Precision 7720 Owner's Thread

Just picked up a refurbished 7720 (i7-7920, P3000) but it has a 1TB 5.4k HDD. I am going to replace that with a Samsung 960 NVME M.2 drive, and install Windows 10 pro fresh on the new drive. Anyone experience any issues with doing a fresh install of Win 10 (non Dell factory image) on their 7720? I've done some searching, but haven't come across anything other than people cloning factory Dell images onto new M.2 drives. That seems to be pretty sealess, but wondering if I should expect any driver issues or such?

Thanks and regards.

 

Doing a clean install is no big deal. Nearly all of the needed drivers will be pulled in automatically via Windows Update, so just run that once you get the system online. The only one that I can think of that you will want to look at installing manually is the touchpad driver (otherwise you don't get the GUI control panel for the touchpad). And maybe the freefall sensor driver if it is showing up as an "unknown device" in Device Manager (I think that it is also in Windows Update now though, it wasn't for a while).

If you have the system set to RAID mode for the disk controller, you might have to provide an Intel Rapid Storage "F6" driver to the Windows installer before it can "see" the drive to install Windows on. This won't be an issue if the system is set to AHCI mode.

[Edit]
Oh, also download the most up-to-date BIOS.

 

Not interested in a raid config, so will be AHCI. Maybe I should do a practice run with an older 2.5" SATA SSD before I install the new M.2 drive.

The Win 10 forced driver install is what I'm most worried about. LOL. Tends to overwrite any manual 'manufacturer' driver installs on next update anyway. