Still Portable, the Creator’s Choice: A Review of the Dell Precision 5690 Mobile Workstation
In the past two years, as laptop processors have become increasingly powerful, many ultrabooks have started branding themselves as portable creation devices. However, as the pioneer of portable creation, mobile workstations have also seen rapid development in recent years. With significant advancements in hardware configurations, industrial design, and AI-driven software, are mobile workstations still the top choice for mobile creators today?
The Dell Precision 5690 Mobile Workstation has arrived at the PChome review lab. Both Dell and its Precision series have a long history of helping countless professionals excel in their work. Today, let’s explore the mobile creation experience delivered by the Precision 5690, powered by the first-generation Intel Core Ultra mobile processor and NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation professional mobile graphics.
All-Metal Chassis: Premium Texture Without Compromising Portability
As a mobile workstation, the Dell Precision 5690 maintains a classic design language. Its minimalist and elegant silver-white metallic finish, paired with the iconic circular “DELL” logo, exudes the stability and understated professionalism expected of a workstation.
Despite being equipped with a discrete GPU, the Precision 5690 boasts impressive thickness and weight control. At approximately 20mm thick and weighing just 2.1kg (for the discrete GPU version), it remains remarkably thin and portable among professional creator laptops.
Security is a priority for this workstation. The fingerprint power button is discreetly placed in the top-right corner of the keyboard, featuring a recessed design and distinct tactile feedback to prevent accidental touches. The left side of the keyboard includes dedicated shortcut keys for volume, microphone mute, and screen brightness, offering a convenient and secure user experience.
Above the screen sits an HDR webcam supporting Windows Hello facial recognition for secure and seamless unlocking. Flanking the camera are dual-array microphones with built-in noise cancellation algorithms, ensuring clear audio capture during video conferences and enhancing the overall office experience.
The input devices are equally impressive. The laptop features a large haptic touchpad with a matte glass surface, offering precise control and a smooth feel that reduces reliance on external mice. The spill-resistant backlit keyboard provides comfortable key travel, satisfying tactile feedback, and excellent typing performance for both creative work and daily office tasks. The adjustable backlight accommodates various lighting conditions. Additionally, four built-in speakers combined with a bottom-firing woofer deliver outstanding audio quality.
In terms of connectivity, the Precision 5690 offers excellent expandability. The left side houses an HDMI port, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a 3.5mm audio jack. The right side features a USB-C 3.0 port with DP support and a MicroSD card reader. A Type-C to Type-A adapter is included in the box. Coupled with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, the device meets diverse expansion needs in both speed and quantity.
Large ventilation grilles on the bottom ensure ample airflow, maintaining stable performance under heavy loads. Speaker grilles on the bottom left and right corners further enhance the stereo sound experience.
The Standard Display is Equally Impressive
The Dell Precision 5690 features a 16-inch display with a three-sided narrow bezel design and a high screen-to-body ratio. The 16:10 aspect ratio provides a more immersive and comfortable visual experience. While the highest configuration offers a UHD+ OLED touchscreen, our review unit came with a 1920×1200 60Hz IPS panel. Let’s take a closer look at its performance.
In terms of brightness, the screen achieved a peak brightness of 530.4 nits in our tests, exceeding the rated 500 nits. The contrast ratio reached 1470:1, which is exceptional for an IPS panel, ensuring great visibility outdoors and excellent handling of light and dark contrasts.
Regarding color performance, the display covers 100% sRGB, 89% Adobe RGB, 100% DCI-P3, and 87% NTSC color gamuts, surpassing our expectations with solid coverage across common color spaces.
Color accuracy is also commendable, with an average ΔE of 2.4 and a maximum ΔE of 4.78, fully meeting basic professional requirements.
Overall, this screen performs well in brightness, color gamut, and accuracy, making it capable of handling a range of creative tasks. For video and image creators, the optional 3840×2400 OLED touchscreen remains an excellent upgrade.
On the graphics front, our unit is equipped with the NVIDIA RTX 3500 Ada Laptop professional GPU, featuring 5,120 CUDA cores, 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM, and a 100W TDP. As a mid-range mobile professional compute card, its larger VRAM enables users to tackle more demanding professional workflows.
