Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

I don't use the Adobe video tools, so I don't know the answer, but does Adobe support GPU-offloaded transcoding or export? If so, does the higher CUDA count on the RTX 4000 vs. the RTX 3000 make a significant difference in throughput for that application?

(I'm not at all disagreeing with @Aaron44126, just wanted to ask about this tangential consideration.)

 

Yes, Adobe supports CUDA on GPU. But I am not sure about usage of all cores during rendering. Now I am using HP Z640 workstation with Nvidia Quadro M4000. It is usually loaded only on 30%. So now I am doubting about more powerful RTX 4000 over RTX 3000.

Thank you for your answers. In synthetic test there is 10% advantage in marks of Xeon over i9. What do you think of real life usage? Will there be any difference between these two processors? I heard that Xeon is more stable, cool and reliable than i9 series, but no proofs.

 

I have a friend that uses Adobe Premiere a lot and we have looked into this. At the time (a couple of years ago) Adobe did not offload video encode to the NVIDIA GPU. The only options were CPU encoding, or offload to Intel Quick Sync. Anyway, video encode/decode using NVENC actually doesn't use the CUDA cores but a separate piece of hardware that is common on all cards within a particular generation (i.e. RTX 3000 and RTX 4000 should have identical NVENC performance). It would offload to the NVIDIA GPU for "rendering", and if you put the GPU under heavy load here then maybe you could save some time by opting for a card with more CUDA cores. (I don't do this type of work so I'm not sure; his impression was that he was CPU-bound rather than GPU-bound in almost all situations.)

Xeon and i9, if you are comparing chips with the same clock speed, should have performance that is basically the same (identical architecture running at identical speed). Mobile Xeons are not the same as desktop/server Xeons, my understanding is that they are basically the same chip with ECC memory support added. I have seen nothing to back up claims that the Xeon CPU is more "stable" or "reliable" — this would imply that the Core series is prone to, what, data integrity issues or crashing? That's not the case. And there is certainly no reason that they would be "cooler" when running at the same speed.

 

Is there any apparent reason for 10% higher scores in synthetic test of the Xeon or is just numbers that don't have anything common with real life? The difference between these processors is in higher base frequency (2.4 vs 2.3), maximum frequency (5.0 vs 4.8), and crystal size (174mm vs 149mm). Also Intel GPU has higher frequency (1.25 vs 1.20).

 

If you are comparing i9-9980H with Xeon E2286M, those CPUs are not the same and the Xeon would be a bit faster. The equivalent to the Xeon E2286M is the Core i9-9980HK, which used to be offered in the Precision 7740 but for some reason is not an option right now.

 

Thank you for clearing everything! That was a big help for me.

 

I bought my 7740 in late December with the 9980HK in the UK, and it's still available as an option here at the moment.

https://www.dell.com/en-uk/work/sho...7740-laptop/xctop7740emea?view=configurations

Are you in the US?

 

Yes, I am looking at the U.S. store which does not show the 9980HK available as an option currently. I don't know if it is stock issues or what.

 

Pretty rare that we can get hold of something you can't!

 

The NVMe placed more central to the motherboard (near the RAM slots) is just under the PCH chip. The PCH chip gets very hot when doing I/O no matter the source/destination, so it's naturally a hot place. NVMe drive will stay on by default as power will flow through unless configured otherwise. Please see below how to fix this temperature issue.

For the temperatures to drop, go to Advanced Power Options and set the PCIe Power Managemnent settings to "Maximum Power Savings". This will make the NVMe drives that aren't used go to sleep. Waking from sleep is almost instantaneous so there's no performance impact. Please see here for more details.

It's not necessary to reboot after changing this but it's best if you do it nonetheless.