Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

You are right the USB PD firmware update does not get rolled back. But somehow the degrade/upgrade cycle worked.

Rolled back BIOS to 1.5.1 and the dock came back on. The power usage remained high.

So updated to 1.6. Dock working but power usage still high.

Further updated to 1.7. Dock working but power usage remains high.

Now I am on BIOS 1.7 and hovering at ~22W idle (vs. ~10W earlier) and the fans are working like turbines all the time. I updated whole lot of other drivers/apps today. Like the graphics cards (Intel and nVidia), audio, Intel management engine, Ethernet, wireless, Dell power management service, Dell precision optimiser.

 

About urgent help needed after BIOS 1.7 update.

Shutdown and unplug everything, also the dock.
Start laptop once without dock.
Shut down the laptop.
Connect power cable back to dock.
Connect dock to laptop.
etc.
The result is?

I have flashed about 12 Dell 7540 and so far only one laptop lost connection to dock after update.
Shutdown unplug / plugin resolved my case.

Reflashing the same version again is one possibility.

 

I was aware of this trick and tried it out several times before posting. Unfortunately, it did not work.

Fortunately this did work. I rolled back to BIOS 1.51 and then upgraded back to 1.6 followed by 1.7. However, the point to be noted is that 1.7 did update the USB PD firmware in the first instance which was not rolled back or updated therein after.

On a different note, I had been experiencing occasional BSODs for driver DMA/IRQ related issues. And therefore decided to update drivers, apps and BIOS despite busy schedule on my head. Hoping that the BSOD has been resolved...

Anyone has good experience with Auto Driver Update utilities like Driver Genius on the Precision? Do not mind paying for a good utility which takes care of installing latest reliable drivers in auto. The Precision Optimiser somehow does not work well for me...

 

Dell drivers should be downloaded from support.dell.com (easy to remember)

For example Dell 7540 drivers are here.
https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/precision-15-7540-laptop/drivers

Sort by date so you will see what's new.
Dell Precision Optimizer or Dell Command Update can be used to test once month if your PC is up-to-date.

I download only Nvidia drivers directly from Nvidia. Dell is a bit behind the Nvidia in this case.
Depends what kind of software you run on your laptop.

 

Seconded, I recommend sticking with drivers posted on Dell's site (even though you can often get newer ones directly from the upstream vendor) unless you like to experiment with such things; best to use the ones that have been validated by Dell.

I just check the site monthly for new ones, easy enough since you can sort them by posting date. (I used to have a program that scraped their simpler FTP site, but they stopped updating it, so I need to figure out a new way to do that.)

 

I have updated to the 1.7.0 bios on my 7740 and do not have high power drain issues. My guess is installing the NVIDIA driver update changed your Optimus profile and some app is holding the GPU on in an idle state. Can you run this utility and see if anything shows up in the list? The NVIDIA GPU should be listed in the IDLE state.

 

Please use this application to switch between Dell internal power profiles. Make sure that the Windows power plan is set to "Balanced" and within the Dell Power Manager, switch between the different Thermal Management options, but please wait for 10 seconds before switching to another profile. So try to set it to "Cool", then "Quiet", then "Ultimate" and then "Optimized" and see whether you get any change in turbines and power draw.

In the future, when updating your BIOS, it is recommended that the only thing plugged into your laptop should be the power cable and that the laptop is not connected to anything else, including the docking station. This is how I always do the BIOS update to make sure nothing interferes with it. I even unplug the mouse and use the touchpad for this.

Also, the NVidia Power Profile might have been reset somehow, so please switch and apply the different setting within the NVidia Control Panel.

As for the Intel Graphics, you might want to go to Device Management and under the Software Devices there should be 2 Intel entries:

- Intel Graphics Command Center
- Intel Graphics Control Panel

Please right click the "Intel Graphics Control Panel" and choose DISABLE. Then, load your Intel Graphics Command Center and switch between the different power profiles, ultimately setting it to what you like.

The idea here is to force the computer to set the profiles to something else and then set it back, to make sure it's applied.

If, after doing these things, the issue persists, then I'd suggest you get on a call with Dell Support about it.

 

I purchased my current machine from HID Evolution and have found their pre- and post-sales support to be excellent, so they're not an unknown quantity for me at all. After looking into the support question in detail, I did go ahead and order through HID Evolution. Even though I could do my own delid/repaste, I've not done one before and don't want to use my very expensive new work computer as a learning lab. Maybe after I get my new machine I'll consider giving this a try on the old one, which I'm keeping as a backup machine and for some offline rendering batches.

My order does include the full ProSupport plan from Dell, for five years, and I checked with my Dell-certified colleague to make sure this was all okay. The only caveat is that the Dell support won't cover my third-party SSDs, but my colleague says the worst Dell would do is to ask me to test the system with their SSD onboard -- and I'm getting a small SSD from Dell that I'll keep formatted and bootable just in case. My colleague says she's never actually seen Dell make an issue of third-party storage media, but it's theoretically possible they could, so she advised me to keep their OEM SSD on hand against that unlikely possibility. This sounds a lot like the way Cisco handles support contracts -- we have some Cisco gear at work with third-party transceiver modules, and our Cisco support contract says we might have to remove those modules temporarily during a service call to prove that they're not causing the problem. That's a reasonable request by the OEM, which we accept.

Incidentally, I did take the advice of several folks on this forum, and I bought the Quadro RTX 4000 GPU rather than the much-more-expensive 5000. All my research shows that the 5000 would only give me about a 2% performance bump for the applications I use, and the money I saved by going with the 4000 instead paid for doubling my RAM and SSD capacity while still dropping the overall cost of the machine. My machine is due to arrive in early March.

 

Sounds good, then; I hope you enjoy your new Dell!

That's par for the course as far as Dell is concerned—shouldn't be much of an issue.

 

Can anyone with the 4k screen on the 7740 use hwinfo or something similar to get the manufacturer/part number of the display?