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

It was supposed to be earlier this week but I guess that's not happening...

 

After I bought the Precision 7530, I found out that there were too few USB ports. I want to connect my mouse, external microphone, external drive, and maybe a keyboard. So I need at least 4 usb ports or two more via a dock. I also want to connect to the projector at the classroom so I need VGA. I want to charge my phone through a type-c to type-c port as I want to insert the cable just the way I like (instead of having to try the direction of usb-a cable)
I got about $98 loyalty rebate from the laptop purchase and I bought this dock for abour $14 (with tax).


Not as versatile than the tb18 dual thunderbolt dock, but thinner and lighter and can be carried around without adding much weight to my aging bag (and much cheaper).

 

They have literally just appeared. By they I mean just WX 4150. It's roughly £300 ($400) cheaper than P3200

 

and WX7100 is out now. £120 cheaper than P3200. I'm starting to regret ordering 7730 with P3200 now as WX7100 seems like a faster GPU

 

The WX7100 is based off the same chip as the RX 580... Which is on par with the GTX 1060. The P3200 is based off the GP104 Architecture of the GTX 1070 and 1080, and should perform somewhere in between a GTX 1060 and 1070.

I would say, on paper, the Quadro P3200 is a little bit better chip, but not by much.

In reality, AMD struggles (big time) with legacy driver support, and support of older and niche programs. If you plan on keeping this laptop for 4 or 5 years, new programs may have problems. Or problems if you want to run older programs and uncommon ones. I would like to see AMD succeed, but I run to many old programs to invest in their hardware.

 

Good point thanks for that. I was comparing things like that https://www.notebookcheck.net/Quadro-P3200-vs-Radeon-Pro-WX-7100_8764_7964.247598.0.html since there aren't that many benchmarks yet and on the paper it looks like wx7100 should be 25% faster. I guess its not just how many cores/bus speed, but other factors come into play too

 

You can't really cores and clock speed to get a performance measure, unless you are comparing within the same GPU class (i.e. Quadro P3200 vs P5200). AMD and NVIDIA cores are naturally rather different and perform differently when run at the same clock speed.

TechPowerUp shows the WX7100 at around 80% of the performance of the P3200 but even that is more of a guess than based on benchmarks (which we just don't have yet). I think @ThatOldGuy's analysis is the best, comparing it against other GPUs with similar architectures and known performance.

 

And Ubuntu 16 is finally an option in the configuration page!

 

Also note that the Quadro drivers are usually optimized for different tasks than the Radeon Pro drivers. The best choice in your case, whether it's Quadro or Radeon Pro, depends on what you actually do with the GPU. In some fields, the Quadros outperform the Radeon Pros, while in other fields it's vice versa.

Here's a nice comparison of the (desktop) Quadro and Radeon Pro GPUs:
https://techgage.com/article/radeon-pro-vs-quadro-a-fresh-look-at-workstation-gpu-performance/

As the article says, it's always good to know your workload before deciding between Quadro and Radeon Pro.

 

The WX7100 and P5000 results should be close to the WX7100 and P5200 offerings in the 7730. I will do a SPECviewperf 12.1 and Cinebench run on the P5200 to confirm.