Precision 7530 & Precision 7730 owner's thread

Just curious, did you get the 4-cell battery or 6-cell?

@spacetime
Shall I say I told you so regarding the schedule? (Post #571)
Glad you're enjoying your new laptop.

Ranting a little regarding Windows 10 "Pro for Workstations", that's definitely not a core count license thing, I think that it's pretty ridiculous that it is required for Xeons. The i9 and the Xeon have the same core count. It was also required for Xeons in the 7720, before 6-core was a thing. Before Windows 10 "Pro for Workstations" was available, Dell was already selling Precisions with Xeons (7710), and you could order it with plain Windows 10 Pro. All or nearly all of the advanced features that "Pro for Workstations" supports require specialized hardware not seen in the Precision or any laptop. You could order a 7730 with a Xeon and install Windows 10 Pro by yourself and it would work fine.

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft has added to their OEM agreement that "Pro for Workstations" is required on any system that ships with a workstation-class CPU (Xeon) and that is the only reason you have to spend that extra $100+. (Similarly, NVIDIA requires that "workstations" ship with Quadros so you will never see a cheaper GeForce card in a Precision, even though for many applications it would work just as good.)

 

How is the performance? zippy?

 

I got the big 6 cell battery -

451-BCFS Lithium-Ionen-Akku, 6 Zellen, 97 Wh, ExpressCharge

Regarding W10 Workstation: its basically a windows 10 pro, you even install a default 10 pro, yet after acitvation it wants a reboot and then offers more features like ReFS, better SMB and extended hardware support for the XEONs... so just a 100 bucks more to MS, but in my case the xeon 2186m was even cheaper than the big i9 - so it was at nearly the same price in the end. And I got my ECC ram - its just 2400 instead of 2666 but I dont expect big differences in real world performance here. Heck, my local fujitsu workstation has a 2100 ECC as it was the fastest ECC at that time....

 

thx a lot for this. I cant measure the temperature myself, yet my fingers tell me its defenitely over the 41 degrees you get.... and your performance on battery got never reached by my unit - on AC its the same;

Yet, I got an AMD gfx and you nvidia... wonder if that could affect it

 

After several hours with keyboard and mouse connected to the Dock and BIOS on 1.3.7, the keyboard stutter just reappeared. It seems less often, but still not gone...

 

Dell will now also replace my dock. Hopefully it will be here tomorrow.

 

ReFS is supported in regular Windows 10 Pro, doesn't require "Pro for Workstations"... (Though, truly, since maybe version 1703 you have to add a registry entry to allow formatting on a non-Storage Spaces volume, you can mount and use an existing partition without jumping through any hoops)

The advanced "SMB Direct" feature requires that the network adapter support RDMA. The Intel LAN adapter in the Precision 7730 and the Realtek LAN adapter in the dock do not support this.

Not sure what "extended hardware support for the Xeons" means. This may be true for "server" Xeons which have some additional capabilities, but the mobile ones don't have anything that the Core i7/i9's don't except for support for ECC memory, and vPro which is missing from some of the Core CPUs, neither of these require "Pro for Workstations".

 

Oh, and with workstation you will not get candy crush installed !!!

joke aside - its just a pro where MS squeezes out more money, but since the xeon was nearly the amount cheaper than the 10 pro workstation costs extra I didnt really care....

 

Disabled "C states" in the BIOS a few hours ago.

Without changing anything else - still on 1.3.7 - I didn't get keyboard stutter since.

 

Please keep us updated... I might try this next time I reboot...