The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
I just bought a new 5406 with pen. I bought the i7 1165g7, 512 gb nvme, 12gb of ram and xe iris graphics. The upgrades are going to be a 4tb sabrent ssd and 64gb of ram. I am excited to get this new notebook since its essentially doubling my computing power on the move.
Just figured out my on location resolve / affinity setup for this notebook. I am getting a dual NVME enclosure with 2 1tb ssd for project and cache drive work. Also, I will have a 4tb HDD for finished project storage. I wanted to use a eGPU but as far as I know it does not have tb. I will confirm once it lands on site. It's also really good as a creative tablet as well and I am getting a keypad/dial controller for sketchbook pro. Creating is going to be awesome on this one. The awesome part about this notebook compared to the XPS and other "better" devices is they lack SD card slot. this has a full size SD card slot for my cameras. Just shoot footage and pop the card in.
Did some reading about the 5406 vs xps 13. The internals are near identical. The only difference is the ram is on board in the xps. The inspiron and XPS are identical in speed and rendering tests when all other things are equal like ram size and cpu speed. Also, it is rumored that the USB C port is indeed a TB port but they don't advertise it to try to move sales of that group to XPS / G devices instead to make more profits.
Yeah the ram speed is better on the XPS, but that's only helpful in some areas. With the XPS you're paying for the form factor, screen, battery, and build quality. Both are good options and had I not got a great deal on the XPS I would have considered the 5406.
Is the ram speed a board thing or just the ram thing? I can swap out the ram and add a larger battery as well. I agree the screen and build of the XPS is better. But, that's the trade off I will take to get the SD card reader and expandable memory and SSD.
The ram coming in my new machine is 3000mhz with one 8 and one 4gb. Not running in dual channel obviously. My old ram is 2400 mhz. but 2 8's. will it be better to run dual channel with 16gb but slower ram?
Sadly the RAM speed thing is a limitation of the bios and lack of 4267MHz LPDDR4x sodimm memory on the market. In the end it will only make a difference in memory intensive operations though.
Your 8+4GB setup will run in dual channel memory for the first 8GB and then single channel for the other 4GB. You can run your two 8GB sticks in there too, I think the loss of speed coupled with the extra dual channel memory would probably be a wash for most things, but if you use ~16GB of memory it will be much faster.
I got my new notebook. I am typing on it now. It's miles better than the last one build quality wise. Keyboard is "clicky'r", The chassis is aluminum, speed is much faster. I am going to install the 16gb of ram now in a little while and report back in speed. Overall, a great device. Build quality is on par with my son's macbook. It's really that good.
Just played with the dell active pen. It's really good. Just as good as my previous surface pen. I like the feel of it better than my apple pencil on my ipad.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
