Laptop for Work

[HangOutdoors]

Dell is having some decent sales coming up starting this Friday. We are going to pick up a couple of these. They have nVidia 3070 RTX in them. At the price point of $1999 it is not a bad deal. Plus another 10% if you have a dell credit/Card account, so $1,800. The drive will only be 512gb, but it an M2. The x17 also has a second m2 slot so I can drop in a 1TB or so Samsung EVO Pro and then double or quad up the RAM with some corsair fast timing RAM. Still cheaper than the XPS'es we have with more screen real estate.

I was going to wait till the 12th gen Alder Lake with 7nm die's comes out to laptop's but that could be another 8-9months or so and the price is going to be up there.

Anyhow thought I would pass it on.

Alienware X17 Gaming Laptop | Dell USA | Member Purchase Program

 

[I_squared_r]

Dell is having some decent sales coming up starting this Friday. We are going to pick up a couple of these. They have nVidia 3070 RTX in them. At the price point of $1999 it is not a bad deal. Plus another 10% if you have a dell credit/Card account, so $1,800. The drive will only be 512gb, but it an M2. The x17 also has a second m2 slot so I can drop in a 1TB or so Samsung EVO Pro and then double or quad up the RAM with some corsair fast timing RAM. Still cheaper than the XPS'es we have with more screen real estate.

I was going to wait till the 12th gen Alder Lake with 7nm die's comes out to laptop's but that could be another 8-9months or so and the price is going to be up there.

Anyhow thought I would pass it on.

Alienware X17 Gaming Laptop | Dell USA | Member Purchase Program

That's a pretty good laptop for the price. RTX 3070 has an excellent benchmark.

An update: I had to change my RAM because it was unstable at the max frequency and the PC wouldn't boot up. I had to reset the BIOS by jumping 2 wires on the motherboard and that got me back up. I went through the motherboard's compatibility list and found a replacement RAM and everything is good now.

The AMD 5800x has been great. Day to day functions are a lot faster compared to my old 7th gen intel i7. Especially since Autodesk Revit is heavy on the processor. The 5800x runs hot and the 240mm AIO cooler was a good choice. I don't think TSA will bother me about liquid cooling when I fly to brazil .. it is a sealed unit ..

 

[HangOutdoors]

I was looking at the 5900HX with a 3070 RTX, 32gb RAM and 1 TB M2 and a 360hz 1ms refresh for $1749, minus the 10% would put it at $1580 on a 15" form factor. Which is a fantastic/incredible price price. Just cant seem to digest not having Thunderbolt 4 since I have multiple docks with it. The bench marks a bit softer than the Intel's as well. But I keep going back and forth, have till friday. I missed monday's sale with an x17 I9 and a 3080 RTX for $2700. They are completely sold out. That sale lasted about an hour.

Alienware m15 Ryzen™ Edition R5 with AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU | Dell USA

 

[I_squared_r]

I was looking at the 5900HX with a 3070 RTX, 32gb RAM and 1 TB M2 and a 360hz 1ms refresh for $1749, minus the 10% would put it at $1580 on a 15" form factor. Which is a fantastic/incredible price price. Just cant seem to digest not having Thunderbolt 4 since I have multiple docks with it. The bench marks a bit softer than the Intel's as well. But I keep going back and forth, have till friday. I missed monday's sale with an x17 I9 and a 3080 RTX for $2700. They are completely sold out. That sale lasted about an hour.

Alienware m15 Ryzen™ Edition R5 with AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU | Dell USA

I asked the question about processors on Toms Hardware forum and people were quick to point out that userbenchmark.com is biased towards Intel because they use specific metrics. It's a conspiracy and I haven't confirmed it. But it seemed like everyone was pointing me to AMD including the young guys at the PC hardware store so I went with AMD.

EDIT: That alienware is a great deal

 

[HangOutdoors]

We have benched them in house and they score a bit lower than intel at least for now. Also their battery run time on the Alienware laptops looks like about 1/2 that of the 11th gen intel models. But without Thunderbolt 4 it basically would be a no go, otherwise I would have to redock machines. I keep looking at them though. At that price point I really want to like them.....

Now don't get me wrong. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper is amazing if that is what you are looking for and within budget. I would like to build an awesome tower with one in it, but for $1000 - $3000 for the high end Threadrippers, wouldn't make much sense.

Intel's Alder Lake 12th gen is a phenomenal chip. The 12th gen I5 is better than previous I7's for the most part. But they just released them in the last couple of months for Desktops, I don't think they will be coming any sooner that spring at the earliest for laptops and probably not on sale unless sales are way down.

