Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

That's the problem, the M.2's must slide right to fit into the edge connector. But you can't do that with the one closest to the battery (bottom one) because the slots between the case and heatsink are not such that you can push down and slide right. For that heatsink to fix the case mount points it has to go down and to the left - which with an M.2 adhered to it would simply unplug it from its socket.

Yes, all three slots have mounted heatsinks and screws. Grateful for that.

So maybe that's just the design for when no M.2's are inserted. Otherwise just stick on the heatsink and screw it down. Maybe the person that wrote the document was just illustrating reinserting the heatsink with the down and slide into the mount slots action. But they didn't realize that was not possible if an M.2 was attached to it - at least in two of the 3 slots.

 

I don't have a 7730 but I can tell you that I've read multiple reports of people installing three and four drives in this thread, and no one has complained about it being impossible because of the heatsink design...
You shouldn't be able to "unplug" the M.2 drive from its socket by pushing the heatsink in either direction. It only moves in and out from the socket freely when it is angled up. And in any case, you can just attach the mounting screw to the end of the M.2 drive before attempting to mount the heatsink, and the M.2 drive will be immovable.

Are you trying to install the drive and heatsink simultaneously, i.e. with the heatsink "stuck" to the drive when you are plugging it in? Don't do that; install the drive without the heatsink first and then install the heatsink afterwards.

 

I'm probably just being too overcautious. But yes, since there are notches in the frame that are designed for the heatsink to be placed then slid left/right, I thought I was supposed to do that with the M.2 attached. But that's just physically impossible. I could and might just cut off the tip that the arrow points to in my post above. You can see in that photo, the tip was inserted into a notch just to the right of the arrow then the heatsink was moved left - thereby securing that "tip" beneath the frame and presumably holding it firmly down. With that tip on the top of the frame, I'm not sure how much contact the heatsink has with the M.2.

If the socket was on the opposite side, you could assemble the heatsink/M.2, lower them into position, then push into the edge connector with the heatsink "fin" secured beneath the case molding. There's even a guide in the frame for the part where the screw attaches - you can see that in the photo above too.

 

That's not the case. The M.2 connector needs the drive to be 'slid in' at a 30 degree angle from the motherboard, and then pushed down to the board. It will bounce back up until you screw the drive down. There is no room for any lateral movement once the drive is pushed down and that's how it should be.

Mount the drive, then mount the heatsink. The drive won't budge once the screw is in.

I do agree that it feels awkward to slide the thermal pad across the drive. I would have preferred a second screw.

 

Is it possible to boot from an SD card? I am trying to boot an Ubuntu Live SD card but not having any success. Things I have tried include enabling in the BIOS "Secure Digital (SD) card boot", disable secure boot, enable Legacy external devices, enable legacy option ROMs. None of these allow the SD card to show up as a boot option in the boot menu.

One odd thing was that I had forgotten the Ubuntu SD card was in SD card slot, and was booting off a Mint Live USB, and after it started to boot (showed the Linux Mint loading screen), it then booted into Ubuntu from the SD card... weird.

 

I doubt this is what you're looking for, but an SD to USB adaptor should work. Which wastes both an SD card and a USB port. I've tried booting off SD cards too, to no avail. Perhaps raise it to Dell support?

 

Yeah, you're right about the 30 degree angle. Also, I've not considered/tried sliding the thermal pad across the drive after attaching it. I just assumed it would not be flexible enough to budge sufficiently to line up the screw hole. Also I thought it might pull the drive out of the socket - given that I'm nudging in the opposite direction. But maybe that's mechanically impossible - with the small amount of force that would be used.

I'll try that - sounds like I made this more complicated than it needed to be I suppose we're not talking super glue here. Maybe the slight budge needed just helps spread/seal the adhesive across the surface - as opposed to just applying brute downward force to get a good stick/seal.

 

Hi, am new to the forum, did anyone find the model numbers for the IGZO 4k panel for the 7730 ?

(I have search and scanned through 80% of the pages and so far cant find it)

Thanks in advance

 

Hey guys, do any of you guys know of a mobile workstation that has a Quadro p5200 mobile (not MAX-Q), so that we can get the BIOS of that graphics card and update the firmware on the 7730 p5200 to get more performance?

 

Interesting idea but I think that's less likely to work than the P3200 vBIOS flash success that @Ionising_Radiation had. I was looking at the Eurocom Tornado F7 workstation specs this afternoon. It has a Quadro P5200 rated for full performance at 160W. That system ships with a 330W power supply. Laptops that I've seen with GeForce 1080 (not max-Q), which has similar specs to the Quadro P5200, all ship with power supplies in the 300W+ range. For reference, laptop 1080's pull 150W+ and the desktop cards pull 180W+. There hasn't been any architectural advancement in the GPU here to reduce the power requirement, these chips are all running Pascal 16nm, the same GP104 chip. I'm thinking that the P5200 just needs more power to run at full speed than the Precision's 240W power supply can provide (plus powering the rest of the system and the CPU at turbo speeds) and that's the main reason that the GPU is power-limited in this system. Possibly Dell played it a little more safe than they absolutely needed to (like with the 7530/P3200) and it could be possible to eek out 10% more performance, but there is definitely a numbers problem when it comes to power.