Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

Yes, seems odd but it seems that Windows likes to put the SATA drives before the NVMe drives when enumerating so this is a normal situation.

 

Ok, updated bios to 1.9.0 and windows 10 to 2004. Everything ok except for throttlestop, I need to put on a 2m delay on scheduled launch or I always got blue screen "page fault in non paged area". Seems like in the new windows version some service or similar that throttlestop needs is launched in a delayed way.

Still ~ 5% in cpu performance loss respect bios 1.0

Edit: 2m delay is OK, 1m still not sufficient. Really odd.

 

Hey everyone. Just wanted to share my setup in case anyone is interested and can find it useful. I have 7540 with Xeon 2286, RTX4000, 128GB RAM, 4K display. I'm a professional developer so mostly using it for programming. For effective work, I need additional screens and the ability for dGPU to support multiple external displays was one of the selling points. I spent some time researching the perfect setup to maximize screen real estate while maintaining cleanliness and hassle-free use. Finally I discovered monitors with PBP (picture by picture) functionality. This monitor allows splitting it into several independent screens with each of these screens connecting to a separate device if needed.

I opted for Dell 43 inch monitor U4320Q with just this functionality https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/del...20q/apd/210-avke/monitors-monitor-accessories
It's 4K monitor that can be split into 4 independent 1080p screens.

I connect the laptop to this monitor via wd19dc dock. This dock has exactly 4 outputs for external displays.Dock has 2 DP ports, 1 HDMI, 1 USB-C DP port. So I thought there would be no issues to plug the laptop to the dock, plug 4 dock outputs to the monitor and assign each output to a separate display and then it would work. Well, didn't happen. As it turns out after reading dock manual (you only read it when crap hits the fan) and after a tip from a fellow forumer, HDMI and USB-C DP cannot be used simultaneously, which essentially limits the dock to only show 3 external displays. Alright, I guess I have to live with it. But there is still one 1080p display that is not connected. Since laptop has 1 mini DP port and 1 HDMI port on the back, I tried connecting mini DP to monitor HDMI (monitor has 5 ports: 2 HDMI, 2DP, 1 USB-C DP, so plenty enogh) and it was still blank. Laptop HDMI to monitor HDMI was also blank. Only when I closed the laptop lid, that 4th display lit up on the monitor.

So my conclusion is that even though on spec sheet, it says that dGPU can support up to 4 4K screens, apparently regardless of the resolution, it can't support more than 4 screens overall. Meaning, you can't have a laptop screen working and plug additional 4 screens on top of it. At least, I couldn't make it work. Additionally, I had to disable graphic switching in BIOS to have RTX be the main card for display since it was not switching from Intel graphics when I plugged in all these 4 screens.

Even though on picture it looks small, believe me, it's plenty enough. You essentially have 4 21'' monitors side by side.

So to sum up, to have 4 screens in one monitor, I did the following:
1. Disable switchable graphics
2. Connect WD19C dock
3. Connected: Dock 2 DP ports to monitor 2 DP ports, 1 dock HDMI port to 1 monitor HDMI port, 1 laptop HDMI port to monitor HDMI port (laptop mini DP port to monitor HDMI did not work).
4. Close laptop to have all 4 screens on monitor function properly.

Here are the pics of my setup

 

With the 7740, isn't the power button light supposed to blink/pulse on & off when it's in sleep mode?

I've set the power options to sleep when pressing the power button / closing lid, etc. I've read that powercfg -h off at an admin command prompt disables hibernation so I've done that.

Still, when I put the thing to sleep, or try to, the power button light turns off - doesn't blink. So it's hibernating? I didn't see anything to change in BIOS, maybe I missed something?

Any tips?

Thanks!

 

When you turn the system back on, if you see the Dell logo and spinny circle animation for a moment (just like you see at a cold boot) then it was resuming from hibernate. Resume from hibernate has to go through the regular BIOS boot process. If it snaps directly to the lock screen without ever showing the Dell logo, then it was resuming from sleep.

I think that the power button light should be pulsing but I can't say that I've actually checked this on anything newer than a Precision 7510. Maybe they changed it or maybe something is just odd with your system.

 

Got it. It does not go through BIOS boot process when coming back on so it must be sleeping. So yeah, I guess things changed or I got some weird problem child

 

My 7740 does not blink its power light when sleeping.

 

Nor does my 7530. Even the front LED doesn't pulse. Was it ever supposed to?

 

My 7740 doesn't blink either while sleeping.

 

Alright, so it’s normal. You’d think that they would give some indication that the system is asleep and not off, as sleep will still drain the battery if the system is unplugged.