Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

Installed 1.9.0 and undervolting is still possible - BIOS reset to factory defaults was not necessary - I did that last time, after installing 1.8.2 to get back undervolting.

 

I would appreciate some suggestions on troubleshooting/fixing a performance problem. My 7740 gets stuck at 0.78GHz every couple of months. It is running Windows Pro 1909 that I installed from the MSFT installer, with drivers downloaded from Dell.

It first happened in early January, and at the time I found an error in event log related to the Intel Management Engine driver, so I tried installing an updated version of that, and that fixed it.

A couple of months later, same thing, although at the time I updated most other drivers using downloads from Dell.

Now it's doing the same thing. I tried updating the IME driver last night, but no joy. I also noticed during this problem that only 1 core was being reported. I went into the BIOS which also reported a single core, so I reset BIOS to default settings. That got me to all six cores (i7-9750H), but still at 0.78GHz. Tried updating from BIOS 1.6.0 to 1.9.0, also resetting BIOS to default settings, still no luck.

Any suggestions? My preference is to figure out what the problem is and address that problem, as opposed to just reinstalling everything.

 

My M6700 used to get stuck in a throttled state regularly. It would persist across reboots. The way to fix it was to just unplug and replug the AC adapter.
(Turns out the AC adapter was faulty. I have not had the issue since I replaced it.)
Something simple to try if you have not yet.

 

Face-palm moment. Thank you Aaron, that did the trick!

I do recall yesterday before this happened that I got a pop-up that the power adapter couldn't be recognized (or something like that, I forget the precise wording). At the time it had wiggled loose, mostly out but just enough contact to cause problems I guess.

I don't know if there's a precise protocol for resetting things. When I read your post I called home and had the wife unplug the laptop. But the time I got home it was at 3% battery. I power cycled with no power adapter, then plugged it in and booted, and everything was fine. That may very well be more complicated than is necessary.

 

When this happened to me the fix was to just unplug and replug the AC adapter. No fancy trick to it. Done in two seconds. Give it a try if this happens again.

 

On my Precision 7530 I checked, streaming a 4K video from YouTube in Microsoft Edge (Chromium version). I saw <1% CPU utilization from Edge, and around 10% utilization of the Intel GPU.
Technically everything that you run on your desktop is "putting stuff on the screen" and not all of it is the same amount of "effort". Decoding a pre-recorded video is a lot less work than generating a full 3D environment.

 

Since the bios update to 1.9 TS is not working for me. I ran Cinebench 20 with TS disabled and then enabled. There was a 7 point difference in the score. Prior to the bios update I was getting a CB 20 score of 3705. So I have to make some changes in the Dell bios? Thanks.

 

Yes, try going into the bios and click the "Restore" button, then "Factory Reset" option from the menu. It does not say it, but I believe it restores all bios options, even the hidden ones, of which are in a bad state after applying the plundervolt CVE patches. Some folks mentioned downgrading to 1.7.x bios was also needed, but I would suggest simply doing a factory reset first.

You can easily tell if the offset is applying in TS by looking at the FIVR panel table in the upper-right corner.

 

Thanks so much — restoring to "factory settings" did the trick. I have TS undervolted to -123.0 and am now getting a CB 20 score of 3703. This is with a i9 9980 hk.