Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

I’ve found a dell precision 7730 online refurbed with the full dell warranty with an i7 8850h, 16gb ram, 1tb PCIe ssd, quadro p3200 graphics, but it doesn’t have a webcam or a fingerprint reader.....anyone know if it would be easy enough to upgrade the palm rest to a fingerprint enabled one? I assume the whole screen would need to be replaced for a screen with a webcam + microphone as well? Anyone any idea the part numbers on these?

Thanks

 

The webcam is actually separate from the screen. You would need to replace the bezel around the screen (need one that has the little hole for the camera) and probably also the display cable (I heard that the display and webcam appear to share the same cable on the motherboard side?).
For the fingerprint reader, you would have to replace the entire palmrest but it should be doable, the ports on the motherboard are present whether you order the system with the fingerprint reader or not.
Internally, both the fingerprint reader and the webcam are USB devices, they should be automatically recognized by the system once they are plugged in.

 

Thank you for that!

Do you know whether the GPU is also removable as well? I don’t particularly need the graphics card is it going to be used at a host for 4 vm’s or so as a training lab.

Would removing the graphics card (if possible) yield better battery life as well?

 

I've read that, unlike prior systems, this one will not boot if the GPU is removed. (The HDMI and mDP ports are attached to the GPU as well, so those would go away...) They actually install some sort of spacer card with HDMI and mDP ports if you purchase the system with Intel graphics only.

You can practically disable it. Turn graphics switching ON and discrete graphics output mode OFF in the BIOS, and the system will run all displays off of the Intel GPU, leaving the discrete GPU powered off unless it is needed for rendering support. Disable the discrete GPU in device manager and it should never be given a job to do, and stay powered off.

 

Thanks for answering my questions

Finally, I’m wanting to run 4 or so vm’s for a virtual lap (not actually production, they’re just dc’s not doing much. Maybe a few client machines, no more than say 4 idle vm’s at once. I’m deliberating between going the whole hog and ordering a 7730 as I want a system with a 17 inch display and it has to be of premium materials and build quality.

The only other laptop I can find which would fit the bill would be the new dell inspiron 17 2 in 1 7786, which comes with an intel i7 8565u quad core base clock of 1.8ghz up to a turbo of 4.6ghz, vs the core i7 8850h which is in the refurbished 7730 I’m looking at which is 2.6ghz base and 4.3 boosted.

Question is, do you think the 8565u would fit the bill? The saving is is about £1200 between the 2 units! The refurbed unit also has a p3200 as above which would allow a decent gaming rig as its comparable to the gtx 1060, that is if I ever decided to start gaming.

TLDR; would an intel 8565u be up to hosting a host machine + 4 virtual machines not doing very much or would it be a better option to go for a full fat i7 8750h or above?

 

Is there a recommended driver installation order that I should follow or does that matter?

I picked up a 1 TB Samsung EVO Pro today and I'm about to do a clean installation.

 

I don't think that the order matters. I personally did (IIRC) the Intel serial I/O and Ethernet drivers first, let Windows Update pick up almost everything else, and then filled in the gaps with the drivers that I mentioned previously. I also updated a few things afterwards (Intel Wi-Fi driver from Dell, latest NVIDIA driver from NVIDIA)... You can see a full list of drivers here: http://ftp.dell.com/published/Pages/precision-15-7530-laptop.html and I have updated a few things off of this list but I have been sticking to drivers only (the only non-driver Dell tool I have installed is Dell Power Manager).

 

Excellent, thanks. That driver page will be very useful. I'm just downloading the W10 media onto a flash drive.

 

The 7730 gives you much better options to update RAM (4 slots instead of 2) and storage (4x m.2) which is always nice when running multiple VMs. Going with the i7 8750h and above gives you more cores. Nice for multiple VMs as well.

If you think you will never run demanding VMs then the Inspiron could be OK - would go with max RAM in that case, 32GB I would expect for the Inspiron.

 

So, looking at the service manual for the 7730, it shows just TWO heatpipes (one for each fan). Can anyone confirm that this is only for the non-dGPU configuration? I sure hope the versions with dedicated 100w GPU's have more than two...