Like the recently reviewed Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 and not-yet-reviewed HP ZBook Fury 15 G8, the Dell Precision 7560 (starts at $2,449) is a flagship 15.6-inch mobile workstation, built to tackle the toughest jobs in computer-aided design (CAD), 3D rendering or CGI, and scientific and engineering analysis. Even at a steep $4,866, our test unit is one rung from the top of the ladder, with only one-quarter the maximum memory, one-sixth the maximum storage, and an 11th Generation Intel Core i7 instead of Core i9 or Xeon processor plus Nvidia’s RTX A4000 instead of A5000 professional GPU. But it’s a formidable performer and a fine system to have in your corner when there’s difficult work to be done.
A Serious Slab for Power-User Pros
Dell may complain that we quoted a starting price of $2,449 for the Precision 7560 when you can technically buy one for $1,919, but that model has Intel integrated graphics, so it doesn’t qualify as a workstation in our eyes. (And not that our eyes could focus on its dim 220-nit display.) The “real” base model combines a six-core Core i5 CPU, Nvidia T1200 graphics, and a brighter 1080p screen.
Our $4,866 review unit flaunts an eight-core, 2.5GHz (4.8GHz turbo) Core i7-11850H chip, 32GB of memory, a 2TB PCI Express Gen 4 solid-state drive, Nvidia’s 8GB RTX A4000, and a 600-nit non-touch screen with 4K (3,840-by-2,160-pixel) resolution. You can climb to the 16GB RTX A5000 and a Core i9-11950H or Xeon W-11955M if you have the dough. The RAM limit is 128GB, with error-correcting-code (ECC) memory available for Xeons, and there’s room for three 4TB M.2 SSDs.
A 1080p touch screen is available, but ours is the top display choice, with no OLED panel on the menu. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth, Windows 10 Pro, and three years of on-site service are included. Our unit has both a face recognition webcam and a fingerprint reader (integrated with the power button) for Windows Hello logins. Qualcomm 5G mobile broadband is optional.
Clad in what Dell calls Titan Gray aluminum, the Precision 7560 measures 1.08 by 14.2 by 9.5 inches and tips the scales at 5.42 pounds, which is bearable but hardly ultraportable for a 15.6-inch laptop. It’s still considerably trimmer than the ThinkPad P15 Gen 2, which is 1.24 by 14.7 by 9.9 inches and a ponderous 6.32 pounds. The bezels on either side of the screen are quite thin, though the top and bottom bezels are chunkier.
Two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports join a SmartCard slot on the laptop’s left edge, with two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, an SD card slot, an audio jack, and a security lock slot at the right. Around the back, you’ll find HDMI and mini DisplayPort video outputs, an Ethernet jack, and the power connector.
Lovely to Look At
The screen delivers fine details, as you’d expect from a 4K panel, with wide viewing angles and high brightness and contrast. Colors don’t quite pop like poster paints but are rich and well saturated; white backgrounds are crisp instead of grayish or dingy. Dell PremierColor software lets you choose from vibrant, internet (sRGB), HD video, SD video, custom, or two low-blue-light color palettes; use an X-Rite or Portrait Displays color calibrator; schedule low-blue-light settings; or arrange app windows in various ways.
Only a couple of layout quirks keep the keyboard from a high recommendation: It offers two-level backlighting, a snappy typing feel, and a convenient numeric keypad, but follows the unpleasant HP practice of arranging the cursor arrow keys in a row instead of the proper inverted T, with hard-to-hit, half-height up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right arrows. Worse, while there are dedicated Home and End keys on the top row, you must team the Fn key with the up and down arrow keys for Page Up and Page Down.
There’s a good-size touchpad south of the space bar, with three soft-touch buttons at its bottom including the middle button beloved of CAD and other independent software vendor (ISV) workstation apps.
Sound from the speaker grille above the keyboard is only loud enough to fill a small room, but clear and not tinny or distorted even at top volume. Bass is minimal but you can make out overlapping tracks. The 720p webcam captures fairly well-lit and colorful, soft-focus shots with some noise or static.
The provided Dell Optimizer software, which has always let workstation users save combinations of settings to tweak performance for different applications, has gained system diagnostic and analytic functions, network and audio optimization (the latter for conferencing, not music or movies), and the option of using the webcam as a proximity sensor to put the system to sleep when you walk away and resume when you return.
Testing the Precision 7560: Workstations Vs. Content Creators
For our benchmark charts, I naturally compared the Precision 7560 to the HP ZBook Power G8 and Lenovo ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 mobile workstations. That left two spaces which I filled with high-end creative laptops that lack ISV certifications, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 and the Dell XPS 15 OLED. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage. (See more about how we test laptops.)
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
Performance sticklers can configure the Precision 7560 with 3,466MHz instead of our system’s 3,200MHz memory (non-ECC only), not to mention a Core i9 or Xeon processor, but even as is it—like the other laptops here—is sheer overkill for Microsoft Office or Google Docs, with speedy storage and a blazing CPU. Its performance and 4K display make it a stunning Photoshop station.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics), and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
The RTX A4000 is the second fastest (behind the A5000) of Nvidia’s current “Ampere” generation of mobile workstation GPUs, replacing the “Turing”-architecture crop that wore the Quadro label. It’s meant for ISV apps and visualization, not gaming, but obviously highly capable of playing a few rounds after hours.
Workstation-Specific Tests
We run two additional programs to simulate workstation applications. The first, Blender, is an open-source 3D suite for modeling, animation, simulation, and compositing. We record the time it takes for its built-in Cycles path tracer to render two photo-realistic scenes of BMW cars, one using the system’s CPU and one the GPU (lower times are better). BMW artist Mike Pan has said he considers the scenes too fast for rigorous testing, but they’re a popular benchmark.
Our most important workstation test, SPECviewperf 2020, renders, rotates, and zooms in and out of solid and wireframe models using viewsets from popular independent software vendor (ISV) apps. We run the 1080p resolution tests based on PTC’s Creo CAD platform; Autodesk’s Maya modeling and simulation software for film, TV, and games; and Dassault Systemes’ SolidWorks 3D rendering package. The more frames per second, the better.
Even as an RTX A4000 versus A5000, the Precision slugged it out with the ThinkPad P15 Gen 2 in Blender (where the X1 Extreme was the surprise winner) and almost kept up in SPECviewperf. It’s more than ready for any demanding workstation workflow.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of SteelTears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
High-end workstations are plugged in for all-day rendering runs, not perched on airline tray tables, so the 7560’s mediocre battery life isn’t a deal-breaker. Its IPS screen falls short of the brilliant colors of the XPS 15 OLED but is still a pleasure to view, helped by brightness that’s ample even if shy of its advertised 600 nits.
Taking Care of (Serious) Business
The Dell Precision 7560 misses an Editors’ Choice award by the narrowest of margins, mainly because of its mildly finger-frustrating keyboard and the lack of an OLED screen option. But it gives you a stellar array of other options, from CPU, GPU, and storage choices to 5G mobile broadband in case Wi-Fi isn’t available. And it has the power to crunch through any job you throw at it. It belongs in the top rank of mobile workstations.
