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

Design and construction

This laptop is built like a tank. Its lid and bottom cover are made out of metal, while the base has a rubberized texture. It is either a high-quality plastic or carbon.

In terms of dimensions, the machine weighs 2.60 kg and has a profile of 22.3-23.2mm. Quite thin if you ask us. Yes, these dimensions are not comparable to something like the XPS series, but for a workstation that has 55W CPUs, and up to an RTX 4090.

Anyways, the lid can be opened with one hand, which is great. Its bottom bezel is a bit thick, but the rest are fine. Moreover, the top one houses a Full HD Web camera with an IR face recognition scanner beside it.

Looking at the base, we see something very interesting. First, the keyboard has a backlight, is spill-resistant, and features a full-sized NumberPad. Moreover, the key travel is great, while the feedback is clicky, making it really comfortable for typing.

Then, there is the fingerprint reader. It is a FIPS-compliant fingerprint reader, which is as good, as fingerprint readers can fingerprint read. It might be a bit ugly, but we don’t really mind. By the way, the touchpad’s texture is a bit rough, unlike the one on the fingerprint scanner. However, it is quite accurate and responsive. Plus, you can click pretty much the entire surface.

Moving to the bottom panel, we see the speaker cutouts. In addition, there is a large ventilation grill, while the hot air is exhausted through a vent on the back of the chassis.

Ports

On the left side, there is the power plug, a LAN port, an HDMI 2.1 connector, a USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) port, two Thunderbolt 4 connectors, and a Smart Card reader. Then, on the right, you get a security lock slot, a USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) port, a USB Type-C 3.2 (Gen. 2) port with DisplayPort 1.4 output, an Audio jack, and an SD card reader.

Author: Alex Iliev

Author: eng. Kroum NikolovHead of Engineering at LaptopMedia.com, inventor and innovator with 40+ years of experience in electronics and high technology.

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Poster

3 years ago

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

18

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Jinx

2 years ago

“+ Decent battery life – Horrendous battery life”

Are you serious ?

17

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Admin

Simeon Nikolov

2 years 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.

14

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robert

1 year ago

keyboard arrow keys completely unusable, no page up or page down. micro return key. laptop tries to heat whole house. at least its a work machine for just email and i have a non dell machine for software development
feel sorry if you actually bought this machine

1

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