Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

My Precision 7760 did arrive today (this afternoon actually). I'll write up some initial impressions at some point this week - overall though, I'm really happy with it. I'm still waiting on an order of Crucial Ballistix memory which is on its way and should arrive by EoD tomorrow. I'll post my experience with that when I am able to install it.

In the meantime, I got a little eager to start running some benchmarks - and figured I'd share here as a few people have been a little eager to see some. So this evening I just quickly ran three benchmarks with Cinebench R23 and 3DMark Time Spy.

• Cinebench R23 Multi Core: 12166 pts
• Cinebench R23 Single Core: 1619 pts
• 3DMark Time Spy: 9557 (GPU: 10492, CPU: 6352)

To recap, this is with a i9-11950H and a RTX A5000 and only 8GB RAM. I was moderately impressed with the Cinebench results. The Time Spy results seemed good, but not as high as I'd expected. I'm going to chalk that up to the fact I only have 8GB RAM at the moment and the system uses pretty much 70-80% of it just in idle. I also disabled integrated graphics and only used the discrete graphics with power settings set to Best performance.

I'd like to rerun the benchmarks with the updated RAM as well as introduce some additional benchmarks / KPIs to look at. That may not happen until the weekend depending on my availability this week.

If anyone has any questions about the laptop - let me know, I'll gladly try to answer them.

 

TimeSpy score seems quite low though that could be due to RAM

 

Agreed it's fairly low. I'm hoping as well it's the RAM. I'm fairly certain the score should only go up once I add more to it - as there was probably some swapping going on that hindered performance.

 

I don't think the CPU process shrink will help that much with fan noise. They've boosted the transistor count as "compensation" (that's how they achieve the IPC gain) so total power usage remains around the same.

 

Very low indeed. Compare to 80 W Quadro RTX 3000 with 40 GB RAM:

Spoiler: Quadro RTX 5000 80 W

Note that at 90 W, the RTX 5000 breaks 20000 in Fire Strike Graphics.

 

*Take the below with a semi-grain of salt as I haven't had the laptop yet for even 24 hours - these are just my experiences so far and is mainly anecdotal vs. empirical evidence at this point.*

At the very least, compared with my Precision 7730, the fan is nearly silent on my 7760. Even when I ran the two benchmarks - Time Spy & Cinebench - I was quite surprised as to how quiet the fans were. At one point, I had to actually pick up the laptop to see if the fans were running (now this was while watching a movie on a TV - so not just ambient office noise). This was with Dell Power Manager set to Ultra Performance under the Thermal Management section. Even when you do hear the fans, it's a soft whir vs. a high pitch whir, which is a bit more pleasant to the ears.

Now, there are some caveats with the above statement.

1. I'm comparing a brand new laptop to a 3 year old laptop that has gone through quite a bit in its life. Although, I recollect the 7730 always having a fairly loud fan.
2. I believe the thermals were significantly improved overall between the 7730 and even the 7750. Especially as they learned how to handle the Core i9 thermals vs. i7/i5 is my assumption. i9 made its first debut in the 7730 and I think a number of manufacturers had to make adjustments over the next generations to handle the thermals for an i9 and possibly the CPUs just better at thermal management. (Again an assumption is being made here based on observations of different i9 laptops over the past few years)
3. This is comparing the 17" models - the 7560's fan noise may still be loud - so 7560 users' experience may vary.

If you compare the service manual images of the 7750 vs. 7760, I did notice there seems to be more fins/blades on the 7760 fans vs. the 7750. Not sure if that leads to it being more quiet, better air circulation, or combination of both. It does look like Dell put some effort in changing the thermals, at least minimally. You can also see one of the heat sinks is slightly larger (forget if it was the one for the CPU or the GPU).

I plan on doing more tests later this week. I have seen at least one of the CPU cores still hit 100* C under combined CPU + GPU load. However, I don't know if that was sustained or a one off blip. That is something I want to capture and look at in the next while.

During idle/light workload, the CPU did dip into the high 30s* C - which was unheard of with my 7730.

[Edit]
Added additional quote that I originally missed.

 

Good to hear. Notes...

* If you haven't cleaned out the fans of your 7730, consider doing that. (I didn't clean out my 7530 until earlier this year, so about two and a half years into its life, and I definitely noticed a modest CPU temperature decrease in light workload & the fans ramping up less often afterwards. I'm now making it a point to blow off the fans every ≈3 months.)
* They switched from plastic to metal fan blades with the 7X50 generation, which allowed them to make the fan blades thinner and thus cram more blades into the fans, and at least one other user commented that the fan noise was "softer" as you mention here with this new fan design, even though the fan speed RPM was similar. (It's possible they have increased the blade count even further this year...? Or maybe they still had a plastic fan in the 7750 service manual photo.)
* With the high turbo boost speed these days I think you can always expect to see the CPU hit around 100 °C under full load. The question is more along the lines of what clock speed can it maintain at that temperature?

Can't wait to check out this aspect in particular... Still waiting for 7560 to ship.

 

When I first cleaned my XPS fans, I'm surprised the fans weren't completely stuck with the amount of dust that was in there. I got a 10C temp drop after doing that. Maybe my house is just very dusty.

 

The fans could have higher quality bearings/motors that are quieter
Another possibility is that the airflow is less restricted when it exits the exhaust, making the fans quieter.

 

Pretty sure these have been maglev for many years now, there should be no motor noise, just noise coming from air movement and air friction. (They could have improved the airflow channel to minimize friction and that would help with noise.)