Precision 7720 Owner's Thread

I got a 7710 refurb which I'm trying to decide whether to keep, or wait for the 7730 later this year.
Any opinions on whether this is a good deal?
I7-6820HQ
2x8GB ram
1TB 7200 rpm drive
3840x2160 display
3 year warranty
NVIDIA Quadro M3000M 4GB GDDR5
$1300 + tax

 

Upgrade to 4k Resolution.

Has anyone upgraded their Precision 7720 from the 900p Screen, to the 4k Screen? If anyone has, can they tell me what parts are required for the change?

-Precision 7720
-1600 x 900p
-WX4130 dGPU
-I also have an external eGPU of which I game on, so I'm not worrying to much about gaming performance at that resolution.

From what I've searched, the 4k Screen utilizes a 40 pin eDP and the 900p screen uses the 30 pin eDP.

 

I am using TB16 in the office for 7720. I observed after booting into windows welcome screen, it takes close to 10 seconds before the keyboard is recognized and responsive. It doesn't happen to conventional dock where the keyboard is working immediately. Anyone facing the same issue?

 

This seems to be normal, unfortunately. The display component of the dock seems to be usable immediately, but the USB component (which also includes the additional ports like Ethernet and audio, they are USB devices inside the dock) takes a few seconds after bootup to start working...

The conventional dock is just an extension of the system so the ports work just like ports right on the laptop. There seems to be some negotiation that has to happen before the separate USB controller in the TB16 dock activates.

 

Ouch, that is pretty annoying, it just simply adds unnecessary 10 seconds boot up time.
I have not tested, does it have enough time to press F2 enter bios or F10 with external keyboard when the system bootup?

 

Interesting. I don't have a tb dock. is that delay you mentioned only on cold bootup?

How about on a restart or wakeing from sleep? Would keyboard via tb dock allow f2 during a restart? Would keyboard via tb dock wake a sleeping and docked laptop?

I enter bios infrequently but would be an annoyance having to open a closed and docked laptop just to enter and then navigate bios.

 

I don't know if I've ever tried to use a USB keyboard/mouse to access the BIOS. For my work system, I have both docks connected currently (TB16 and ePort), and the input devices are connected to the ePort dock.

That said, I don't think that you would be able to use any USB devices attached to the dock before Windows boots. You have to grant permission for the dock to be used before anything aside from the displays work, and that happens with the Thunderbolt software within Windows. (There's good reason for this, Thunderbolt is an extension of the PCIe bus, and a malicious device could potentially crash the system or access system memory. The attached displays don't use the PCIe interface, but everything else does, or rather everything else is attached to a USB controller in the dock that itself is attached via PCIe.)

The delay at startup isn't an issue for me. I reboot like once every other week, waiting a few seconds isn't a big deal. I haven't experimented with sleep/hibernate, but I suspect there would be a delay of a few seconds there as well.

 

I wonder if these TB options in BIOS would change that behavior. @iieeann you could try experiment with these settings. Be aware of security issue Aaron mentioned.



two screen captures so I could scroll the text shown.

I was always curious what all this bios stuff about tb meant.

 

I haven't messed with the settings in the BIOS, though I have seen them. I suspect the one about pre-boot modules would allow you to use dock-attached USB keyboards/etc. to access the BIOS.

 

Yes any reboot will have to wait for the extra 10s. I move my laptop few times a day, so this is a big deal for me. Anyhow only office is using TB16, i could anytime replace it with PR02X, I have 4 of them in total. I use TB16 just because i have bought it out of interest and do not want to leave it idle, but if it is not making any good for me, then might as well replace it with something better.