Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

Thanks for the in deep explanation of your doings. This Schrödinger idea came only because of the mention of "wake gpu" on hwinfo.

But in the meantime I tested myself and couldn't see any real impact at that point.

 

Question @Ionising_Radiation:
If you have the system running with Lightroom minimized so that the dGPU sleeps properly...
If you fire up another app that wants to use the NVIDIA GPU, does the NVIDIA GPU "wake up" and run as it should? Does it sleep again when that app is closed?

If that is the case, I am wondering if it would be feasible to figure out what Lightroom is doing to sleep the GPU, and then just write a silly background app that does whatever that is.

 

That's a good question. I fired up Kingdom Come: Deliverance to see what happened, and indeed, the GPU power rose to around 30 W, and battery discharge rate was around 50 W (limited by the fact that my notebook was un-plugged, of course). When I closed it again (provided Lightroom was still open and minimised), the discharge rate dropped back down to around 8-9 W (this was because I had VS Code, Acrobat and around a dozen tabs in Chrome open).

Definitely Lightroom doing something behind the scenes—whatever it is, it's good for my battery. I have, on average, gained around 3 extra hours of in-use battery life.

EDIT: I'd like to add that the screen-off idle discharge rate is stupendously low, at a mere 3 W.

 

Does anyone know if eBay
NYFJH battery works with 7530? Dell shows the 97 battery part number CJ18V. Are these the same battery? Thank you.

 

An Amazon seller says "...NYFJH Battery Compatible with Dell Precision 7730 7530 Series": https://www.amazon.com/HWW-11-4V-Battery-Compatible-Precision/dp/B07JLC315V

 

So, I'd like to report that I've gotten in direct contact with my regional Dell Expert Centre, and they've requested that I send in my notebook for analysis at the engineers' lab (I'll be receiving a replacement notebook from them, which I can keep).

They've asked me to keep things as-is, so I'll prepare a system image of C:, remove only my own WD Black drives and the ECC RAM (and replace the original 8 GB), check that I can reproduce Lightroom's strange behaviour after these changes, and then send it in when I've gotten my replacement system.

Let's hope that their lab can reproduce this, too, and thence a BIOS update addressing all these problems.

@Div033, are you able to see the same behaviour?

 

Good Morning Ionising,

I tried a second time, and signed up for an Adobe trial specifically to install Adobe Lightroom CC and try this out. I never saw a load less than 19W, usually a little bit more. However, I do have SQL Server and who-knows-what else running even with the VMs off, so I'm not too surprised. I turned down the 17" 4K screen to very low brightness, so that's a minimum of 5W additional to the low-water mark of 14W. What was very interesting to me is that when I disabled the P4200 GPU in the control panel, power utilization shot up to about 30W and pretty much stayed there. The GPU didn't return results to HWInfo anymore, but that is a very curious anomaly. I am not routing the video through the GPU.

Good luck!

 

Yes and no. Minimizing Lightroom was correctly setting the GPU to inactive as discussed (when power settings were set to optmal power) but I observed identical power draw under normal circumstances where Lightroom wasn't open. Simply put, I saw no power draw change between normal, "supposed" GPU idle and minimized lightroom. In both cases the system reported the GPU consuming 0W and in both cases my system drew 9-12W, which is low enough to rule out the GPU actually being in use. With these numbers, I'm able to get 6.5-7h of battery life, which is just okay.

 

I also made efficiency tests and i have noticed strange behaviors. If I use a better performance mode i get about 28 - 34W power draw. Better battery gives 24 - 28W and best battery about 14- 20W. And what is the best - Best performance gives 9 -14W ??? And in this mode i get about very pleasant 7 - 8 hours on battery - all measurements with half dim. On the AC power results are nearly the same. P4200 is still dormant but it has started to be after yesterday drivers upgrade directly from nvidia site. During office works and browsing machine is totally quiet and I may also keeps it comfortably on my laps. For me very strange but now this machine are working as it should from the beginning. In one i am still disappointed - sound problems. I thought that they disappear but they are present but not so frequent. Dell please fix it finally because listen to music is very annoying with this.

 

Question about DisplayPort monitors and my 7730 and TB18DC. Right now my display setup is:

1) 7730 at 3840 x 2160
2) Dell U3014 connected to TB18DC via mDP at 2560 x 1600
3) Dell U2713HM daisy-chained to the U3014 via DP at 1440 x 2560

I picked up a Dell U3419W USB-C monitor that I want to add to the setup using USB-C to the TB18DC but it appears that I can either have the existing monitors connected or the new monitor, but not all of them.

Am I running to a DP bandwidth limits or can I make this work?