DELL Precision 7760 Review Part I: DELL Old Bottle

I'm sorry that my English is not good. Here is machine translation:
There are many pictures in the original text, so it's not easy to upload them. Please see the original text:
https://forum.51nb.com/thread-2004662-1-1.html


inertia
Ten years ago, in 2010, the author purchased the Precision M6500, a mobile workstation produced by Dell for the first time. Since then, with the annual update, the author successively purchased M6700, 7710, 7720, 7730, 7740, 7750, and only M6600 during the period. I didn't purchase it with M6800, but I had a short experience.
In 2021, 10 years later, I habitually purchased the DELL 2021 mobile workstation flagship model Precision 7760.


Unboxing
The DELL Precision 7760 (hereinafter referred to as 7760) purchased this time was placed on July 2nd and received on July 27th.


It was directly sent from Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, using China Post. This time, there were three more stickers from China Post Yueyang Branch on the outer box. The resulting green pattern text was very dazzling on the original Dell packaging.


The internal packaging is the same as the 7750 I reviewed last year. It still uses an environmentally friendly pulp protection module. The right side is a cardboard-separated power storage space.


Packing list: 7760 body, power supply and power cord, and three paper documents enclosed in a semi-permeable plastic bag.


The power supply and the power cord are exactly the same as the previous generation, 240W. I took a photo and took a look, and sealed it directly before using it, because the author had multiple DELL 240W power supplies before.


Exterior
The top view of the top cover (commonly known as A side) of the 7760 is as follows: Champagne gold gray metal, ZY is the DELL logo, and there is a clearly separated strip of the same color on the upper edge, the material should be plastic, and the gray-black shaft part can be vaguely seen below . The author did not find any difference with the previous generation 7750.


The top view of the bottom of the 7760 (commonly known as the D side) is as follows: each of the upper and lower edges has a long rubber foot pad, and the lower part (equivalent to the rear of the bottom of the fuselage when laid flat) is mainly a dense heat dissipation grille. The appearance is still the same as the previous generation.


The front view of the 7760 is as follows: without any ports


The rear view of the 7760 is as follows: there is a heat dissipation grille on the left and right, the middle part is the port, and the external power interface near the left heat dissipation grille.


The top view of the 7760 when opening the top cover of the screen is as follows: Due to the viewing angle, the screen looks close to 16:10, but in fact it is still 16:9, the same ratio as the previous generation.


The maximum opening angle of the top cover of the 7760 screen is as shown in the figure below: it is about 135 degrees. Like the previous generation, it cannot be expanded by 180 degrees.


Above the screen is a microphone array and a camera with a physical shielding switch. This time I chose the model with the WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) pre-installed at the factory, so there is no infrared camera that supports Windows Hollo face recognition.


The overall appearance and structure of the 7760 is the same as the previous generation. The body is full of rigidity, feels cold and has a good texture.



Perhaps it is the problem of the difference in the assembly level of the factory. The author found that there are obvious imperfections in the left and right corners of the upper cover:



At the same time, it was found that the bottom was next to a fixing screw hole, with obvious traces. The author suspected that it was the traces left by the high-speed rotation of the screwdriver accidentally during assembly during production.


port
The ports on the left side of the 7760 fuselage, as shown in the figure below, are from left to right:
Two USB-C 3.2.2/Thunderbolt 4.0 ports, one USB-A 3.2.1 port (supporting PowerShare shutdown power supply), and one SC smart card reader.
Compared with the previous generation 7750, the Thunderbolt port has been upgraded from 3.0 to 4.0.


The ports on the right side of the 7760 fuselage, as shown in the figure below, are from left to right:
SD card reader, 3.5mm audio output and input composite jack, 2 USB-A 3.2.1 ports, security keyhole.
No difference from the previous generation.


The ports on the rear of the 7760 fuselage are as follows from left to right:
miniDP 1.4 port, HDMI 2.1 port, RJ-45 port, power port.
Compared with the previous generation, the HDMI port has been upgraded from 2.0 to 2.1.



Mouse and keyboard
The keyboard and mouse of the 7760 are exactly the same as the previous generation. For its layout and experience, you can check the author's evaluation of the 7750 last year, and I will not repeat it here.


What I chose this time is the configuration of the power button with integrated fingerprint. Officially, the fingerprint recognition function logo is affixed to the side of the power button in the upper right corner of the keyboard.



Screen
With the physical size of the B side of the 7760, switching to a 16:10 ratio screen is actually completely stress-free.



However, compared with the previous generation, the screen of the 7760 has been improved. This 7760 is equipped with a 4K 120Hz screen with the highest gear. The detailed technical parameters are as follows: Option three in the chart: brightness up to 500nits, The contrast ratio is 1200:1, the color gamut is 100% Adobe, the refresh rate is 120Hz, and the power consumption is also the highest of the three, with a peak value of 12.2 watts.
Compared with the top-mounted screen of the previous generation 7750, the refresh rate has been increased from 60Hz to 120Hz, and the peak power consumption has been slightly increased from 12 watts to 12.2 watts.


