Dell 17r N7720 SE - user review

Can't say. FRAPS does not like me very much. But with the first setting I have posted, I've done the game 'till the earhquake and all was smooth and OK.

For ultra 1920x1080 ultra 4x MSAA 16xAF notebookcheck.net gives 14fps. Since I am quite far from those settings, game plays fine.

 

MSAA (or AA) is the "feature" who eats frames per seconds mostly.

I cant nearly wait to try BF3 on this PC. i think its gonna kicks after been testning other drivers, erasing bloatware and turning off unnecceray programs who runs in the background.

If you can. Please video record a clip while playing BF3 in 1080p and upload it on youtube

It doesnt need a fancy video cam. A simple iphone 4s or a samsung Galaxy s2 records in great quality

 

I was considering doing it with fraps, but it doesn't work.

My biggest problem is the fact that something keeps blocking the card at 745Mhz. I need to find the source. There is no OC and temp does not go above 80°C. With burn in it will hit 90 and there are no site effects other that a reduced speed to 790Mhz.

So it must be a software bug.

 

Thanks for confirming. It's kind of surprising, I had expected more reliability from Intel USB 3.0.

 

It is strange, I had no problem with Linux. Maybe it's something with W7.

 

1. Have you done a clean install of windows?
2. Which gpu driver are you using?
3. Also remember that the gpu sometimes not reach "state" 3D ( what we call it here). With that i mean that sometimes the gpu stays in state 2 (half 3D)

State1: 2d
State2: half 3d
State3: 3d means full clock of the card and uses nearly allways in hardcore 3d applications such as ex, bf3.


Ps. How much do you get i 3dmark vantage?? Are you far away from regular scores. If not i should not be worried

 

C_man, if you could make a video, that would be great!

How is the fan noise during gaming by the way? And the HDD? Probably not noticeable when turning those lovely Skullcandy speakers on. But how is the fan/HDD noise when just surfing the web? And how is the fan/HDD noise when playing games like BF3 without sound?

Thanks in advance!

 

Ive read 6 different reviews here
Dell.com - Inspiron 17R SE 7720 customer reviews - product reviews - read top consumer ratings

All guys say the same thing. Very good cooling system. Not very noisy. Think this laptop will be one of Dell best selling models. (such as xps m1710, 9400)

Also check in this gt650m review. Its mindblowing how much potential this card have. 384 CUDA cores says everything
http://www.softwaretechnology.info/2012/06/nvidia-geforce-gt-650-m-dedicated.html?m=1

 

One thing I've noticed about the 7720 is just how effective the cooling is. The fan is relatively quiet, yet can take the GPU temperature down from 85 to below 50 in only a few seconds if the optimus kicks in, eg by alt-tabbing out of a game. It seems to emit a huge amount of air out the side vent, which may suggest a rather large (and hence quiet & effective) fan.

 

Well the fan is one thing. The more important thing is the heatpipe the gpu feature. Nvidia have allways use excellent heatpipes on their high end cards

 

But should the GT 650M be considered a high end card? I know it is very capable, and thus a very good choice for a midrange gaming laptops, because if you go one step up (GTX 660M), you will have to pay a lot more. You will find the GT 650M in "normal" laptops. And because it is actually a "normal" GPU, and not a GTX, but so similar to the GTX 660M, I was worried about the heat.

Another more general question: what exactly is a backlit keyboard, and specifically the backlit keyboard of this laptop? I have the option for 40 euro more. If the only advantage is it being lit up in dark rooms, then it is not worth it for me. But I heard some backlit keyboards have other advantages for gamers, like key mapping.

 

Heat dissipation does not seem to be a particular problem in the 7720; during a burn-in test it took mine over 20 minutes just to reach 85C. Even OC'ed by 65MHz, the max temperature reached during an hour of Diablo 3 was 75C (It's not exactly a stress test though!).

I have heard of heat problems in other laptops with the 650M, although I don't know how severe they are. In a lot of cases I think it is skimping on the cooling system. What seems to happen often is the 17" is 'upsized' from the 15" model, keeping the same cooling system when the extra space could have been used to improve it. I don't know whether the 7520 and 7720 share the same cooling system, but (perhaps surprisingly) the 7720's certainly seems more than adequate.

