Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

I almost expect that to happen, given how frequently I cycle the battery (every four and a half hours? That's nearly thrice a day)...

It arrived with about 6.2% battery wear, then oddly it went down to 5.4%, then back up to 8.5% wear. I don't even care about th wear, as I can order a new one if it gets too high.

I just want to fix the exorbitantly high idle power draw. 20 W doing nothing is ridiculous. I want to push it down to 10 W or less, and I know it's possible. The MacBook Pro 15" has around half the battery capacity, and yet Apple advertises twice the runtime (and according to TechRadar, they achieved it). This means the Precision is a quarter as efficient as the MacBook Pro, and it's a very lousy outlook indeed.

 

Do some testing. Run HWiNFO > Sensors and you can see a load of data including CPU speed, CPU package power and the battery drain. Throttlestop will show the C-states behaviour - so you can see if the CPU is getting into the lower power states with a few watts power drain. HWiNFO will also show the power used by the Intel GPU. I'm not sure if it will show power used by the Nvidia GPU but if it's not listed in HWiNFO > Sensors then it's parked and not using power. You can also see an indication of power used by the display backlight by varying the brightness and seeing the change in the battery drain.

Once you have understood what is using the power then the next step is understanding what is causing the hardware to use more than minimum power. Your objective of less than 10W is a reasonable target. If, on idle, the CPU is not running at minimum speed and sipping only a few Watts then first check your power plan (don't use best performance).

I note that you have started a separate thread on this subject where you mention an unknown process. That might be something specific to this notebook.

John

 

Hi everyone - ok I got my new 7530 and set up/installed everything just like my HP ZBook. Installed Windows 10 from scratch and Dell makes it very easy to then install drivers and the apps I wanted.

The Dell 7530 is really nicely built, everything to me is perfect, only thing is there is a bit of backlight bleed on lower right-hand corner that you only notice on boot in dark very conditions but otherwise in normal use conditions impossible to notice.

My battery came with 5% wear. I feel like maybe complaining about that because my HP ZBook (and Lenovo I had for many years before that) did not come with more than 1% wear. With 5% wear it makes a 97 Wh battery a 92 Wh battery.

@Ionising_Radiation By HWiNFO I am also pulling 15-20W in idle conditions. I have everything in the BIOS and Windows/Dell power management to optimize power savings when on battery, including switchable graphics and my P1000 isn't being used at all. Not sure what is the cause, the CPU does get down to 797 MHz when idling just like my HP ZBook i7-7820HQ.

 

@Aaron44126 and other 7530 owners what is your idle power draw?

 

Great that you've gotten your notebook.

I tested it with the DGPU enabled, too. The average power draw remains at around 20 W. Changing the display brightness (from 30% to 100%) hardly affects the power draw, either.

This leads me to believe that even in the 'switchable graphics' mode, the Quadro is drawing significant power, and eclipses the power draw of any other component. I'm thinking of disassembling the notebook and physically unplugging the power to the Quadro, and trying again. I'm not gaming, CAD-ing, rendering or transcoding anything for now, so I can make do with the Quadro physically disabled.

It's quite irritating that I bought the 97-Whr battery so that I might get around 8–10 hours per charge, and it turns out I only get four. This is ridiculous.

Hell, I even performed a clean install yesterday, and I'm still getting this problem.

 

Yep, I can confirm with a clean install its the same here

 

Admittedly the C-states aren't as ideal as I'd like them to be (one core is consistently around 5-10% at C0, I have no idea why), but the CPU power draw itself hovers around 1-2 W at idle. The Nvidia GPU is listed in HWiNFO, but everything is 0—clocks at 0 MHz, temps at 0°C, memory/core utilisation at 0%, etc.

Oddly, I don't even have the option to choose other power plans. I'm using the default Balanced plan, with other tweaks to drive down power draw at idle on battery, while maximising performance while plugged in.

As mentioned a couple posts above, I performed a clean install. No changes whatsoever.

 

So, an update...

I unplugged the DGFF GPU power cable(or what I think is the power cable) in an attempt to see if an unplugged DGPU would mean that the power draw became reduced...

The system shut down altogether when the cable was pulled. It didn't reboot afterwards, until I put everything back together.

Strange. Why does the system not boot when the Quadro is unplugged?

 

Does anyone have an 16GB ECC memory recommendations for the 7730 with Xeon E-2176M? I'm looking to save a few bucks compared to the Dell website.

 

Where's the switch for enabling / disabling Optimus? The very first post in this thread refers to "Optimus disabled". Also, I found on my Precision 5510 that having anything plugged into the USB-C port would wake up the Thunderbolt controller chip which increased the power drain (but only by a couple of Watts).

John