Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

I guess it causes less power savings, so maybe less runtime on battery. But I could not stand the noise in silent environments...

 

The reason for my advice here was to get him running on a different disk controller driver and see if it has any bearing on his issue. I was not talking about actually setting up a RAID array or anything. I've found the Intel RST path/driver to be the most stable (maybe not the fastest). I've had issues with generic Microsoft drivers before. Two concrete examples I can point to are when they broke multi-drive systems with Windows 10 Anniversary Update in 2016 (they would totally hang up a few minutes after boot; easily fixed by switching to any other disk controller driver; took Microsoft a few weeks to get it figured out), and here in the office we had Precision 5510 and XPS 15 9550 systems regularly crashing (BSOD) if using the Microsoft NVMe driver (had to switch to either Samsung or Intel+RAID, and Samsung's NVMe drivers have been spotty when it comes to working well after Windows upgrades). Both of these issues were known and widespread at the time. The easiest set-it-and-forget-it option for me has been to just keep Intel RAID on, as Dell has the system set to by default anyway, and use that. Not guaranteeing or claiming that you will run into trouble if you don't do this, but certainly something to try if you are having trouble.

Since he has multiple SSDs installed from different manufacturers, I do not think that loading a vendor-specific NVMe controller driver would be wise. Unless I am mistaken, such a driver will take over NVMe traffic for all connected NVMe drives.

 

This makes more sense actually. Thanks for clarifying.

 

I believe this is incorrect on both counts. NVMe controllers are built into and thus specific to the drives..I have two SSD drives: one uses the generic MS NVMe driver, the other leverages the Samsung driver. All is very well indeed.

 

Ok. I assumed wrongly since there is only one NVMe controller listed in Device Manager. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever carefully checked a system with multiple NVMe drives to see what it looks like. (My 7530 has one NVMe and one SATA M.2 drive.)

 

Does anyone have 32GB 3200Mbps RAM modules installed? Samsung is now offering 3200Mbps 32Gb ECC modules so I am wondering whether to expect hiccups if I install them. I just got my 7540 with Xeon 2286 and am about to order 4x32Gb ECC 2666Mbps modules. But if 3200Mbps work fine, I'll go for those. Thanks in advance!
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/dram/module/M474A4G43AB1-CWE/

 

Not sure if related to C states or not, but I noticed getting zero coil whine in Linux, whilst in Windows 10 it sounds like I have a mechanical HDD - constant chirping, even when mostly idle.

 

I've got the exact same HDD chirping issue with my AW m15. Only happens when the laptop is connected to a charger. After inspecting the audio recording I sent them, support told me it's just normal coil whine... Not sure how to tackle this, apart from trying to flood some potential offender components, like exposed chokes etc. in K5Pro. The chirping is not audible when the laptop is under load or on a cooler, but gets irritating in quiet conditions when reading etc.

 

Hello impussybull, This is exactly the same question I really would like to know answer to. I also got Xeon 2286 and interested in 32Gb ECC memory modules, 2666 or 3200, the fastest I can get but still ecc. May I ask you where are you planing to buy those modules. I would highly appreciate if you could point out where I could get 3200Mbps ones?

 

I apologize if this has already been mentioned, but I just learned something valuable about this machine that I wanted to document in case others have the same problem.

My 7740 arrived last Friday, and it's been rock-solid so far on stability except that games were unstable to the point of causing abrupt hardware shutdowns. I couldn't figure out why a game like Fallout would do this when hard-running lightmap bakes in Unity were causing no problem. I had also noticed that my sound had a peculiar reverb-like effect, quite distracting, even though I had turned off all of the enhancement options in the Windows device settings.

It turns out the system has Waves MaxxAudio installed by default (https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=vwpkk), and this service and driver were causing a lot of trouble for me. It doesn't show up as an uninstallable app, but I was able to use the Services manager to kill the running service and disable it from restarting.

Getting rid of this app was like magic for me. The unwanted reverb is entirely gone, and my system has stabilized quite a bit. Fallout was crashing within about 15 minutes for me previously, but I just now ended a two-hour session with no crashes. There are still some occasional hitches that concern me, but it's *much* better than it was.

I'm sure for some people, on some systems, this app is useful and wanted, but for my system the policy is "kill it with fire."