Latitude 7450 Owners' Thread

My initial thoughts are (i) find at the default brightness settings in the BIOS (I think they are there) and set them (separate for mains and battery) to your preferences; (ii) install Dell Command | Power Manager which handles various power-related items - mainly related to battery but more may be happening in the background; and (iii) reinstall the Intel graphics driver.

John

 

Thanks for the info, John. I found one WWAN card on aliexpress which had some buyer comments about it working in Russia and ordered it. The frequency standards is really a headache. I spent quite some time looking for the right card, but never succeeded.

Also, I have one more problem after mb replacement (if it has something to do with the problem at all). To test the Nvidia discrete card, I played The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux (which seems to be a demading game) on medium with stable FPS count. Now it lags even on low, and prior to launch suddenly required to update directx ("dx11 feature level 10 is required to run the engine"). Why's that? Is it possible that with newer drivers integrated graphics tries to handle it?
I ran all dell's tests and tests for the GPU's separately and it says everything's OK.

 

See if it makes a difference if you go into the Nvidia control panel and manually assign that game to the Nvidia GPU.

There is also an option to have the Nvidia icon on the task bar. This changes colour if the GPU is being used.

John

 

Thanks, manual selection worked (glad there are manual options). I'm suprised by this Intel HD's heroic attempt to run a videogame.
However, during the game icon's colour didn't change (small green square nvidia logo alongside the battery icon, signal strength, etc).

 

Intel graphics improve with each generation. The 840M used in the E7450 is only about twice as fast as the integrated GPU.

My Nvidia icon is normally black and when I hover the pointer over the icon there is a message: "Nvidia GPU Activity = None". So perhaps your dGPU is active when it doesn't need to be.

John

 

I confused the icon with Nvidia GeForce Experience. The proper one can be enabled through Nvidia control panel options.
Yeah, seems like this iGPU is quite capable and is also a decent way to conserve battery charge (as CPU is low-voltage).

Does anybody know if there's an option to make keyboad backlight timeout longer?
I tried Dell Feature Enchancement Pack, which added a tab with the backlight options to the keyboard options, but it crashed/didn't affect anything when I applied any changes to the backlight, so I uninstalled it.
By the way, on-screen sound-meter provided by that pack is just horrible, if you want one, use Volume^2, that's a great little addition.

 

Wow thanks John. You're right, it is likely the brightness adjustment in the BIOS. I've also upgraded the BIOS to A11 that just came out. Seems to have fixed it

 

Thanks for the update.

Thanks also for pointing out that another BIOS update has arrived. Dell do keep providing updates even though the computer is now out of production. A10 only came out a month or so ago.

John

 

Anyone of you have this problem whereby the display bezel is not a tight fit? At the topmost corners mine seems easy to pull apart to reveal a gap but it does not come off completely. Wonder if its a flaw or did the previous owner break some clips off the bezel

 

The bezel on my E7450 is a tight fit.

Unless you have reason to think that the previous owner had reason to remove the bezel I wonder whether something was done correctly during assembly but no one noticed until now.

John