Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

How in the hell? Teach me your ways, please. I live on the Equator, which does me no good when it comes to temperatures. Even idle temps are above 55 °C.

 

Is yours on stock thermal paste or also on liquid metal?

I am not joking, right now about 40 tabs open in firefox, some vmware consoles, word, visio, outlook, ton of puttys and some java oob managment thingys and I used the DellFanCmd to set the Fan to 50% not really hearable (because 50% is not really 50% since 100% is not the max the notebook can do - if you let it on automatic its a lot louder than 100% with DellFanCmd) and I have around 66°C. Idle it drops below 45°C

@Aaron44126: just read the posts. Seams like what I thought. Its nothing you can override. Or at least not with the Intel XTU or Throttelstop. Looks like somehow Dell managed to do something with the Bios to hardcode PL1 PL2 and also Boost Time. Because I can do what I want with those values in XTU. It always pushes back to 60W after Stock Boost Time. So I would need to downgrade Bios... but I am not sure if what they did will revert again...

 

Not stock: I'm using Cooler Master MasterGel Maker Nano. I think the contact has worsened over time. I'm in half a mind to try @Hopper82's screw mod, and try using graphite pads. I am very wary of using liquid metal.

 

Ok, even the BEST normal thermal paste (from what I have heard - is a non official Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme) will not get you close to what you can achive with Liquid Metal. What screw mod?

Sorry, just wanted to make this clear. Liquid metal can really eaaaaaaaasy destroy your complete system. If it shortens two little tiny tiny transistors which you are not aware, system is destroyed for good! So always be aware of that you are toying around with a quite expensive laptop if you are doing Liquid Metal mods.

Like I said I destroyed two expensive mainboards learning how to deal with liquid metal. But since I have done it a lot over time. I did it too my Precsion 7530, also to my fully specced Latitude 7390 and my fully specced baby notebook the GPD P2 Max. Worked on all very very well.

Btw. I just found out that I am a morron and so are the guys from Dell... I thought because it was written 03 Oct 2019 that 1.5.2 is newer than 1.11.0 which of course does not make any sence at all... but if you remove one year for this 03 Oct 2019 its clear that 03 Oct 2018 could have been the actually date of the Bios 1.5.2

 

Oh, I didn't think too hard about your BIOS version comment but yes, 1.11.0 is the newest and they have been released in version order. Regarding the dates that you are seeing on the support page, from time to time Dell will update or repost something which causes the dates to change so you cannot rely on that. I've seen it messed up many times with older driver updates.

 

Hello, that is a nice mod you've got there. I've got 2 questions for you:

- How did you upgrade the vBios? I've got an NVidia p5200 and I'm interested on how I can do this.
- Could you please go into advanced power options and under the PCIe Link State Power Management, make all the entries "Maximum Power Savings" and then test the benchmarks again while checking on the temperature?

I'm more interested on the first question though as I have no idea where I can get the vBios files for upgrade.

The second question though is related to the issues I've been having with the PCH diode temperatures staying at 100°C as mentioned in my previous post here.

 

This tweak is specific to the Quadro P3200 in the 7530. You can get a speed boost by applying the vBIOS taken from the 7730 version of the P3200, which has a higher power limit and clock speeds.

 

First of all Thank you ;-)

About the vBios, like @Aaron44126 already said it was pretty easy for me since I could use the vBios File with higher boost speeds from the 7730. For your 7730 P5300 I think you could give TDP Tweaker 1.12 a spin and toy around with the Target Power / Power Limit values and then use a hacked version of nvflash which does not check for the signature of the vBios. But be aware if you don't know what you are doing, you can easley brick your GPU.

About the PCH I just read your post, how did you manage to messure the temperature of this PCH? Since I run a fully loaded M.2 config as well, it could be interessting to see my temperatures.

//Edit: Just found it - sorry. Using HWiNFO instead of HWMonitor

 

I use AIDA64 to read the PCH temperature. It will show up under the "Sensors" for the temperature. Sometimes, it will disappear from there, so I'm not sure if you need a driver installed for it to appear, but for me it's there (Either listed as "PCH", or "PCH Diode").



For the Precision 7730, if the PCIe Link State Power Management is either set to OFF or Maximum Performance, the PCH temperatures stay at 100°C in idle and going up to 130°C causing a power cut at one point as well as multiple thermal throttling.

Once that is set to Maximum Power Savings, the PCH temperature will go up to 80°C under full load (Sometimes 85, but never seen it higher than this).

Taking out the NVMe drive that's near the RAM memory will make the PCH stay in idle at around 47°C, which is a huge difference (With the PCIe Max Power Savings it idles at around 54°C with the NVMe drive inserted).

As you can see from the picture, the NVMe drive with the amber color that sits near the RAM is actually below the PCH diode. Keeping electricity flowing through that storage unit will make it hot all the time and coupled with the diode on the other side which also gets hot as it handles all the I/O, you get temperatures to skyrocket.

Dell could make an updated BIOS which can force that specific connector to sleep aggressively, but this can also be fixed with a Windows 10 Setting. Ah, one more thing, Windows has a service called SysMain (Formerly known as Superfetch). You need to disable that as well as it proactively polls the storage units for data that can be loaded into memory. Given that these are NVMe drives, the Superfetch will not make it faster as they are already fast enough. Without disabling this service as well as setting the power options for the PCIe, CPU will probably go up to 85°C and you still get thermal throttling because of this PCH diode going into "lava" temperature.

Hope this helps anyone that has temperature issues with this machine. It has been driving me crazy for the past year and I never thought that this could be easily solved via setting up 2 options in the system.

Please try these 2 settings and let me know if you still get any thermal throttling (You shouldn't).

 

@Soromeister
Those are nifty NVMe heatsinks. Did you do any before/after temperature measurement to see how much they help?