Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

Ah, ok. Thx.

 

Placed my order for a 7740 last Wednesday 8/21 and now on Monday 8/26 it has shipped. So now I'm hustling to get peripherals ordered.

Perhaps a silly question: got a recommendation for an external optical drive? Just going by reviews, was considering this cheap one from Amazon (same as others on Amazon).

I'm gambling a little on CL16/3000MHz GSkill memory from Newegg. Stand by for a report!

I'll keep the Dell "class 50" OS drive, plus I'll order the 2TB Samsung EVO Plus. I'll either get another at some point or wait to hear about a future 4TB 980 QVO.

@Hopper82, about the thickness of the heatsink. It's not immediately obvious how thickness of the heatsink will affect heat conduction. For a pair of heat source & sinks that are the same area, a thinner heatsink will be linearly better. That is roughly the situation between a chip and fluid-filled heatpipes. For natural convection from a small chip to cooling fins, there's a juggling act of spreading heat across more fins but requiring a thicker plate to make that happen. The next point is think of thermal paste as insulation! It's thermal conductivity is maybe 100X less than copper... but it's 100X more than plain air. So get your thermal paste as thin as possible while still making 100% contact coverage. I ain't no expert on this but did model & build a job once using heatpipes from a chip to cooling fins where no fan was allowed.

Gotta get an optical drive ordered - my software is on DVDs! I must be old school!

 

Checked to see what model I have for my portable drive. It is BDR-XD05B (from Pioneer). It is a BD-RE drive. I need a BD drive because when I get a Blu-ray movie, I rip it to my media server and throw the disc in a box in the basement. I will occasionally burn data to BD-R for backup/archive as well. If you don't need Blu-ray functionality you could probably get something cheaper.

At work I have a Memorex MRX-650LE attached to my dock — this is what I found when I searched for it on Amazon, and my drive looks exactly like this, not sure why the listed model is different. It is just a DVD+/-RW drive. I have it for the odd case when I need to boot something from a disc (I still find it easier to keep a collection of discs for Acronis/MemTest/Linux/etc. than to re-flash a USB drive every time I want to boot something).

Both of these are a few years old at this point (so there are probably newer models to look at) but they have been working great for me. [Edit] - Just realized that these are both coming up a good deal more expensive than the ones you linked. You should be fine with basically anything that has decent reviews.

Unless you're still getting new software on DVD, you could just create ISO images from your current discs and then you wouldn't need to worry that much about a drive for your new machine. (You should probably do this in any case to have backup copies of them.) ImgBurn can do this for free. If you double-click an ISO file in Windows it will just mount it to a "virtual" CD drive.

 

One more question:
would somebode have a picture from the bottom view? And what material are the bottom-covers made of? I will have the aluminium-top, if this makes a difference.
Thx.

 

I'm really curious to see the difference in performance compared to the spec 2666. Please make a shot in AIDA64 if you can

Yeah, got the point. But, apart from material quantity (that anyway is still to evaluate, since in a scale economy the driving fact is normally cost, not -only- performance), the others 2 points are contact pressure and the quality of contact surface, exactly for the reason that you told, the thermal past should be a layer as thinner as possible to have the maximum efficiency.
Anyway, I just ordered the new heatsink, I will try to obtain a mirror-finished surface before install it and see if I can pull out some other Mhz (or at least lower temperature) from the cpu.

 

I don't have photos at the moment, anyway the bottom covers are mainly made in plastics.

 

As already told, with non-sustained 100% loads it's really easier to go full speed without throttling.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/14456112

 

Great info Hopper82,
Just ordered an 7740 i9 9980hk today.

To your link: Isn't it a Coffee-lake? Your link says caby-lake?

I found info on the bottom-cover as well:
https://www.dell.com/support/manual...f84649-a3f5-4b74-9a97-01631e5a2aa6&lang=en-us

Do you have some recommandations/experience for RAM? I just ordered the min 8GB . I planning to take out the 8GB an insert 32GB (2 Sticks)

 

So welcome aboard

Yes, it's coffee lake. Maybe GeekBench doesn't recognize it as it should. The link is related to my 7740.

Only what we have already discuss in the 7X40 threads:
use only RAM of the same type/spec and the best combo is low timings (cl) with high speed (Mhz), keeping in mind that anything above the 2666Mhz is out of the intel spec and can give stability issue (but Dell says that with the new bios they will officially support RAM up to 3200Mhz).

 

Hi Hopper82, yes officially up to 3200. I have seen that.
https://www.dell.com/support/manual...a070cc-7772-48fd-bddc-84b148afe28e&lang=en-us

I will try to keep throttling and energy-consumption down as much as possible, to be still rock-stable
So my idea was to take for example Kingston HX426S15IB2K2/32. (2666Mhz, CL15)
https://www.kingston.com/dataSheets/HX426S15IB2K2_32.pdf
Then undervolt it a little. I think it is better to have lower CL instead of higher frequency (with then higher CL), when the frequency will not be matched by
the CPU to a 100%. We'll see...