Precision 7550 & 7750 Owners' Thread

So my 7750 came in today.



First Impressions.

It's running warm even when completely idle, the part between the hinge and keyboard. Must be all that V8 power under the hood. Or is GPU the culprit in this case?
Camera has a mechanical shutter, which is a nice touch. Pretty slick charger.
Everything works smoothly so far, haven't tried to set up the finger print reader yet, but I think Ubuntu 18.04 doesn't support it by default, so I need to wait for my SSD that arrives later today and install Ubuntu 20.04.
The bottom has the SSD door, presence of which was debated earlier on this thread. The bay is empty, so the default SSD must be in another slot, so I guess I'll just keep it there as it is in the even of warranty.
Something annoying - if I suspend Ubuntu, when power button is pressed it just reboots, gotta figure that part out.

EDIT: Surprisingly, 200% scaling seems to be perfect, something I was concerned about, because on my 27 inch 4K displays I have fractional 138% scaling (Unity).

 

Not sure what the situation is with graphics switching on Linux. In BIOS setup you can turn graphics switching on or off. If it is off, then the dGPU will be active all of the time and that will make a little bit more heat.

 

Presumably it will also decimate battery life.

 

Under a llight load the dGPU should be only consuming around 4-5W, so it will impact the battery life but you should still be able to get a few hours out of it.

 

That would be amazing. Assuming this is the mobile RTX 3000, it has a bit lower TDP than my 2070 MaxQ which draws min 8W + spikes to 15-30W and consequently higher average. Basically, the dGPU doubles the total system power draw under light use and thus halves the battery life.

 

@etern4l is right; Linux and NVIDIA have never played nice, and proper, Windows-esque Optimus support was only recently implemented in Linux. Furthermore, non-Turing GPUs still don't switch off entirely when applications aren't running on the GPU, and even with a Turing GPU, D3 power management is buggy: my RTX 5000 has not worked properly. While I see 8-9 hours of light use on Windows with Optimus enabled, I see around half that in Linux, and total system power draw is typically between 15-20 W.

@etern4l, have you tried enabling runtime D3 power management?

 

My anecdote was Windows-based. I hope I've had this enabled by way of setting Nvidia Power management mode to "Optimal power".

 

Guys, those of you who run Ubuntu, or other linux flavor, do you know how to Suspend/Resume properly? When I suspend the power button just starts the laptop as it was turned off.

 

On my Quadro M5000M I have found that the NVIDIA GPU operates at a lower level if you leave that setting at the default, "Optimal power" causes it to clock up more.

 

Optimal power is the default setting for me (445.87 driver). The other feasible options would be Adaptive or Nvidia-driver controlled. It's strange that the latter is not the default. Can't really find a decent description of these 3 options...