Today we have an entry-level mobile workstation from Dell complete with an NVIDIA Quadro P620 GPU. The Dell Precision 3541 in this review is targeted at mobile CAD workloads. Dell has solutions in its stable for a variety of corporate users, and many of those are creative professionals that need GPU offload. For IT organizations, they want vendor support and certified drivers which makes the Precision 3541 with the NVIDIA Quadro so appealing. It has features designed specifically for enterprise IT management. In our review, we are going to show you around the system and how it performs.
Dell Precision 3541 Mobile Workstation Overview
We take our first look at the Dell Precision 3541 which is fairly similar to the Latitude 7300. The size of the Precision 3541 comes in at 13.85” x 9.29” and 0.86” thick and has a starting weight of 4.34 pounds. Our Precision 3541 came equipped with a 15.6″ FHD WVA, 1920×1080, anti-glare non-touch, 72% color gamut display and IR camera.
Security features with the new Dell Precision 3541 include a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 and feature a FIPS fingerprint reader. These are important for many organizations. Additionally, a numeric keypad fills out the keyboard area and an additional row of left/right mouse buttons just above the touch-pad. One can also equip the unit with WWAN options to keep road warriors connected on the go.
At the left of the Dell Precision 3541, we find (1) Memory Card Reader, (2) Optional SIM Card Slot, (3) Headphone Jack, (4) USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.1 Gen 1 with PowerShare, (5) HDMI, (6) RJ-45 Port, (7) Wedge-shaped Lock Slot.
Over at the right side, we find (8) Power Adapter Port. (9) USB-C with Thunderbolt, (10) USB 3.1 Gen 1, (11) Smart Card Reader which is optional.
This is not designed to be the thinnest and lightest notebook. Unlike other smaller models, there is a solid array of ports on the chassis.
Next, let us take a look at the Dell Precision 3541 mobile workstation key specifications and continue on with our performance testing.
Great benchmark !
Have you noticed some fans noice during your tests and idle ?
This seems to be a real problem for new Dell laptops.
This is the dumbest laptop review I’ve read.
* 5 pages of benchmarks: but these are almost pointless, you are benchmarking the specific CPU configuration you have, when Dell sell this machine with a range of different CPU options. Any laptop with the same CPU and same RAM etc is going to have very similar benchmarks.
* No reference at all to the aspects which differentiate laptops, i.e. screen quality, keyboard layout, touchpad, fan noise / cooling, and overall build quality.
Dell laptop buyers, if you are a power user, please note that, dell have very tricky mechanism in the bios that they limit the processor power to less than 50% or 25% depend upon the dell power manager settings they have.
If you say to them that the laptop is heating and throttling is happening, they will ask you to put the laptop on cool mode, which limits the processor clocking only upto 1.5GHZ. which is a very poor performance.
These machine especialy 3541, which has a poor thermal discipation design, which leads to processor temperature at 99 deg C and continious clocking even in normal applications.
Specifically, I would recommend power user’s to check the laptop with “intel extreme tuning uttility” and run your applications before buying. If you find any throttling issues like power / thermal / current edp throttling, stay away with dell for this machine.
We are always a bad luck people, that we cannot have sony vaio type laptop not available in India. We should make attitude to get performance laptop brands and we should boycot these type of cheap designed laptops, just only an eye candy for specification, but in motherboard design they are not.
Hope this information helpful for the new buyers.
I bought a secondhand Precision 3541 to use as a Linux laptop. While it works perfectly fine, the performance is extremely underwhelming. My old ThinkPad T460s “feels” faster than this thing (I know it’s probably not when it comes to raw CPU power, but the user-experience feels a lot better).