 

[haknslash]

Dell is having some decent sales coming up starting this Friday. We are going to pick up a couple of these. They have nVidia 3070 RTX in them. At the price point of $1999 it is not a bad deal. Plus another 10% if you have a dell credit/Card account, so $1,800. The drive will only be 512gb, but it an M2. The x17 also has a second m2 slot so I can drop in a 1TB or so Samsung EVO Pro and then double or quad up the RAM with some corsair fast timing RAM. Still cheaper than the XPS'es we have with more screen real estate.

I was going to wait till the 12th gen Alder Lake with 7nm die's comes out to laptop's but that could be another 8-9months or so and the price is going to be up there.

Anyhow thought I would pass it on.

Alienware X17 Gaming Laptop | Dell USA | Member Purchase Program

If their Alienware group is as backlogged and incompetent as their Dell Professional Workstation group is then I’d say pass. Really not impressed since they are making us switch from HP to Dell for our replacement CAD workstations. Dell tried to pull a fast one on my company. We spec’d the machines with NVME drives and this fuckers swapped in old POS slow ass mechanical HDD’s yet still charged us as if they were NVME drive. We are STILL waiting on them to send in the hardware. What is so crazy is they don’t mount the NVME on the motherboard like 99.99999% of all other NVME are installed. Nope Dell must do things the hard way for the sake of added cost and questionable complexity by using a custom ribbon cable to relocate the NVME to the front of the tower in a hidden compartment. Why? I have zero clue other than to add bloat and cost to a build. Took the case apart and just laughed and shook my head at how much plastic and shit is in there. It looked like the inside of an office workroom copier with all the plastic shot you have to remove to get to the guts. Wished my work would just let us build our PC’s but of course the bean counters and powers that be are likely in some contract with Dell or some shit to shave a few pennies....of course at the cost of my Engineering department being slowed down while we are waiting for early a year now to have our order filled.

Hopefully your experience goes better than ours has. So far really not impressed with their bait and switch tactics. I get it supply is an issue but you don’t toss in inferior hardware AND charge the customer for the top-tier shit they spec’d knowing damn well they tried to pull a fast one. As if nobody is going to question why the boot times seem like a computer from 20 years ago and forget trying to write large chunks of data lol.

 

[2kwik4u]

......Wished my work would just let us build our PC’s

Dude, I have no idea what the risk aversion is to building your own PC's.

We were fighting some performance problems with super large assemblies in inventor a few years back. We got authorized to drive over to BestBuy at lunch and get the top of the line, best you can get video card at the time. Brought it back and spent he afternoon installing, getting drivers updated and doing the remainder of "before and after" testing. It was exceptionally favorable in load times, as well as in maintaining workable framerates for navigating in those large assemblies. I think the card at the time was like $750/ea or something like that. We have 12 guys in our drawing room that would need it, of those 12, 5-6 are primarily "large assembly" guys that get those tough projects. Total cost would have been around $13k (including 4hrs each to install and configure). Instead they squashed the idea, and the next spring (like 6mo later) bought everyone new "Thinkstations" for around $4k each. Still didn't have good cards in them, and still didn't perform as well as the one "home brew" solution we had. Was a total waste of time/effort/money and we got poorer performance in the end.

When we questioned them we got a "We wanted to get approved hardware in case there's an issue"........They didn't like when I asked "Isn't sluggish sub-par performance an issue?!?!"......I don't get to sit in those meetings anymore.

 

[HangOutdoors]

If their Alienware group is as backlogged and incompetent as their Dell Professional Workstation group is then I’d say pass. Really not impressed since they are making us switch from HP to Dell for our replacement CAD workstations. Dell tried to pull a fast one on my company. We spec’d the machines with NVME drives and this fuckers swapped in old POS slow ass mechanical HDD’s yet still charged us as if they were NVME drive. We are STILL waiting on them to send in the hardware. What is so crazy is they don’t mount the NVME on the motherboard like 99.99999% of all other NVME are installed. Nope Dell must do things the hard way for the sake of added cost and questionable complexity by using a custom ribbon cable to relocate the NVME to the front of the tower in a hidden compartment. Why? I have zero clue other than to add bloat and cost to a build. Took the case apart and just laughed and shook my head at how much plastic and shit is in there. It looked like the inside of an office workroom copier with all the plastic shot you have to remove to get to the guts. Wished my work would just let us build our PC’s but of course the bean counters and powers that be are likely in some contract with Dell or some shit to shave a few pennies....of course at the cost of my Engineering department being slowed down while we are waiting for early a year now to have our order filled.

