Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

Can anyone confirm whether or not the Adobe Lightroom battery trick works with Hyper-V enabled? I have Hyper-V enabled as I need it given my work, so I'm simply curious whether or not this might be the culprit.

I'm getting the above.

 

Is the icon in the tray colored or gray? If it is colored then the dGPU is still powered on for some reason.
You can always disable Hyper-V temporarily and see if that changes anything. I believe it can be toggled on and off with a bcdedit command.

 

Is the card in D0 (full power state) or D3 (lowest power state) at idle? You can check it in the device manager as shown in this screenshot:

 

Thanks for pointing that out. I had no idea that I can read the power state from the Device Manager.

It's D0 allright:



I will test this further, but as a general rule, I believe this is how I should check the power further onward.

 

Can't you use many other apps to get the power usage? even GPUz for example?

 

Anyone updated to BIOS version 1.6.0? I'm wondering what changes have been made since 1.5.1 since there is no change log.
Hoping that they do not lock up the undervolt capability due to Plundervolt.

 

I had my company provided 7540 updated to 1.6.0 mainly to fix the issue of the ethernet on my WD19DC dock from disconnecting (very annoying). I can't speak if it has broken one's ability to undervolt, but it like the 1.5.1 release fixed the ethernet dock issue.

 

That is great news... had been waiting desperately to hear it!!

I am in for one RTX5000...

Thanks a ton again to Ionising_Radiation and also to mg12 for enabling this.

 

I'm looking for pre-purchase comments and recommendations as I consider the 7740 as my next mobile workstation purchase. I'm planning to order either this machine or one of its competitors within the next few days.

Usage and constraints:

• I'm a computer engineer working in software development and 3D content creation for simulation, education, visualization, etc. Tools in use are Unity game engine, Blender, Substance (suite), GIMP, Audacity, and Lightworks (video editing). I also sometimes perform data analysis using purpose-built programs and either MariaDB or PostgreSQL databases. These can be large -- the last such project had me loading in about 1.5 GB per day of new data for a 3 month analysis engagement, all on a laptop.
• A desktop computer -- regardless of its performance advantages -- is out of the question, because I need to have my full work environment when I am onsite with clients.
• I am not currently running any of the Autodesk products, but there is a good chance I might add Maya, Revit, and/or 3DS Max to my tools within the planned usage life of this machine. So I don't immediately require ISV certification of Quadro over GeForce, but it's a possibility on the horizon.
• My Unity projects can be quite large -- I'm currently working on a client project that is about 45 GB in the source repository and expands to over 60 GB in the local workspace. My last build (on a quad-core i7 at 4.5 GHz) took over 4 hours, and lightmap bakes can take several hours as well (these are offloaded to my GTX 1080 mobile GPU).
• Over the past 2 years, and on the roadmap for further progress in 2020, the Unity engine (runtime and editing) are moving heavily toward exploiting high core count CPUs as well as offloading parallel workloads to CUDA GPUs.
• Currently my o.s. is Windows 10 Pro, but I am an experienced Linux user and spend a lot of my time at the WSL (Linux subsystem) bash prompt. I also run Linux in virtual machines. All the tools I use are available in Linux, except that Unity itself is still "experimental" on that platform. The upshot is that Linux compatibility is a Very Big Deal for me, and I want to position myself to be able to switch over someday when Unity is fully supporting Linux as an editing platform (they already do officially support it as a build target).
• This will be my new "daily driver" for work, and as such, reliability, field serviceability, and build quality are more important than being on the absolute bleeding edge for performance. (To illustrate, my current machine is a high-end EVOC from HID Evolution; I had them delid and repaste CPU and GPU, and I do overclock -- but I tested the machine before "go live", determined that I could reliably hit 4.7 GHz on all four cores, then backed off to 4.5 GHz for stability.)
• I definitely need 4K resolution (for editing 4K video and for having a *lot* of small text on screen at once in my dev tools), but don't need faster than 60 Hz refresh rate. Yes, I do game in my spare time, but I'm middle-aged and don't play the reflex-heavy PVP shooters.
• Battery life is absolutely unimportant for me. I need mobility but not cordless mobility; the onboard battery for me is basically a "built-in UPS" and nothing more.
• Speaker quality is immaterial; for any serious work I use high-quality acoustically-neutral headphones.
• My budget is not tightly constrained. I'm buying a top-end engineering workstation for work and don't expect to get that at a bargain basement price.

