Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

No registry trick, it's not up to Windows to enable or block undervolting. It might be possible to work around by adjusting an undocumented BIOS setting. I'm investigating this on the 7530 tomorrow but I'm not sure if any success will translate to the 7X50/7X60 where the CPUs have been locked out of undervolting since the systems launched.

 

I've been having some good luck with GPU-P, and I wanted to share my experiences. tl;dr: My Hyper-V VM is getting at least 35-37fps with full sound and an XBox GamePad controller through a normal UDP connection to the VM and a minimum of software to install.

This guide is all about getting GPU-P running inside a Hyper-V Virtual Machine, along with a few steps to optimize the experience. There are some very valid reasons for needing to keep your gaming isolated to a VM - primarily, it prevents anything that game might do to the operating system from interfering with your workspace. In other words, the VM here is a persistent sandboxed environment, but fully provisioned for a halfway decent game experience. Being generous, it's probably half the performance of not installing it in a VM, but for many, that's good enough. Note that this guide relies a bit on owning a wired Xbox USB gamepad.

You may have heard of GPU passthrough, which is primarily Linux hosts allocating the entire GPU to a single GPU. This is not that - this is paravirtualization, and you could set it up in about fifteen minutes on a normal Windows 10 Pro distro with Hyper-V enabled.

- Make sure both the host and VM are running Windows 10 20H2 or 21H1.
- To start with, go to Craft Computing's "Two Gamers, One GPU" video at , starting at 11:47 and continue to 21:07, with several modifications:
- At 13:10, he disables "Enhanced Sessions". Skip this step.
- At 17:53, There's no need to use filesharing to copy files from host to VM. Simply shut down the VM and mount it to your host, then:
1. Copy the C:\windows\systemt32\nv* files from the host to C:\windows\system32 on the VM
2. The driver names are not the same as discussed in the video. Instead, simply copy all folders in the FileRepository folder that start with nv from the host to the C:\Windows\System32\HostDriverStore\FileRepository on the VM (after making the folder structure, as the video prompts you to do)
3. Unmount the drive.

By this point, you should be able to activate the VM, and see your laptop GPU in the Display Adapters of the VM. Note that you need to enable set a password on the user account, enable Remote Desktop on the VM, and then create and save an RDP session on the laptop host, as connecting directly from Hyper-V Manager disrupts the ability to use a GamePad.

When connecting with an Enhanced Session, you can hear sound very well. However, if you try to play an FPS shooter, you will quickly notice the limitations of the mouse movements - VMs receive mouse updates via absolute positioning rather than relative positioning, which means video games won't really work with that. Thus, we need to be able to plug an XBox GamePad into the notebook and be able to see it on the VM. To do this, follow this guide:

https://github.com/microsoft/RdpGamepad

Finally, RDP is normally locked to 30 fps flat. I personally didn't see more than a 5-8 fps improvement with this, but that can make a difference. Follow this guide to set a registry key within the VM itself:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-US/troubleshoot/windows-server/remote/frame-rate-limited-to-30-fps

For light and moderate gaming, the above should be fine. This is just a summary of my experiences playing with my 7760 Precision today, and testing with one graphically intensive game, it seemed to work pretty well.

P.S.: For those who want 100% native gaming performance and 90% of the isolation of a VM, check out Sandboxie Plus @ https://sandboxie-plus.com/

 

Does anyone else get screen tearing when running the display off the dGPU? the iGPU doesn't seem to cause tearing

 

What application(s) are you getting tearing in? Are you running in mixed mode (hybrid graphics on + external display attached to dGPU)?
(I'm running two displays off of the RTX A2000 with hybrid graphics disabled, no tearing here...)

 

My 7560 has been built and shipped.

I will run CineBench R15 and R23, the complete 3DMark suite from Fire Strike up, as well as Unigine Valley, Heaven, and Superposition. As for game benchmarks: I have Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, Anno: 1800, Civilisation VI, Metro Exodus.

I will run everything with V-Sync disabled, at 1080p Ultra, and G-Sync disabled, at 1440p High. I will likely customise settings for RDR2, as there are some settings that absolutely hammer the framerates for zero visual benefit, and will be turned down appropriately.

 

Nevermind, it was because I turned hardware acceleration off in Firefox (to try to get the dGPU to turn off, but that didn't work)

 

Fan speed observations (with a particular emphasis on getting the system to stay consistently quiet)

I mentioned in a few prior posts how this system has much more granular fan control than previous Precision systems. Previous systems had five or six discrete fan speeds and you could hear when the system ramped up or down to a different level than it was previously running at. This system is able to smoothly transition the fan speed up and down.

I care a lot about the fan staying quiet, or if it's not going to be quiet, to be consistently "pretty quiet" and not drastically changing. That's the whole reason why I wrote my fan control software, really. I was annoyed with this since I first got my Precision M6700, nine years ago. This system running an idle workload likes to alternate the fans between "off" and "≈2500 RPM", and when it turns the fans on, they make a big whirring noise, briefly running faster than the target fan speed. Quite distracting to me (sensorimotor OCD here). They would cycle on and off every, say, 8 minutes or so. I was eventually satisfied when I found a way to keep the fans running at the 2500 RPM speed and just never shut off. Newer systems that I have tested would not run the fans at any speed below around 2300 RPM (unless they were off) and they would also have this off/on cycle under an idle/moderate workload.

