6 ms·

I am in the same boat. I read that the 5510's fan is quite noisy so I am still thinking of the xps (it's really important for me).

pgaddict 10y ago
I don't think it's particularly noisy. Sure, you can hear it when doing CPU-intensive stuff (say, doing "make -j4" on a large project), but well - the heat needs to go somewhere, otherwise the laptop would get quite hot (like the MBP, for example). The fan opening is on the bottom, not on the side/back as on other laptops, so perhaps this also dampens the noise. I've heard there were issues with proper power management on skylake when it was new, so perhaps they fixed it in the kernel - no idea. Or maybe the noise is worse on the models with Nvidia, which is one of the reasons why I wanted a model without it. It's also possible that the fan will get more noisy over time, so let's see. Update: The one thing I'm only 95% happy with is the keyboard - it's way better than on all the other 15.6" laptops I've tried (in particular no numpad stupidity), but I'd still prefer the keyboard from my old t420s. The enter is way too narrow on the "EN international" keyboard, should get the US keyboard instead, for example.
brudgers 10y ago
Fan operation is pretty much dictated by physics. Higher wattage CPU's will generate more heat as a tradeoff for less throttling. The two ways standard ways to deal with heat are more aggressive cooling profiles or a bigger heat sink (i.e. a larger and heavier laptop overall). The 5510's are packaged to be relatively smaller and lighter. The Precision 7500 models are heavier and larger. The additional volume also allows more expansion (and accommodate significantly more powerful hardware at initial build). In terms of fan noise, choice of CPU and workload is probably going to make more difference than anything else.

6 ms·

I am in the same boat. I read that the 5510's fan is quite noisy so I am still thinking of the xps (it's really important for me).

by johnchristopher 10y ago

pgaddict 10y ago
I don't think it's particularly noisy. Sure, you can hear it when doing CPU-intensive stuff (say, doing "make -j4" on a large project), but well - the heat needs to go somewhere, otherwise the laptop would get quite hot (like the MBP, for example). The fan opening is on the bottom, not on the side/back as on other laptops, so perhaps this also dampens the noise. I've heard there were issues with proper power management on skylake when it was new, so perhaps they fixed it in the kernel - no idea. Or maybe the noise is worse on the models with Nvidia, which is one of the reasons why I wanted a model without it. It's also possible that the fan will get more noisy over time, so let's see. Update: The one thing I'm only 95% happy with is the keyboard - it's way better than on all the other 15.6" laptops I've tried (in particular no numpad stupidity), but I'd still prefer the keyboard from my old t420s. The enter is way too narrow on the "EN international" keyboard, should get the US keyboard instead, for example.
brudgers 10y ago
Fan operation is pretty much dictated by physics. Higher wattage CPU's will generate more heat as a tradeoff for less throttling. The two ways standard ways to deal with heat are more aggressive cooling profiles or a bigger heat sink (i.e. a larger and heavier laptop overall). The 5510's are packaged to be relatively smaller and lighter. The Precision 7500 models are heavier and larger. The additional volume also allows more expansion (and accommodate significantly more powerful hardware at initial build). In terms of fan noise, choice of CPU and workload is probably going to make more difference than anything else.