Before we start off, you should know that this isn’t going to be your ordinary laptop – it is a complete powerhouse and perhaps a perfect replacement for your desktop. Yes, Behold the mighty Dell Precision 7730 laptop which combined with its beyond perfect performance, and a comfortable keyboard, you can put your mind in peace for at least another 7 years or so.
Furthermore, you shouldn’t be doubtful about its build quality, since it is pretty rugged, and even then offers a premium look which no other laptop does. The only downside which comes to high-performance laptops, as well as this one, is its low battery life, and that it can reach rather uncomfortable temperatures. Also, for all the performance, you need to pay a premium $5,543 which means that this laptop surely isn’t for everyone but only for professionals like engineers or the creative minded.
Design
The laptop has a weight of 7.5 pounds, and indeed weighs more than the HP ZBook 17 G4’s 7.1 pounds but is still lighter than the ThinkPad P71’s 8 pounds. The Precision 7730 measures 16.3 x 10.8 x 1.2-inches so isn’t portable enough but still, you can at least carry it from one place to another with disconnecting the cables as you do on a desktop.
The laptop is made up of rugged materials, like a carbon-fiber lid and a metal frame which add further beauty to the laptop.
Ports
Unlike other laptops, the 7730 houses many ports than you can even think. On the left side of the laptop, there a smart card reader, an SD card slot and two Thunderbolt 3 ports as well. While on the right side, there are two USB 3.1 Type-A ports, along with a Kensington lock and headphone/mic combo jack too.
In addition to this, there are ports at the back of the laptop too, which packs an HDMI, a mini DisplayPort, an Ethernet port, a DC power jack and a third USB 3.1 Type-A port.
Durability
Due to its rugged nature, you don’t have to worry if you drop your laptop incidentally since it passed the 15 MIL-SPEC durability test, which means that it can be used at high altitudes, and also extremely hot and cold temperatures as well. The laptop is also resistant to dust, occasional shock, and drops.
Security
You can opt for a FIPS fingerprint sensor, which sits in the palm rest on the bottom ride side. There is also a standard smart card reader, and also an NFC sensor for contactless smart cards.
Display
With that much higher price tag, you are going to get an excellent display after all. The 17 inches 4K display delivers an exquisite display. The colors are exceptionally vibrant and true.
Furthermore, the panel manages to reproduce nearly 211 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which is currently the highest on any laptop. Other laptops like the Lenovo ThinkPad P71 managed 183 percent and the HP ZBook 17 G4 just 173 percent (comparatively).
Moreover, Dell’s panel is bright enough even under strong sunlight. The panel recorded 330 nits on the light meter, which is more than the category average of 325 nits.
Keyboard
The full-sized keyboard has an actuation force of 69 grams and an ideal key travel of 1.6 millimeters. The keyboard, also chiclet-style, provides an extremely comfortable typing experience and also has a dedicated num pad to punch all those numbers. The backlight keyboard also provides a wholesome experience especially at night, when the room is in utter darkness.
Touchpad
Unfortunately, even being a huge laptop, its touchpad is not spacious at all, with a size of just 3.9 x 2.1-inches. Even then, it responds pretty quickly to multi-touch gestures. In addition to this, there are three discrete mouse buttons – left, middle, and right respectively.
Like the Lenovo’s ThinkPad lineup, there is also a little rubber nub present in the center of the keyboard which you can use an alternative for the touchpad.
Performance
On the Geekbench 4 performance test, the laptop scores a significantly higher score of 23,130 where other laptops like the Lenovo ThinkPad P71 and HP ZBook 17 G4 could only fare 15,972 and 15,839 respectively. The category average also stands at just the 15,252 mark.
Graphics
The laptop is equipped with the Nvidia Quadro P5200 GPU, which packs an incredible 16 GB of DDR5 memory. Courtesy this blazing fast GPU, the laptop manages to score 3,953 on the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra synthetic graphics test. Lenovo ThinkPad P71 scores 3,588 while HP ZBook 17 G4 manages 3,643, which are both lower than the Precision 7730. The workstation average is also just 1,490.
Audio
When we said, the laptop is a perfect desktop replacement, then we meant it since you won’t need to attach any external speakers, as the inbuilt speakers can easily fill a large sized conference room.
Battery
The only big downside about the laptop is its low battery life, with the laptop lasting just 4 and 14 minutes while being continuously used for web browsing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. The category average is 6 hours and 49 minutes, therefore this time is considerably short. Though the Lenovo ThinkPad P71 and HP ZBook 17 G4 also last lesser than the category average with 5 hours, 57 minutes and 5 hours, 23 minutes respectively, at least they last a whole hour longer.
Webcam
Unfortunately, the webcam seems to be just okayish, even for a laptop priced this much high. Though, not anything you can’t work around with.
Heat
The laptop doesn’t remain calm while being used and reach rather uncomfortable temperatures. The underside even manages to reach a high 110 degrees Fahrenheit, under stress.
Configuration
In case, you are on a budget, you can always get the base model Precision 5570 which packs a 1600 x 900 display, an Intel Core i5-8300H CPU, integrated Intel HD GFX graphics, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB and 7,200-rpm HDD for $1,479.
For the price of $ 5,534, you would get an Intel Core i9-8950HK CPU, a Nvidia Quadro P5200 GPU, 32GB of memory and dual 512GB PCIe NVMe SSDs and an amazing 4k display.
The options don’t max out here, since, for a whopping price tag of $10,928, you get a beast of the beasts packing an Intel Core Xeon E-2186M CPU, 128GB of RAM and 8TB of SSD storage, with the same 4k display and P5200 GPU.
Other than that, you can opt for Nvidia or Radeon GPUs to your liking, get 4 2 TB SSDs for a total 8 TB of whopping SSD storage, choose between i5, i7 or Xeon CPUs, change RAID configurations, change the keyboard to backlit, extend the battery life further using a 97Wh rather than a 64Wh one, while also opt for a fingerprint reader. The best thing is that you can also opt for a model with a whopping 128 GB of RAM with 32 GB each.
What our advise would be to close your eyes, and buy this laptop, even if it seems expensive because, to be honest, the Dell Precision 7730 is quite worth it.