XPS 15 vs Precision 5520

I've been putting off replacing my 4 year old (maybe 5?) Alienware M17x behemoth for a long time, but it is crashing fairly frequently on me and just showing a lot of signs of age. I want to replace this super heavy, huge, 1 hour battery life desktop replacement with a very thin, very portable, very long battery life notebook. Due to the amateur video editing I do with Cyberlink Powerdirector (mostly) and sometimes Adobe Premiere Elements I need a quad core CPU, and that really narrows down the field when it comes to thin, lightweight, very long battery life. A 13 inch screen is too small for me, 15 inch works fine (I'm willing to trade down from my 17" for battery life and weight and cost) this will be my only computer; i.e. this is not a supplement to a desktop.

I've narrowed down to the XPS 15 (newest gen) and the Precision 5520. I won't be gaming, the video editing (again, amateur level, occasional) is the heaviest task. I like the idea of better built, more reliable, the business level warranty and support on the precision. However, the configuration options are limited for both the XPS and the Precision: I want a 1080 screen, non-touch, i7 quad core, 16 gig memory and a 1T M.2 PCIe SSD. And the 97 whr battery (I really want long battery life.) It's very difficult to get that configuration on the Dell site. It appears the only way to get what I want I would need to purchase the smallest SSD and then replace it with a good 1T SSD (which would add about $500 to the total cost.) When I config up something like this (with 3 year warranties) the XPS system appears to be about $620 cheaper than the Precision.

So - is the Precision worth the extra $600? I know that's a loaded question, but I would like to hear the pros and cons before I choose. If I'm spending close to $2500-3000 on a notebook, I want to be happy with it now and for several years down the line.
Thanks.

 

The difference mainly resides in the CPU (superior clock speeds in the i5, i7 and Xeon) and the GPU (Quadro beats Geforce mainly in GPU rendering efficiency), so the Precision is truly aimed for business class users, while the XPS targets a regular consumer base while retaining the business class quality and warranty. If your work does not involve heavy modeling and rendering operations and/or Virtual machines (which would be extremely stable on a Xeon/Quadro machine thanks to the dedicated drivers), then the XPS should be more than enough.

 

The hardware, with the exception of the dGPU, is essentially the same in both but Precisions tend to have better warranties (usually NBD on-site) and support. I would suggest that you keep a close watch at Dell Outlet for both the XPS15 and the 5520 and also watch out for the Dell Outlet coupons on the Dell Outlet twitter feed. If you can find the basic hardware combination (less SSD) you want at the Outlet price then the cost of upgrading to the 1TB SSD won't be very painful.

John

 

I guess you need to spec both but imo the quadro line up are priced a lot higher than the GT/GTX equivalent, also the quadro's are a lower spec for mainstream use.

I would go as far as buying a home spec, grab a cheap pro key and take out the nbd 3-4 year warranty and you may find you have a chunk of cash left!

I did price up the business XPS15 vs the home spec, same warranty minus the pro licence was £400 less with the offer codes that pop up for the consumer range even though both had been specced for nbd 3 year warranty.

Build quality is not going to be better as they are made by the same blind people wearing mittens.

 

Is the hardware and build really the same? I've not seen the 100s of pages of problems with the Precision that I have with the XPS.

 

With the 5520 you get the Quadro M1200 which is weaker in cores and clocks but has pro graphics drivers.

On the CPU side, on the 5520 you can pay for somewhat faster clocks, though at the same TDP power limit 45W. I'm not sure what this means in practice. A recent review of the 5520 with the Xeon E3-1505M v6 seems to indicate thermal throttling under CPU load. I guess it is most likely they got a sample with a poor paste job (the 9560 i7-7700hq can run long-term CPU-only load under 80deg), but it might also hit the power limit.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-Precision-5520-E3-1505M-UHD-Workstation-Review.213844.0.html

They mention another problem too, so I guess Precisions are not immune to issues, they just sell less of them, mostly put Intel wifi cards inside, come running for support faster and are mostly bought by companies also having internal support I suppose they couldn't avoid the same dock issues, and I'd be surprised if they weren't affected with the same Intel HD video driver issues...

 

I bought one from the outlet and promptly returned it. The screen was misaligned.

 

Can't speak to the M5520, but for the prior two generations -- 9530/M3800 and 9550/M5510, they were identical in every significant way except the GPU (and I suppose to some folks the i7-6700HQ vs. i7-6820HQ difference although having used both I haven't found the extra cache and small clock speed bump makes any noticeable difference.)

The gaming performance difference between the 1050 and the M1200M is big because of the generational change -- bigger than the M1000M vs. 960M. If you don't need certified GPU drivers/OpenGL and can afford the very small CPU hit, then for this generation the XPS seems like a no-brainer to me.

OTOH, the heat thing is a little worrying; the TDP of the mobile 1050 is unpublished, and the M1200M is already 5W higher (45W vs 40W) than the M1000M... with the cooling system apparently unchanged (going on teardowns) that may make some difference with either model.

 

Good points here.

I think the current generation heatsink has improved vram cooling (not warped anymore) and a fail moving from 8 to 7 screws. Thermal paste on current and prior generations seems to be uniformly poor.

The 1050 and the newer generation CPUs run a bit hotter and the cooling system is not up to the task. The power module is underclassed also so thermal throttling at low temps is a problem with the 9560.