 

Well, that was a reason for me to go for a 17 inch. And also the subwoofer of course.

 

@androyed.....YES, gt650M is a Class 1 video card... (alias High end).....its nearly more then so...its reaching upon the best GTX 5XX series, which is freaking awseome.


with a good laptop cooler (or a small fan pointed under the chassi), you can easily go over 10000 in 3DMark Vantage GPU. (thats just crazy for a mobile GPU with that price tag).

 

What I meant is that they don't advertise it as a Class 1 card, even though it reaches the performance level of the GTX 560M and almost the GTX 660M. They still name it a "GT" and not a "GTX". Which is great because that means you will find it in "normal/mainstream" laptops which are often a lot cheaper.

For example, the Acer Aspire V3-771G has the GT 650M (although DDR3). You can get one for only 720 euro. Compare that to the Alienware m14x for example... Or an Asus laptop (not really fair, you pay for other things like the cooling system in Asus laptops).

 

.if its named GT or GTX it doesn't matter.

here its the amount of CUDA cores who gives you the answer. (class 1 performance, no doubt about it)

edit.......and of course (the speed on the memory).....if its GDDR5 or not.

 

The big problem at the moment is there isn't a Nvidia GPU worth getting between the 650M and the 680M. The 660M is just a 10% faster 650M (easily made up through sensible OCing if you're bothered), while the 670M and 675M are Fermi architecture and are much higher TDP so run hotter and use more power. You can't seem to get AMD GPUs in this space either.

 

Well what can i say. Nvidia Kepler tech rules.
Amd/Ati is allways a bit behind. Allways have, allways will.

 

Sorry guys, I can't make the video.

Browsing is almost dead quiet. Fan spins at 2500rpm.

The most intensive gaming I've done is BF3. You can really hear that fan without the headphones. It will go at~3900rpm if I recall this exactly. GPU stops at 80°C, 835Mhz. I did not OC, I can't tell if it will reach the limit.

Maximum temperature for GPU is 91°C, after burn in. It will start downclock at that point and go from 835Mhz to 790Mhz constant, does not go any lower.

Maximum CPU temperature is +90°C, no throttling.

You can hear the 7200 rpm HDD in a quiet room.

I saw no mapping of keyboard. Just a 2 step light options. it does not seem much, but if you type at night, it's a nice feature. I really wanted this.

Yes it was a clean install.

Right now 304.79-notebook-win8-win7-winvista-64bit-international-beta. I had the Dell one before.

I am testing to see what triggers OFF the Auto-OC function on GT 650M.

Scores are in the first post. I think is not that far from what others get.

 

Check the BIOS about turbo boost (auto OC), make sure all tabs are enabled.

Go to laptopvideo2go and bring gpu driver(either use Dell driver, i never use Beta drivers)

 

Where is this vBIOS?

The beta is just for testing. I want to try every option.

Things go like this:

- auto OC is enabled, it will hit 835Mhz;
- you do something unknown that will disable auto OC and it will only do 745Mhz.
- to make auto OC work again, fastest way is to reflash Dell's BIOS.

There must be a bug somewhere or the card itself has some problems and enters a "safe mode" state. I am not the only one with this and I guess most people might not even know.

Right now I am tracking every move to see what the problem might be. So far so good. I did some BF3 and temps are not the problem. Gaming does not trigger it.

LE:

With these settings I barely hit 70°C. Room temp is 32°C.

 

Some videos:
Inspiron 17R SE soundquality - YouTube
Dell Inspiron 7720 - Unboxing - YouTube
Preview of the DELL Inspiron 7720 - laptop.bg (Bulgarian Full HD version) - YouTube

 

@c-man...........im not sure i really get your issue.

do you "feel" some freezing/lag/slowdown or extreme temps when you play games (for example BF3) ????

if not, i shouldn't be bother.


if you must reflash BIOS every time to get auto OC working its something wrong.

(first of all its not good to FLASH BIOS over & over again (its actually a type burning you do every time you flash a BIOS (nothing similar to update a driver)

ps...you can push the card even more in BF3 with good temps (just fix the airflow under the laptop with a small usb fan or something)

 

There is a difference between 745 and 835. In numbers at least. But the behaviour itself is not normal. AOC should not turn off. I like my machines working like they are supposed to.

