Dell Precision 16 7680 review – overheating and underdelivering on battery life


Temperatures and comfort, Battery Life

Max CPU load

In this test we use 100% on the CPU cores, monitoring their frequencies and chip temperature. The first column shows a computer’s reaction to a short load (2-10 seconds), the second column simulates a serious task (between 15 and 30 seconds), and the third column is a good indicator of how good the laptop is for long loads such as video rendering.

Average P-core frequency; Average E-core frequency; CPU temp.; Package Power

Intel Core i7-13850HX (55W TDP)0:02 – 0:10 sec0:15 – 0:30 sec10:00 – 15:00 min
Dell Precision 16 76803.46 GHz @ 2.99 GHz @ 92°C @ 141W3.13 GHz @ 2.75 GHz @ 96°C @ 117W2.19 GHz @ 2.26 GHz @ 81°C @ 72W

This laptop can’t sustain high clocks for long periods of time. However, in short loads, it is decent. In our view, the thermal management is not the only issue, as the 180W charger, can’t really let you max out the CPU (we’ve seen HX-series processors work at nearly 200W on some devices).

Real-life gaming

NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada GenerationGPU frequency/ Core temp (after 2 min)GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 30 min)
Dell Precision 16 76802400 MHz @ 75°C @ 67W2400 MHz @ 76°C @ 67W

Here, we see no throttling in the GPU temperature test. As you can see, the device runs its RTX 2000 Ada Generation at 67W.

Comfort during combined load

So, the device is not too loud, which is good, and its large fans should be pushing a lot of air at a low speed. However, the externals of the laptop can get pretty warm. Here, you can see an IR image of the base, while the hotspot of the bottom panel reaches nearly 54°C, which is definitely not ideal. We wouldn’t recommend using the device on your lap.

Battery

Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with. This machine’s 83Wh battery pack lasts for 3 hours and 17 minutes of Web browsing, or 2 hours and 59 minutes of video playback.



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Poster
Poster
10 months ago

No 2.5G ethernet for the top tier mobile workstation model!? That’s ridiculous

Jinx
Jinx
4 months ago

“+ Decent battery life – Horrendous battery life”

Are you serious ?

Simeon Nikolov
Admin
4 months ago
Reply to  Jinx

Unfortunately, the latter is the right one, my colleague has made a mistake, and thank you for pointing it out! The Precision 7680 is indeed one of the laptops with the shortest battery life we’ve tested, despite having a decent battery capacity.