later settling in at 115W.
After ~7 minutes: Fans ramped up even more, and GPU went to 123-130W for 30 seconds. CPU is at 15W (down from around 30W before I think). GPU temps are now at 77C.
After ~7.5 minutes: GPU is now at 115W, CPU is at 30W, and the fans have calmed down a bit. GPU is at 75C.
It seems like the GPU does go above 115W, but the behavior is interesting. Maybe the fans only go faster (giving GPU more thermal headroom) with a CPU+GPU stress?
The max board power draw in the first 10 minutes measured by GPU-Z is 129.4W.
I will try 3DMark TimeSpy and see the max GPU wattage.

CPU wattages and temps seem pretty erratic

The palmrest is pretty cool but the speaker area and is hot to the touch. My hands aren't hot from typing while the stress test is running.

After running for 15 minutes, every minute, the GPU goes to to 127W for ~10 before dropping back down to 115W.

I also tested CPU + GPU load with CB20 for CPU. Weirdly, the only time the GPU hit 140W was when I started CB? Looks like the Dynamic Boost can use some tweaking since it performs a bit weird. And also the quiet fan noise (allowing the GPU to throttle) is pretty annoying. On "Ultra performance" mode, I would like the fan to be faster to keep the system cooler and faster. After all, optimized mode exists for a reason...

At 128W, the GPU clock for an A4000 is ~1150mhz, and at 115W, it's ~950mhz. So a pretty big difference.

Looks like without the RT and tensor cores, the A5000 will struggle to boost above 1Ghz, and performance w/out RT and tensor cores should be around the same since the clock and power difference is very proportional (with the A4000). In RT/tensor workloads, the A5000 should be ~10% faster.

Hopefully the Dynamic Boost is tweaked in future updates.

 

2x16Gb non-ECC

 

Most gaming laptops have a limit of two SSD's and 64GB RAM. There are a few exceptions, like the Clevo X170KM, but it is much heavier (10lbs) and requires dual 280W AC Adapters, so it is not nearly as portable. Then again you can get a overclockable RTX 3080 mobile for the same price as an RTX A4000, so maybe the trade off is worth it to some. I also like that fact that its keyboard still has dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys.