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 sec | 0:15 – 0:30 sec | 10:00 – 15:00 min |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dell Precision 16 7680 | 3.46 GHz @ 2.99 GHz @ 92°C @ 141W | 3.13 GHz @ 2.75 GHz @ 96°C @ 117W | 2.19 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 Generation | GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 2 min) | GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 30 min) |
|---|---|---|
| Dell Precision 16 7680 | 2400 MHz @ 75°C @ 67W | 2400 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.
Brightness: 180 nits; Display Mode: SDR
Time to Full Discharge: Higher is Better
In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.
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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No 2.5G ethernet for the top tier mobile workstation model!? That’s ridiculous
“+ Decent battery life – Horrendous battery life”
Are you serious ?
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.
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