Precision 7730,5530,7530 (Coffee Lake) pre-release

Dell Precision 7530 ordered, ETA July 3.
The TB18DC dock is going to arrive way sooner, by June 18. I'll be able to enjoy it with nothing to plug it into.

 

Specs?

 

Intel Core i7-8850H (6-core 2.6 GHz / 4.3 GHz turbo)
32GB RAM (2x16)
NVIDIA Quadro P1000
512GB M.2 NVMe SSD "Class 40"
4K display + webcam/mic
6-cell 97Wh battery / FIPS fingerprint reader / backlit keyboard / Intel Wi-Fi

I'll be adding a 2TB SSD as secondary storage, buying it aftermarket. It will be a Samsung 860 EVO M.2 (more interested in space than speed, already stretching the budget a bit with this buy ). Also, will probably purchase another 2x16 GB of RAM and upgrade to 64 GB total, later in the year.

This will be replacing my work PC (currently Precision 7510).

 

as they say at EEVBlog "Don't turn it on, take it apart!". Just kidding, don't do that, unless you want to

 

Just ordered a TB18DC as well. Hope they stick with the positioning of the two Thunderbold connectors that this Dock will last a few Precision models like my E-Dock did.

 

Lenovo announced their new P52 today, but no P72 yet. Will be interesting to see pricing compared to their Precision counterparts.

 

I still can not understand. Can Dell clarify this question? TB18DC uses two tb3 ports. I'm planning to connect external lacie 2big dock thunderbolt 3. Will there be a drop in speed if I connect it via TB18DC and not directly to the connector tb3 in the notebook?

Ideally, I would like to connect to one tb3 port the lacie 2big dock thunderbolt 3 and to another tb3 any dock station to get more usb
Does the Dell have such an external station that will take only one tb3 and not two
Otherwise, just lost the meaning of 2 ports tb3 in 7530

 

The 2 ports are needed because one port cannot carry enough power to fully run the laptop. I am curious architecturally to know how this is all plumbed. Is there one controller with 2 interfaces on the laptop so still 40 Gbps shared between them (and how does this route to the CPU, directly or through the PCH and DMI?), or is it 2x 40 Gbps connectors with 80 Gbps available at and through the dock?

Either way, you should be able to daisy chain another dock off of the TB18 but that will share bandwidth with other peripherals plugged into the TB18 directly. This could have impacts on latency as well if that is a concern. I would use the TB18 to have a convenient single cable dock for the laptop and run the LaCie and a nice USB Dock off of that. The shared bandwidth shouldn't be much of a concern. as long as you are not trying to run an eGPU through the dock as well.

 

@Dell-Mano_G mentioned that the Thunderbolt controller in the TB18DC dock is the same chip that they used in the TB16, so there is not a bandwidth increase. I suspect that all of the data runs over one port and the second is for power only. It should be possible to have data running over both ports for more bandwidth (it's just more PCIe lanes)... Maybe in a future dock.

I was checking out the Lenovo P52 and noticed that it also has the option for the Quadro P3200. So, I highly doubt that they are using MXM cards (doesn't seem like a GeForce 1070-like card would fit in a MXM type A form factor yet), question is did they solder it onto the board or did they come up with another graphics card solution like Dell's DGFF?

I'm surprised that they did not announce the P52 and P72 at the same time. Are they dropping 17" again? IIRC they did not offer 17" workstations for the Ivy Bridge and Haswell generations, and brought them back for Skylake.

 

Following some links about the new Lenovo P52, I found this article about the new 32Gb RAM sticks: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-introduces-10-nm-class-32-GB-DDR4-SoDIMMs.306204.0.html
Maybe these will be the ones for the 7530?