It has air. There is no way to get below those. Keep in mind the room temp.

Look at these Review Dell Inspiron 17R (N7110) Notebook - Notebookcheck.net Reviews

Idle:


Load:

Room Temperature 18.1 °C

I have 32°C room temperature. It's 14 more.

Not to mention what hardware they have:
- Intel Core i5-2410M 2.3 GHz;
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M;
- 500GB 5400rpm.

 

does anyone really know such awesome, super-sweet, super-strong CPU we have here guys ????

its the

http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/5518/namnlswh.png

i know people understand how good this i7 CPU is
........but does anyone really know how awesome this CPU is ????

its the Seventh(7) fastest (mobile) CPU you can get...... WOW !
and its the 16 fastest CPU overall......(counting desktop & mobile CPUs)...thats just mindblowing)

 

I've put up some test in my original post at the end. I was impressed by it as well.

Update to the boost lock: I could not replicate the fenomenon. I'll keep at it.

 

do you have to switch (manual) to the gt650 card inside Nvidia control panel to play games with GT650 ??? (or does Optimus works properly ??)

i saw a review on HP dv6 7000 (same spec as 7720) and that guy had to switch manual before gaming. (not very fun)

 

GT 650M always got active in games and tests, except one. I was unable to run 3dmark Vantage without using "Run with graphics..."

There might be a bug somewhere, but lately it was no present. I got it twice so far. It would make the system not find the Nvidia GPU. A simple restart fixes this. But like I've said, not present lately. In fact today the damn thing worked so perfect as I was trying to get that boost problem to show. Like it knew or something.

Everything is new, some bugs are to be expected. As long as there are no hardware problems, all will be solved eventually.

 

No significant optimus problems here. It used the intel graphics for the aero Windows Experience test (although arguably this is actually correct, since it is responsible for doing that!), and Kombustor had to be told to use the 650M for the burn-in tests.

Touch wood, the gpu clock lock problem hasn't returned for me yet (and only happened the once).

Incidentally, LA Noire seems to run very nicely on DX9 almost max 1080p settings @ 900MHz (86C max temp).

 

ooohh thanks guys...im so relief

....im getting my 7720 in a week and the optimus feature is probably one of the most important feature on this PC.


who want/bother manual change video card setup every time you write or play games.

 

I am curious if anyone has tried opening their Inspiron 17R SE laptop to find out if the CPU and GPU have 2 separate copper heatsinks OR does the CPU and GPU share the same copper heatsink?

I will be getting the 17R SE laptop in August and I plan to open it up to replace the cheap stock thermal grease on the CPU and GPU with Arctic Silver 5 thermal grease. I was curious if anyone has opened up their laptop yet. I wish someone would do a youtube video on disassembling the 17R SE laptop.

 

Guys what are your idle CPU temperatures?

Mine are 45-50C measured by OCCT (room temperature ~10C).

 

You can see mine in the first post. As idle as it can be. Around 50-55°C.

Those are at 30°C room temp. You have 10°C??? How do you measure it?

 

Mine seem to be around 44-47C at a 21C room temperature.

 

can someone (owner) explain what this new 3 buttons does ??? (never seen this before on Dell laptops)

 

I was deciding on this laptop as well and here are its specs as is it slightly different from the one in OP.

Windows® 7 Home Premium SP1, 64-Bit, English
3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3610QM processor (6M Cache, up to 3.3 GHz)
8GB Shared Dual Channel DDR3 Memory
1TB 5400RPM SATA HDD + 32GB mSATA SSD w/ Intel Smart Response
Nvidia GeForce GT 650M 2GB
8X Tray Load CD/DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD+/-R Drive)
Stealth Black Anodized Aluminum
17.3" Full High Definition (1080p) LED Display with Anti-Glare
48 WHr 6-cell Lithium Ion Battery
Intel® Centrino® Wireless 2230, 2x2 bgn + Bluetooth
Skullcandy Speakers with WaveMaxx 4.0
Integrated 10/100 Network Card
Dell Backlit Keyboard with Multi-touch Touchpad, English-Int'l
Power cord, 125V, 3.2 Feet, US
Adobe Elements 9.0 Photoshop and Premiere Bundle
DataSafe 2.0 Online Backup 2GB for 1 year
Intel® Centrino® Wireless 2230, 2x2 bgn + Bluetooth
I know I know the hard drive sucks but I doubt I would have money leftover for a SSD but maybe a 7200rpm hard drive but would the 32GB mSATA SSD help any with performance? Also for the nvidia card it doesn't specify if its ddr3 or gddr5. It does seem pretty awesome for the price though.