In 3DMark tests, the RTX 3500 Ada Laptop scored 29,047 in Fire Strike and 10,993 in Time Spy. Although these are game-oriented benchmarks, the GPU still demonstrated impressive theoretical performance.
For memory, the Precision 5690 comes with 32GB of soldered LPDDR5 RAM running at 7467MHz. In AIDA64 Cache & Memory Benchmark tests, it achieved read, write, and copy speeds of 84,454 MB/s, 73,419 MB/s, and 93,843 MB/s respectively, with a latency of 133.8ns. These figures indicate excellent speed and latency performance, and the 32GB capacity is sufficient for most productivity needs. Users requiring more memory can opt for a 64GB configuration.
Storage is handled by a 1TB Kioxia XG8 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. This OEM-exclusive drive utilizes 5th-generation BiCS FLASH 3D TLC NAND. In CrystalDiskMark tests, it achieved sequential read/write speeds of 7,014.09 MB/s and 5,887.37 MB/s, along with 4K random read/write speeds of 69.60 MB/s and 216.95 MB/s. This high-end cache-less PCIe 4.0 SSD delivers outstanding performance for both creative work and daily use.
Regarding power and thermals, an AIDA64 CPU stress test (FPU) showed an average CPU package power of 70.415W after 15 minutes, with P-cores reaching up to 3.9GHz.
A 15-minute FurMark 2 GPU stress test resulted in an average GPU power output of 94.3W and an average temperature of around 72.8°C, indicating a good balance between performance release and thermal management.
During a 15-minute dual stress test (CPU + GPU), the processor averaged 92°C and 51W, while the GPU maintained a higher average power output of 74.6W at 69.1°C. The total system power consumption was approximately 125W, which is quite impressive for a mobile workstation.
Despite its slim profile, the Precision 5690 packs a massive 99.5Wh battery. In the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery test (Standard mode, Windows Balanced mode, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on, 60% brightness, discrete GPU active), it lasted 8 hours and 1 minute. This is an exceptional result for a discrete GPU laptop. Combined with 100W PD charging support, users can work on the go without battery anxiety.
The device ships with a 165W USB-C charger. Charging is remarkably fast: it reaches 32% in 30 minutes and 59% in one hour. It hits 96% in about 90 minutes before switching to trickle charging.
Productivity Tests: Fully Meeting Professional Demands
Beyond synthetic benchmarks, we conducted various comprehensive and specialized tests to evaluate the Precision 5690’s real-world productivity performance.
In the cross-platform CrossMark test, the Precision 5690 achieved an overall score of 1,897. It performed well across Productivity, Creativity, and Responsiveness, with a particularly high Creativity score of 2,192, proving its capability to handle diverse creative tasks with ease.
In the UL Procyon Video Editing Benchmark, it scored 6,543. Powered by the RTX 3500 Ada, it delivered outstanding performance in mainstream H.264 and H.265 encoding workflows.
In the UL Procyon Photo Editing Benchmark, it scored 7,273, demonstrating fast response times and a smooth editing experience in both Photoshop and Lightroom.
But how does it handle AI? We used the UL Procyon AI Text Generation test (float16 precision) to evaluate its performance with large language models. Scoring 1,554, the Precision 5690 showed rapid response times across multiple models, confirming its readiness for AI workloads.
Productivity Tests: Fully Meeting Professional Demands
After extensive testing and hands-on experience, it is clear that the Dell Precision 5690 offers a more balanced performance in design, display, thermals, and power compared to discrete GPU ultrabooks. The combination of a vPro processor and a professional GPU allows creators to tackle professional applications with greater confidence.
Furthermore, this generation of hardware fully supports AIGC applications, while its enhanced portability and larger VRAM provide a superior experience for users with AI creation needs. If you still require robust mobile creation capabilities, the Dell Precision 5690 Mobile Workstation remains an excellent choice, fully satisfying the demands of professional designers, video editors, and researchers alike.