Hopefully your experience goes better than ours has. So far really not impressed with their bait and switch tactics. I get it supply is an issue but you don’t toss in inferior hardware AND charge the customer for the top-tier shit they spec’d knowing damn well they tried to pull a fast one. As if nobody is going to question why the boot times seem like a computer from 20 years ago and forget trying to write large chunks of data lol.

Its unfortunate you had a bad experience. Dell has been great with our orders and machines as well as customer service, my System Admins have no gripes really. We have close to 150 computers from them in house, from light use up through professional workstations, servers laptops, etc. Their replacement process has been smooth as well.

I have purchased two Alienware computers personally, one laptop, one desktop and also a Dell XPS laptop Personally. Except for the gripe about a couple of firmware updates on my laptop I have not had any other issues.

I do prefer building my own Higher End Desktops and have been thinking about it for my home office, but with the costs of the RTX 3080's and the prices of the 12th gen I9 Alder Lake right now, I am going to hold off on doing that. Perhaps they will drop after the first of the year.

 

[HangOutdoors]

Dude, I have no idea what the risk aversion is to building your own PC's.

Well my input if anyone is interested, basically follows budgeting and resource allocation. As a CIO and 100's of computers in house, I cannot pay for the System Admins to build PC's and the increased hardware cost as well as time to implement, which is quite significant. It all adds up. Then we would have disparate systems over time. Patching, Firmware update's, sourcing parts, warranties on parts, financing, inventory/asset control etc. etc. all add to the bottom line and it doesn't make good sense. Our primary business is building software/applications and data warehousing and manipulation. There is a finite amount of time that my System Admins can put in during any given week and I wouldn't be prudent to increase staff and costs for no lift. I prefer them to be focused on security, our cloud, minor break/fix and education. Labor, Maintenance, Hardware costs, etc. have to be optimized. I would rather put the money in my staff's salaries, better health care, benefits and training/education.

With that being said, we do have a couple of systems in house that are built but they are for prototyping next gen software and crypto programs as well as a CAD Program.

Of course if we can't get the job done with the technology that we can find through one of our Vendors or Manufacturers, then more custom avenues would be approached.

 

[haknslash]

Dude, I have no idea what the risk aversion is to building your own PC's.

We were fighting some performance problems with super large assemblies in inventor a few years back. We got authorized to drive over to BestBuy at lunch and get the top of the line, best you can get video card at the time. Brought it back and spent he afternoon installing, getting drivers updated and doing the remainder of "before and after" testing. It was exceptionally favorable in load times, as well as in maintaining workable framerates for navigating in those large assemblies. I think the card at the time was like $750/ea or something like that. We have 12 guys in our drawing room that would need it, of those 12, 5-6 are primarily "large assembly" guys that get those tough projects. Total cost would have been around $13k (including 4hrs each to install and configure). Instead they squashed the idea, and the next spring (like 6mo later) bought everyone new "Thinkstations" for around $4k each. Still didn't have good cards in them, and still didn't perform as well as the one "home brew" solution we had. Was a total waste of time/effort/money and we got poorer performance in the end.

When we questioned them we got a "We wanted to get approved hardware in case there's an issue"........They didn't like when I asked "Isn't sluggish sub-par performance an issue?!?!"......I don't get to sit in those meetings anymore.

It is a shame our IT dept doesn’t have enough backbone to take on building the machines for us. Hell I would gladly help them. Our parent company I think got in with Dell so they are trying to push it across all sub-companies when replacements are needed. Makes me want to bang my head through cinder block walls.

I built my render rig at the time for like $4-5 grand. It was a beast back then with 3x 780Ti’s and it’s a beast now with 2x 2080Ti’s. No way you could build the same rig for that cost these days but it;s usually better to spec and build your own than buy some mass-produced “professional workstation series“ computer from the big MFG names, at least in my experience. you get what you pay for definitely holds true.

Old setup of my render rig... (pay no attention to my mess of GPU cables lol)

 

[HangOutdoors]

It is a shame our IT dept doesn’t have enough backbone to take on building the machines for us. Hell I would gladly help them. Our parent company I think got in with Dell so they are trying to push it across all sub-companies when replacements are needed. Makes me want to bang my head through cinder block walls.

I built my render rig at the time for like $4-5 grand. It was a beast back then with 3x 780Ti’s and it’s a beast now with 2x 2080Ti’s. No way you could build the same rig for that cost these days but it;s usually better to spec and build your own than buy some mass-produced “professional workstation series“ computer from the big MFG names, at least in my experience. you get what you pay for definitely holds true.

