Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

The SIM card slot cover is an integral part of the motherboard—I don't see why it should be missing, unless QC was not done properly (as it likely hasn't, for this machine).

 

It's only a guess from my side but the Intel Display Driver is sometimes automatically adjusting display brightness (and refresh rate) according to the actual context (eg. dark/bright windows) displayed on the screen. This is a very annoying power saving feature in my eyes and can be disabled inside the display driver settings. So right click on the desktop and select Intel Settings (or whatever it's called - I'm german *g*) . Go to power settings and disable all power saving features for the display. This barely effects the battery runtime but is a huge improvement for the user experience

Side note: this is no dell specific problem

 

Really sad that they have regressed here. I checked my M6700 (1080p) and it shows 8-bit, and also my 7530 4K shows 8-bit.
Agree with @Rippchen about turning off the Intel display power saving stuff. That "feature" has driven me nuts in the past.

 

What's up with the battery life on these? The laptopmag and notebookcheck reviews only got a little over 4 hours of runtime on the 7530, compared to over 6 hours on the 7520. Is it really that bad, or are they not using hybrid graphics for their battery tests?

 

I think Dell's implementation of Optimus is broken. I get around 6 hours of battery life, regardless of whether or not I'm using Optimus or the dGPU. The power draw, as the NotebookCheck review rightly mentions, hovers at around 15-20 W regardless of what I do, and oddly enough, the idle figures are equal when Switchable Graphics is enabled, and Direct GPU Output Mode is disabled.

Dell has some serious fixing to do with respect to this machine. Max-Q P3200, lousy quality control, 6-bit screens in this day and age of 4K HDR, etc...

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, the display isn't merely dimming to lowest brightness—if you notice, I used the word 'near black'. The back-light turns off altogether, or flickers between an on- and off-state at high frequency. It is extremely annoying. On the bright side, the technician is coming over tomorrow.

@Aaron44126, have you got links or contacts to Dell engineers, given you're a corporate customer? I'd really like Dell to get to the bottom of this power issue. Even the technician that swapped my battery out mentioned that the norm ought to be 10+ hours under switchable graphics mode, while I get around half that.

 

Hopefully the power issue can be fixed with a BIOS update. I wonder if the Radeon GPU's are affected as well?

 

They don't let customers talk to the engineers directly (corporate or otherwise). For good reason, I believe... I'm a software developer I've been in situations where I have to deal with customers and in situations where someone else is handling that, and the latter is much better for my productivity; so, I can appreciate Dell's isolation of the engineers.

I'm currently engaged with a high-up support person who does have access to the engineering team, regarding the two dock issues. No special channels to get there, I just called the pro support line and got a "regular" pro support person. He didn't know the product very well but did some checking and followed up in an email that it is "just the way it is" (you have to connect a separate AC adapter), I wrote back with a detailed, polite, but somewhat terse message that could be summarized as "uh, no that's ridiculous and here's why" and got booted to the expert resolution center. It's not the first time I was able to get the engineers to take a look at an issue, another one that comes to mind is the NVIDIA auto-contrast on battery issue — I was unsuccessful with that one in the end (Dell ended up reproducing and acknowledging the issue but refused to engage with NVIDIA to get it fixed, but some time later NVIDIA fixed it on their own).

So basically, engage with support and see how far you can get... It is best if you can demonstrate that the problem happens on the Dell-provided Windows image because that is what the engineers will test with, with detailed reproduction steps ("expected" and "actual" outcomes with data). Bonus if you can demonstrate that it happens on multiple systems (but they don't seem to care as much about "a bunch of people on a forum are complaining about it").

Anyway, (maybe you mentioned this already but) have you played with the "link state power management" setting in Windows power options (advanced)? Another user noticed that the power usage drops off somewhat if you set it to "maximum power savings".

My team has decided to run with Optimus off and I don't really have time to experiment with this issue myself at the moment, but I will try to check it out down the line.

 

About the audio issue I currently have on 7530, Microsoft drivers produce the same latency as Realtek one.

 

The m6800 got stuck with an FHD 6-bit TN panel, so they regressed back then too. At least the 4K is 8-bit.

 

Are you still getting the pops with the Microsoft drivers, or are you just going of of the latency reported in LatencyMon?