Dell Precision 3541 Power Tests
We ran the Dell Precision 3541 through a series of battery tests to find out just how long the 6 Cell (99 WHr) would last. After each test, the battery was again fully charged and then the next test started.
PowerMark tests would run until the battery was at 15% charge.
Battery life is the strong point of the Dell Precision 3541. The Lenovo ThinkPad units have higher-end but also higher-power GPUs. That is great for GPU performance, but it is not good for battery life. The Dell Latitude 7300 gave us a 731 minute time on this test which the Dell Precision 3541 just beat by 35 minutes. This is certainly in the all-day productivity category.
Dell Precision 3541 Boot-Time
BootRacer is an app that will tell you how long your computer takes to boot. It will measure the actual time your PC takes to get to the windows boot process, then measure the actual Windows OS boot time.
BootRacer is a free download for personal use and can tell you if your PC is booting slower over time or after you have installed apps.
We ran Bootracer on the Dell Precision 3541 after we set everything up before any other apps were installed. Over time and use, installing other apps, you might find that the laptop might start to slow down or take longer to boot. The best practice is to keep your laptop clean of unwanted applications that affect booting times.
The Dell Precision 3541 boots fast with a usable time of 19 seconds to start working on the desktop. During the workday, most users will put the unit to sleep by closing the lid, opening the lid results in almost instant use availability.
Final Words
As we would expect, there are many different configurations for the Dell Precision 3541. With processors we found the Intel Core i7-9750H gave the Dell Precision 3541 a significant punch for CPU based workloads, one can even configure the unit with an Intel Xeon E-2276M 6 core/12 Thread processor along with ECC memory for those that would prefer this. The highest processor option would be an Intel Core i9-9880H 8 core/16 thread CPU. We do feel that graphics processing is holding the Dell Precision 3541 back with the NVIDIA Quadro P620, it simply does not have the graphics punch one might want. There is no higher-level GPU option for the Dell Precision 3541. As a result, the Quadro P620 is there for having certified drivers, not because it is a maximum performance option.
One can purchase Dell Precision 3541 notebooks start at only $879 list price for very basic configurations. Our review sample is configured to cost around $1,954 at list price for a higher-end configuration. The Dell Precision 3541 does show excellent processing power and exceptionally long battery life which mobile users would be very happy with.
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).