Dell Precision 17 7770 review – its cooling needs a revamp


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 i7-12850HX (55W TDP) 0:02 – 0:10 sec 0:15 – 0:30 sec 10:00 – 15:00 min
Dell Precision 17 7770 3.18 GHz @ 2.29 GHz @ 89°C @ 101W 2.82 GHz @ 2.06 GHz @ 90°C @ 90W 2.77 GHz @ 1.91 GHz @ 82°C @ 85W
Dell Precision 16 7670 3.46 GHz @ 2.88 GHz @ 94°C @ 131W 3.01 GHz @ 2.66 GHz @ 92°C @ 109W 2.49 GHz @ 2.17 GHz @ 78°C @ 72W

Interestingly, the smaller 16-inch notebook delivers a better short-to-medium extreme load performance. However, stuff falls in its right place at the end of the test, where we measured 85W of power draw from the CPU, as opposed to 72W on the smaller unit.

Real-life gaming

NVIDIA RTX A3000 GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 2 min) GPU frequency/ Core temp (after 30 min) GPU frequency/ Core temp (Max Fan)
Dell Precision 17 7770 1578 MHz @ 83°C @ 114W 1568 MHz @ 84°C @ 115W
HP ZBook Studio G9 1405 MHz @ 63°C @ 80W 1404 MHz @ 64°C @ 80W
ASUS ProArt Studiobook 16 OLED (W7600) 1578 MHz @ 78°C @ 103W 1589 MHz @ 79°C @ 105W

Unfortunately, all of the additions to the cooling setup of this machine can’t really help it use the full 130W of the RTX A3000’s TGP. As you can see, it not only settles for 115W, but the high temperatures don’t let the clocks go too high. Thus, the Dell Precision 17 7770 gets overtaken by the ASUS ProArt Studionbook 16 OLED (W7600).

Comfort during full load

Fan noise is present, if not a bit loud. Weirdly, the laptop’s keyboard gets warm, but we are almost 100% sure that there is a hot breeze going through the keys, meaning that the airflow is venting from underneath. Usually, manufacturers do the other way round, So that the fans draw cool air through the keyboard, cooling the keyboard in the process.

Battery

Now, we conduct the battery tests with the 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. Our unit is equipped with the larger 93Wh battery, which lasts for 13 hours and 6 minutes of Web browsing, or 10 hours and 22 minutes of video playback.

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.



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