Latitude E7240 and E7440

Hi all. I'm a new member here. Just purchased an E7240 FullHD Touch at a bargain price. It comes with Win 7 Pro and I've installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS from Dell's website.

All is good, except the temperature and noise. Coming from Thinkpad series (T430s with 35Watt i5 Ivy Bridge) this E7240 is way louder. I noticed the HD4400 is stuck at 600MHz even though it's idle. It's supposed to be 200MHz. I have done a bit of Googling. It seems like Haswell iGPU driver is at fault but nobody has found a solution yet.

I've also heard that Dell forgot to apply the thermal paste for the GPU chip. Is this true? Has anyone here opened up the heatsink fan and checked if the GPU has thermal paste?

The latest BIOS A14 released last week had fixed this. My Ubuntu 12.04 LTS works flawlessly (except the monitor switching shortcut key...doesn't work yet)

 

There is a long strip of thermal paste on the heatsink, which covers both the CPU and GPU.

 

Hi and welcome to NBR. We're still going through a bit of a transition after a major forum software upgrade so please pardon the mess.

I just installed A14, I'll report back in a few days when I will be able to tell if the keystroke problem is gone. Thanks for the tip, I never catch BIOS updates on time.

 

E5440 i5-4300U owner here

My machine also suffers from terrible thermal design and fan control. The CPU/GPU is shrouded in plastic with no vent and a long heat pipe to the tiny fan. Once it hits 50C the fan comes in at 3,000rpm and won't stop until most of the temp sensors are below 30C, impossibly low in some scenarios.

After a ridiculous amount of ranting at Dell I've found the BIOS for all these recent machines has no thermal profiles to choose, they are permanently stuck on a cautious "Cool" profile. Dell add thermal mode settings to the Windows Power Options but there's no support for it in the BIOS!

About 6 months ago they released a new "Power Manager 2" utility but it just throws errors when you try to apply CPU profiles. They are supposed to be adding BIOS support for it in July, almost 2 years after launch

I've also had constant issues with wi-fi not reconnecting (mostly the disastrous Intel 7260 card/driver), random crashes connecting/disconnecting from my dock, epic amounts of Intel bloatware (PROSet using 456MB of disk space), huge memory use and CPU spikes from Dell drivers... What an absolutely hateful machine!

I'd encourage you all to get on the Dell Community forum and rant about your issues because this is the only support route. Email and phone support don't handle software/driver/BIOS issues and you can't formally raise these without a paid software support contract. Absolutely insane, I'm not paying money to tell Dell their machine is faulty!

 

Thanks!
The temp was really bad. Even playing a YouTube video it will ramp up to 63C easily and this is with my custom low power profile.
I updated the HD4400 driver to the latest version by using Have Disk. It doesn't fix the 600MHz idling issue but the Windows Experience Index score for 2D increased from 5.0 to 6.x
But I noticed the power consumption never stayed below 1W like the Dell-supplied driver.

 

Interesting, can you explain how to do it?

I tried over and over to remove the Dell driver and revert to a Windows VGA driver so I could install it but the Dell driver kept coming back!

 

I can only vaguely remember what I've done because I was guessing too. BTW, I'm using Win 7 Pro 64-bit.
1) Download the latest driver (ZIP version) from here: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=24596&lang=eng&ProdId=3719
and Unzip it.
2) In Device Manager->Display adapters->Intel HD Graphics Family->(right click) Uninstall
3) A warning box will prompt up. Check on "Delete the driver software for this device" and click OK. Then your display will revert to low resolution and asked you to reboot. Reboot your laptop.
4) After booting up, go to Device Manager->Display adapters->Standard Display->(right click) Update driver->Browse my computer for driver software. Then put the directory where you unzipped the driver in Step 1. Click Next and install.

Hopefully this helps. But so far other than the increased 2D performance in WEI, I have not seen any advantage from doing this. The idle clock speed for HD4400 is still 600MHz.

PS: Sorry for the English. English is not my first language.

 

So far so good with the A14 BIOS. I haven't had any stuck/repeated/double keystrokes. (note: Linux is my only OS so I can't test others)

 

Is Dell aware this is also a problem with their new model the e7450? i just got one for work and the debouncing/repeated keys issue is present in Linux Mint 17. If they are not aware of this, how do i file a bug report?

 

Glad to hear that.
BTW which Linux distro and version are you using? I was a bit adventurous and tried Ubuntu 14.04 LTE since it supports E7250. It's buggy with my E7240 though. :\

BTW has anyone tried to enable HIPM and DIPM settings? http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/177819-ahci-link-power-management-enable-hipm-dipm.html

Didn't work with mine. The option never appear.