Old setup of my render rig... (pay no attention to my mess of GPU cables lol)

View attachment 167562View attachment 167563View attachment 167564View attachment 167565View attachment 167566View attachment 167567

Nice Clean Build. Great Rig!

 

[2kwik4u]

Well my input if anyone is interested, basically follows budgeting and resource allocation. As a CIO and 100's of computers in house, I cannot pay for the System Admins to build PC's and the increased hardware cost as well as time to implement, which is quite significant. It all adds up. Then we would have disparate systems over time. Patching, Firmware update's, sourcing parts, warranties on parts, financing, inventory/asset control etc. etc. all add to the bottom line and it doesn't make good sense. Our primary business is building software/applications and data warehousing and manipulation. There is a finite amount of time that my System Admins can put in during any given week and I wouldn't be prudent to increase staff and costs for no lift. I prefer them to be focused on security, our cloud, minor break/fix and education. Labor, Maintenance, Hardware costs, etc. have to be optimized. I would rather put the money in my staff's salaries, better health care, benefits and training/education.

With that being said, we do have a couple of systems in house that are built but they are for prototyping next gen software and crypto programs as well as a CAD Program.

Of course if we can't get the job done with the technology that we can find through one of our Vendors or Manufacturers, then more custom avenues would be approached.

I get that for a large corporation, even medium sized businesses. We're less than 60 users I think. Makes less sense the smaller the company gets IMO. Especially when comparing time spent (and errors made) in the CAD department vs time spent to complete the upgrade.

As a CIO, how do you handle wildly different workloads on PC's across your infrastructure? Surely you aren't running high end workstations for your admin assistants that just need MS Office, and likewise you aren't surely aren't running low end stations for your engineers and developers that need the computing power right? There have to at least be "classes" of machines within the structure or your unnecessarily wasting resources at some level. Could you look at a custom setup for the "high end tier", that perhaps isn't completely hand built, but at least hand selected?

 

[HangOutdoors]

I get that for a large corporation, even medium sized businesses. We're less than 60 users I think. Makes less sense the smaller the company gets IMO. Especially when comparing time spent (and errors made) in the CAD department vs time spent to complete the upgrade.

As a CIO, how do you handle wildly different workloads on PC's across your infrastructure? Surely you aren't running high end workstations for your admin assistants that just need MS Office, and likewise you aren't surely aren't running low end stations for your engineers and developers that need the computing power right? There have to at least be "classes" of machines within the structure or your unnecessarily wasting resources at some level. Could you look at a custom setup for the "high end tier", that perhaps isn't completely hand built, but at least hand selected?

You are absolutely correct. Typically we group them up just like you are illustrating. General Staff, Managers, Data Processors, Development Team. Each one has a minimum spec/cost we agreed upon in IT that they need to do their job completely. This is done in conjunction with the departments and discussions of their workload and needs. Of course the spec changes over time. Customarily we would buy the same line of computers, with different processors, M2's/SSD, RAM and Graphics but in the same line, footprint, OS, chipset, etc. For Example, Dell Precisions from I5 (min. spec) to XEON's or I9's We have one computer that runs checks/invoices/mailers for our companies and another CAD Machine. These are custom/hand selected. Everyone in the company has the same monitors. Minimum of 2 and maximum of 4, 24". Although my system admins appear to have 6 each as of late, LOL, I let it slide since they work very hard and some long hours.

The trick is, is to figure out is it more cost effective for me buy a higher spec machine and use it across multiple departments or to split specs up but increase possible maintenance. I have a budget and at the end of the day I have a Top and Bottom line that I need to meet or I have to answer to the Powers that be as well as our clients. Some days I don't feel like I am in IT at all......

This last run we got a fantastic deal on 10th Gen I-7" with 32gb RAM from Dell. I got them for about 4% more than what I would of paid for I5's with 16gb. So we bought 50 of them and cycled out the lower spec machines. Timing was good to. As an aside, we donate all of our old hardware 3-5 years usually, to schools, non-profits or veterans.

 

[haknslash]

We do the same at my work. The only folks that have high end computers are my Product Engineering dept, MFG Engineering dept, Wiring Harmess dept, a few Assistant Project Managers and their tech staff as well as our Marketing dept. Everyone else gets the bread and butter minimum spec machines to easily run typical Office apps, video conferencing, ERP system etc. The shop floor and production computers we have them mainly on tablets and the same for the fork lift operators.