Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

I am after BIOS upgrade to V1.9 and i can notice big improvement related to previous versions. For few days non audio clicks and interrupts and also temperatures of the system are a few degrees lower than previously. Whole the system is very stable and fast response for any of tasks. But i am with the same opinion about power draw - it should be much lover without stress. Different systems in our company with the similar specs are much colder and low power draw during office work

 

Hi All,

I am having random OS freezes / hangs with my 7530, have to hold the power button to take it down and restart... No BSOD, error codes or events so this is challenging to Troubleshoot. Hardware wise I changed the spinning drive with a Samsung 970 Pro NVMe and the stock 8GB SODIMM with 4x HyperX Impact 8GB 3200MHz SODIMMs.

During low resource utilization its fine (browsing, office, etc.) but as soon as I do something that causes the fans to spin up it will eventually freeze.

Things I've tried so far:

- ePSA Diagnostics (once)
- Installed all the latest drivers and OS patches (1903 was also just recently installed BTW, maybe this has something to do with it?)
- Unplugged from TB18DC dock and also unplugged every other device but my logitech mouse.
- Switched to the latest Intel DCH driver for video (non discrete graphics laptop)
- Switched to AHCI disk mode
- Installed the Samsung NVMe driver
- Did the Win10 memory diagnostics in advanced mode, no errors.
- Disabled in BIOS and uninstalled the Free Fall sensor driver, this should not be needed for NVMe, correct?

After each one of those changes individually confirmed the problem persists, it is easy to repro by putting some load.

Finally I tried the ePSA diagnostics again and it froze checking the memory, one more time and froze again checking the memory in the second pass.

So it seems to be a memory issue, I originally discarded it because the first time I tried the ePSA all was tested fine, and the Windows Mem diagnostics also passed fine (this one took forever BTW).

Has anyone here had a similar issue with these HyperX Impact 3200MHz SODIMMs? is there any 3200MHz memory that has proven to be good quality and reliable? do I need to switch to to a lower speed memory if I want reliability?

 

In case this helps anyone: It is not possible to boot from internal drives using Legacy Mode - only UEFI, only hardcore.
Seems to be Dell's policy.

 

High-speed memory support on notebooks (and the Precision) is flaky. Use 2666 MHz memory—the improvement of 3200 MHz memory with Intel CPUs is marginal.

 

Yes, was just just reading some posts from @anuraj1 @CR3 about their experience with different memory modules and speeds and seems like this this is the case... Any modules you can suggest / recommend?

The one the machine came with is a Samsung M471A1K43DB1-CTD, I'll see if I can find 3 more of these somewhere...

 

Put the original 8 GB of memory back in and see if it works. (Yeah, running with 8 GB instead of 32 GB might be yucky, but it's not that terrible, and you should be able to tell if it is your problem in short order.) RAM issues can be tricky. Passing a memory test does not mean that you are good.
It might be possible to install three of your HyperX sticks along with the original 8 GB stick and have everything work fine; this would force the HyperX sticks to run at a slower speed.

Disclaimer: I have not tried legacy boot on the 7530. (I don't see any reason to be using legacy boot for your OS anymore.) But you do know that you can't flip-flop between legacy and UEFI with the same OS install, right? The partition layout is different, the one that you pick at install time is the one that you are stuck with unless you do some work to change the partition scheme.

 

Ok, could not find any Samsung modules that can be shipped fast, found this 2 options with Amazon.ca that I can get same same day or next: Crucial Micron 2666MHz CL19 or Timetec Hinyx 2666MHz CL19. Any input / recommendation? or any other that would be better? Fastest possible without compromising stability would be the ideal for me...

Also, would it be better to get 4x 8GB single rank vs 2x 16GB dual rank?

Ah, interesting idea! I have not been able to try the original stick because I installed it on a coworker's laptop but I just "borrowed" it and will try tonight and see how that goes before buying anything else...

 

You have BSOD in case of the RAM. I had the same - non of the 3200 Ram's work flawlessy in this machine. Change for the 2666 and problem will dissapear.

 

If mix-match ends up working out then you could just hand your remaining HyperX stick back to your coworker to install mixed in his system. All done.
It might not work if the BIOS cannot find good compatible timings that work across both of the two different types of modules. (The system will just fail to POST in this case.)

 

Ok, time for some updates:

OS Freezes:

So I tried with the OEM (Samsung 2666MHz CL19) module and the problem went away, I can confirm those HyperX 3200MHz modules are trouble with this laptop. I even tried with only one module (different ones) and had the same problem so I do not think it was a case of a bad module. Mixing the OEM modules with the HyperX ones didn't work either, laptop does not boot with that config.

Being quite bummed about this decided to buy the 2666MHz modules with the lowest CL I could find, Dell does sell this laptop with a 2933MHz memory option but the only memory I could find with this frequency was the HyperX and didn't want to get burned by that brand again. Ended buying a pair of 16GB Crucial (Micron) Ballistix 2666MHz CL16 which BTW is half the price of the HyperX.

Got the memory about 3 hours ago and the machine is running beautiful with it! tried a bunch of different things that would have been a sure freeze before and no problem at all. Using the math posted earlier in this tread, given the low CL of this memory, it should perform even better than the much higher frequency HyperX so I think this may be the best option for this laptop.



4th Display without discreet graphics:

I ended getting this USB 3.0 to 4K HDMI adapter for about 84 CAD and this works amazingly well, of course I do not game on it or anything like that but I think DisplayPort has come a long way, I tried one of these devices some years ago and was quite buggy and constantly eat a big chunk of your CPU.

This thing worked right out of the box plugged to the back of the TB18DC and I can now use my main laptop display plus 3 other monitors which is really useful. I have not noticed any CPU impact at all and no noticeable lag for regular apps either...

Intel DHC Graphics drivers:

Troubleshooting the Freeze problem I switched the graphics drivers to the Intel DHC ones as I have Windows 10 1903 and Intel only added official support for it in the 26.xx drivers (Dell's latest published drivers is 25.xx). Anyway, this ended not being the problem and I'm not sure if there is any upside or downside to these driver, everything seems to work fine. I did encounter a problem where Windows update would constantly replace the driver with an even older version (24.xx). They removed the option to skip an update from the latest windows update interface, after some googling found that they have a little app for that called Show/Hide Updates tool, in case anyone is having the same problem...

Thanks all for the suggestions and help!