Dell Precision 7540 and 7740 Owner's Thread

I'd be surprised if this is the case; the internal audio adapter should be fully unused if you are routing sound through a USB adapter (seeing as that a system can run audio just fine through a USB DAC with no internal audio chip present at all). If you want to be sure... try disabling the Realtek audio adapter in Device Manager, and then Windows should definitely not be trying to use it for anything.

I'm going to again point back to this post from @Soromeister (which I don't think that I've seen you comment on?), which is the first thing that worries me about your setup.

 

Possible, but unlikely; a USB sound path means that the internal DAC/ADC are completely unused—at least, in theory. If this happens despite using a USB DAC, it means your CPU is somehow throttling, or choking on some instruction, because CPUs are usually massively optimised for sound.

EDIT: just saw @Aaron44126's response above: that liquid metal thermal material sounds particularly suspect; a random short in the vicinity of the CPU could be extremely harmful, and this might be your CPU shutting off to prevent itself and your (very expensive) notebook from being destroyed.

Do note that if this progresses to an actual, catastrophic hardware issue, this won't be covered, even by Accidental Damage.

 

If you do believe the internal audio could be still interfering then it can be disabled in the bios via "System Devices" -> "Audio".

Could this be a DPC latency issue?

 

New BIOS 1.8.2 is out.

Do we really need to disable BitLocker to update the BIOS, as the warning on the description page says?

I didn't do that when Dells update tool updated the BIOS to 1.7.0. I uninstalled the update tool, so now I apply the updates on my own.

Was that a lucky update, or is a BIOS update expected to work with BitLocker enabled?

 

If you run the BIOS update executable from within Windows, it will actually offer to suspend BitLocker while running the update, so you don't need to take any action as long as you leave the box checked. (I noticed that this was added to the 7X30 BIOS updater two or three versions ago so I assume it is the same for the 7X40 anyway.)

You do not need to disable BitLocker, just suspend it. It will automatically resume after the next reboot. If you do not suspend BitLocker before you update the BIOS, then you will be required to enter your recovery key at the next boot (and possibly every boot after that, until you go and suspend and resume it).

 

Worked like you said. Thanks!

 

What are the pros and cons of Xeon E2276M vs the E2286M ?
The only difference seems to be the speed and number of cores.
They both have the same thermal power spec. Does that mean the 2276 can run each core at a higher speed continuously compared to the 2286?
Since we have the GPU for serious multitasking, wouldn't it make more sense to get the 2276 for the superior single-core speed?

Thanks!

 

That is essentially it.

Oddly enough: no, actually; the Xeon E2276M has a lower single-core boost than the 2286M (4.7 GHz vs 5 GHz). As many others might tell you, Intel's TDP rating has become meaningless, and it isn't even the average power consumption. It is a very arbitrary number at an arbitrary clock speed. Given Intel CPUs in notebooks clock down to 800 MHz at idle, they draw anything between 0.5 W to 107 W at full tilt.

Just to clarify a misconception: GPUs are good at doing the same thing over and over, like rendering games, multiplying matrices, etc. If you want serious multitasking, chances are you have wildly different workloads at the same time, like an IDE compiling something on one desktop page, a couple dozen tabs in Chrome in another, your email client, a word processor, etc, and a high-core count, high-clock speed CPU is the best solution to this use case.

In short, the GPU's shader core is not (and won't ever be) a substitute for the highly optimised branch predicting pipeline in CPU cores.

In summary, if you want the best possible performance, power be damned, get the i9-9980HK instead of the Xeon, even.

 

Has there ever been an OLED option on the 7540 or 7740??
How does the OLED screen on the 5540 compare to the UHD IGZO display??

 

Say I want to go traveling and want ultra mega long battery life from a 7540/7740, is it possible to completely power down the dGPU from the BIOS ??

Is the Optimus function still available under Linux??

Thanks.