 

Most software can be found very easy, based on this:



The link is this one Drivers and Downloads | Dell [United States]

TAG is on the back of your laptop.

You should get this APP_Quickset_W7_A03_Setup_7PFT6_ZPE as far as I could tell.

First button



Second one



Third

There is like 99% chance for a DDR5 GPU.

Yes, the mSATA will help.

 

Thank you sir! Will be looking forward to this computer for sure. Some videos in the future would be nice like a review and a boot time video and possibly gameplay videos.

 

That hard drive along with the 32gb mSATA SSD are working with the iRST feature which enables the most used files on the HDD to be cached on the SSD so this would almost put you up to SSD boot/shutdown time. This is one of the reason they could put a 1TB HDD which is only 5400rpm.

As for the video card, it is GDDR5.

 

Hhmm i thought one of the buttons had something to do with Optimus and fan(cooling) system.

What do you really change with the second button ??
For example MAXXSENSE...whats that(and what does the other symbols do)

By the way,,,C-man i have not got my 7720 yet. Little hard to have a service tag then

 

Well, now you know.

With those you have fast control over different sound presets.



Dell will not allow you to control the fan, like I had on MSI or Clevo. In fact, Dell allows little control, close to none in general.

 

So with the help of the ssd it shouldn't be that bad using the 5400rpm hdd?

 

Exactly, the mSATA will do a good job at this.

I can vouch for this because i am using a Seagate Momentus XT HDD which is a combo drive that has 500gb total with a 4gb SSD inside the same drive. It was insane fast to boot and shutdown, and the algorithm was well conceived within it to enable my Alienware M11x to boot under 25 sec, and shutdown under 10.

 

Awesome! Thanks for the info. Also does anyone know if the 1000$ price tag is permanent or temporary because it may be another 4-5 months until I can purchase this.

 

If you get the 3d model can you also use WIDI?

 

Hello guys, I'm new here as I am in the "notebook world"; the N7720 (wich will arrive tomorrow; planning to make an unboxing vid) will be my first laptop and that's why I've been reading the entire topic to learn some things from you.

That beeing said, hope I won't bother you too much with my noob questions, I just really wish to get the best experience with this laptop.

The first question is related to this:

So I have the W7, what do you reffer to as a "clean install" KSMB? What do I need to do to avoid the blootware?

Thanks!

 

Hi all,

Been following this thread from the start, I also ordered a N7720 a few days ago, unfortunately for me it has almost 3 weeks delivery time on it... Ah well it will get there eventually and gives me time to sort a few questions.

During the configuration I noticed we are stuck with the Centrino 2230, that's a shame as it only supports 2.4 GHZ and not the 5 GHZ band. So I plan on swapping this for the Centrino 6235 when i receive the notebook. Is there anyone else who already did this ?

Also another network related thing, Anyone who already own a N7720 that can conform which wired network speeds are supported ? as the DELL site states it only has a 10/100. I assumed this was a misprint, but seeing a rep stating the other documents also state it has a 10/100 connection only. I'm really wondering if that is true and it does not support 10/100/1000 gigabit Ethernet.

Thanks,

 

No Gigabit.

I'm not sure where the wireless card is.

 

I haven't done it, but I think it would be very easy. You can see the 2330 card when you open the base cover. Driver can be downloaded from Intel if Dell does not have it.

Upgrading to gigabit is probably doable too, but it's a lot more hassle, according to the owner manual.

 

Congrats to your new 17 r se first of all

What i meant is that you should either call Dell and ask them if they can send a copy of your Windows 64 bit otherwise you have to burn out a copy from your laptop ( ghere is a options in Windows for burning backup copy. Very easy

After that reboot your laptop with the Windows CD and make a clean install. MUCH better then just erase the blootware inside thr controll panel