Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

Hello-

Bought a 7740 with a 2.5" hdd and plan on imaging that drive and moving to an nvme, does it matter what slot I put it in? Any suggestions?

Also, plan on using both drives after reformatting the hdd. Do I need to make any changes in the BIOS, etc? Just the boot order?

Oh, what size - height wise - 2.5" drives fit? up to 9.5mm? or just 7mm?

Thanks!

 

Drives up to 9.5mm tall should fit... Nothing larger. All of the NVMe slots have the same bandwidth potential. The main difference is that some of them also support SATA M.2 drives, and some do not.

Use your favorite imaging tool (I use Acronis TrueImage bootable media, but you can also use Macrium Reflect or the Samsung data migration tool).

After the clone, remove or disable your old drive before booting off of the new one for the first time. (You can disable drives in the BIOS, there is a checkbox to enable or disable each drive slot.) I've seen Windows get confused about which drive to mount and strange behavior immediately after a clone if the old drive is still present. After a successful boot off of the new drive, you can re-enable the old drive and then format it.

With UEFI boot you shouldn't have to worry about switching the boot order. If there is only one bootable drive, the system will automatically figure it out and boot it without interaction.

 

Good to know, Thanks!

And thanks for mentioning removing/disabling the old drive at first boot - I vaguely remember reading something about that before but couldn't find that info again.

BTW, which slots support SATA M.2? Maybe I could save a few bucks next time I look for another storage drive, although the price differences don't seem to be that big...at least on the low end.

Thanks again!

 

Two of the four M.2 slots support SATA. One of them is the one you would "sacrifice" to have a 2.5" SATA drive installed, the one that is way down by the battery. I don't know which is the other one. The information is in this long thread somewhere... Someone posted a picture at some point. It would be easy enough to determine by trial and error.

 

Got it, Thanks again!

 

Does anyone know the technical reason why the 7740 can run DDR4-3200 in 8GB and 16GB but not 32GB modules? Intel's published specs say that all 9th-gen Cores support a maximum 2666 and even the 10th-gen i9 is limited at 2933. Crucial lists their 32GB DDR4-3200 modules as 'guaranteed compatible' with the 7740, but I have tested several of them as well as Samsung's equivalents on my i9-9880H and they are definitely not compatible.

 

Are you trying with the Crucial and Samsung modules on their own, or you mixing them in with the OEM modules?

 

I've tried all combinations of 1/2/4 modules, 4 Samsung/4 Crucial, separate and mixed, running MemTest86, booting into Windows. They all give BSOD or freeze within a few seconds. The original Samsung 8GB 2666 still runs fine.
Edit: One weird note - one of the Crucial modules actually passed the BIOS diags once and then ran Windows for about 30 minutes before it finally borked. No overheating at all - just idling then BSOD.

Resolved: I spent a couple of hours with support and... I was finally told that 3200 is NOT supported for the 9th-gen cpus after all. The current owner's manual and the configurator are incorrect in advertising that. The motherboard is capable of running 2933 and 3200, but not until the 10th-gen cpus are available. Lame. Now I'm stuck with 20% restocking fees for the memory and wondering what else will go wrong.

 

I have a 7740 that was configured with "no out-of-band system management", does that mean that Intel ME couldn't be added later and that it's permanently locked out? Thanks in advance. Travis

 

Yes, this option is disabled if you disabled switching and rebooted to go back to bios again BUT you can enable it at the same time when disabling switching during one bios session. I just told you this approach worked for me, not making things up.