Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

The main difference that I can see between yours and mine is that I had the UHD display as well.
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Yep, I just tried it. 1920x1080 + RTX3000 + Ubuntu is ok. 3840x2160 + RTX3000 + Ubuntu is not.

Not sure that would have changed what I ordered, but still good to know and maybe it helps the next person.

 

Does anyone have a block diagram for the 7740 or 7540? What Thunderbolt controller is being used and do the PCIe lanes come from the CPU or PCH?

Also, I don't understand why both these Dell machines, the Lenovo P73, HP ZBook 17, etc. all use USB 3.1 Gen 1 for all the type A ports. Makes me wish all the more that the MSI WT75 had an upgrade path to a Touring GPU. Except the crazy MSRP, that machine had so much going for it... USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type A, unlockable bios, GPU MUX, huge storage expansion...

 

Indeed, very strange.
On the other hand, hp zbook 17 g6 can be customized with freedos 3.0 and no problem choosing uhd display+quadro gpu.

Another thing i've discovered about 7540/7740 with nvidia+linux combo is that regardless of the panel you select, you must select 'Not ENERGY STAR Qualified' in order to have a valid configuration.


@TunaDog So what config did you order at the end ?

 

Hi,

I ordered 7740, 9980hk, 8GbRam(cheapest option), 4k Display, RTX3000, 256Gb NVMe(cheapest option), Big battery, W10

I replaced Ram with Kingston HyperX 2666, 32GB, and changed the NVMe to Samsung 970 Pro 512Gb for OS.
Second one with 1TB will follow

 

The TB3 controller is Titan Ridge and I think it's lanes are off the PCH.

The build quality on the 7740 is great and it even has a second MUX for the video output ports. From the benchmarks it appears that the RTX 4000 can perform better than even the Quadro P5200 @ 150w.

 

For those interested, attached is a calibration output from X-Rite i1 colorimeter on the 3840x2160 UHD screen. The plot doesn't show me much unless it has an aRGB plot overlay. I have a big roll Epson inkjet photoprinter, and for printing full aRGB is useful to preview what you're gonna print (WYSIWYG). But doubtful I'd ever do such work without an external monitor.

Edit: Haven't got the external monitor to communicate thru the dock for color profiling. Dunno if going the rear Mini DisplayPort will make the difference, but just ordered an adapter to try.

The dock works pretty smoothly with my antique 1920x1200 external NEC monitor (93% aRGB 12-bit LUT). Oftentimes the window has a little blur while the application is crunching, but the program icons are mostly sized as needed.

Got some growing pains on the laptop display with older programs like Photoshop CS6, getting programs icons sized up. Been messing around with programs > properties > change high DPI settings. Doesn't motivate me to spend big bucks on a new 4K external monitor... besides I don't know of one that is around 30" or 32" that is 4K and 100% aRGB.

 

Last thing for now... my real-world benchmark. These are times only to initially open files.
Old computer: Win7 M6800, i7-4940MX, 24GB 1600MHz, Nvidia Quadro K3100M, SATA M550 SSD
New: Win10 7740, i9-9980HK, RTX4000, Dell's Hynix 512GB for OS and 2ea 2TB 970 EVO Plus
In the new computer I had 32GB of HyperX 2666MHz/Cl15, and today installed another 32GB.

(1) Messy Solidworks 3D design (single-threaded)
Old: 2:59 (i.e. three minutes)
New w/32: 1:37
New w/64: 1:35

(2) Big Solidworks 2D assembly drawing (some multi-threading)
Old: 1:06
New w/32: 0:50
New w/64: 0:50

(3) Photoshop CS6, 1.7GB image:
Old: 1:08
New w/32: 0:50
New w/64: 0:50

My old Finite Element Analysis program, "FEA" called Abaqus, won't install to Win10, so I still need to get a VM going to try that. Last week I had a 10.5-hr job run on the M6800 and it'll be interesting how that compares on the 7740 inside a VM.

#1 is impressive. I have barely started designing on the 7740, but it should be a nice upgrade manipulating busy CAD parts and assemblies with less coffee breaks. I'm still using the 2016 & 2018 versions of Solidworks for client compatibility (plus I hate upgrading = learning new stuff to do the same old things), and not until the 2019 release did Solidworks optimize for RTX.

Comparing the results of the 7740 with 32GB vs 64GB tells me that I did just as well getting the fastest RAM that is currently limited to 16GB modules, rather than go the full 128GB with higher latency memory. Of course we don't know if the times would be really any worse with slower RAM, just that my applications don't utilize lots of memory.

The 7740 fan runs fast lots; kinda annoying background noise.

Other than that, the M6800 which had been glitchy and cause for worry has been behaving flawlessly the past month, so given most of the numbers above.... I'd say the 7740 was a unneeded drain of time, energy and money!

 

If the fan behavior bothers you, I'll point you to this tool for enabling manual fan control and the configuration that I have settled with. In "quiet mode" the fans are inaudible but the CPU is capped to around 2.6 GHz (that might eliminate the performance gains you are seeing in (2) and (3) which I am suspecting are mostly single-threaded operations).

 

Copy/paste from the order summary, with noise manually removed by me.

Spoiler

Intel Core Processor i7-9750H, 6 Core, 12M Cache, 2.60GHz up to 4.5GHz Turbo, 45W
Win 10 Pro 64 English, French, Spanish
Nvidia Quadro RTX 3000 w/6GB GDDR6
17.3" UHD IGZO 3840x2160 AG NT, No WWAN, IR Cam/Mic, w/Prem Panel Guar 100% Adobe Color Aluminum
8GB, DDR4-2666MHz SDRAM, 1 DIMMS, Non-ECC
M.2 256GB PCIe NVMe Class 40 Solid State Drive
Internal Dual Pointing Backlit Keyboard, US English
6 Cell (97Whr) Long Life Cycle Lithium Ion Polymer Battery (3 Years Warranty)
Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 2x2 .11ax 160MHz
7740 Smart Card only
Not ENERGY STAR Qualified
Resource Media not Included

I had placed my order on 9/18 before we figured out that Linux+NVidia+FHD could be ordered. For, for me, the question was whether to cancel the order and place a new one. I'm going to stick with my existing order. But the way I view this now: Dell says that screen is a $338.62 upgrade, but I have to add the cost of Win10 into it, making it a $446.84 screen.

32GB HyperX ram will arrive before the computer does. A 2TB WD 3D Blue (i.e. SATA) is being moved from the dead computer that this is replacing. Not sure what I'll do for the boot drive: if I decide to replace it in the short term it will likely be with a WD SN750 or 970 EVO Plus of size TBD, but if Dell's drive doesn't suck I may just use it until the next generation of drives appears.

 

sata m.2 or 2.5" ?