Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

The one I quoted above? I'm sorry; I completely missed that post. After reading it, however:

99% of my settings are the same as yours. I've gone the further mile and locked clocks in ThrottleStop, set the EPP number really high, too.

However, my point is not about lowest possible power draw or the battery life when the laptop is untouched, and just sitting there; my point is about battery life in active, but moderate use. It makes little sense to see equal power draw regardless of whether or not Optimus is enabled or not—6 hours on both, means that the Nvidia GPU is also drawing significant power, even when Optimus is enabled. I don't game or render (not yet, at least); my primary use is as of now web browsing, PDF viewing, compiling the occasional C/C++/LaTeX file, typing LaTeX... You get it.

You're right, however: it might just be a problem on my own notebook. I plan to get Dell support on this officially. One question: what is your battery life, under normal use, when Switchable Graphics is on/off? Are they equal? If so, this is a systemic problem.

As for which panel I chose—I sincerely did not expect to get a 6-bit panel, as I currently do. I have very little use for UHD on a 15" notebook—I'd rather see it on a 55" TV. The normal expectation was that a high-end workstation come, by default, with a HDR panel. There aren't any, fair enough (there should have been, though: the AW13 came with a beautiful OLED panel, and OLED on notebooks has just fizzled out).

However, skimping on costs to offer a run-of-the-mill 6-bit panel really grinds my gears. As @Aaron44126 put so eloquently, Dell has cheaped out, even on the '72% NTSC' panel upgrade. The response times and refresh rates on this panel are really poor, too; the panels I'm looking at, the N156HHE-GA1 or the B156HAN07.0 are both high-refresh rate panels. The former is TN, and the latter is VA, but the former has garnered something of a stellar review here. The latter—no questions; it's a high-refresh rate, VA 8-bit panel with much-improved response times.

Furthermore, I disagree that HDR is more likely to feature on gaming notebooks. I frequently see gaming set-ups sacrifice colour accuracy and width for refresh rate and speed—i.e. TN vs IPS/VA. This is a workstation aimed at professionals who will push the Xeon and Quadro on these machines, not office-goers. Users who will likely work with video/photo media, that is likely to require the wider, deeper colour performance of HDR displays.

Your argument would be much more accurate for G-Sync, which Dell has also failed to include, in what is a $3500 machine.

 

@Ionising_Radiation
If you believe that the NVIDIA GPU is drawing too much power even when Optimus is on, have you checked... (and maybe I have mentioned this before)
1. Go to the NVIDIA control panel, and from the menu at the top, select Desktop -> Display GPU activity icon...
This will put an icon in the system tray that tells you if the NVIDIA GPU is powered on (colored) or off (grey), and if it is on, you should be able to click and see which apps are using it.

If you notice that the NVIDIA GPU seems to be powered on when it "shouldn't" be ...
2. Also in the NVIDIA control panel, visit "Manage 3D Settings" and change the preferred graphics processor from "Auto-select" to "Integrated graphics". This will prevent some things like your browser or other graphics-accelerated apps form "accidentally" activating the NVIDIA GPU. The downside is, you need to go to "Manage 3D Settings" -> "Program settings" and manually set the NVIDIA GPU as preferred for any apps that you actually want to use it. (Some apps that use CUDA or are multi-GPU aware may activate the NVIDIA GPU regardless of the settings here.)

This is how I run the Optimus configuration on my M6700 (otherwise I find that something always seems to be turning the NVIDIA GPU on).

 

Given what you've said your are using it for I honestly believe you should have very little use for a Dell Precision 7530 . Not sure why you decided to buy a mobile workstation when you could easily accomplish what you do with any run-of-the-mill laptop. One should never buy a computer based on some hypothetical future use case(s). Also given that you made the decision to totally overspec your laptop I don't understand your reasoning about "I have very little use for UHD on a 15" notebook", why not just overspec that too? The UHD panel on the 7530 looks really great, and don't believe the BS that HiDPI scaling doesn't work well on Windows 10, it works very well and for a long time as I've only had UHD panels on my 15.6" laptops since mid 2017.

I chose and bought the 7530 for heavy machine learning work, which is very CPU and sometimes I/O intensive. If you aren't doing high-end photography, graphic design, video work, 3D rendering, AI/ML, CAD, etc I do not think the Precision 7000 line is the right choice for people.

 

You missed the keywords in my reply above: 'not yet', 'as of now', etc. I will have use for the hardware in the P7530, just not right now. Furthermore, there's no need to judge my purchase and tell me that I ought to have gotten a run o' the mill laptop, thank you very much.

It definitely does not work well, and certainly not as well as OS X or Linux.

When I have to use a Registry setting to ensure that Microsoft Management Console does not look blurry, or Microsoft itself has to include a prompt for 'fix blurry apps' every time I change the graphics adaptor, then yes, it is broken. For example, here's the IP address dialogue box for a given network adaptor:

Note how crisp the 'Wi-Fi Properties' titlebar text is, compared with the rest of the window. Windows, by its very implementation, is bound to have problems with scaling.

To be really frank, I would rather 16:10 than UHD...

 

Just a friendly reminder to keep it friendly in here as I read every post.

 

Issues...

Lately (after some update i guess) i have had some issues when connecting harddrives to the USB-C ports on the left side. The 7530 dies! It is turned off or goes into an unknown state of annoying "blackness", it cannot be restarted. Hitting the power button, nothing happens. Unplugging the HDD cables, nothing happens. Holding down the powerbutton, nothing happens.

Only after disconnecting the power cable, i'm able to restart the laptop. Then i'm not sure what happens, what state it get into, but at some point of restarting, i get a black screen saying:
"Time-of-day not set - Please run setup program
Press F1 key to retry boot
Press F2 key for setup utility
Press F5 key to run onboard diagnostics"

So i rebooted and everything works. But once in a while this blackout happen again when i connect external hard drives.

This evening i updated "things" via Dell command update and now the hard drives doesn't even show up!!! Can i roll back this update?!
This was updated:
- Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver and Management Console
- Dell Precision Optimizer
- Dell Touchpad Driver

 

I agree, the scaling issues in Windows are certainly annoying. It's why I've avoiding high dpi displays up til now. I love being able to use 100% scaling @ 1080p. I also like my laptop to have a touchscreen; something the P52 doesn't (at 1080p).

In other, slightly annoying news, I went to repaste my CPU today only to find that a couple of the heatsink screws seem to be stuck on. The screw heads spin just fine, but they don't lift or tighten. Yikes.

 

I thought that was the case at first, when I realised the screws were actually tightening in... There are springs on the CPU and GPU heatsink screws to increase mounting pressure, so you might have to press down on the screwdriver a bit.

Speaking of thermal paste, I'm considering getting myself some Fujipoly thermal pads and Phobya Nanogrease Extreme for the VRAM and the CPU and GPU respectively—hoping for a ~5 °C improvement.

 

I wonder if that panel will work with a FHD P52.


The issue here is that if the 4K cable is needed, the panel is touch :|

 

How much force did you have to apply? I applied a good amount and saw no change. I'm afraid I over-tightened them and broke them. I can recall when screwing one of them back in it went past the tension point.