Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

Are any past 6XXX Precision owners displeased with the new Dell 7XXX series design? The Dell 7740/7730 weighs almost 7lbs (just a smidge lighter than the HP ZBook 17 G5) and yet Dell has removed the 2.5" drive slots (with the bigger battery installed), no longer supports the more open MXM video cards, has no optical drive option, has no touch screen option, and has a flipped motherboard on a workstation for crying out loud. My take on Dell's 7XXX is cost-cutting on the part of Dell as users have only lost options and gained nothing in return.

 

4x NVMe is pretty good. Here I think you have to consider what their target market is. There are people like us who would prefer to have options like 2.5" drives (cheaper, easy to carry from old system to new) but their main audience for these systems is big businesses with lots of money and going big on NVMe makes sense there.

No MXM but some other vendors are soldering the GPU onto the motherboard; GPU upgrades are still very much an option for the time being. Like the above, their target audience for these systems doesn't care about GPU upgrades anyway. And it's not just Dell. Very few new systems from any major vendor support MXM. You will only see support continue to dry up until it is gone within another generation or two.

No optical drive doesn't bother me at all. Get a portable USB drive. My home system M6700 still has an optical drive but I have two USB opticals hooked up to the dock (one for 4K Blu-ray and one for HD-DVD). I have another USB BD-RE drive that is easily portable. After I upgrade to a new system, it'll just sit in my bag for the odd case that I need it. And it's the same as with MXM, it's the industry trend, not many systems from any vendor are shipping with optical drives and not many people miss them.

I don't want to come off sounding like a total fanboy of the current status. I call it like I see it. I was pretty miffed when the 7710 came out with only one 2.5" drive option. But, the cost of flash drives has come down a lot in the last few years so I'm not terribly put off by having to buy all new drives when the time comes to upgrade. I railed against Dell on this forum for the keyboard design of the 7510/7710 (specifically, moving the Home and End keys to require a Fn press, ridiculous for anyone who does serious work on the keyboard). I also had plenty of bad things to say about the docking situation with the 7530/7730 and that TB18DC dock. (Jury is still out on the new WD19DC dock.) To their credit, the keyboard redesign in the 7X30 systems which included dedicated Home and End keys was a direct result of the complaining on this forum (so they pay attention... sometimes) and Dell took the TB18DC dock issues seriously enough to fix the biggest two problems with it (though it took a while and numerous smaller problems remain).

I probably would not have bought a 7710 or 7720 for the keyboard layout issue alone. 7730 restored my confidence somewhat. They fixed the keyboard, brought the NVMe drive count from three to four, improved the thermals with the better intake vent and extra two side exhaust vents, and also fixed the port layout to something more acceptable (adding a USB port back to the back, and a second USB-C/Thunderbolt to allow for adequate charging from a dock). 7740 has an awesome aluminum top design and offers basically the best specs you could hope for in a system of this profile (17" without ridiculous exhaust vent thing on the back). My biggest complaints with the current situation are really only that the fans aren't easily removable like they were in the M6X00 systems, and that the high-end Quadros cost so darn much. I'll run my M6700 to the ground but as long as they don't mess anything up between now and then I am totally excited about purchasing a maxed out 7760 in a couple of years.

 

I own both an M6800 and M4800 with the 4940MX processor. I thought these were the greatest machines on Earth until I got my M7730.

I don’t miss the 2.5” drive slots. The NVMe SSDs work beautifully with the i7-8850H and even though that’s not “top of the line,” my M7730 runs rings around the M6800/M4800. Overall, it’s a much better “computing ecosystem.” I don’t think I’d want to go back to SATA III.

I bought a portable usb-c blu-ray drive. It’s OK but most of the time I use a desktop blu-ray drive in an enclosure. I don’t miss having it in the laptop.

I’m not interested in upgrading video cards so that doesn’t really factor in for me. Same with the touch screen, I find that effectively useless on a laptop.

I don’t know about “cost cutting.” My M7730, bought thru Dell Outlet, was expensive enough. With the NVMe drives I bought (3 2TB drives, total of 6 TB on the laptop plus the 500 GB OS drive), the laptop cost well over $2500. It did come with a couple 1TB sticks so I have those to play with. I might use one to upgrade a recent purchase (M5530) for my son.

The M7730 is lighter, well-built, has what I need, overall is a great machine. It’s become my daily driver and has won my heart and mind.

I would like to see at least one more USB 3.1 port, a removable NVMe slot or two (like on the M6800, where you could relatively easily remove the 2.5” drive), and a light around the touchpad and buttons.

 

Don't get me started!!!!

That part I've been very happy about. As a photographer, I regularly upgrade camera gear and new gear creates ever-larger images. So having plenty of drive expansion ability was a key feature for me.

 

Sounds great what powertop idle consumption are you getting? Would you mind testing while playing a couple mins of bigbuckbunny 1080p too? (using vlc if possible)
Thanks!

 

I just noticed that there is a new BIOS, 1.10.1, which among other things claims to improve the DPC latency situation.
https://www.dell.com/support/home/u...de=biosa&productcode=precision-15-7530-laptop

 

I haven’t gotten X working yet with Switchable Graphics enabled (only works with the NVIDIA GPU alone), and I’ve been working entirely out of the virtual console tty for now. PowerTOP reports around 10-11 W of power draw, but I have run the battery down over around 11 hours: 93/11 gives a power draw of around 8.45 W.

Installed with fwupd on Arch for the first time, with no problems. As always, unlike Windows, it's not a one-click solution, and there was some initial configuration, but any future updates will be as seamless as running 'fwupd upgrade', versus visiting the website and downloading it, on Windows.

 

Ok, thanks.
If you're curious and you're happy with rebooting every time you want to switch gpu, a quick way is to just reuse the module blacklist conf used by PopOS (there's no magic, just a list of nvidia modules to blacklist) to make sure only the intel is running

 

In my case with a 7730 i7-8850H and Radeon 4150 the latency claim isn't true. I booted into windows 10 to give BIOS 1.10.1 a shot. I might have a particularly bad example or configuration for audio latency/cracking. I had the issue in windows 10 with the factory drivers and bios 1.8. Had the same issue with a fresh install, newer drivers and bios 1.9. I had been meaning to RMA the machine since I got it two months ago in June, but the audio latency/cracking has been behaving fine in Ubuntu 18.04 so I kept it.
The latest 10 minute latency/audio cracking test in windows 10. BIOS 1.10.1 and the rest of the drivers from last month. https://i.imgur.com/ygOOfA7.png

 

In my case also without significant improvement with the new BIOS - sometimes i notice latency higher than 100ms (501ms max) and of course still cannot listen to music without issues. Also sometimes a have a totally freeze mouse for a while. In machine of 15k PLN. Total failure...