Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

I checked the service manual and the install manual both do not mention anything on the NFC with a pdf search. If the NFC is limited to the palmrest then an change on the part would be what is required and from the look of the service manual an easy process. A brief check on Ebay only came up with FIPS, Smartcard, and NFC on the Dell precision M4600

 

Long story-short, I have been recommended a Precision 7540 for some trading that I do. It will only be used on battery for 7x5 minute periods over a 4 hour time frame. It will run 1 app, nothing else. It will be using WiFi 90% of the time. A dedicated GPU will not be needed. I haven't decided on the CPU yet, but I was going to get the M2 PCle, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X20 LTE (for when WiFi is not available) and 8gb of ram.
Milli seconds are crucial in what I do, so basically I am looking for a low latency, fast CPU combination that will be battery powered. Am I in the right ball park or should I be looking for a different solution?

 

Have you considered a Latitude instead? For your workload, it will be noticeably lighter and easier to manage, unless you need the CPU to run at full throttle (which is not likely to happen under battery power, anyway—the EC imposes CPU power draw limits).

 

Thank you Ionising, I would gladly go for any smaller/lighter option, but with speed being crucial I wanted to get the 802.11 ax (WiFi 6) card + LTE, combined with the fastest CPU on battery power, and no dedicated GPU. If I could find this in a smaller package it would suit me perfectly.

 

The Latitude 15 5501 can be configured with the Intel AX200 and an LTE module. Do check them out!

The Precision 7540, if you don't have a dGPU, is actually way heavier (and thicker) than necessary.

 

That's exactly what I am looking for, unfortunately the Dell Ireland site that I am directed to has 5 versions of the Latitude 5501 none of them offer WiFi 6 or LTE as an option. The 5501 also comes a lot cheaper than the 7540.

 

I've been wondering if it's possible to install drivers directly from nvidia.com or if the precision is only using the official dell driver package. Every time i try installing the driver which should be good for the configuration i got, the installation fails.

 

If you have previously installed the drivers from Dell, you must either totally remove them before installing drivers from NVIDIA, or, make sure that you are picking up the DCH driver package from NVIDIA.
(Use this page: https://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us and then select DCH from the driver type drop-down on the right)
Dell's drivers are DCH and you cannot cross-upgrade between DCH and Standard.

Personally, I recommend just using the driver package from Dell unless there is something from the newer NVIDIA versions that you have particular need for. Dell does periodically update the NVIDIA driver (but not as often as NVIDIA does).

 

So this morning, after a reboot my powerlimits were back to 100w and 75w and it took 4 hours of trying all i could think of before I found a way to increase them again, - to get throttlestop to increase the powelimits you need to lower them below 100w and 75w (say to 60w and 45w) and then increase back up again. This only needed to be done once, though I am pretty sure that it will reset itself to 100w & 75w once again at some point.
Running with PL1 @ 140w and PL2 @ 130w I finally managed to break 2000 CB15 points mark and hit 4574 in CB20. This was with DellFanCMD maxing out the fans to keep the temps down.

 

Which bios version are you using?