In order to keep the system quiet, I run with the CPU turbo boost disabled most of the time. The CPU speed is capped at around 2.5 GHz, totally adequate for office work and light/moderate software development & database work. If I do need the extra CPU power for a big compute or database job, I can just enable turbo boost while I need it and let the fans run wild. (You can set Windows up so that turbo boost can easily be enabled or disabled with the power slider. Additionally, I have software on my personal[/non-work] system that will automatically enable turbo boost and adjust the thermal mode when certain programs run — for a gaming session, for example, where I'd be wearing ANC headphones so fan noise wouldn't matter anyway.)

So, after testing for a while, I can say a lot of good things about the Precision 7560 with regards to the fan behavior. First of all, I can't even hear the fans over the ambient noise level when they are running below around 1700-1800 RPM, unless I purposefully put my ear right next to the chassis. With turbo boost disabled, for an "office" workload I am finding that the system likes to keep the fans somewhere between 950 RPM and 1400 RPM, so, perfect. Occasionally they turn off but I can't hear when they power back on either. And, in this configuration it's pretty hard to get the system fans up to an audible level if you're not purposefully loading the CPU.

For a test, I ran Prime95 with the system set to "quiet" mode and turbo boost disabled. After a minute or so, the fans leveled off at around 2600 RPM (audible but still pretty quiet). CPU utilization was pegged at a full 16 threads, and the CPU temperature barely went above 70 °C. That's a pretty extreme case. I haven't even heard a peep from the fans as I go about my daily work, even with compilation jobs or SQL work that occasionally hits the CPU pretty good. I'm not feeling the need for fan control software. The system is actually running so quietly that when the workday is done and I go back to my Precision M6700 (running fans at 2500 RPM), I now think that it is "loud". (Can't wait to replace it with Precision 7770, and I hope that they don't goof up the system fan control in that one.)

An exception...
I have noticed that like previous systems, the fans seem to react to an increase in the PCH temperature, even though (I believe) the fans can't actually cool the PCH. An example of this would be, if I just start a full gigabit network transfer or a big disk transfer, even with CPU utilization and temperature being quite low, the system thinks that it needs to run the fans up to around 2500 RPM.

I do feel that the surface temperature of this system is on the high side. The keyboard is on the warm side, especially near the top (number row and up). Not especially bothersome to me. The "hot" CPU and GPU chips are on the bottom side of the motherboard, which is probably a good idea. (Prior to Precision 7X50, they were on the top side of the motherboard.) The aluminum bottom panel gets quite hot.


For the most extreme case, with Prime95 running, the system in "performance" mode, and turbo boost enabled, then fans will run up to a maximum speed of around 4800 RPM and the CPU temperature is unbalanced (some cores hit 100 °C and others stay in the upper 80's). It takes about a minute for the system to decide to ramp up to the maximum fan speed when a big CPU load starts, and about 30 seconds for it to decide to go back down to a "quiet" level when the load is removed. Also nice because prior systems would run the fans for a long time after the CPU load stopped... My Precision M6700 will sometimes wait 10 minutes before letting the fan speed drop back down to the lowest level after ending a gaming session.

 

From one fan obsessed user to another, I second the assessment of the system's fan noise. I actually got a Precision 7540 partly because I knew your fan control software was available!

Overall, I completely agree with @Aaron44126 regarding noise. The one thing I will add is my anecdotal experience with the pitch of the fans in the 7760. Fan noise is one thing, but high pitch or irregular/inconsistent fan noise frequency is what drives me crazy. In my quiet office, my mind will obsess over it to the point I can't get anything else done. I tried a Razer Blade Pro last year and it took all of 35 minutes for me to nope right out of the machine because the sound of air moving through the grill on the bottom of the laptop absolutely infuriated me. I've even gone so far as to try and replace laptop fans with non-oem components that happened to fit (see my Tornado F5 fan mod thread...) My previous daily driver (Area 51m R2) actually had 51m R1 fans installed because Dell changed the supplier between revisions and the spindle sound of the R2 fans bugged me compared to the R1.

I must say, the 7760 is an acoustic dream machine for me. Even when the fans are on and could be described as on the 'loud' side in terms of volume, it sounds like air moving with a low pitch rather than whistling, pulsing, or motors grinding as is the case with so many other devices. I ultimately sold my 7540 not because the sound was too loud in absolute terms, but because the harmonics of the fans bugged me, even at their lowest speed. In contrast, I cannot even hear the fans in the 7760 most of the time and when they need to spin faster, the frequency and profile of the sound is the least offensive I have ever heard. Obviously this is just my experience, but for what its worth...I am more pleased with this 7760 than I have been with any other notebook in a long time.

Two other comments on the topic of noise:
- This is also the first Dell device I've had in a while where I do not perceive any coil whine. I'll keep listening, but so far so good.
- The spacebar squeaks really bad after a day of typing. Every. Single. Press. As if the new layout and missing nipple mouse weren't bad enough, they had to carry over the squeaky keyboard from the XPS line...

 

I noticed a little bit of squeak to the keyboard spacebar after a few days of use as well. It actually seems to have gone away after another couple of days. Not sure what to make of it...

 

I too have this - atlhough I've not used my machine all that much yet so it might bed in. If it continues after the machine has been 'run in' then I'll be doing a support request for it - it's not going to be suitable in the long term.