Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

In this post, I mention three SODIMMs from three different manufacturers. They are all 16 GB ECC DDR4 2666 CL19 SODIMMs.

The switch is in the BIOS; there's also an option for 'direct output', where the HDMI and DP outputs are routed directly out of the Quadro, rather than the Intel iGPU. Thanks for the Thunderbolt tip. Gotta check that out—maybe I can disable the Thunderbolt controller and check the power improvements.

 

Thanks for the reply. Did you ever end up purchasing and using any of these?

 

Not yet. RAM is too expensive; I already spent about $500 extra on NVMe SSDs. I'll wait until I don't spend more than $200 on 32 GB DDR4.

 

Hi - this is a tangent - I came across this forum looking for other stuff and saw you MysystemInformation.xml file - How did you generate the file? It looks like a useful output. Thank you. My email is [email protected]. Cheers.

 

I presume that you've got Optimus enabled as that should be the most power efficient plus outputs via the Intel iGPU as otherwise the Quadro will be kept awake. If in doubt, try the various options and see what effect there is on the power consumption.

As mentioned elsewhere, temperatures can also show where the power is going. HWiNFO > Sensors will show the temperatures of the main hardware components.

John

 

@Ionising_Radiation @John Ratsey

In HWMonitor PRO and HWiNFO under the CPU powers it shows the "Uncore" is usually consuming approx 12W even on idle. I don't remember my HP ZBook i7 CPU doing that, doesn't that seem high and could explain the issue?

 

@Ionising_Radiation
Do you have the Quadro GPU Activity status enabled? It is in the Desktop menu of the Nvidia Control Panel which Hybrid graphics are active. The icon in the taskbar should be grey if the P3200 is idling.
Do you have a mobile broadband card installed? They can consume power even if they are inactive so it would be best to remove it if you aren't using it.
Is Intel AMT enabled in the bios and disabled inside of MEBx? Some bios's have a very weird bug where if you disable the AMT option in the bios, it actually re-enables it in MEBx.
The Toshiba XG5 doesn't have the best power consumption.. I know your budget is limited but a SATA SSD or even a better NVMe SSD could drop idle power consumption by a few watts.
You could try disabling things like USB powershare in the bios. If you find some device using an inordinate amount of idle power, you can ask Dell why - sometimes they can fix bugs like this in the quarterly bios update, but only if they know about them.

 

Do 7530/7730 owners notice in HWiNFO that the Intel PCH temperature is really high? My system is running idle, with CPU at 42 deg C incl. other sensors around the same, but the Intel PCH shows 84 deg C!!

 

On my Precision 5510 the PCH includes the Thunderbolt controller and one of the annoyances is that plugging anything (even a dumb USB device) into the Thunderbolt port wakes up the controller, ramps up the temperature and gets the fans running even if no data are flowing. However, it doesn't get anywhere near your temperature but, perhaps if you are using Thunderbolt then it does hot up. On my 5510 what I think is this chip doesn't get served by the heatsink or even have a thermal pad. However, the new Precisions might be different.

John

 

I can't give you a good "best case" measurement. I'm running with C states disabled and graphics switching disabled. (I can still get around 3.5 hours on battery so it can't be higher than 25W...)

In the BIOS setup this option is called "graphics switching" and it has an enabled/disabled toggle.