Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

@mg12, agreed with @Aaron44126: do post photos of internals once you receive them: whether or not the 7530 can be upgraded or not depends on that, too

 

Will do. Thanks for your replies!

 

Just as information, someone else noticed a little performance degradation after updating to bios 1.5.1? Maybe due to cpu microcode update (thanks Intel and his damn security issue)..

 

I am just fighting to get Dell 7540 to be charged with WD19DC and get two or three external displays show something in all cases.
How you have measured the performance hit with BIOS 1.5.1 and what is the result?
BIOS 1.6.0 was released 20 Dec 2019.
Fixes & Enhancements
- Not Applicable.

Why release something if it does not fix anything? I have not yet tested this version at all.

 

Cinebench and SSD benchmark. Performance drop is 2-3% in the first case, 8-10% in the second one.
Already updated to 1.6.0, more or less same performance of 1.5.1.

 

Has anyone got an idea how to remove this plug? Can't find it in the manual. In a bit of a dilemma here :x
Don't wanna ruin anything.

 

Looks like the 7540 with the RTX 5000 is finally in That looks like a cable that ought to be pulled outward, horizontally towards the right. Grab the bundle of cables as close to the plug as possible, and apply firm, even, continuous pressure to slowly ease it out.

I look forward to the complete disassembly images

From this image alone, I think I can infer that the form factor of the RTX 5000 hasn’t changed. Let’s wait for complete confirmation

 

Hello,

I have received my new Precision 7740 with RTX 5000 as the GPU and the Xeon with the 6-cores. I have been reading through this thread as well as the 7730 thread about battery life.
I don't understand how some people get 8 hours of runtime with this machine. I am getting an average of about 20W in IDLE (with Lightroom Classic opened as well as minimized). If I open Firefox, it will jump to 31W. This is with full brightness. With minimum brightness, I am getting 24W with Firefox openend as I write this and it sometimes spikes to 45W.

I did the following to achieve this power draw, which is very good otherwise I'd have it last for less than 2 hours:

- Changed the "Balanced" power plan and set the maximum processor state to 50%, in order to limit the power draw.
- Set it to Power Saving mode through the slider by the battery icon.
- Make drives go to sleep after 1 minute of inactivity (I have 4 NVMe drives)
- Have the PCIe Power plan set to Maximum Power Savings
- Quit most of the apps running in the background. At this moment I see the Wi-Fi, Windows Defender, Sound icon and battery icon in the system tray.
- Opened Adobe Lightroom Classic, loaded up an image and then minimized it.
- The NVidia driver has the power management set to "NVidia Driver-Controlled"
- The Intel Graphics Command Center has the power management set to "Maximum Power Savings" for the on-battery.
- In BIOS, I have the C-States turned on as well as the other functions (All the cores are enabled as well as Intel SMM and USB Power Share). By the way, I turned off the USB Power Share and the results are the same.
- I don't have anything plugged into the laptop. Nothing.
- In the Dell Power Manager application, the thermal profile is set to "Adaptive".
- I disabled the NVidia GPU using the device manager (right-click and disable). This made it jump from 20W to 40W constantly.

I have the 97 W/Hr battery and the 4K screen. This is a brand new laptop and I must say that I had this battery issue with my other model (7730) where it would hold only for 1 hour and a half with 80% screen brightness.

Therefore, I find it hard to believe others when they say that they reach 8 hours of usage. I fail to see how I can lower the power draw even more, so if anybody can assist with this would be super helpful. I never reach the 4 or 5W draw. For me it's more like 20-25W.

Can anybody help with this?

 

If you have any monitoring program it might be waking up the Nvidia GPU, also, drop the m from the mW readings, because if your laptop was running with a 40mW power usage your 99Wh battery would be good for 99/0.040 = 2475 hours(100 days).

At an average of 20Wats(that seems pretty high), 99Wh should last you 99/20 = 4,95 hours, given that your other laptop did the same, its some software or config that you do that is not really doing any power saving at all...
Even at a pretty high 45Watts your battery should be fine for 2 hours, and that would be some heavy use on battery to use all that power.

I would start by a nice clean OS install.

 

It's a clean Windows 10 install with ISO from Microsoft and drivers manually downloaded from support.dell.com website. I have no monitoring program other than the BatteryBar Pro (https://batterybarpro.com/) that shows me the power draw. What's weird is that with the GPU disabled from the Device Manager, the power consumption goes up. I am pretty sure that there is something about the software config that's causing this but I can't really find out what. The only other monitoring program that I have is the Windows Task manager.

After following this guide, I managed to make it go as low as 9W, however, this is only a temporary surge. In Idle it usually stays at 15W.

Absolute minimum consumption I got:



Regular consumption:



These values are when on idle. With the 15W I had Firefox opened to write this post. It spikes also around 30W.

I disabled all the non-Microsoft services in the system. At this point, I don't know what more I can do to lower the consumption.