I had a 5530 for work before my current computer. They were awesome the first couple years we had them. They ran Catia well, as well as a lot of engineering applications. They were light and had decent battery life for a workstation. But they were awful from a maintainability standpoint. Almost all the batteries on the 5510 and 5530s swelled up and were expensive to replace out of warranty. A lot of them had issues with the GPUs becoming unstable (probably because they were separating from heat sinks). When you are really using them the keyboards are pretty toasty. They use a special power brick with a slim plug. You can get an adapter but they were hard to come by. The USB-PD is finicky and only likes a very limited set of profiles and is also the only thunderbolt port. More on reddit.com

i think that’s a bit expensive. something closer to the $450-500 range would be better considering what used gaming laptops go for More on reddit.com

I got like the same one as my 2nd laptop still. I think it’s worth it. the UHD display makes me keep it forever. the only feature they screwed up is the webcam position at the bottom of the screen. and maybe get a usb-c charger! still €520 is a fair price. More on reddit.com

Thanks for the effort and insights into your experiences.

My previous Precision never had any issues. I'm inclined to believe that Precisions have higher QC and possible higher spec components (capacitors, tolerances, etc.)

It's entirely the same, but the obvious. The conductors, capacitors everything the same. It's also the same QA and QC process. It's more the audience that changes and their use-task profile. Most here who complain have the usage profile of a gamer and are mostly also pretty young.

 

I'm not sure it could maintain that performance long term,

Nope just in bursts. The base frequency is way below.

 

I have not had problems with overheating or throttling, but I almost always use a cooling pad

Great. I come to believe that these are the best method to cope with heat issues. Won't work when you are on the go, but then what should you do that strains your system so much, but gaming?

And to that end I entirely agree with:

I don't game directly on this computer because this computer isn't meant for that

Which most certainly also is the reason why you've simply less issues then other users who primarly get the XPS/Precision for gaming and wonder why anything burns down after half a year of gaming with it daily for hours - including the battery.

 

The bad: Yeah, the sleep function sucks on this thing. Occasionally, I'll take it out my bag and it will be hot and nearly dead. I've disabled connected standby, I've tried to hibernate after 20 minutes. Dell definitely needs to fix something.

Sleep mode is extremely sensitive to realize if you'd want to provide additional waking-up features. DELL should simply eliminate those features and make a normal sleep method which only wakes up on lid interaction and takes out the whole periphery activity. The reason why sleep is so inconsistent atm is because you can still use ports for charging stuff and also additional administrative triggers so you can wakeup laptops as clients remotely.

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