Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

Has anyone ordered from Dell USA and got it shipped to another country?
I live in Dubai and the local reseller's price is 300$ more than the US price.
Has anyone transferred warranty?

 

I believe you'll have to have a US address and a US credit card to do this.

Do note that your local reseller price might include taxes (which sort of explains the $300: it is around 7% of $4000, which these machines can easily reach). These taxes you cannot escape unless you personally go to the US, collect your notebook, remove all packaging and travel as though you had it all along. which is 1) technically not legal, and 2) probably more expensive than just buying direct from your reseller.

 

Got it!

 

Dell U.S. will accept PayPal for payment so you could probably place an order from anywhere.
They will not ship it outside of the U.S. though. You'd have to use a forwarding service and the cost would likely be equivalent to or even more than the $300 difference from buying it locally in your area.

And yes, the prices listed on the Dell site do not include sales tax, which can't be computed until closer to checkout because it varies by state, but 6-7% would not be an unusual figure for this.

 

I just did the math with a forwarding services, you are on point Aaron.

 

I just got a new 7740 and was surprised to find that it uses the same PCI chip my old M3800 laptop. This limits the PCIe generation 3 speed to 8GB/s.
I think this is very bad because even the current generation of SSD drives are already approaching 4GB/s.

Can someone with a new 7540 and Linux please tell me what PCI bridge they have?

Here is my result:
alexd@alexd-Precision-7740:~$ lspci | grep "PCI bridge"
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 0d)



EDIT:--
It appears that Intel do not yet support PCIe 4.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/305241-intel-may-have-pulled-pcie-4-0-support-for-comet-lake

I any case, it would be good to confirm that the chipsets in the two machines are identical.
Please post your output from lspci | grep "PCI bridge" Thanks!

 

That's possibly merely Linux driver developers being lazy with their names, and using a single catch-all device name for different device IDs.

The Precision 7530, 7730, 7540 and 7740 all use the Intel CM246 chipset, as does nearly every other notebook with a 8th/9th/10th-generation Intel Core/Xeon CPU. Your old M3800 almost certainly doesn't have this chipset—given it was from the Haswell generation, it probably uses the Intel HM87 chipset.

The Intel PCH is connected to the CPU via a 'DMI 3.0' link, which has approximately equal bandwidth to a PCIe 3.0 x4 connection. It has been proven that a single M.2 NVMe drive will saturate this connection. This is universal across the Intel consumer platform, be it Intel Celeron/Pentium, or even the 10900K. If you want more bandwidth, you will need to move to an AMD Ryzen notebook.

See the image below for the case of the CM246 chipset in particular:

 

Did anybody already install BIOS 1.9.0?

If yes, how does it behave?

E.g. does undervolting still work?

 

Is a discrete GPU needed for playing 4k videos on a 4k laptop screen?
No gaming

 

No, the Intel GPU is able to handle this.