Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

Cool to see those pictures.

I'm puzzled by the placement of the blower. Usually, these type of fans are used to blow air at something, rather then to the outside... Set up like that, you've got non-directed, relatively slow moving air. Most of this air will, I think, move through the free space in the device rather than over the electronics.

 

I get a feeling your benchmarks are running on the iGPU, given the extremely poor performance compared to even your GTX 1060. As a better test, could you go into the BIOS (press F2 repeatedly on startup), go to the Video Subsection, and uncheck the Switchable Graphics checkbox? Then reboot, and run your benchmarks again.

I notice the same thing, but I don't use the dock. In fact, I've noticed this with most notebooks—when the CPU is locked to below 1.5 GHz, there's a noticeable lag and worsening of performance.

I think the touchpad driver is polling extremely incessantly, leading to very high jumps in CPU usage and system power draw.

There are a lot of niggling issues with the P7530/P7730, as summarised here:

1. High idle power draw even on Optimus mode and with lowest brightness, leading to short battery life compared to XPS 15/Precision 5530, or Precision 7X10 (Quadro GPU idling, but not reported to system?)
2. High audio latency (courtesy of MaxxAudio enhancements?)
3. High poll-rate of the Touchpad driver, leading to CPU clock and usage spikes (but it's so smooth; best touchpad I've used on Windows)
4. 6-bit IPS display, instead of a minimum 8-bit sRGB IPS display
5. Low power and voltage limit on the P3200, despite plenty of thermal and power headroom (GPU hardly exceeds 65°C under even synthetic loads for me)

@Aaron44126, @Regular_Ragnor, @Div033, @kittenlips, @brazzmonkey and anyone else I missed (sorry), have any of you got anything to add to this list?

 

Does anybody know where I can send my zbook 17 G5 and precision 7730 to get repasted? I'm not comfortable doing it myself and don't want to screw up my $10,000 investment. And I would like to have it look like it hasn't been touched so I don't void my comprehensive service agreements.

 

About to purchase 7530 32GB, P1000 with i7-8850H (6 cores). I need to decided about Win10 with support for more than 4 cores. I noticed for Latitude 5591 and XPS15 Win10 with support for more than 4 cores is not offered. Two concerns. where to get image for clean install and do I need it. Primary use is SW development and VMs. I have read almost all posts in this thread and only a handful are about linux. I expect to dual boot win10 and archlinux anyone with experience?

 

Windows 10 supports more than 4 cores without any problem. You only run into (licensing) trouble with multiple sockets, not a problem in a laptop. If you want to do a clean Windows 10 install, you can get the image directly from Microsoft. This tool will create a bootable DVD or USB drive for you. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

The Dell business machine images are pretty free of bloat, though, so you should be fine if you choose to use the stock install.

 

Yes, I agree the type of fan seems not the best solution.

 

So Dell being a little greedy, thanks

 

I don't know if this has been brought up before, but your problem sounds a lot like the unresolved Dell XPS15 issue where the Nvidia GPU doesn't ramp up unless if something manages to *quickly* kick it over a minimum temperature threshold. I suppose for the full story, you'd have to search the XPS15 thread.

EDIT: for more of the XPS15 stuff, a reddit thread where Dell fans eat their own, like Apple fans.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/a2o5di/dell_xps15_9570_160_system_bios_is_out/eazw2sm

But the reddit thread I was really looking for
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/9nme92/extreme_gpu_throttling_in_cold_situations_xps_9570/

I think I've seen it on NBR, too, but I haven't looked at the XPS15 thread recently.

 

Starting to wonder if I just got a lemon. In addition to the aforementioned fingerprint reader issues, in which it fails to recognize my fingerprint 19/20 times, these issues have popped up:

- yesterday, when putting it to sleep and disconnecting for the day, it suddenly decided there was no battery installed.
- things came back to life after opening the case and disconnecting the battery for a bit, but today it’s said the battery is connected at 59% and charging for the past 6 hours. Pulling the AC powers everything off instantly, so there’s still a battery issue.
- the system is missing every four or five key presses unless I type extremely slowly.

Guess I’ll be calling Dell this afternoon.