My top contenders are the Dell Precision 7740, the Lenovo P73, and the HP ZBook 17. I like the HP but have probably ruled it out because of its port layout (too many cables on the right side, where my mouse lives). Between the Lenovo and the Dell, I like what I've read of the Dell's thermal design better, and based on reading the machines' service manuals, they're both very field-serviceable but I give a bit of an edge to the Dell. Also, I can get an 8 core Xeon on the Dell but only a 6 core on the Lenovo. So, at the moment my first choice is the Dell 7740 -- hence asking for comments here.

Specs in my plan:

• Xeon 2286 8 core (the top CPU)
• 32 GB RAM as 2 x 16 GB sticks, so I have ability to expand to 64 GB later. Opting for ECC for reliability.
• 4K non-touch UHD display
• Quadro RTX 5000 GPU
• 256 GB NVMe SSD from Dell, purchase a 2 TB device from a third party (probably Newegg, and probably a Samsung 970 EVO Plus) as the system drive; migrate one of my existing 2 TB Samsung 970 EVO SSDs from my current system to the new one, leaving the existing machine with its stock 2 TB SSD and my new one with 4 TB total

General comments and recommendations are welcome (particularly if anyone has worked with both the 7740 and the other two machines on my "short list"). Additionally, I pose these specific questions:

• What sort of thermal throttling, if any, should I expect with either the GPU or CPU running heavy but the other one relatively light? This is my normal situation, rather than the two both working hard at the same time.
• Same question as above, but now in the case where both CPU and GPU are loaded.
• Can I undervolt the Xeon slightly to reduce operating temps and to prevent thermal throttling?
• How good is the color accuracy on the 4K non-touch panel? (I own an X-Rite colorimeter and will be calibrating my display.)
• Should I opt for the non-ECC memory to reduce internal power dissipation (and therefore heat), or is the reliability worth it?
• Is the Xeon CPU a mistake for me, even as a developer, and should I instead consider the highest core-count i9 CPU?
• Does anyone have some benchmarks for the Dell-supplied NVMe SSDs? I can't seem to find online a spec for whose SSDs they use.
• I plan to research this one myself, but wonder if anyone offhand knows if current steppings of the Xeon 2286 have fixed the speculative execution vulnerabilities (Meltdown, Spectre, Spoiler, and the like)?
• Does anyone on this thread have experience with Linux dual-boot or single-boot on this machine, and if so, any comments?

 

Thermal throttling: The CPU will thermal throttle under load. The GPU will not. (In fact I've been on these forums for a long time and I've never heard anyone complaining about an NVIDIA GPU thermal-throttling in one of these systems.) The Quadro RTX 5000 will be power-starved at 110W, so it will power throttle well before it will thermal throttle. Because of the power limitations, the RTX 5000 is only coming in about 5% faster than the RTX 4000 in benchmarks so you could consider just getting the RTX 4000 and saving yourself around $1,000. But if the budget isn't a big deal, more power to you.

You can alleviate CPU thermal throttling somewhat by undervolting it. Yes, you can undervolt the Xeon, it seems that most users are able to safely undervolt by 100-130 mV. Installing high-quality thermal paste also helps (but just a little bit). There are also power limitations in place that kick in after the CPU is running under high load for a while so it can power throttle as well ... here are some posts to check about that.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...40-owners-thread.830037/page-37#post-10965749
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...40-owners-thread.830037/page-48#post-10972376
If you would like to attempt to override these power limits it seems like you will have more luck with a Core CPU instead of a Xeon. (And I think that you'll find this behavior from Lenovo and HP systems as well.)

ECC memory: This is sort of an over-the-top memory stability guarantee, but ordinary modules don't get random memory errors so I think that it is only needed in critical usage scenarios (maybe long-running simulations or something where getting a memory error would set you back a lot of time). You can also probably get faster memory that is not ECC-capable.

Xeon CPU: The only benefit to the mobile Xeon CPU over same-clocked Core CPU is ECC memory support. The only reason to get it is if you are also getting ECC memory, or think that you might upgrade to ECC memory later on. Xeon also requires you to pay for Windows 10 "Pro for Workstations", but these laptops don't actually have the hardware to use any of the "Pro for Workstations" extra features (except for ReFS) so this is basically a cash grab for Microsoft.

Dell NVMe SSDs: My Precision 7530 came with a Toshiba SSD, though Dell has been known to use several different brands. If you really care about which module you get, you should buy the system with the cheapest NVMe drive available from Dell and then drop in your own afterwards. The system comes with everything that you need to install four NVMe drives even if you just purchase it with one. The Samsung drives are excellent so it looks like you have a good plan here.

My understanding is that the speculative execution vulnerabilities were only seriously addressed in Intel's new "Cove" architecture which is presently only shipping on 10nm CPUs (Ice Lake), not available in this system. Though it seems that they keep finding new problems...