Dell Precision 17 7770 review – its cooling needs a revamp


Disassembly, Upgrade options, and Maintenance

The first thing we see in this laptop is the service door. Pry it open with a plastic tool, and you’ll get access to one M.2 PCIe x4 slot.

To continue with the disassembly, undo the six captive Phillips-head screws. Then, pry the bottom panel with a plastic tool, starting from the front corners.

Inside, we find a 93Wh battery pack. It got us through 13 hours of Web browsing or more than 10 hours of video playback. To remove it, unplug the connector from the motherboard, and undo the three Phillips-head screws that secure it in place.

Next, there is the new CAMM memory Dell introduced to replace SODIMM. It takes less space but is considerably more difficult to upgrade. That’s because it is held in place by four screws. Two of them are used to mount the CAMM connector module to the system board. Interestingly, the same connector is used to put a SODIMM adapter, if you prefer to use the traditional memory type.

The difference between the two is that you can put up to 128GB of CAMM DDR5 RAM inside the laptop, while SODIMM memory is limited to 64 GB. On the flip hand, it supports ECC RAM. As far as the storage goes, you get a total of four M.2 PCIe x4 slots, which fit Gen 4 SSDs and support RAID mode.

Lastly, the cooling comprises two heat pipes, shared between the CPU and the GPU. They are attached to a long heat sink, which is being cooled down by two beefy fans. Furthermore, you get two heat sinks directly above the processor and the graphics card. Thankfully, the graphics memory and the VRMs are managed by a couple of heat spreaders.



Subscribe
Notify of
guest
3 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
John
John
1 year ago

despite the common verdict of the Precision 7770, and I agree their performance and design flaws aren’t worth their workstation price premium., but still I ordered one, and didn’t end up returning it. Why? Because on Dell’s Outlet store got one with i9, 64GB RAM, and 16GB A4500 GPU for a relative steal by combining discount codes totaling -81% off, paying $2,100 when sticker price was $9,865!!!!
It has met the needs of my academic research analyzing and training models on large engineering datasets, can even play Forza Horizon 5 at Ultra setting on 3440×1440 widescreen monitor at 60-75 FPS!

Philipp M.
Philipp M.
6 months ago

The most marketing oriented waste of ressources and money I have seen in recent years. With only 210Watts of AC power available, the mainboard is physically incapable of using CPU and GPU at the same time. Putting this amount of power into components that are half the price will give similar, if not better results. (better because a 4090GPU has a larger baseline powerdraw, and needs to be extra careful to not accidentally fry itself under that flimsy heatsink). This thing is like an 7.2l V8 with a fuelpump capped to 1 Gallon per hour: Overtaking a Big Truck will… Read more »

Evan
Evan
2 months ago
Reply to  Philipp M.

Can you just upgrade the power supply / wall adapter to 300W+ to get better performance? Also, I understand recent BIOS updates have fixed, or at least mitigated many (all?) of the thermal / amperage management concerns.