Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

I've been experiencing a couple issues fairly consistently lately - wondering if anyone could share some experience or knowledge if possible.

1. Repasting my CPU always results in great temps right after doing so, but after a few days to a week I notice that core 2 tends to reach 98-100C quickly and thermal throttle. The rest of the cores are fine though. Is this due to my application method? I usually apply a straight line down the die. I've tried both using a lot and what I'd consider to be a normal amount - the result is the same. I'm using Cooler Master Maker Gel Nano.

2. Lately I've been having trouble staying connected to my 5GHz network with the Intel 9260 wifi card. Occasionally the network connection will just drop and I'll have to run the troubleshooter to get it working again. This results in needing to disable and re-enable the network adapter, but it resumes working right after. I have an R7000 Netgear Nighthawk and seems to handle every other 5GHz connection in the household just fine. I don't recall having these issues earlier on, strangely. I've tried reinstalling drivers from Dell and Intel to no avail. I tried reseating the card and antenna cables as well. Debating if I should just order a new one on Amazon or contact Dell about it. I have swapped the screen a few times, so I'm also concerned it might be an antenna issue.

 

Thermal throttling without undervolting is completely normal on this laptop, repasting will not do the impossible unfortunately. From my experience with my 7530, only after I repasted and undervolted then the laptop is able to easily maintain all the highest turboboost freqs for the number of active cores without temps ever going higher than 85 deg C or so.

I've had no issues with the Intel 9260 on my 5GHz wifi network.

 

Sorry, I should've stated that I do undervolt as well. I have a -100mv undervolt as anything higher tends to cause instability when waking from sleep. Even still, with the undervolt and repaste, the "good" cores hover around 92-93 degrees, which is acceptable. It's that pesky core 2 which is problematic. I'm not sure if I should try different paste or try manually spreading it because common sense tells me it's a paste issue.

Thanks for the feedback on the 9260. I recall it was stable for me too before I started going ham with screen swaps.

 

I have a 9260 in my M6700 and I have two routers in my house, a Google WiFi and an older AirPort Extreme (802.11ac version) which is serving as an access point only. With the Google WiFi, the 9260 can't maintain a stable 5 GHz connection, it periodically drops (once or twice a day). If I have the Intel card set to 5 GHz only (a setting in Device Manager), it will reconnect automatically after several seconds. If I have the Intel card set to dual-band, it will usually reconnect to the 2.4 GHz network after dropping, and the connection remains stable on the 2.4 GHz connection (but its way slower for LAN transfers).

I switched to using the AirPort network (which is only broadcasting 5 GHz) a few weeks ago and I haven't seen it drop out yet. It seems to be stable on this connection.

All this to say, I think that there are some network compatibility issues with this card, I hope future drivers fix it. I don't think that I can blame the Google WiFi, other devices that I have seem to be fine.

 

My core 3 always gets slightly higher temps than the others and two careful repastes with Kryonaut made little difference. I gave up as it's a pain to repaste on this laptop, not only do you have to remove most everything except the display panel just to get at the heat sink, but didn't you just thoroughly enjoy trying to get those two tiny rear flap thermal pad strips to sit where they should when sliding the heat sink/fan assembly back into place?

I guess I'm lucky as my E-2176M could be undervolted -180mV and iGPU -80V with total stability so far. So not even core 3 goes above 85 C on full stress test. I knew my CPU would likely get a significant undervolt because with default settings idle CPU VID was 0.75 - 0.76 V which is high. From my experience, undervolt idle CPU instability can be traced back to undervolt setting causing idle VID to get too low for that individual CPU. Depending on the individual CPU, that minimum before instability can be as low as 0.50 - 0.60V. So I generally shoot for idle VID 0.60V as a start when setting undervolt voltage offset.

 

Iiiinteresting... Okay, so it totally could be the router + card compatibility, good to know. Part of me thought it couldn't possibly be the router specifically as I have 3 other 5GHz devices which have no issues, and it's good to know that may still be the case. I don't have another router to test this with and I'm not really in the market for one either. For now I think I'll try switching to the 5GHz only option and go from there. Really appreciate the detailed info!

Whew, good to know I'm not alone. My guess is that over time the TIM tends to spread in a way that creates hot spots around the hottest parts of the chip. Cores 2 and 3 are both smack dab in the center of the die, which would be a pretty obvious place for heat to centralize. I was thinking about picking up some Kryonaut and trying that myself, but now it seems to be the nature of the beast. Either way, I'm impressed by your CPU! I unfortunately tend to get unlucky with silicon lotteries.

 

That's great—you should be getting around 10 hours of run-time with that sort of power draw (do you?)

Care to share your settings? Thanks very very much.

 

@Div033
Could you paste here your 7530 system component configuration so that I can compare with mine and try to find which one is responsible of latency?

 

Power draw will dip down as low as -9W on HWiNFO when completely idle but of course it's not there consistently, the moment you do anything it goes up. So I don't think the calculation would be accurate since it's not real runtime as the computer cannot be used at that power draw. But yes HWiNFO reports an estimated remaining time of over 600 mins when it gets that low (see below).

Undervolt your CPU and iGPU as much as possible

BIOS:
Disable USB PowerShare
Dim Keyboard Illumination
Enable Switchable Graphics
Enable C states
Enable Intel Speed Shift Technology
Disable USB Wake Support
Disable Wake on LAN/WAN
Adaptive Primary Battery Charge Configuration

Windows Intel Graphics:
Power Plan -> Maximum Battery Life
Enable all panel refresh and power savings options
Slider bar two ticks to left of Maximum Battery

Windows:
Display Brightness 50%
Taskbar power slider "Better battery"

Windows Balanced power plan advanced settings:
Change all "On battery" settings in power plan to save the most battery, i.e. maximum power savings, USB enable suspend, etc, it should be obvious.

Dell Power Manager:
Thermal Management -> Optimized

Voila, when computer is sitting idle after only a minute it will consistently start dipping down into 9 - 10W power draw territory. It gets as low as 9W:



If you change the taskbar power slider to "Battery saver" mode, it can even dip into the high 8W range (see maximum column, I miss it when taking screenshot):

 

Well, to be clear, I'm pretty sure my system has the same latency issue as everyone else. I think it comes down to Dell's implementation of the Realtek drivers. However, there may be light at the end of the tunnel:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-...ency-issue-should-be-fixed-soon.341436.0.html

I'm willing to bet that all of Dell's systems using the newer chipset have this issue. It's possible that such an update would come to our Precisions too if a fix is found. Until then though, if you need low latency, I'd recommend moving back to the Microsoft drivers if those even correct it.