Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

Has anyone tried NVIDIA drivers newer than 418.81? Both of the newer ones 419.17 and 419.67 cause roughly daily BSODs on my system (SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED or something) while 418.81 is stable. This is with graphics switching disabled.

I'm thinking that I'm just going to go with Dell's NVIDIA drivers for this laptop, maybe...

 

Hi Aaron, no problems as far as playback unless I have the buffer set quite low which is only applicable for playing vsts.

 

@Kyle You can use nvidia-settings in linux to adjust color saturation (if your video card is nvidia, of course).

 

I was getting 2700 MB/s write speeds on my Toshiba, but that's also with a pristine, barely touched drive. In your case, you're at 82% capacity, This post shows exactly the same write speeds when the disk is 75% full:

https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8284/toshiba-xg5-1tb-oem-2-nvme-pcie-ssd-review/index.html

The explanation they give is pretty dire: This drive is geared specifically to be a laptop OS boot drive, and instead of a "floating" SLC cache that reallocates itself to unused drive space, instead it uses a "pinned" SLC cache that is utilized by the operating system. In other words, this thing has 2700 MB/s writes when you first install the operating system, and a few GB thereafter. Once that's used up, it has permanent 900MB/s write speeds.

This is why I always buy the absolute minimum drive spec on a new laptop - you simply don't have control what they put in there, and you will always get a vastly better drive for the same money with an aftermarket drive.

 

The 4K speed is all too low... The ssd speed that matters most http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-n...vme-ssd-review-3d-bics-64-layer-flash-shines/

 

Hey, I'm back with minor issue. I work usually on dock, my taskbar is always on additional monitor. Quite often when I take laptop out for work, and attach it again to dock, my taskbar lands on laptop monitor. Going to settings, set this display as the main one option is set properly. I have to "reset" it: check main display as laptop one, nothing happens, and then again choose external one, then it is good. It's annoying that I go back and have to go to settings all the time. Any ideas?

 

I'm honestly surprised that the insanely high idle on-battery power draw isn't made out to be a bigger issue than it is. I run through an easy 2.5 charge cycles per day, meaning I will ruin my battery's capacity in less than a year, flat. I am not even doing anything intense. Chrome tabs are kept idle; my IDE is VS Code, which is comparatively lighter than any of the heavyweights like VSE, IntelliJ; I don't ever run the Nvidia GPU on the go; I don't even watch videos, or play music. I am usually coding or taking notes with Markdown, or simply viewing PDFs.

What the heck is wrong with the battery? Competing notebooks can last 4 hours on batteries half as large as the 97 Whr one in my 7530, whereas I only get about four hours of battery life out of 97 watt-hours. The XPS 15, which has a billion other issues, doesn't have one: battery draw problems. Dozens of my classmates own it, and they all manage an average of 10 hours.

What is going on, Dell? And why won't you forward my complaints up?

 

Maybe @DELLChrisM have the answers. He works for Dell and can probably give you an final answer on this.

 

Did I get a bad unit, I mean badly put together or can someone confirm similar gains in performance (https://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/13223077) and quietness/thermals after doing what i did with 7530 P3200? So, after changing thermal compound it jumped by another 1000 points adding to an already amazing graphics score of over 16000, just from flashing different BIOS) . Seems to me like i did nothing extreme, just fix what was broken. I did a repaste yesterday which coupled with modded vBios (well not even modded, its actually the correct one straight from 7730, not artificially capped for no apparent reason like the default one) gave much better results than i ever expected to get and after a reasonable undervolt on CPU, it even turns out, that the cooling is more than capable with i9 (after putting Gelid Extreme on both chips i got 20 degrees or so less on the GPU alone which i guess was not without effect on the cooling of CPU and probably got rid of a lot of thermal throttling alone). In cinebench R15 now I get a stable 1280-1310CB every single time, even in loop (ambient temp. is around 20 degrees). Under synthetic load from XTU my i9 happily sits at 4.2GHz all the time (i got bored after 15m or so). This is not a negligible difference and it doesn't seem like OC, but much more like fixing manufacturers mistakes which in this case are apparently many. So why isn't 7530 made properly in the first place? Is there a good reason for using a really really crappy thermal compound in a factory? Probably not everyone feels comfortable enough "fixing" a 3000$ machine, which at this price should at least perform as advertised in a reliable fashion. I think Dell should have already adressed some of these issues a long time ago, especially as these faults are easy to fix or avoid in future hardware revisions.
Btw. how powerful should my AC Adapter be? With my 7530 i got a 180W one which i think might be a little too weak; even for a stock one (with i9 and P3200). Do I risk something using this one? Are there any performance disadvantages like components not getting enough power?

If anyone is interested how system with such "patches" performs in benchmarks or how much better/worse it will overclock i can do some additional tests, just let me know what you want to see. Im much more interested in stability and low temps myself but it might be interesting to see how much further it can go.

 

People have been complaining about this for years... Exact same thing on the Alienware side, as well. Unfortunately it is just the case that if you want the best thermal performance from your system, then you have to crack it open and apply your own (good) paste. Best I can come up with is that the paste that they are using (probably in all of their systems, not just Precision) is easy and cheap to apply at the factory, and they haven't bothered to do the R&D to come up with something better. Which is a shame, because most of the rest of their thermal solutions in the Precision line are really good, and held back because of this problem that seems like it wouldn't take much to fix.

I think that 180W is adequate for the 7530. If you add up the maximum power draw of the various components you should come out well below 180W. One thing that I am not sure about is the P3200 with the 7730 vBIOS slapped on it, that increases the power draw above what Dell intended for this system, so maybe one would benefit from trying the 240W PSU with this mod?

On a side note, have you tried pushing both the CPU and GPU to 100% load? We have recently found this to be impossible in the Precision M6700 with Quadro P5000 (which pulls 120W, vs the 100W limit on all of the other top cards in this system) — fully loading the GPU forces the CPU to clock down well below the max turbo speed. I was wondering if the 7530 with the high-power P3200 vBIOS runs into something similar.