The author will use SpyderX Elite to measure it according to the usual practice, and the test results will be issued in subsequent serials.


upgrade
The detailed configuration of the 7760 I selected this time is shown in the following chart: The yellow font in the figure is two 32GB DDR4 3200 memory, a 2TB Samsung 980Pro SSD and two 128GB Samsung SM951 SSD hard drives that I have replaced by myself.
The official configuration price is about ￥46,000, plus the self-upgrading parts, the total price is about ￥51,000.


In order to replace the memory and install the hard disk, it is necessary to disassemble the machine.
The disassembly of the 7760 is exactly the same as that of the 7750, and the bottom is fixed with 8 screws.


The bottom cover uses a large number of copper heat sinks in the parts corresponding to the three main hard disk bays, wireless network cards and wireless wide area cards.


The official factory-equipped hard disk is installed in the position of the secondary hard disk that supports quick release close to the wireless network card:


Take it apart and take a look, the model is Micron 2300:


I tested the three main hard disk locations one by one, and found that none of them support M.2 SATA SSD.


The reason seems to be that the factory default BIOS of the 7760 is RAID On, and the new platform uses the Intel VMD controller—intel VMD (Volume Management Device) is a deployment solution launched by a new generation of storage that supports the PCIe bus to NVMe The solid state disk is hot upgraded and replaced without shutting down the system.
As for the question of which of the 4 hard disk locations of the 7760, or whether they all support PCIe 4.0, the author will issue the actual test results in a follow-up serial.


By the way, the interface of the UEFI/BIOS Steup of the 7760 is also refreshed, and the viewing operation is more comfortable and convenient than the previous generation.


A single 8GB memory pre-installed at the factory, installed in slot C under the keyboard:


So I had to start disassembling the keyboard on the C side:


Replaced with two 32GB DDR4 3200 SK hynix memory. In fact, the 7760 officially supports DDR4 3466 memory, but unfortunately it cannot be selected when placing an order, and it is not available on the market.


After changing the memory, a warning appears when the 7760 starts up, and the onboard diagnostic system prompts that the system memory has changed. At this time, you can choose to continue, enter the BIOS Setup or diagnose:


After the diagnosis, everything went well, and the 64GB memory accurately identified:


After completing the above disassembly and assembly process, the author found that the four antennas of the WWAN card pre-installed in the factory of this 7760 also had the problem of irregular operation by the production line employees: the bottom of the figure below is the author installed the WWAN card on the 7750 last year. In the picture, the official standard installation location of the WWAN antenna should be inside the cable management slot, and the 4 WWAN antennas above the 7760, the bending and turning parts are no longer in the cable management slot, fortunately there is still space on the bottom cover of the 7760. Otherwise, when the bottom cover is installed, there must be squeezing between the two, causing undue deformation.


In addition, although the above disassembly and assembly do not have a heat dissipation part, it is impossible to fully observe the full picture of the new generation NVIDIA graphics card used in the 7760, but through comparison, the author still found that the 7760 DGFF graphics card this time, and some changes have taken place: the silver white rectangular connection of the 7760 The number of filters becomes two groups.


The left side of the picture below is 7760, and the right side is 7750. It can be seen that the number of silver-white rectangular connectors of 7760 in the yellow box is two groups, which is three groups less than the number of 7750 in the red box.
However, on the motherboard, both maintain an idle FPC beam connector position.


expect
In summary, the appearance and internal structure of the 7760, compared with the previous generation 7750, can be said to be completely the same. This is the origin of the subtitle "DELL Old Bottle" in this article.
However, in this "old bottle", DELL of course poured "new wine"-this 7760 uses the new Intel 11th generation mobile standard version of the CPU i9-11950H, Nvidia's new generation of laptop version of the professional graphics card RTX A5000 , 4K screen with a refresh rate of 120Hz, support for PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, support for Thunderbolt 4, minor HDMI upgrade to 2.1, etc., all of these still make the author very much looking forward to the performance of the 7760!


This is the end of DELL Precision 7760 Review Part I, so stay tuned for Review Part 2.

 

Thank you for very detail review !

 

Nice review. Too bad they went with that annoying non-standard cursor keys layout.

 

I must say, I always like @song_1118's reviews; they are as detailed as they go for the Precisions.

 

I'm trying to match this photo up to my 7760. Mine seems to be one piece there.

 

The top part of the lid is different depending on whether you have WWAN antennas or the IR webcam (they seem to be mutually exclusive). This photo looks like the WWAN antennas version. They have to have a bit of plastic at the top of the lid because that's where the antennas are, and they wouldn't work as well enclosed in aluminum.

 

Makes sense. Thanks! Yes mine doesn't have WWAN.

 

Dell official is indeed like this: if you choose to pre-install the WWAM card, you cannot choose the infrared camera. It is said that there is a conflict between the two in hardware installation.

 

Thanks for the compliment! I will try my best to share with you!