Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

@Soromeister
Any reason you are not using the free slot beside the battery? Is it slower somehow?

 

Those heatsinks are too thick and thus the cover is hard to close so I removed them. The stock ones work fine as long as I use those 2 settings mentioned in my previous post.

But I am using it. It's the amber/yellow heatsink from the picture. Underneath it, there's the NVMe drive. It's only used as a general purpose storage drive and I rarely access it. When I use it, the PCH temps will go up to 100°C and above, but I rarely use it and when I do, I won't use it for a prolonged amount of time.

 

I'm talking about the highlighted slot.

 

@Soromeister : Okay, I did as told. And it had a interessting impact. I can now go even higher with the undervolting. Highest runs where about -0.185V did only 5 runs but seamed stable. Was also able to achieve an ever higher score in Cinebench R15



Package TDP dropped below 70W (i think 67W) on Full Load and I am still below 80°C on 5 runs after each other. PCH Temp is around 80°C as well when doing all this runs.

 

But if I do long runs... like Cinebench R20 or Stress Tests, CPU Temp is still not going over 80°C but Power Limit Throtteling is killing me...

I wish there would be a way to turn it off. Or at least set it to 75W.... because with all the undervolting I would be below

 

I see what you mean. I have 4 of those NVMe drives and I am using all of those slots, but that one is not showing in the picture. This picture was taken when I wanted to take them all out and just place the original NVMe drive in order to send the laptop to the Dell lab. They don't really need my Storage units, just the laptop itself.

Apologies for the confusion created.

Makes perfect sense, because your PCH temperature won't jump to the skies, provided you use a very good thermal paste, there should be no thermal throttling, unless you use the NVMe drive that is closest to the PCH diode on your motherboard. For example, if you frequently use that Storage unit, it will get hot, propagating the heat towards the PCH and the PCH, having no means of cooling down will cause your machine to throttle thermally.

The PCH diode is a small chip on your motherboard that has a clear surface, just like the CPU or GPU has after you clean the thermal paste off of them. The PCH diode is probably not connected to the heatsink so it should be the only chip with clear surface that's not connected to the heatsink. It might have a thermal pad on top of it though. Search for it and then determine if there's any of the NVMe drives that's close to it, or beneath it. If so, you should use that drive sparingly, else PCH will heat up.

For the power limit I can only think of Intel XTU. You might want to try that one. For the dGPU though, I'm not sure you can change it as it's hardcoded or locked somehow. I also tried to raise it on the dGPU using MSI Afterburner but it didn't work (I have P5200).

 

Thanks, and that's a good point, but technology seems to be moving so fast these days that I doubt the PCIe Gen 4 will be the latest by the time I get a new Precision. This is however great news for people looking to buy PCIe Gen 3 SSDs as their prices are only going to drop further. Happy about that last bit. Cheers.

 

On the 7530, the PCH faces the other way (so no risk of NVMe slots locking in the heat of the PCH). This appears to be an unfortunate design side effect of the 7730 and 7740.

On my particular 7530 unit (a replacement), there actually exists a block of thermal foam to conduct heat from the PCH to the metal beneath the keyboard.

Why not just keep link state power management at maximum power savings? It does you no favours to leave it at maximum performance, as it powers down unused PCIe lanes, and, as you've seen, keeps the PCH cool.

As an aside, desktop motherboards have large heatsinks for the PCH alone; I don't understand why notebook manufacturers don't prioritise cooling the PCH as well, too.

 

Sooo further testing showed me that PCH in maximum power saving mode does not have any effect on the CPU performance NOR the nvme raid performance. I might do some funny testings soon. NVidia Titan RTX on the 7530 if you want me to

 

So, in a bid for improved battery life, I updated to Windows 10 1909. I was initially very pleased that the battery power draw was less than 10 W, the phenomenon when the GPU is forced to sleep. I was slightly suspicious, and checked the NVIDIA activity indicator: turns out Paint 3D was somehow running in the background. I closed it from Task Manager, and power draw shot back up.

I feel shortchanged. The Dell rep I spoke to dismissed the case as 'expected battery life for a machine 1 year old'. Do they seriously expect only five to six hours of battery life when running the integrated graphics chip only and a 97 watt-hour battery?

That being said, Paint 3D somehow runs in the background all the time, even after manually being closed. I am intrigued. This saves me the hassle of opening an instance of an Adobe app (it has the same effect of locking and idling the GPU, thus saving power), but why does Paint 3D have to run in the background in the first place?