My fairly new Dell Precision 5680 turns out to be a random variable, in stead of the solid value proposition the marketing communicated it to be. The latest issue appears to be a game over event.

The machine has gone into a never ending BIOS update loop, where it never manages to contact the update server and suggests I try again later. There was no obvious trigger for this behavior, halfway into booting it reset and the BIOS recovery screen appeared. After more than a week of attempts at this recovery, I am losing both faith and patience. I am very glad I held on to the machine it was supposed to replace.

Before that there were other issues:

• This laptop has an i7-13800H CPU, that is listed to offer a 5.2GHz turbo. Unfortunately, the CPU has been locked at 2.73GHz on all cores.

I guess the heat dissipation the chassis offers left Dell little choice, even at this level of wing clippage and with the aid of the 8GB RTX 2000 the fans rev up to full speed at the slightest hint of a SolidWorks workload. I suppose Dell can tie a CPU down like this, if they decide to do so. It just seems a bit of a bootleg move to have the marketeers list the maximum a processor can do and then have engineering choke it to barely half that performance.

• There is a severe backlight bleed that renders the screen output uneven. It reminds me of the Thinklight my Thinkpad used to have, before lit keyboards were a thing. This makes the screen unusable for graphical applications.

• The engineering choices made for the lower chassis, make getting access to the inside of the machine a scary endeavor. The force required to make the clips budge that keep the bottom and the keyboard bezel connected, turns adding a second hard drive into a life event. This design feature will eventually result in damage to these plastic clips or to the sometimes fragile I/O cut-outs in the bezel. Given the generous amount of screws used to connect the lower chassis and the keyboard bezel, there is no obvious need to make the inside of the machine this inaccessible.

• The keyboard gets hot. Not to the point that it becomes unusable, but it does become uncomfortable.

The BIOS issue is the most urgent problem, the machine can no longer be used. If there is a way to avoid the pointless attempts to contact a Dell recovery server and return the BIOS to its last working state, that would really help to turn this paperweight back into a -somewhat- functional workstation.

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