Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

Anyone else notice a drop in CPU benchmarks with new BIOS? Rolled mine back as temps seemed to go up, whilst performance dipped down 5% or so.

 

I had that problem with 1.11.0 and opened a support case. They found that the brightness keys were not working for iGPU-only systems like mine and had an estimate of end of december for a new BIOS. So 1.12.1 came earlier than expected for me.

So it might make sense, to start a support case, to make Dell aware and see if they can repro the problem, to come up with a fix.

 

Hi,

is someone having link for extension cable for 240w charger to buy ?

Thanks

 

So I upgraded to 1.12.1, and lost display brightness control on the dGPU only. I don't want to downgrade either, because it contains lots of security fixes. Sigh, Dell...

EDIT: Downgraded. Brightness control is back.

 

I tried the same trick on my 7540 but it doesn't work. I found the NV156FHM is to wide to fit. The original 45% gamut display has mounting rails glued to it, while the BOE has its own brackets.
As I think mechanics are identical on 7530 and 7540, I am wondering why it worked for you but does not in my case??

Regards,
Lars

 

EDIT: sorry seems like I remembered the brackets bit incorrectly - there were no brackets attached to the screen panel itself, it just looked that way. Panel was held in place by 2 screws at the top and 2 at the bottom using highlighted metal bits that are built into the panel (picture attached):

My NV156FHM-N4B did not come with any additional brackets, so dimensions wise it was identical to the panel it replaced.
Would be an odd move for Dell to change the design on this gen, considering dimensions are the same...

 

@Ionising_Radiation - Curious about your Adobe Lightroom battery life workaround, is there any free application from the suite that you found that can induce this behavior?

 

@arcticjoe this is my work-around now. I updated to Windows 1909, and by some fortunate series of events, Paint 3D permanently runs in the background, automatically giving me the battery boost I need. Battery life even at 21% wear (no idea how it got so bad, I plan to change it) is around 8 hours, iGPU only, screen brightness at 40%, when typesetting LaTeX with occasional compiles, and around 15 tabs in Chrome open.

I doubt it needs to be Lightroom—any application that uses and subsequently locks the dGPU into a low-power state when not in use, will suffice. As I mentioned in the quoted thread, Dell somehow managed to dismiss my concerns.

 

I think I will have to re-install Windows again, I am seeing worse performance from the CPU than before (previously I could max out TSBench and CineBench at 4.3Ghz for the whole run, hitting 80w-90w TDP, now the ceiling seems much more conservative, settling around 60w TDP and <4Ghz) and my battery life seemed a little better than now. I suspect me installing Intel DPTF and adding DPTF registry keys has changed something in the way this machine handles power / temp management.
Unfortunately I wasnt able to achieve a reduction in power usage via Paint 3D running in the background, in fact I seem to score a few extra minutes by ensuring that nVidia GPU is not running anything at all - nvidia-smi reports GPU power usage as 4.8w when its inactive and a little bit over 5w when Paint3D is minimized. GPU clocks in both scenarios sit at 139Mhz, so as low as it can go without powering down. I still get up to 8 hours reported on the battery guessometer (screen on lowest setting, all apps killed), which isnt completely terrible considering there is a 144Hz screen, 4x DIMMS and 3x NVME SSDs all chewing up extra volts - but i know that HP Zbook and P53 both get a few extra hours, so there is definitely an issue with the way Dell implemented the dGPU.

 

This might not necessarily be due to performance degradation: 60 W is the long-term power limit on the 7530 and 7730 (on the 7540/7740, they appear to be unlockable, regardless of the CPU in use).

nvidia-smi is not reporting accurate data. I've been able to get instantaneous estimates of up to 20 hours (actual being around 15-16) without touching the notebook—this means an instantaneous power draw of ~5 W—in other words, nearly all power going to the display and CPU only. The dGPU ought to draw 0 W when truly inactive.

I've also got 4 DIMMs, all 3 NVMe drives populated, and screen brightness fairly up. Modern notebooks are very good at powering down what's unnecessary: just because you and I have got those RAM and SSD slots populated doesn't mean they are actively drawing much power, if at all, and data is being transferred.

Best way to properly estimate battery power draw and life is to actually discharge the battery over one entire cycle, and see how long it lasts, and polling occasionally for instantaneous power draw data. This was how I was able to procure data for this post.