Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

BTW, does the Samsung 850 EVO M2 SATA III SSD work with M5510? Like this one - https://smile.amazon.com/Samsung-850-EVO-Internal-MZ-N5E500BW/dp/B00TGIW1XG/

Or I guess it is just PCIe NVMe M2 SSDs which work with M5510? I apologize if this has been asked earlier, please point me to the thread/page if that is the case. Thanks!

 

Both SATA and PCIe M.2 drives will work in the 5510.

 

SATA M.2 SSDs work fine in the M5510. I'm using a 1TB Sandisk X400 as I value capacity over speed (my M5510 came with a 256GB Toshiba NVMe SSD). Performance of the X400 is similar to the 850 EVO and it's a bit cheaper.

John

 

Too early to say... the computer is brand new to me, and it's only on its second battery charge. Also keep in mind I have the 6-cell (81wh) battery and non-touch display. Mileage may vary with the 3-cell battery and/or the touch display.

For what it's worth, the Fedora indicator is making a wide range of battery-life predictions, ranging from 1 hour under heavy load (running mprime for example) to 10+ hours light use (such as text editing with low screen brightness).

I am cautiously optimistic, when all is said and done, I will get at least 6+ hours of normal-duty use with the dGPU off.

To answer your question about turning off the dGPU power, I'm no expert so I'll simply quote the Fedora wiki page about Bumblebee: "The discrete GPU (NVidia) is turned off when not in use."

 

I had similar concerns about the dGPU leaking power when not in use by my experience (Windows 10) is that the idle power drain of my M5510 with the Quadro GPU is no worse than my previous E5570 which had no dGPU. This may be a result of the way that the hardware is configured to use the dGPU for 3D graphics (or other suitable parallel calculations (CUDA)) processing accelerator but the display output is handled by the iGPU.

John

 

Just wanted to thank John and everyone so far for help. I'm very satisfied with my precision 5510.

By the way what's up with my wireless hot key, it doesn't turn wi fi on or off. All it does is detect "print screen"

 

By default the BIOS is set to reverse the functions on the Fn keys. Press Fn + Esc to toggle the settings and/or go into the BIOS and change the default (although I would admit that I've had problems finding the setting which works as wanted).

John

 

Got it thanks! By the way, is there an on screen volume indicator for when I mute, or lower/raise volume? I'm so used to there being some visual on screen indicator show up regardless of if I'm on desktop or not.

 

I have (Windows 10) a pop-up status indicator near the top left of the screen when you use the volume or brightness controls but it's easily missed as it quickly disappears.

If you don't have the indicator then did you do a clean install? I have a dim recollection that this popup is done by one of the Dell software packages but can't remember any details.

John

 

This indicator is part of Windows 10 and will show up after a clean install. Windows 7 does not have a built-in indicator and requires a package from Dell to get it.