Hands on Dell Precision 7710

I've had a plethora of issues since day one with the 7710, and I've been working with two tiers above Pro Support. It was a replacement of my M6800 and I was considering of asking for my M6800 back. Today I've learned that the dell USB restore is completely useless and impossible to use if you have an NVMe drive (and I had mine as part of the build from Dell and the USB recovery was also included).

After changing the from RAID to ACHI in the BIOS and reinstalling Windows 10 using the download directly from Microsoft, I can say after about an hour of usage that the issues in my previous post with the sleeping have been resolved. I can also say that the new BIOS update installed without any issues and the video problems have been fixed. I did do the BIOS update before I reinstalled Windows, and I did the BIOS update while I had the drive setup in RAID. Between my dGPU not being present from the factory and the prior BIOS update being faulty, I believe the new BIOS update is safe to update, considering it was the only thing I've done over the past two months that went flawlessly.

 

Doing fine, thank you. Sleep wake up time is 5 seconds or less (same as with 1.4.8). I'm so glad I switched back to enable switchable graphics - the colors and brightness of the screen are now what I remember - must have been the way Premiere Color interacted with Quadro M5000M since Intel graphics is not available when switchable graphics is disabled.
Otherwise everything seems to be working except for my new Beta version of Davinci Resolve which will load but not the final screen one uses for grading/editing - Bios upgrade didn't affect that. It has the same behavior with the XPS 9550 - works fine on 2 desktops. Guess that's why they call it Beta.

 

Woke up this morning with the same issue that I'e been previously having. I have the machine set to NEVER sleep and I have the display set to sleep after 15 minutes. I left the machine on overnight and several hours later when I came back the screen was OFF and would not turn on. The power LED was on and the backlit keyboard LEDs were on. I plugged in an external monitor and nothing would happen. Plugged in to the dock and nothing happened. Plugged in a USB drive and no windows sound played when the USB was plugged in. It appears the machine was completely off. I forced a shutdown and when I booted back into Windows and checked the event viewer, there was absolutely no logs of any issues. Only thing that was logged was the startup.

 

With the new install, did you install the latest intel video driver from the dell site? Also, I use the Nvidia driver form the Nvida site.

I have not had this issue with the 7710, although I use it mainly with external monitors and a TB15.

 

I downloaded the Intel HD Graphics from Dell and the Nvidia drivers automatically downloaded from window update, which is v10.18.13.6246 (newer than what is on Dell's website). I'll try Nvidia's drivers and report back.

I don't believe it is a display driver issue, because the machine was completely unresponsive. If it was a display driver issue, wouldn't everything else with the machine still work? For example, remote desktop to it, pinging it, etc.

 

The intel display driver i have is:

Driver Provider: Intel
Driver Date: 2/18/16
Driver Version: 20.19.15.4390

I installed the one from the dell site.

I think I read somewhere about disabling C state or something like that in bios for video issues with a TB15. might not solve the issue, but might be worth a try.

 

I just updated the Nvidia driver from their website. It installed with v10.18.13.6213, which is lower than the version # from what I retrieved from Windows Update.

The Intel HD Graphics is v20.19.15.4390.

 

One more issue: In Windows, after hitting Start > Shutdown, Windows goes through the Shutdown process, the screen turns off, but the keyboard remains lit and the machine is still ON.

 

do you have "Turn on Fast Startup" checked in the power settings? I un-check that on my machines. I think with that on, on a shutdown it goes into some type of hibernate state.

 

Correct, with Windows 8+, "shut down" actually means log out and then hibernate. You can disable fast startup or disable hibernate altogether (powercfg /h off) to avoid this.