Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

Just installed a second nvme drive (Sabrent 2TB) paired with Evo:


Nice drive with a very good price/performance ratio, like all the others Phison E12 reference drive (Inland, Silicon Power, etc..), I almost dare to say that It's even better than the 970Evo (especially for thermal, ~20°c of difference with the same heatsink!).

 

Hi Everyone. Coming in 'late' to the game, this thread has been super informative! A few questions/comments:

I picked up a 7540 w/ Xeon as I do a ton of RF simulations, so I went with the $. Right away re-pasted the CPU/GPU. CPU idles at ~4.8GHz. Cinebench scores at about 3800 avg. Power maxes at around 100W on avg before plummeting to 60W. With Throttle stop, maximized turbo at 50 on all 8 cores and -130mV, negligible changes to performance. Real bummer about the throttling down. I am not looking to switch out heatsinks or anything fancy like that, just curious as to if anyone with the same build has gotten any sort of results from TS? My understanding so far is the i9 looks to be a better performer when it comes to throttling down? Perhaps I should swap?

Also, this rig runs super hot when its sitting on a table. I have been doing all these benchmarks with the back elevated with an old USB stick for extra circulation. Obvs temperature decrease are significant (~10-20deg in some instances). Ya'll setting it up similarly?

 

You’re probably hitting the BIOS power limit. Did you see this post? Someone got past it with ThrottleStop.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...40-owners-thread.830037/page-37#post-10965749

I don’t think you’ll see much of a difference with i9 vs Xeon. They are the same except for ECC memory support. If you did not get ECC memory then the Xeon has no extra value.

 

If you have ECC memory then your power consumption will be higher than non ECC by simple logic, but cannot say by how much. The ninth memory chip and the ECC calculations should take a toll on power consumption which could be considerable in memory intensive applications. For outright performance on a thermally constrained chassis (like a laptop), you could avoid ECC, of course unless the added stability/ reliability is more important.

For simple reference, my 7540 with i9 9980HK, 64GB, RTX3000, FHD touch and stock cooling idols at 7.5W total consumption (as reported by Battery Bar Pro).... where it is super silent and barely even warm. I am very happy with the machine that way.

However, initially when I installed a fresh copy of Windows, the machine was always working hard possibility due to the OS updates being pushed by Microsoft. It stabilised after a day or so.

 

Also for the reference of FM who asked via PM and maybe others who may find this info useful, I have a glossy touch FHD display on my 7540, for which the HWINFO is as follows: -

 

Yeah, I tried the power limit adjustments, set it to the exact same levels as the other poster. HWinfo still has it at 60/107. 'Disable and Lock Turbo Power Limits' is unchecked (never hit the install button either, not sure if this matters or not). Is is possible the Xeon doesnt allow for PL adjustments?

 

It's almost certain the Xeon does not allow for power limit adjustments.

 

You should try also the option 'Disable and lock turbo limits' (after install the optional component), sometimes can help reach almost the 75W cap (better than nothing).

 

Looks like this was the key! Increased Cinebench score by 300pts to 4112 Wont go above 75W/96W (peak at 103). Temp Peaks @ 100deg/85deg. Out of curiosity, Where did your 75W figure come from? I ask because I am curious as to what others have achieved on the high/low.

 

Just testing. As I already told in some posts, seems like 75/107W are the 2 limits cap 'hardwired' somewhere.
In this 3d only @JustAnApprentice can go higher, honestly I still don't know how (to me looks like a driver/bios combo that prevent ThrottleStop from have full access to PL).