Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

Thanks Aaron, using DellFanCMD I've managed to push my CB15 score to 1356, which seems pretty decent:

 

Hello everyone,

Following-up with this issue, I got my system board as well as dGPU replaced. The issue was fixed, but after the technician left, I also left for home and when I got home, the dGPU was no longer present in the system. This led me to believe that the issue lies with some cable (possibly the beam connectors or the DGFF Cable).

I called Dell again and asked them to take my laptop to their lab for proper fixing this time. That was 3 weeks ago. This Monday, I received an e-mail that I have a new order placed. That means for replacement of 1 DGFF Cable and 3 Beam connector cables they are replacing the whole system. Weird, but it's ok. I tried to ask them to make sure that this time, the replacement will come with Bluetooth enabled.

After getting bounced in-between 3 different business units (As everyone was complaining that they don't have access to the order), I realized that I had an e-mail from someone about the order. It was the person who created it. After several e-mail exchanges, apparently the Bluetooth was supposed to be sorted out.

However, today, after some more e-mails exchanged, not only the Bluetooth issue should now be gone, but there is a new order placed and they are replacing my 7730 with a new 7740 at no extra cost. Yes, you read that right. It has roughly the same configuration. Still 4k display, 97Whr battery, keyboard and still 64 GB RAM ECC

Where it differs is the new Intel Wi-Fi card which supports Wi-Fi 6 standard now, there's an Intel Xeon E-2276M (6-Core, 4.7GHz, 12MB Cache) instead of E-2186M (6-Core, 4.8GHz, 12MB Cache) and it includes the new NVidia Quadro RTX 5000.

This is going to be interesting. I just hope this will be solved.

 

Hey Ionising_Radiation, quick question - do you get this battery life with dGPU disabled or is dGPU still available to be used if needed? Do external screens work ok? On my last mess around with Ubuntu on my previous laptop i was doubling the battery life by killing off dGPU using acpi_call method, the only problem was that i couldn't get any external screens to work as on that machine HDMI and DP were all routed via dGPU.

 

Currently testing linux Manjaro, had to disable WIFI N band to have a useable WIFI connection and am currently struggling with 2 issues:
- battery life is not great when compared to Windows 10, minimum CPU power draw only goes as low as 3.5w (around -13w total), yielding maximum idle time of around 6 hours vs minimum 0.4w CPU and around -9w -10w total on Win 10 . This is with GPU disabled via acpi_call (otherwise usage is around 4w higher)
- running powertop --auto-tune seems to cause my USB mouse to keep freezing until I reboot the machine.
Has anyone here tried Manjaro and if so have you managed to improve battery life, whilst keeping USB devices working ok? Would love to have a lightweight linux, gui and battery friendly dual boot option on this laptop.

 

Hi @arcticjoe.

I actually haven't figured out the quirks of Linux at all, and I'm sticking to Windows for the time being, as Arch has given me a lot of headaches (primarily of my own making). pacman -Syu doesn't even work, and I am considering formatting the drive (save the UEFI partition), and reinstalling Arch. Hence, I can't really help you with the battery thing as of now.

@Soromeister,

Glad your issue has been resolved. I hope your 7740 works well; feel free to discuss it over at the 7540/7740 owners' thread!

 

I'm a daily user of kubuntu. No problem with wifi whatsoever.

I don't use powertop because tlp proves to be enough. Auto-tuned powertop may be aggressive on some settings (especially regarding usb), but you can manually re-enable any usb stuff from within powertop (if i recall correctly). Then create a powertop config file and load it with powertop at startup.

Tlp is more convenient, if you ask me. You can configure its behaviour for battery and ac. You can also exclude some hardware, such as usb, a mouse, a keyboard...
Give it a shot, but don't use both powertop and tlp at the same time, there's no point in that.

I also get around 6h max and that's about a 15w power draw. I noticed powertop doesn't report consumption very acurately, with some data missing depending on the use of integrated gpu or discrete gpu.

My main concern regarding battery life is the need to enable c-states feature in bios, which causes my machine to quickly lose input devices when it's connected to tb18dc dock.
I'm still looking forward to getting a windows installation in order to be able to upgrade tb18dc firmware and get rid of that issue, but that's another story.

-edit to fix multiple typos, damn smartphone-

 

@brazzmonkey is right about powertop being very aggressive and tlp being better for most purposes.

 

I wonder if you're having the same issues I was with wifi (could not get a stable connection to anything, it would drop every 10 seconds), the following fixed it for me:
create a file /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf

with the following lines added (line 1 disables bluetooth coexistence, line 2 disabled wifi n, line 3 disables power saving features)

options iwlwifi bt_coex_active=0
options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1
options iwlwifi power_save=0
at next reboot these options will apply. If you want to try these without a reboot you can this one liner to test (changes will be undone by a reboot):

sudo lsmod | grep -o -e ^iwlmvm -e ^iwldvm -e ^iwlwifi | xargs sudo rmmod && sleep 3 && sudo modprobe iwlwifi 11n_disable=1 bt_coex_active=0 power_save=0




I've now come to conclusion that 7530 likely has some inherent design flaw in regards to battery life, probably something to do with removable GPU card... Has anyone here tried taking theirs out or unplugging it somehow? I rarely use the GPU vs using the battery every day, so if it wasnt a major pain I might consider disabling it... Would be great if dell offered that as a feature in their BIOS somehow, i am not expecting it to happen though.

 

For anyone curious whether getting a 240w power supply gets your any extra points on benchmarks (this was rumored by another poster), I'm afraid it doesn't. Just received mine and scores are within 0.5% between 180w and 240w adapters.

 

Tried it. If you don't have the pass-through card, the notebook simply refuses to boot at all.