With the 2.13kg Precision 5750, Dell waves goodbye to the bulky 17-inch pro laptops of the past
Among the six mobile workstations launched today as part of Dell’s new Precision line up, the one that stands out is a new thin and light 17-inch model, the Precision 5750. While the others are ‘grounds-up redesigns’ of previous models with brand new smaller chassis, the Precision 5750 is a completely new class of mobile workstation. And that’s not just as far as Dell is concerned – we’ve not seen anything similar from any of the Tier One mobile workstation manufacturers.
Historically, one of the main motivations to buy a 17-inch mobile workstation was to get access to the high-end GPUs, which weren’t available in 15-inch models. This became even more important in recent years with the rise of real-time viz, GPU rendering and VR and one of the reasons the 17-inch mobile workstation market grew in the UK by 25% in 2019.
The Precision 5750 might be considered ‘VR Ready’, but its Quadro RTX 3000 GPU is really more for entry-level VR workflows. The main attraction is the 17-inch 4K display, built into an incredibly thin (8.67mm – 13.15mm) chassis that weighs a mere 2.13kg. The 4-sided narrow bezel ‘InfinityEdge’ display also means its 374mm x 248mm footprint is not much bigger than a mainstream 15-inch laptop. Dell points out that it has four Type C Thunderbolt ports, the first non-Apple device to have that.
The Precision 5750 has been joined by the 15.6-inch Precision 5550, which has a similar slimline design and is a replacement for the Precision 5540. The Precision 5540 was already notably smaller than other 15-inch mobile workstations, including the HP ZBook Studio G5 and the Lenovo ThinkPad P1, but Dell has now shrunk things down even more, making the 5550 a small but significant 6% smaller. It features the Turing-based Quadro T1000 or T2000 GPU which Dell says is around 20-30% faster than the previous generation, and 2 Type C Thunderbolt ports. The webcam has also been moved from the bottom to the top of the display, which was a gripe from customers because of its less than flattering camera angle.
Both the Precision 5550 and 5570 include a choice of 10th Gen Intel Core and Xeon processors up to 8-cores, including the Intel Xeon W-10885M (2.80GHz, 5.10GHz Turbo) and Intel Core i9-10885H (2.40GHz, 5.30GHz Turbo), up to 64GB of 2933MHz memory and 4TB of storage.
For those who place a more importance on performance than portability, Dell has the 15.6-inch Precision 7550 and the 17-inch Precision 7750. Both feature the exact same choice of 10th Gen Intel Core and Xeon processors, but have more much more powerful GPUs, including a choice of Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs up to RTX 5000 (16GB). Memory is also doubled to 128GB. The 7770 has slightly larger storage capacity (up to 8TB spread across four M.2 NVMe SSDs compared to 6TB spread across three). Both machines are considerably smaller than their predecessors – 19% smaller in fact.
At the budget end, Dell has introduced the Precision 3550 and 3551. Both machines feature a choice of 10th Gen Intel Core and Xeon processors up to 6-cores, up to 32GB RAM, up to 2TB storage and Nvidia Quadro P620 GPUs. In fact, AMD Radeon Pro has been pushed out of Dell’s mobile workstation family altogether and Dell has standardised on Nvidia Quadro graphics across the board.
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