Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

You most likely already checked this, but just in case, did you check to make sure that none of the drives were disabled in the BIOS?

 

It's the little things that are the biggest PITA...

The trackpad is definitely better than my XPS 15 7590, and also better than a Latitude 7490. Going back to a "stickier" trackpad feels bad.

It allows me to change the voltage curves (for undervolting), and I think it works, but I can't confirm since the wattages and voltages are all over the place, making it very hard to compare.

It took a lot of trouble moving the connector around, but after the first time, lifting on the handle easily removed the connector.

Needless to say, that scared the living crap out of me

Ha... I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by that

Hm mine was in the PCIE 4 slot (the SSD door slot), though I got the 2280 SSD, not the 2230 with the rationale being the 2280 drive is probably a bit faster than the 2230 drive, and I do plan on using the stock drive for extra storage.

 

Here are some more thoughts on performance: I have had my 7760 for a bit over 2 weeks.
So far, performance is exceptional and I am able to work on models in Blender that I wouldn't even dream of working on with my XPS 15 7590.

CPU: The CPU performance is "very good", but not exceptional. However, you can't really expect more for a laptop right now. Using high poly beveled objects as well as complex booleans in Blender does leave a bit of CPU performance to be desired (a 5 second lag with moving and going into edit mode with objects), but it's not terrible.

GPU: Fortunately, the GPU is a slightly diffferent story. The A4000's performance is incredible, especially for a laptop, due to it being run at 115W+ (CPU idle @ 30W). Using Throttlestop to disable turbo (CPU idle @ 11-15W) makes the GPU go up to 130W.
However...... there is a catch, and that's GPU memory. 8GB ain't bad, but my WIP models take up 7.5GB of GPU memory. And that's running the display off of the iGPU. Blender can technically use out of core rendering (uses system memory to compliement GPU memory), but that instantly reduces performance by 20-30%. The A5000 would be nice... until you have to spend $1000 dollars on it. I will most likely end up getting an eGPU later on with lots of memory.

A side note about video editing: Once you remove a dimension and move into the 2D world of video editing, the tables turn. In Davinci Resolve (heavily GPU accelerated), it's really fast in video editing. And I'm talking about smooth scrubbing in 30 minute long projects with tens of layers and effects. 8GB of VRAM is realistically all you will need for video editing, and the CPU is good enough for intensive particle effects.

Conclusion: For the same price (MSRP), you can build a PC that is roughly twice as fast. However, I really do appreciate the convenience of being able to carry my files and projects around with me, as well as the whole laptop being nice to use in general (keyboard, trackpad, speakers, display, IR Cam, etc.). And it's not like the 7760 is slow; it's fast for a laptop and for a desktop.

 

The most annoying thing about this is: Win Pro 10 for Workstation was an extra cost on top of the hardware, and the most compelling feature it has over plain Win 10 Pro is the ability to format and use ReFS drives. This has some reliability features for virtualization... but ReFS does not want to format a drive it detects on a RAID controller.

 

I hope that if this issue is as pervasive as it seems to me, that they'll be able to fix it with a BIOS update or something pretty quickly...

The safe mode trick only works to go from AHCI to RAID if your Windows install has the appropriate Intel RST driver loaded already. Switching from AHCI to RAID will be more complicated for me because my Windows instance has never had the Precision 7560 Intel RST driver loaded, and the current Windows 10 in-box Intel RST driver is not new enough for this system. Nice 29-step write-up here. Not going to do it until Monday most likely.
https://gist.github.com/chenxiaolong/4beec93c464639a19ad82eeccc828c63

 

Hmm. I'm planning to try ReFS for my Q4 drive actually. I imagine that even if the GUI doesn't want to let me format the drive as ReFS, that it can be done from the command line or diskpart? We'll see once I get to that point.

 

I thought about that if you did a clean install with AHCI would the RST drivers be installed to switch back. I just switch back from AHCI to RAID and worked as easy as switching to AHCI before since I started with RAID-on. I wanted to test with CrystalDiskMark and also figured run with RAID-On since that is the default and right now I do not see a reason for me to be on AHCI. Still curious if anyone with the Samsung Drives are on RAID-on and if Magician sees the drive.

Here are some tests with each AHCI and RAID-On.

Drive is Samsung 2TB PM91A
CrystalDiskMark

In AHCI


RAID ON

 

Thanks for your feedback, I think our stories can definitely benefit people who choose to buy the RAM separately!

Two other, minor items:
- The USB driver drive Dell ships doesn't seem to be bootable at all - it's not a Windows installer, it will have the drivers you need to boot with that RAID controller, however.
- For ultra security conscious folk, there's now a "Memory Encryption" option on the BIOS - although there will definitely be a performance cost, it's a nice option to have.

 

If you do a clean install, you will have to provide Intel RST drivers in order to use RAID on mode.
* If the disk controller mode is set to RAID when you start the clean install, you will have to provide Intel RST drivers to the Windows installer before it will show you any drives available to install on. This is done with the "load driver" button on the "which disk do you want to install on?" screen in the installer. You then should be good for the lifetime of that Windows install.
* If the disk controller mode is set to AHCI/NVMe when you start the clean install, you will not get an appropriate Intel RST driver installed. There will be no RAID controller device showing in Device Manager to apply the driver to. You'll have to use a method like what I linked above to switch to RAID mode later.
(...Basically the same problem if you migrate over a previous Windows install like I did.)

I'm thinking about moving the drive back to my Precision 7530, switching it to RAID mode, upgrading the driver, and then moving it back to the 7560. That would probably take care of it. Tedious, but maybe not as much as the whole registry mucking described in the directions linked above.

Windows has an in-box Intel RST driver. Presumably this will eventually be updated to a new enough version to support this system's RAID controller without having to provide a driver manually. I remember having the exact same problem with the Precision 7510 — it was a pain to switch to RAID mode if you didn't start that way — but it was eventually made a non-issue when Microsoft updated the in-box driver.

 

My replacement just went into production. How long did all of your notebooks take?