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This is a great laptop if you are not using the gpu and the cpu at the same time and you don't care about the screen response. So basically you put a game in th
by jorgemf 9y ago
This is a great laptop if you are not using the gpu and the cpu at the same time and you don't care about the screen response. So basically you put a game in this PC and after some minutes you see the great faults of the computer. The 4k screen has low response and it is a bit more blurry with movement than usual displays, although you will only notice this if you have another display to compare.
The biggest issue is the power throttling. When the CPU and the GPU get a bit hot, the VRMs area get hot too and they drop the CPU to 0.7GHz. You play for few minutes and you are amazed, you can play last gen games quite good. But suddenly everything is crap. The VRMs area is hot and is dropping the voltage of the CPU to cold down. Really bad air flow design. Where I said games you can say another application that uses GPU and CPU like deep learning, or maybe watch a video and compile the kernel.(Message for Dell: why do you put a great CPU and GPU in a laptop if we cannot use both for more than few minutes?)
The other minor issue with this laptop is the thunderbolt with 2 PCI lanes. If it had 4 PCI lanes it could be you all day computer as you could connect external GPUs without losing too much. But 2 PCI lanes is not enough.
As a side note some people also have problems with the Wi-Fi. I had to buy another Wi-Fi card for my router as it couldn't connect, but with others routers that it connects it works quite good.
P.S. I run Windows 10 Pro and Archlinux in this computer. The fingerprint does not work on linux yet, everything else is fine.
- gizmo686 9y agoIn my (anecdotal) Dell laptops have been crap at heat management. My current laptop (about 4 years old at this point) had the problem you described, except once the CPU throttling turned on, the BIOS was extremely conservative in turning it off, to the point where I would often reboot to get it running at speed again. Eventually they released a BIOS update that fixed the issue, (and started throttling earlier to avoid dropping to .8ghz) Point being, when buying a laptop, always ask about the thermal.