Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

Depends. If they had 8 GB of RAM per stick, then that's definitely single rank. Only the newest RAM sticks can fit 16 GB in a single rank (see Samsung's 32 GB RAM).

If you had 2×4 GB on the M15, that's definitely single-rank.

 

If you're confident about that, then they were probably single rank, considering their wattage was similar.

I would say the memory controller load was probably the cause of the difference in frequency then

It is interesting for me to discover that the memory controller can lead to 20% lower frequency under restricted (but not too much) PLs

Thanks everyone

 

@Ionising_Radiation I have been trying to investigate the power consumption issues too.

So far the minimum discharge rate I can get is 8.5W at the last but one brightness level (8750h, 2x16gb, fhd 72% ntsc). (about 6.5W with the display off)

The unit came with Win on the hdd and an empty ssd.
I disabled the ssd via bios (don't want to reinstall Win before I decide to keep the unit).
I should maybe install another copy of Win on the ssd and disable the hdd via bios, just in case the hdd is not power efficient.

Cpu Package Power goes as low as 0.6W when stars align (other times it gets stuck at 0.9-1.1W) and the lowest Package CState is C10 when running on battery with the Battery Saver profile.
Those are very good 'minimum' values, lower than m15 (which seemed to be unable to go below Package state C3).

However, the power consumption on average is higher.

I am trying to understand:
- what is preventing it from reaching 7w discharge rate or less (p1 could do 4w as far as I remember).
- why is the average consumption of video playback higher too (bigbuckbunny 1080p 30fps with no sound leads to discharge rate of 8.5 on the m15 vs 13.3W on the 7530)

Is there any program I can use (to see if the nvidia gpu is to blame) which is not from the adobe suite?

 

Have you configured your 7530 with an NVIDIA GPU in the first place?

 

Do you mean if I added the gpu or if came with it? It came with the p2000.

Interestingly, if I disable the nvidia gpu via Device Manager, discharge rate increases to 15W.

I bet that's because when Win disables the gpu it is not really disabled but the driver loses access to it and Optimus stops working.

For that reason, I'd be inclined to think the discharge rate of 8.5 is already with the gpu disabled, but I would be happy to discover I'm wrong (otherwise I need to investigate other sources of power consumption )

 

This is likely the case. The idle power draw on most NVIDIA GPUs is around 7 W, so 8 + 7 = 15 is fair.

 

Right... Let's start a deeper investigation...

I read you managed to get idle discharge rate of about 6W

Was that on Win or Linux?

 

With nVidia Optimus the best thing to do is enable the "GPU Tray Activity Icon", set the default preferred GPU to Intel, then only whitelist the app's that need the Nvidia GPU to use it. I do the same thing on a HP Zbook X2 with a Quadro m620, and it can easily double battery life compared to the default configuration, even with a 4k display.

 

Thanks. I have already set that up the same way.

Apparently, from what I read a few pages back, you can't trust the GPU activity icon to be representative of whether the GPU is using any power
Same with hwinfo, apparently for some people it was showing 0w on the nvidia gpu while it was actually consuming 7w

 

On Windows. On Linux, I can achieve something like 8 W, with powertop applied.

Right now, however, my GPU is not being utilised at all, and the battery is drying up at 30 W.