Workstation power at a price
Dell Precision 7780: 30-second review
Portable workstations are an anachronism. By definition, true workstations aren’t easy to carry around due to all the hardware and cooling inside them.
Therefore, it’s best to consider devices like the Dell Precision 7780 as devices with one foot in the workstation camp and the other firmly planted in the mobile computing space.
The problem is that because of the limitations of battery power and physical scale, this hardware can’t be the best workstation or laptop, but it is a hybrid with notional nods at each side of that equation.
Dell made a large 17-inch display laptop with a 93Whr battery, a monstrous Raptor Lake processor with 24 cores and 32 threads, up to 96GB of RAM, and four M.2 NVMe drives.
Those who imagine that this sounds heavy will be surprised to learn that it weighs a whopping 3.3kg, or 7.23 lbs, in old money.
Picking this machine up on one corner with one hand is a huge mistake and could result in a wrist injury.
Should health and safety agree to let you use this, it is something that you will put down and not move again unless you are forced.
A chassis this large provides plenty of room for ports, and the Precision 7780 has all the USB, Thunderbolt, and others that you might reasonably want. With Thunderbolt 4, it’s relatively easy to add even more with a docking station.
However, the flagship feature of this design is the Nvidia RTX 3500 Ada Generation GPU, a discrete graphics card that comes with 12GB of GDDR6 memory. While this won’t make the Precision 7780 outperform a desktop workstation running an RTX 4800 or 4900 series, it’s dramatically better than the Intel ARC integrated GPU that comes gratis with the processor.
Overall, this is an impressive piece of equipment that’s only held back by its excessive mass, the limited operating life on the battery if the GPU is used, and the high asking price.
If you need a machine of this performance level at home and work, it might be worth crunching the numbers to buy two desktop workstations over one mobile machine.Dell Precision 7780: Price and availability
How much does it cost? From $2500
When is it out? Available now
Where can you get it? Direct from Dell
When shopping for one of these, don’t be sipping hot coffee when you start to browse the prices; you have been warned.
Depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you wish to go, a Dell Precision 7780 can start at around $2500. This seems reasonable until you realise that at that cost, you only get a Core i5 processor, 16GB of RAM and a paltry 256GB of storage.
A machine with the same specification as the review hardware in processor, memory and storage costs around $4079. But that’s for the Core i7-13850HX CPU, as in the USA, the Core i9 isn’t offered yet.
A Core i5 machine with the Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada 16GB graphics card, 128GB of RAM, and 4TB of storage is available for an eye-watering $8,500.
For UK customers, a machine of the review hardware specification starts at £3,322.82. But you can bloom that by £989 with extra storage, another £97.50 for the Smartcard option, and even more for a docking station.
Please be aware that some cheaper options don’t come with discrete GPUs, making the title of Mobile Workstation more of a token gesture than an actual description.
Overall, depending on where you buy it and the chosen spec, the Dell Precision 7780 is either expensive or equivalent to the GDP of a small island nation.
However, it is cheaper than the Lenovo P1 Gen 7 with the same GPU, although it has a 14th-Gen Ultra 9 processor and a 3840 x 2400 OLED screen for the £3,882.50 asking price in the UK.
The equivalent HP platform is the ZBook Fury G10, which costs £3,239.99 and has a similar specification to the Precision 7780.
Most of the other brands pitch their mobile workstations with 4K 16-inch displays, whereas Dell has only 17-inch models, but typically only at 1080p resolutions.
It comes down to what you find more useful, screen resolution or image size.
Whatever you choose, PC makers appear to believe that putting “Mobile Workstation” ahead of the description justifies a massive price hike.
It’s worth noting that HP, for example, makes a great collection of AMD Ryzen-powered OMEN gaming laptops for around 70% of these prices, with mobile RTX 4080 GPUs that would probably do the same job for much less money.
Value: 2 / 5Dell Precision 7780: SpecificationsDell Precision 7780: Design
It’s a boat anchor
Large keyboard
Great port selection
No easy access upgrades
The elephant in this room has a metallic skin finish, and a Dell logo emblazoned on it because the Precision 7780 is a laptop of truly pachyderm proportions.
It’s so large and heavy that even the more substantial recipients of this device need to be careful about handling it, and it isn’t anything you want to hold with one hand, ever.
The advantage of being so large is that there is plenty of room for a good keyboard with a numeric pad and spacious wrist rest ahead of it.
