Hands on Dell Precision 7710

I must have had the wrong version of Crystal DiskMark - ran a test with the Portable version - 1729/924 read write on the OS Drive and 2438/1943 for the RAID 0 PCIe NVMe array!!

You were lucky! I was taken in by all the "fixes and enhancements" so I bit and did the update to the latest BIOS - on reboot there was the colored snow screen - luckily I remembered there was a fix involving booting into F2 and having a small band of clear screen and then blindly doing a specific series of tab/enter keystrokes which disables switchable graphics and then the system boots back to normal but it wasn't normal - my TB15 Dock which worked perfectly was now broken - got that fixed by uninstalling and reinstalling all the Dock Drivers but then the computer was running very slow - the Video grading program no longer played realtime 4K and a Userbenchmak test came back with horrible results. Long story short I restored computer back to when I received it and reinstalled all drivers and programs and now everything is back to normal. Of course, I went back to 1.3.12.

My advice - don't attempt to upgrade to 1.4.8 BIOS - it is broken and has caused some people to have their MOBOS replaced. I think there was a reason that Dell put 1.3.12 on a system with the other BIOS having been released 2 weeks before (my build date was April 4) - they know there are problems - amazing they haven't pulled it or posted a new BIOS.

 

7710 hesitation problems: installed windows 10 cleanly on my new 7710 (32G, 4K display, Samsung PM951 M.2 C: and 1T 7200 RPM HDD D: ) and it is solid so far and I love the keyboard but I am seeing hesitation every now and then: The mouse cursor stops moving and nothing seems to happen for a while. Is this a driver issue? Any similar experiences and solutions?

Also scrolling in CMD is extremely slow. I have a directory with more than 1000 files in it. When I type "dir" on my XPS 1712 machine it is almost instantaneous but on 7710 it takes 15 seconds or so. It is painfully slow. Any ideas?

XPS is also SSD C: and HDD D:
Thanks.

 

Does anyone know if the HDMI port with the nvidia GPU is 2.0?

 

Congrats on receiving your new system.

*edit: I see you got the crystal disk mark test results you were hoping for in a later post that I missed. Ignore the following since you got it figured out already

since crystal disk mark gives various speed measurements, would you be able to display your crystal disk mark results in a screen capture to be sure we are comparing apples to apples? Here are mine shown below (note my drives are not in a RAID configuration so your disk mark results should be at least as fast as these if you are in RAID 0).

my system drive: SM951 512GB


my data drive: PM951 1TB

 

I have not experienced any of the hesitation with mouse cursor or slow scrolling in the cmd window even with my folder file list of 1200+ files.

Are you using an external mouse? If so, first I'd check if the mouse is at fault. Try it on another system if you haven't already. Maybe the batteries are dying if it is wireless or maybe it is otherwise just going bad.

You've probably tried this stuff already but here is what I would do:

Check the "scroll" speed settings in both your touchpad/mouse settings app (the dell app with dark screen theme) and in your particular 3rd party mouse app settings (I use logitech mouse so I check in the logitech stepoint mouse app). For my external mouse' scroll wheel speed I set it to scroll 3 lines at a time. I sometimes set it to 7 lines at a time to scroll even faster.

You could also try uninstalling your mouse and touchpad drivers. Reboot and test again. Then reinstall just the dell touchpad driver and retest. Then finally reinstall your particular mouse setting app and retest.

 

Well I did repeat tests and was back to 800 speeds on both drives. I went ahead and bit the bullet again and changed BIOS to 1.4.8 but this time disabled switchable graphics (says in the setup portion of the 7710 manual that it should be enabled for only Windows 7/8 anyway) and now the computer seems to be working normally (including TB15 Dock). I now did Crystal DiskMark tests and will try to upload here

The first image is the RAID 0 PCIe Drive and second one is my system drive.

 

Out of curiosity, did you re-enable switchable graphics? I think not having win 10 in the manual is just because 10 is new. It is applicable to 10.

 

Mike, when you did the upgrade to 1.4.8 bios and it was successful, do you remember if you have switchable graphics enabled in BIOS at the time?

between having switchable graphics enabled (a BIOS setting) versus having up to date thunderbolt and dell control vault software, I would expect the BIOS settings having more impact on a success/failure during BIOS upgrade than software that resides in the OS. I say that because the BIOS is essentially oblivious to OS during upgrade (I think) and a driver or OS setting should have no impact on success or failure during a BIOS upgrade.

So I still think it is either a firmware, BIOS or hardware condition that causes BIOS upgrade to 1.4.8 being successful or not. But I'm no BIOS expert, that is for sure.

 

Yes I did - on reboot back to colored snow and then doing the F2 - highlight switchable graphics and the tab enter routine. If you have switchable graphics enabled then the 1.4.8 BIOS will not work.

There were a lot of new enhancements on the new BIOS update which I like. Am I losing anything on my particular system by not having that enabled?

 

I did have switchable graphics enabled. I agree. I think it is doing something to the intel video bios. Not sure what it did not happen on mine. Earlier in the thread, I thought it was a Xeon issue, bit someone else with the non xeon had the issue too.