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In October 2015, Dell announced the first generation of Precision mobile workstations and introduced the amazingly thin and light 15-inch 5150. The company had two more generations, and in May of this year rolled out a 17-inch fourth-generation unit, the 5750. And what a machine it is.
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| Dell 5750 17-inch workstation notebook is only 4.7 lb. (Source: Dell) |
The Precision 5000 models can be equipped with an Intel Comet Lake H with Core i9 or a Xeon processor. They have two RAM slots (up to 64 GB DDR4, ECC-RAM for the Xeons) and two M.2 2280 SSD bays (offering RAID). The Dell Precision 5750 also can have a Quadro RTX 3000 with 6GB GDDR6. You can get up to 132 GB of ECC RAM, and up to 2 TB of NVMe storage.
It’s bright, light, and you can touch it. The almost invisible bezel screen options include WUXGA (1920 × 900 or 1080) or 4K-UHD touch screen (3,840 × 2,400 × 24) with a brightness value of 500 cd/m². The system has a 97 WHr (wats per hour) battery and is only 2.13 kg (4.7 lb basic unit), the lightest 17-inch ever. (Our test unit weighed 5.5lb.)
The Dell Precision 5750 starts at $2,399. The unit we tested with a 4k touch screen, Xeon 10885 2.4 GHz 32 GB, 1 TB NVMe, and a RTX 3000 came in at $4,500.
There are four USB-C slots (2. USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports with PowerShare, plus two Thunderbolt 3 Type-C), one gets used for power, plus an SD card reader (a Smart Card reader is optional). and just in case you’ve got a bunch of old stuff, Dell includes a clever little dongle that converts the USB-C to USB-B and HDMI. The dongle is losable because it has a fold-up cable and is tiny.
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| Dell’s tiny USB dongle |
The portable workstation is 14.74 inch (374.48 mm) wide, 9.77 inch (248.08 mm) deep (with a wide palm rest), and 0.34 inch (8.67 mm) thick in the front, 0.52 inch (13.15 mm) in the back.
It can hear, see, sense, and talk to you. The screen has the tiniest bezel ever put on a workstation notebook. We couldn’t find a danged micrometer, but using a scale the bevel measures about 1/32-inch (0.76 mm). And in that tiny space in the center of the top bezel is a 720p camera. The system also has a proximity sensor and IR camera that can recognize you and automatically wakeup.
In addition, for those zoom calls, there are dual integrated high-quality speakers and dual integrated noise-canceling digital array microphones standard and MaxxAudio Pro by Waves software.
How does this dream machine measure up?
Well, there’s not much to compare it to, so we compared it to itself, and a last-gen 15-in. Dell. Measure up is a deft term, the beloved 15-inch 5520 weighs 4.7 lb., while the 17-inch is only 5.5 lb. with much more screen real estate.
| 5750 | 5520 | % difference | |
| Visible screen diagonal | 17 in | 15.5 in | 10% |
| Physical screen size | 17.5 in | 16.5 in | 6% |
| Horizontal visible screen size | 15.5 in | 13.375 in | 8% |
| Vert physical screen size | 9 in | 7.438 in | 21% |
| Visible screen area | 139.5 | 107.5 | 30% |
| Lines | 2400 | 2160 | 11% |
| MPixels | 9.216 | 8.294 | 11% |
| Horizontal PPI | 248 | 267 | -7% |
We ran SPEC’s Viewperf 13 at two resolutions and compared the 4K results to tests Dell ran with a similar machine. Our machine had a Quadro RTX3000 and Xeon 10885 2.4GHz. The machine Dell used had a Quadro P3200, and an i9-8950HK 2.90 GHz.
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| Benchmark scores for Dell 7530 notebook workstation |
During the first run, we received a time out message from Windows. The TDR was because it took more than 2 seconds for a frame (or a couple of consecutive frames) to complete.
The operating system is the one that controls that, hence the Microsoft message on TDR registry keys:
The missing scores at 4k for 3ds max and Showcase were expected as SPEC does not have 4K traces for those in SPECviewperf 13 as neither application supported 4K at the time that traces were taken for those viewsets. Also, Showcase will not be included in SPECviewperf 2020 since it’s no longer supported by Autodesk, but every viewset in the new benchmark, expected for release later this year, will support 4K.
Dell is targeting the machine at the four key vertical markets, Media & Entertainment, Manufacturing & Engineering, Higher Education, as well as State and Local Governments.
What do we think?
The skinny bezels give you a 30% improvement in visible screen area to the overall area, while the added scan lines give you 11% more resolution. For those visual improvements, you pay one pound. The added weight is in the bigger battery, and cooling system.
The new 5750 is the thinnest, smallest, and lightest 17-inch workstation with a great balance of performance and design elegance. It has an amazing 94% display to body ratio (the most ever) and the lightweight combination of aluminum and carbon fiber makes a 17-inch mobile workstation platform possible. With a display up to an HDR400, and its 4-sided InfinityEdge skinny bezel, combined with the diamond cut sidewalls and machined speaker grills, it’s a workhorse that could easily be used as a multimedia machine.
We speculated about using the IR camera as a thermometer, especially in these pandemic times. Dell hasn’t gotten back to us on that.
The Dell 5750 is a little heavier (18%) than the previous 15/5-inch version which is an easy trade off for the added screen size and resolution. Lighter than a luggable but heavier than XPs, the 5750 is the one to take with you everywhere—the more you can see, the more you can do, and you’ll be able to do a lot with this machine with its Xeon processor and Quadro GPU.
And yes, we’re going to try some games on it, but that’s a story for another time.