Thank you for reaching out to us. I’d be glad to look into this for you right away. As our interaction would involve sharing personally identifiable information, I would recommend that you private message us so that we can start working toward a resolution.  

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I am with 7770 with the same CPU and I experience the same issue.

Though my score is about 14500, it's pretty low. I came to the conclusion that it's thermally bottlenecked (hence it's a little higher than yours because of the marginally better cooling). I hit 100C almost immediately after starting Cinebench or any other multicore intensive program.

FYI there was a review posted on YouTube yesterday that showed the same performance - 13,000 - 14,000 range.  That's pretty disappointing because that's basically an 11th gen i7 type of result.  Also, I contacted Dell support and they said they won't address benchmark comparisons to other laptops.

After messing with it for a week or so I'm pretty convinced that the Dell chassis design just can't allow the 12th gen CPUs to pull as much power as they need to perform well.  As I noted above, my CPU has plenty of thermal and power headroom but the laptop will not allow it to pull any more power.  I think Dell limits the power because the laptop is already smoking hot.  If they allowed it to pull even more power I suspect they'd have issues with burnt skin.

So the limit seems to be chassis temps, not CPU temps.  At least that is the case for my 7670.

I wonder what the Lenovo, ASUS and MSI are doing differently that allows them to perform so much better.  I can't find any comparable reviews on those.

Probably not of interest to anyone on this forum but I also found the 7670 real-time performance to be significantly worse than on the 7530 I intended to replace.  I have a benchmark project in my digital audio workstation that runs without audio dropouts at 6.7 ms on the 7530 but requires 24 ms latency on the 7670 to run without dropouts.

Needless to say, I returned my 7670.  I'm not going to pay 12th gen prices for 11th gen CPU performance with real-time performance that is significantly worse than 8th gen.  I've been buying Dell products almost since they started selling them and have always been fairly pleased.  But the 7670 is just not performing well, and from what I can see it's not just mine.

I think Dell got stuck with a need to do a "me too" with 12th gen but didn't have the engineering to make it work.

Do you mean 25,000 in CBR23?  Or do you mean 2500 in the single-core benchmark?

Regarding the thermal throttling,  as I mentioned above, the CPU has plenty of thermal margin.  The CPU is not thermal throttling.  It appears Dell is limiting the power draw because the chassis gets too hot to touch.

Regardless, it seems an odd decision to design a laptop around a component that you have to cripple in order to use it.

If you can't make use of a particular CPU because of thermal issues, why even offer it?

You need to remember 7670 is 16” inch portable workstation in 15” enclosure. If you configure it with top 16-core CPU like 12950HX you can be sure that thermal throttling will limit your CPU performance. Now check cooling system and noise levels in Alienware with 14-core 12900H (there are four large fans) to get about 2500 pts Cinebench R23.

Sorry 2500 pts in CB R15 and about 16 thousand in CB R23: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Alienware-x15-R2-Laptop-Review-Ultrabook-like-UFO-soars-with-Core-i9-12900H-and-140-W-RTX-3080-Ti.649898.0.html Possibly Dell limit power like you mentioned because it is mobile workstation to work (not gaming) so what you expect is stable flat long term performance even when you set more than 10 loops in CB (simulated workload). Honestly speaking even 12600HX can be hard to cool but if you want more power go with 12850HX - it has more cache and lower base CPU frequency (easier to get in realistic scenario). To check your system install ThrottleStop first or Intel tool: check PL1,PL2 power limits and what is more important check „Limit Reasons” table. If it is almost empty (no red flags) then we can skip thermal throttling as a source of our problem and assume that Dell limited power intentionally. To be sure you can turn off CPU cores in UEFI or disable Turbo Boost. Also remember to install Dell Power Manager and set Ultra Performance in Thermal Management dialog. Regarding your last question - reasons are multiple. You can divide it to financial (marketing) and technological reasons. Dell needs to advertise and sell with high profit. Top notch CPU looks cool for customers, reviewers etc Stronger CPU means +400$ so profit can be higher depending on the price from Intel. The problem is that Intel CPUs are power hungry and Dell performance strategy is to get as much peformance with high temperatures up to 100 Celcius degrees. Apple had similar approach in the past but they generally used custom CPUs from Intel with limited TDP (best silicon) eg 28W instead to buy stock 45W CPU. Even that power draw and thermal management was a challenge. That is why they drop Intel architecture. Now in Alder Lake power limits are more configurable (that is why the same CPU has +-30% result in the same benchmark besides difference in cooling system (amount of heatpipes, fans and thermal mass etc). Practically what I can suggestions to check CPU benchmarks (eg Passmark or CB) because very often we can observe that theoretically stronger CPU like i9 can have result lower than eg i7. For example if we see that some good laptops with the same i9 have performance drops then we can assume that cooling this unit can be challenge. You can also focus on CB loop test of single unit - every drop/dip after first seconds means that cooling system is not designed correctly if we talk about mobile workstation or gaming laptop.

