Hands on Dell Precision 7710

nathing=anything

 

Had my 7710 for a couple of days now, will try to make a review at some stage incl. comparison to an M6600, but here's one funny thing I've met so far.
Win10 started crashing at every boot, just around the time of reaching the logon screen. Reboots, reverts, nothing helped, until I... removed an SD card from the slot. That did it.
For whatever reason, a 32 GB Samsung micro-SD card (in an adapter) inserted in the card reader slot, is causing Windows 10 to crap out with BSOD atfer every boot. Took me hours to identify the bastard.

Other very quick notes:
- overall the build quality is very good;
- impressed by the audio quality, given the speakers are below, but they can deliver a small punch if the laptop is placed on a proper surface;
- it is very, very quiet, especially comparing to my M6600;
- the dreaded keyboard: the quality is very good, way better than expected, but the layout / design is crap, as expected - FN's on home/end, enter key very small, no dedicated volume keys - this will really take time to get used to;
- boot time SUCKS BIG TIME! I do have the latest BIOS installed, yet it takes around 15 seconds until OS starts to load, and another 10-15 for OS to actualy boot... Win10, on a Samsung 950 Pro in AHCI mode. Installed using legacy boot as UEFI wouldn't detect install media created using Windows tools... Funnily enough I've created a virtual machine with Windows 7 using Hyper-V and that takes approx 3 seconds (!!!) to fully boot into the logon screen...
- screen quality (UHD) is very good, but there's some scaling issues with certain apps making them a wee bit too small to fathom, I guess software updates will take care of that;
- TB3 / Type-C port works, I have the small Dell adapter for it with VGA / USB3 / HDMI / Ethernet outputs. I have an old 27" monitor with no HDMI so that's why I got the adapter;
- the Windows 10 install media offered by Dell is absolutely useless, it can only be used to fix an existing OS install, not to reinstall from the scratch - had to download image from MS;
- I have a software issue where any videos played in fullscreen by Firefox are jaggy and pixelated, some issues with the hardware acceleration apparently;
- it does run Witcher 3 with all nearly bells and whistles enabled (in Full HD resolution) quite smoothly ;-)

I've updated my signature with the specs.

 

I concur with almost all of the above @Winger

Scaling issues I've seen on the internal display are often when I initially launch certain apps on my external display (VMware Workstation 12.1 for example) and if I later disconnect my external then the window run in native 4K resolution when it reappears on the internal display. I basically have to log out and then relaunch the application to have it scale correctly on the UHD internal display. 4K internal 17" display is a dream to work on by the way (in VMware guest or in the host). Scaled to 150% is equivalent to 2560x1440, which is very nice even if it means I need to wear my glasses more often.

Slow boot times are purely BIOS related I believe and will resolve as the system matures. I'm hoping, but I don't require rebooting very often. After the Dell bios splash screen my windows 10 boots fast. Likewise same as what you've seen, my VMware guests boot extremely fast (mine are win10 guests)

My system runs extremely quiet and cool compared to my old m6500 that had i7 920xm and fx3800m. Ill be ordering a 2nd identical machine soon for my business partner-coworker. I would not be doing this if I was anyway concerned of quality, reliability, or support.

 

It's funny that you mentioned the BSOD when support assist was analyzing the system. This was also happening to me during the time when the dGPU was not being detected. Once I was able to get the dGPU detected the BSOD stopped when running support assist.

 

Anyone pair a Bluetooth headset with the 7710? I have the 8260 card and trying to pair a blue buds X. I have the headset in pairing mode and the PC is searching, but it never finds it. I have the 8260 from with Dell support site and running windows 10.

My droid turbo 2 phone can see the blubuds (i unpaired it from the phone for now). So I do not think it is an issue with the headset; rather, the 7710.

Also, on the 7710, I set the Bluetooth setting to "Alllow Bluetooth devices to find this PC" and my Turbo 2 does not see the pc.

 

Turns out the white antenna was not connected. I looked at it the other day, and thought it was connected. Dell sent me a new card so when I went to disconnect the antennas from the card in the system before removing it, the white one moved and was now obvious it was not connected. I connected it and now BT works. It did not want to snap in at first, but I got it. Hopefully it will not pop out.

 

How does one reinstall windows on 7710?
I got my machine yesterday and I'm pretty happy with what I have seen so far. The problem is that I ordered just a hard-disk with the machine and got a Samsung PM951 256GB M.2 drive to make a boot drive online. As far as I've read this is a supported configuration. The problem is I didn't get the back-up OS media so the question is now how I'll install the OS again once I add the M.2 drive.

Also is there a service manual for 7710 ? Where can I download it?

Thanks.

 

support.dell.com has manuals available when you select your machine model.

 

Has anyone setup the 7710 with 2 - M.2 PCIe NVMe drives in RAID 0 (or RAID 1). Am I correct in assuming the RAID controller on the 7710 natively supports both SATA and PCIe? I have ordered a system with three M.2 PCIe drives and specified NO RAID so one should be for the OS drive and the other 2 (one with Interposer) could be setup by myself to RAID 0 using Intel Rapid Storage Technology software. Does anyone have specific knowledge that this would work?

 

I have a 7510 with two of Dell's 512 GB NVMe high performance drives (SM951) in RAID1.

Setup is very easy. Just set SATA mode in the UEFI bios to RAID. Then reboot and hit F12 till the startup menu appears. I believe the header is called device configuration? Select this. This will then load the Intel RAID utility and allow you to create an array. Just make sure all drives that you include in your array are the same model. The Intel raid array is a hardware raid, which is great because I was then able to turn on bit locker and encrypt my array. Bitlocker can't be used with software raid.

I believe all the systems are shipped with SATA mode in raid so you shouldn't have to reinstall your OS. Intel claims that you can build your array without having to reinstall. Once you're finished here, boot into your OS and install the Intel F6 driver from Dell's website and then reboot. Then install the RST driver from Dell's website and reboot.

Verify in the RST tool that your array was setup correctly and is healthy. The RST tool is rather neat as it runs a scan every couple of weeks that verifies the integrity and health of your array and automatically makes any repairs if necassary. So far, no corruption or bad blocks though, which is good.