Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

• All of the SSDs are still running slow - sometimes 5 x slower than previously. See link below for current speeds vs a couple of weeks ago. The 512gb drive which has always been completely empty is now doing read/write speeds of 654/726 MB/s compared to before it was doing 2989/2722 MB/s. They were all running at normal speed until recently.
  

• The Realtek drivers for general audio are terrible - so much loss in audio quality in addition to clicks and pops making it unusable. I have had to go to Windows HD audio but still get clicks/pops. Below is a link to three recordings - one is Realtek, one is Window HD default driver and one is a $2000 dedicated audio interface. Both the Realtek and Windows HD have clicks/pops every 5-10 seconds but the Windows HD is much better than Realtek. The dedicated interface has pops occasionally but is much better than the other two.

• Good audio is unaltered audio through high quality monitors. Waves maxx audio alters the sound significantly.

• https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wBF6A3MmWJphLj1uhwt9QMmsn_i5ilTk?usp=sharing

• This is my 5th Dell/Alienware and never had so many problems despite being their most premium product.

Has anyone else had issues similar?

 

Bad realtime audio/DPC latency is an issue effecting all 7530/7730 computers as well as the XPS lineup (see here: https://www.sysnative.com/forums/th...ausing-high-dpc-latency-sound-freezing.22228/) and has been known for a long time now unfortunately. I do music production professionally and bought this laptop unaware of this issue. I'm currently about 3.5 months into a ticket with technical support that was just recently escalated to the Product Group Engineering Team trying to find a resolution for this issue.

I've sent Dell boatloads of testing with latencymon and windows performance toolkit and unfortunately so far they haven't been able to come up with a working solution. The worst of the interrupts occurs on core 0 by acpi.sys, with ntoskrnl.exe being the second worst the other cores. The best latencymon results I've gotten (under 1 ms avg) were by starting in diagnostic startup and ignoring core 0.

Currently the only semi-fix I've seen for achieving lower buffer sizes is by having your DAW not use CPU 0 (the worst offending core DPC latency wise). You can do this by using CPU affinity in task manager or an application called Process Lasso. Note that this fix will only give slightly improved results and it will lower your overall processing ceiling. Turning off C-States, disabling all power saving options, prioritizing background services, disabling wifi, and setting minimum processor state to 100 can also improve your results.

I really hope gets a fix to this soon. It heavily effects anyone trying to do anything realtime audio related (performing live, recording) with this laptop.

 

Hmm.

1. This might be a driver/configuration issue. Are you running in ACHI or RAID mode? Have you installed Toshiba's and Samsung's drivers? To have a sudden and inexplicable speed drop is certainly of concern.
2. Have you enabled HWiNFO and EC monitoring? This will cause audio pops. I've noticed it both while playing local FLACs, and while streaming media, whether it be YouTube or Netflix.
3. This is rather subjective, I feel. The Waves enhancement really does improve audio quality out of the speakers, as far as listening is concerned. I don't and don't intend to produce audio with the Precision, so DPC latency is a moot point for me. I work with the GPU much more often, hence my attempt earlier to improve performance out of the box by crossflashing the 7730's VBIOS, etc.
4. You mentioned the trackpad—once again, subjective. I've worked with other completely metallic trackpads, and they all have some sort of weird acceleration algorithm that produces a rubber-banding cursor effect. The 7530's trackpad plus the Windows Precision drivers is amongst the closest to a Mac's, generally accepted as the golden standard.
5. I know this is little consolation, but you also mentioned MacBooks—there are a whole different plethora of problems associated with them as of late, like stuck keyboards, throttling hardware, insufficient power, insufficient ports, etc. You'd never get 4.7 GHz sustained on a MacBook, nor would you be able to install 4 SSDs, or any of the things that you have, on this notebook.

I'd suggest contacting Dell. There was a poll recently about audio latency on the XPS lineup; I think you could jump in on the bandwagon and report your issues as well—I hope they do respond, because they certainly have ignored my calls about poor power efficiency.

 

You 100% have the maxxaudio enhancements enabled when using the realtek driver. These are meant to improve sound quality during playback through the laptops speakers, but for some reason still effect headphones or speakers using the laptops headphone jack port. You can disable this by opening the maxxaudiopro app, going to the playback tab, and turning off all playback enhancements.

 

I think as good as the 7730 is for certain applications, it isn't well suited for audio. I'm at 30 days now since purchase and Dell has offered to doa service on the laptop and if after that it doesn't meet my needs they will so a refund or exchange it for something more suited. I do believe Dell has the best warranty and technical support there is. It's a shame though because having multiple SSDs and adequate cooling is so hard to find in a laptop at the moment. I wonder if an Alienware m17 would be better for audio or as much as I hate Macs, they are renowned for reliability and low latency with audio applications. They can run projects at 64 buffer with no dropouts. E.g. Rufus runs their live show on a macbook

Do you think this is hardware, driver or windows related?

 

Definitely drivers. I am told that the Linux drivers for the XPS line work perfectly, and give rise to much better sound and greatly improved latency. I presume that experience can be extrapolated to the Precision 7X30 as well.

For some reason, the Windows drivers give rise to a hell of a lot of latency.

 

I have the same sound issues like you - identically as your realtek recoding. If somebody has solution for this please share it us. I m very keen to listen music during work but with this machine I have had to jump to my LG v30 as a music player because this cracks and holes in sound from 7730 are terrible.

 

It might be something related to how Windows does power management or how power management is implemented in this system... After all, LatencyMon shows ACPI.sys causing the bulk of the latency issues. No idea why this is or how to tame it. (On my older M6700, ACPI.sys doesn't cause a blip in LatencyMon.) Linux probably has a different approach to handling this that doesn't cause the latency spikes.

 

Running in RAID mode. Have updated ssd drivers

I recommend using windows HD audio as it's much better - go to Device Manager - right click Realtek driver under Sound, video and game controllers, Update Driver - Browse my computer... - let me pick....- High Definition Audio Device.

 

Ok I will try at evening. I would like to add that I have the same issue also on AC power but then it is much less annoying in comparison to battery power.
Update
I have changed realtek driver to windows default driver plus removed definitely Maxxaudio (maxshit rather) and replaced it by APO equlizer (quite well configurable and free of charge). Now no sound issues so lets testing further.