I recently got the 7670 through work. Primarily I'm running Keyshot and Solidworks as my most demanding software. I have the 12th gen i9-12950HX and RTX A3000 12GB GPU.

When I first fired up Keyshot it was basically unusable, taking over 30 seconds to catch up with a simple model spin or material assign. My previous laptop was a MS Surface with an i7 that handled it much better. Much more peculiar was according Task Manager, the CPU utilisation was less than 50% despite the laptop completely locking up. 

After much digging and finding out about the thermal throttling, I found a power setting in the BIOS called "ultra performance". This by default is set to "optimised" which seems to aim for a more balanced management of power and cooling. Ultra Performance seems to have solved my issues, the laptop runs much louder due to fan noise, but Keyshot is now running much faster and definitely faster than my previous laptop. My CPU utilisation is now 95% plus when running Keyshot which is where I expect it to be, core temp ranges between 80-90C at this level.

No idea why Dell don't, by default, set a high performance laptop to be optimised for high performance.

I found a partial resolution to the overheating and thermal throttling in a $70 forced air platform.
Brand, model:  IETS, GT500 (I paid more for the version without the RGB LED surround lights.)

A few times now, I have accidentally left my ancillary fan platform running (adjusted to fairly quiet) underneath my 7670 overnight while it was powered off.  I have found that having the air blowing as the workstation powers on DRAMATICALLY speeds up the cold boot, reducing the boot time (i.e., time pressing power button to Windows login operation) from over 1.5 minutes or longer in some cases, down to less than 15 seconds!!!  The “standby” circling dots or line never even appear under the Dell logo.  It flashes the logo onscreen for maybe 2 or 3 seconds, then begins the Windows Hello login sequence.  From Power-OFF to fully booted up in Windows (with all background services and any restarted apps) only takes about 24 seconds.  This rapid boot happens even if I turn on the forced air just before pressing the power button.

In other words, the fan control in these systems needs to be set to instantly turn the fans up to full speed immediately when the system is powered ON.

In addition to this, the “Ultra Performance” mode needs to allow the fans to run faster in general, to minimize thermal throttling.  I don’t understand why, but the internal fans barely make any sound, even set to “U.P.” mode, until the system temperature reaches critical levels… and even then, they slow back down too fast and too far to enhance the system performance at all.  This poor thing is limping along at less than a quarter of its potential, due to thermal throttling, even while running IDLE!

Now that I essentially have manual control over the air speed with this sealed forced air base (see attached photos), it is obvious to me that this implementation of Dell’s Automatic Fan Control is simply not properly adjusted for these current high-end mobile workstations.  The Dell Precision 7670 & 7770 need their own, much more aggressive fan control schemes… if not also an outright recall & replacement of their heatpipe coolers by Dell!

Note the indentation in the memory foam ring, where the 7670 bottom seals.

I just received the same machine, it performs worse than the lower spec 12th gens our technicians have lol

Our CAD teams have been complaining about these 7670s and the software teams with 7670s using virtual machines are also having trouble running more than 2 VMs. I run multiple VMs and use most all my 64G of RAM with 7 VMs...I don't experience any issues myself...machine seems pretty strong but based on all the complaint here, I am 100% sure I'm not getting the full power of the CPU.

I haven't seen the following issue with the 7670 stated so I go ahead and state it.

Setting "Discrete Graphics Controller Output Mode" will set all external displays to be managed by the discrete graphics card and has helped performance in my 7530 and 7540 laptops I have used in the past, but with the 7670, I experience significant lags in normal office application usage. My coworker had the same experience. Our laptops have the NVIDIA RTX-A2000. Deselecting this mode results in removing the lags caused by enabling it.

Has anyone seen any fixes for these units by Dell or the community? Thinking about buying now that the prices are low but even with a Core i9-12950HX and RTX A5500 which should be a performance machine, I'm worried it will just be an expensive brick based on what I've been researching on the 7670.

@KBdevopz​ I suggest to look elsewhere, I'm stuck with this PC at work for another few years and apparently there is no solution to the slow performance