Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

Ok, just as a statistic data, from bios 1.0 to bios 1.8.2, there has been a ~5% drop in cpu performance (9980HK, same settings).
Intel should be proud of how bad their cpus are aging.

 

Yearp, this is why I'm sticking with version 1.0... at least until they release a BIOS with a DPC latency fix, which might be a worthy price to pay for reduced performance. On some Benchmarks performance hit on mine was over 10%, temps were also increased (which may have accounted for some of the performance decrease via additional thermal throttling). If there were any new AMD CPU based workstations with support for 128GB of RAM I would switch in an instant.

 

Same here, I hope that for 2021 AMD will present a 12/16 core Ryzen9 mobile cpu. Anyway, the worst for me was bios 1.4.0, that infact is no more present in Dell's archive.

As for the temp increase, I also take out the 970 Evo Plus from the Precision, switching it with the other Silicon Power (Phison E12 + Toshiba nand) that was mounted on my desktop workstation, since the Samsung was always far over 50°c, even on idle, not a good deal at the end for a notebook with limited thermal capacity.

 

Problem with graphics switching. I have 7540 with RTX 4000. By default, intel UHD graphics is used. I tried switching to nvidia by going to Nvidia control panel>Manage 3D settings>Global settings>preferred graphics processor>high performance nvidia processor.
Rebooted my computer, checked the drivers and yet when I go to Display advanced settings, it still says I'm connected to Intel. Do you know what could be the problem?

 

This is how graphics switching works. Your display will always be connected to the Intel GPU. The NVIDIA GPU will still be used for 3D rendering. It flushes stuff into the Intel GPU framebuffer for display. The idea is that the NVIDIA GPU can power off when it is not needed (doing 2D stuff on the desktop) and save you power.

If you want the display to be connected to the NVIDIA GPU, go to the BIOS setup and turn off graphics switching.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I turned off graphics switching in bios and now my display is using windows basic driver with low res. I want nvidia to be set as default graphics card for the entire system. Any other ideas?

 

You need to reinstall the NVIDIA graphics driver after you make this change. It shows up as a new device to Windows.

 

I have an issue with the sound in my 7740

Every few minutes I hear a distorted sound for a split second and then a few seconds of lower volume and distorted sound. After that the sound comes back to normal.

I've disabled the Waves MaxxAudio Service Application at StartUp.

Any other software remedies that I can try?

Thanks.

 

Reinstalling drivers did not help. What worked for me was enabling 'discrete graphics controller direct output mode' in bios in addition to disabling 'switchable graphics'.

 

You had to reinstall the NVIDIA drivers after disabling switchable graphics.
"Discrete graphics controller direct output mode" means that displays hooked up via the USB-C port will connect to the NVIDIA card if graphics switching is enabled. The option should be disabled if graphics switching is disabled.