Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

How long is your battery life with the RTX 3000?

When i ordering the 7740, then with a FHD Display.
I wouldn't buy 4k yet, i think there some problems with the scaling.

 

See my entry from a few posts up. Is 5% performance improvement worth $1000+? I think that RTX 5000 should only be considered if you can make use of the extra vRAM (maybe a very large modeling project) or tensor cores — or, if you just aren't worried that much about the money.

(Tensor cores are for machine learning / neural networks and none of the applications that you have listed would use them. Newer games do use them for DLSS, but you don't need extra ones for that, the amount in the RTX 3000 is adequate.)

Scaling issues aren't that bad anymore, for the few apps that still do not work you can work around it by using Windows compatibility settings and forcing the system scaler which will just bitmap-scale the app to the scaling ratio that you have chosen.

 

Yes thanks.

I want to install the ram myself, can i use this ram?
https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Technology-HyperX-HX426S15IB2K2-32/dp/B01NAL3TYY

Or are there better parts?

 

Any DDR4-2666 (non-ECC) "should" work. Do not mix and match with the RAM modules that come preinstalled in the system unless you are sure that the speed and timings are the same.
You can look back in this thread for the modules that other users have selected that are confirmed working.

 

the gpu part 100% agree

sadly the scaling suggestions that you mentioned did not work at all for my software I did reach out to the dev ppl, and they said they will work on it in next release...
I also tried to go to 1080p and running, it is better that way, but then everything else is not as sharp and is a little soft, so its a trade-off, I think for now I will just work with it.
And of course disabling scaling for that app and running 4k, showed everything crisp and sharp, but supper small, which made it very difficult to move about in the software with the icons and text

otherwise 4k is nice, if people do not mind the extra hit in battery consumption

 

This is also to be expected: barring Macs, every single notebook I've seen throttles when running on battery power. This is both a safety and a lifetime concern, because batteries have a limited current in/output limit, and the faster you run through batteries, the less charge you get out of them in the long run.

It is a given with notebooks at this point: if you need 100% performance, plug it in.

 

You don't want to disable scaling, that will make everything small. What you want is to get to Properties on the program EXE or shortcut, and go to Compatibility -> Change high DPI settings -> Override high DPI scaling behavior -> Choose "System" from the drop-down. This should run the app with scaling effectively disabled, but it will still be scaled up for the display. (So, blurry, but correct size.)

I'll say that this has worked for 90% of the apps I have tried it with. The only one that comes to mind that didn't work right was an old version of VMware vSphere client. Everything worked except for the VM console connection, mouse input was way off in that.

 

Many applications are fairly intelligent enough to use the DPI setting recommended by the monitor, so what I do instead is select 'Scaling performed by: application' instead. Barring programs from the early 2000s (like old games), most new programs that aren't aware of Windows' scaling behaviour, are high-DPI aware. Take the NVIDIA driver installer, for instance:

Scaling performed by: System


Scaling performed by: System (Enhanced) (there appears to be little functional difference, except that the fonts are a little sharper):


Scaling performed by: Application (this is the old 'disable scaling' behaviour from Windows 7/8/8.1, and appears crisp):

 

You can play with the options and see what works well for each app. "Application" works well for some apps and when it does, it looks better. "System" works with practically all apps (but with the "blur filter").

Apps that declare themselves DPI aware will automatically go to "application" scaling. Apps that do not declare themselves DPI aware will automatically fall to "system" scaling. The problem is when apps declare themselves DPI-aware but do a terrible job with scaling. (This is where you usually see either very strange layouts, or very tiny text and objects.) In this case you will do better forcing them to use "system" scaling. Similarly there are apps that do not declare themselves DPI aware but actually scale fine. In this case, forcing them to "application" scaling will make them look better.

It's a little bit over-simplified. There are actually multiple levels of DPI-awareness these days, as Microsoft keeps trying to improve things while at the same time not breaking things for older DPI-aware apps.

In the end, play with it, but you should be able to find something that works for almost all apps.

 

Catching up on a few things from this thread.

I got 128GB of this and it works great: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N124XDS

The WD19DC dock is useless if you want to use its Ethernet. I've tried the stock Windows driver for it, the Dell driver, and the latest driver, all producing the same result of it eventually dropping out and disappearing. Hopefully a dock firmware update or newer drivers can fix this.

By request, here's GPU-Z on the RTX5000: