Precision 7510 Owner's Thread

Great!
To be sure I've got it right: You have Win7 and Ubuntu installed on your hard drives? Or is one in a virtual machine?
How do you measure/see the 60W usage?
thx heaps
Soko

 

Someone already answered you, but I wanted to toss this in. I haven't tried a 7510, but on previous generations, the maximum possible power draw from the battery is 100 W. This means that you can push the CPU really hard, or the GPU really hard, but if you try to do both at the same time the power draw will exceed 100 W so you will get throttling.

Rather doubtful that this would work... but haven't seen anyone try it. If there would be any chance it would have to be a PCIe M.2 drive (not a SATA-based one).

7510 includes the mounting bracket for a 2.5" drive even if you do not order one with the system. You might have to find some screws. You can install the OS on the SSD.

 

Some thoughts from me since I came from a W520 as well- Just be aware that if you used and loved the keyboard and trackpoint on the W520, Dell's is just plain not nearly as good. The inverted shape of the actual trackpoint vs Lenovo's makes it easier for your finger to slip off, and the buttons aren't shaped quite as ergonomically. The keyboard and KB layout on the W520 is also the best I've ever used. Dell's touchpad is of course far better, but the pad on the 7510 is itself not nearly as good a surface to use as the XPS13 or XPS15/precision 5510. I'm not sure why Dell wouldn't opt to put the pad from the XPS13/15 on everything they make, since it's by far the best touchpad I've used this side of macbook pros.

Of course this might not matter if you are primarily using the machine with external KB/Mouse/Monitor, but I'm guessing you won't always have those from your question about battery throttling. The screen, cooling, and battery life in general on the 7510 are lightyears beyond the W520 at least, despite my niggles with the input devices. The build quality in general feels at least as good as the W520, and better in some areas, especially around the lips of the actual LCD screen, and hinge connections. The power brick is also a bit smaller (although not by a lot).

Easily, the HD slot doesn't go away or get used for battery space like on the 5510.

Unfortunately, despite my good impressions of the external build quality on my 7510, I think I ended up getting a lemon

I've been seeing a really frustrating problem surrounding the use of Optimus (I got a Quadro M2000M). With a totally fresh windows 10 x64 install, Optimus enabled, ONLY Intel and nvidia drivers installed, it's OK, I don't get any crashing. (Although of course the system isn't exactly totally usable because, well, it's still missing most of it's drivers). As soon as the Intel chipset or more specifically the Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework driver is installed, then if Optimus is enabled and the Nvidia driver is installed, then the system's screen will go blank about 20 seconds after windows boots, and the only way to get it back is to hard power off the system.

Optimus disabled in BIOS, and everything works with all drivers installed just fine. Optimus enabled, but no nvidia driver installed, also works fine. Only when everything is turned on and all drivers installed does it become 100% unusable.

This is the message I've been seeing in the system event log right before the screen goes black and I have to hard power off/on the system to reboot:



I've tried flipping a few BIOS settings in the interest of troubleshooting: Secure boot off/on, legacy option roms off/on, fastboot off/on, but none have made any difference.

I guess the lucky thing for me is that a fresh windows installation from a good USB3 stick to a Samsung 950 takes under 5 minutes, because I've probably done about 10 since getting the laptop yesterday trying to troubleshoot this sucker.

 

@zaccun try reinstalling or updating to current version (ending in .221) of the "Intel Dynamic Framework and Thermal Framework" driver.



see if that makes any difference

Also, here are my advanced power options settings relating to Intel Thermal Framework.



I don't understand what it means. it won't let me change it (nothing else appears in the dropdown listing other than "60w @ 2.4Ghz")

Here is what my device manager shows relating to the Intel Thermal Framework. It looks like it exists multiple times, not sure why except that it is probably monitoring various thermal areas of the system and therefor appears multiple times.



How does your's appear? Consider perhaps updating to later BIOS too, although that is sometimes risky (I had some difficulty updating BIOS last time). I

 

Yea, I tried all three versions available on Dell's site with a fresh windows install between each one. No dice.

Also tried Intel and Nvidia drivers from their respective sites instead of from Dell, no difference there either (Intel's driver won't actually install, it says you need to get one from your OEM's site instead of Intel's)

e: My device manager and power settings looks exactly the same as yours, yghome.

 

Both W7 and Xenial are installed on my Intel SSD, no VM.
Under Ubuntu, I used powertop to check power usage and cpus freq. I launched powertop after 5 minutes of Stockfish stress test and the 8 virtual cpus were running at 3.4 GHz until 10 minutes limit reached.

 

Aha, success, finally!

I downgraded the BIOS from 1.4.8 to 1.3.12, did yet another fresh windows install, and then was super careful about installing drivers one at a time and rebooting after each. Went chipset INF-> Platform thermal management -> Intel iGPU -> Nvidia GPU ->everything else.

I haven't gotten to the random little things like the data protection accelerometer, and I'm somewhat hesitant to bother just in case that happens to be the one thing that throws a wrench in things. (That and I'm not using a mechanical drive).

 

Has just got the new ordered item yesterday. Quite satisfied and no trouble until now, except for the annoy crackling sound from the speaker (don't know what the exact word to describe it, but something like the a vibrated speaker, causing annoying sound). Anyone here with the same issue, and a solution?

 

Is anyone having any issues (seemingly BIOS-related) where the machine takes quite a long while to display the Dell logo upon power-up or sometimes doesn't ever do so? I have been having this issue despite any settings I change. My hardware is 100% OEM.

 

Thanks for that. Now I'm torn again what I should do...
I dont use trackpads at all (deactivated in BIOS), just trackpoints. If a laptop has no trackpoint its a no-go for me. I know that IBM/Lenovo has (had) the best keyboards but the current Lenovo Thinkpad P50 is no option as it throttles the CPU to 1.5GHz under battery.
The other option would be the new HP ZBook 15 G3. I was tending to the Dell because I can freely configure it on the website to my liking - which is not possible for HP...
What to do... what to do...