So do some research at NBR as the Kaby Lake i5 provides better performance for a lot of people here, particularly for gaming. Less power and less heat. YMMV.

EDIT a couple of guys heavily modified cooling of 7700HQ machines and stopped most throttling.

 

I hate reading about people needing to do radical modification of a system to get it to work correctly; that's what threw me off the XPS 15 to begin with. I always do the normal stuff, like uninstall bloatware, perhaps update a couple of drivers, but I really don't have the time right now to spend a ton of time working on a brand new system to get it to work well. My Alienware M17x worked extremely well right out of the box (after uninstalling a couple of bloatware utilities.)

However, it's oddly difficult to find a notebook that has a quad core CPU (for my video editing) and is thin and light and has a long battery life. The battery life is one of the reasons I don't want a screen higher than 1080p and without touch.

 

Yeah, I specced out an XPS 15 on the business side, with an i7-7700HQ, 16gig RAM, 512 SSD (the 256 option was only $100 less and only came with 8 gig of ram) 1920x1080 non touch screen, fingerprint reader, 4 year prosupport plus warrranty (right now same price as 3 year) and it prices out to right at $2000. I'd need to throw in a good 1T SSD (I assume I'd just need to clone everything on the 512 drive that comes with it and then pop it in?) and pay for a second AC power supply.

 

I wouldn't clone the stock Dell install, full of crap and recovery partitions you don't need.
Best to grab the latest ISO from MS or use my ISO that has the drivers.

 

Good idea. The instructions for installing your ISO (and thanks for the time I know it takes to put something like that together and keeping it updated) makes my head spin, but I suppose the good part of replacing the SSD that comes with the machine is if I screw things up on the new SSD I can simply pop the old one back in.

 

The XPS is fine out of the box for 95% of users. If you're going to do very strenuous work loads, I would undervolt it. I put a good amount of work into mine because I like doing stuff like this, nothing that I own is stock. It would have been perfectly fine for me stock to do what I want it to do however.

 

That's good to hear. I don't have an issue if I get it and can start working on it right away, then gradually tune it up as I go (undervolt, which I've never done but sounds simple, repaste, etc.)

 

I'm just wondering, what are you considering selling your M17x for?

 

I hadn't really thought about that! I'd be willing to listen to any offers.

 

Given the crashing, and assuming you would want to keep the hard drives, I'd offer 200. Probably a bit of a lowball though.

 

You pair need to take this to the for sale forum

 

Having had mine for a little over a week, I did end up undervolting and repasting... but frankly, I don't think the machine really needs it. I'm never going to try to use it for anything THAT GPU heavy, and all of my quad core machines back to the E6420 have been on the hot side.

The only real complaint I had with the hardware out of the box is that the Killer wireless card wouldn't talk to my work network (at all, trying a whole bunch of different drivers.)

Definitely second the recommendation for clean install. Manufacturer Windows images aren't as horrible as they were back in the XP days and Dell has never been the worst out there, but I would still consider a clean install the first step upon buying ANY new machine. It's super easy on Windows 10 given that Microsoft has a free and easy download site, and almost all the drivers will install off Windows update (even on this machine; it recognized my USB ethernet dongle out of the box, and while I did end up using a few of the Dell drivers, the machine was fully functional just off Windows Update.)

 

That's good to hear on the Win 10 reinstall. I have done a format and Windows reinstall in the past (Windows 7 then) and it was a pain finding all of the drivers, figuring out which SSD drivers I needed, etc, and then trying to figure out, e.g., why my bluetooth isn't working or my SSD is running so slow (or not booting at all!) etc.

 

First, re: the Killer wireless, as expected the Intel 8265 replacement works flawlessly at my work.

The three things I did before reinstalling were:
* Created a recovery USB (just in case I ever want to go back to the Dell Win10 Home image, or at least the subset of it that it puts on the recovery USB)
* Updated the firmware (BIOS, Thunderbolt controller, and WD15 dock firmware; there is also a TPM firmware upgrader, but didn't spot that prior to upgrading and it's kind of a pain.)
* Switched the BIOS from RAID to AHCI as the install USB wouldn't see the NVMe drive in RAID mode.

After the install, I installed Dell Command Update and let it upgrade a few things just in case, and downloaded the latest NVidia drivers direct from NVidia.
(Similarly, after installing the 8265 card over the weekend while Windows Update saw the Wifi function just fine, the Dell Command Update wanted to upgrade the Bluetooth driver. I let it.)

I was also going from Win10 Home to Win10 Pro on the reinstall but I don't think it made any difference in the process. One thing I LOVE with UEFI is you no longer have to do anything special to create a bootable USB drive -- just mount the ISO and copy all the files over to a Fat32 USB stick and go, vs. the old media creation tools where sometimes the boot sector wouldn't write properly and you'd find out it got an error only after it failed to boot off the USB.

 

I would run the TPM updater as it is just a module in the BIOS and will not cause any unforeseen issues like some updates to the BIOS can, disable or suspend bitlocker if you use it prior to the update, I updated quite a few 9550's and had no problems, it does allow for better encryption standards so well worth it in a business environment. UEFI is great but it is worth noting a EFI install requires FAT32 not NTFS just to be annoying.