Kaby Lake Precision pre-release discussion (5520 / 7520 / 7720)

A note on the screens. You should only get UHD if you understand what you're getting yourself into. It does make the screen a lot more sharp which can help with readability and things like photo editing, however, some applications do not play nice with display scaling and will have issues.

Also note that touch screens are glossy. If you want a matte display, you will want to avoid touch.

 

multiple external displays using a 4k laptop

In win10, programs scale to the primary display's scale setting... so if your primary display is the laptop (3840x2160) scaled to 200% (because it is UHD and you could not read it at 100%) then your programs will open at 200% scaling on the laptop and appear fine. But that 200% scale of the program is maintained even when dragging onto your external displays. So if you have some non 4k external display (a 1080 or a 1440?) at 100% scaling... that program you opened on your laptop which looks perfect, if dragged to that external it will jump to 200% x1440 (or 200% x 1080). In other words, that program will appear overly huge on the external display.

Changing the primary display to be the external 2560x1440 scaled to 100% (no scaling)... similar to above but reversed effect. Programs you open will appear at 100% scaling because your primary display is set to 100% and they will look great on your external. That program window if moved to the laptop's UHD display will appear at 100% (3840X2160) and appear super tiny.... unless that program has built in scaling to adjust itself (most programs do not).

There are workarounds like changing the laptop resolution setting (not scaling) to be something like 2048x1152 will allow for 100% scaling across all of your displays. Therefore everything is balanced, but at the cost of a not so crisp laptop display. Would have been better perhaps to purchase FHD from the out go if changing resolution in windows.

Ideally select displays (laptop + external) that will retain same scaling across all displays (or try to keep scaling pretty close to each other)

*edit. I tried to read what I just wrote and I must say "good luck understanding that", just know that it will take a month to adapt to UHD first time and it requires consideration. I am happy with my UHD 7710

 

I remember your struggle. That was painful to sit back and watch and their recourse, as the AMD lineup back then clearly did not work well with 7710. I'm happy to see you returned for round two 7720. NVidia this time?

 

The Owner's Manual for the 7520 specifies mDP 1.4 under Tech Specs:

http://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/precision-15-7520-laptop_owner's manual_en-us.pdf

 

Don't sell yourself short, ygohome. Your description of the app scaling problem is very clear (at least to me).

It all depends on whether the app is high-DPI aware and whether it declares itself to be 'system DPI aware' or 'per monitor DPI aware'. This is normally done with a manifest that is embedded into the app executable.

Apps that are 'system DPI aware', retrieve a fixed DPI value from Windows when the app is launched and (hopefully) scale the window contents based on this fixed DPI value. These apps do not respond to dynamic DPI changes, that occur when the app is dragged between monitors with different DPI values.

Apps that are 'per monitor DPI aware' dynamically scale up or down when they are moved between monitors with different DPI values. This kind of apps is very rare at the moment.

Most (older) apps are 'not DPI aware'. This kind of apps is scaled up or down by the Desktop Window Manager (DWM). The app paints itself into a virtual (off-screen) window and the DWM scales this window image up or down to account for different DPI values, which usually introduces some blurriness.

For an in-depth description of DPI awareness, take a look at this Microsoft article (I dare you ):
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn469266(v=vs.85).aspx

You can force the 'DPI awareness' of an app, to influence its scaling behaviour, by manually creating a .manifest file. This has been described earlier in one of the Precision threads. The trick is to declare the app as 'not DPI aware', so that the DWM takes care of the scaling.

 

Don't get too excited about that. The Precision manuals have been wrong on finer details in the past. I think @Dell-Mano_G is a better source.

[Edit]
Didn't he actually say that you can get DP 1.4 on AMD GPUs, just not on NVIDIA for the 7510? Maybe it's "right" after all. (My mind goes right to NVIDIA only because that's the only thing I ever get.)

 

No 3rd hard drive option? Maybe I need to wait for the dust to settle on the 'configuration' pages

OOPS, my bad - I didn't scroll down far enough. It's under OTHER OPTIONS.

 

So is by any chance the Maxwell card in the Precision 7520 MXM? A P3000 down the road sounds like music to my ears

 

If you use an Nvidia Geforce, its possible to enable Nvidia DSR to get a virtual 200% scaling resolution on all of your monitors that are not high DPI. With this feature enabled all monitors can use the same scaling percentage in Windows, which results in the size jumping when moving from internal to external displays going away. The only downside is it eats a lot of GPU power, and rendered widgets do look a little different than it would in the native resolution, but still very usable and much more reliable than letting Windows use different scaling percentages on each display. Sadly I do not know if this feature works on Quadro cards.

 

All of the graphics cards used in these systems are MXM cards. However, note that there are two sizes of MXM cards. https://www.techpowerup.com/img/14-02-25/63a.jpg
The interface is the same, the only difference is the physical dimensions.

7520 takes "A" cards and 7720 takes "B" cards. You can install an "A" card in a machine that takes "B" cards, but not vice versa. P3000 will be a "B" card and will not fit in the 7520. However, it is possible that the next generation of cards will be compatible with these systems, so you may be able to upgrade the GPU in a year or so.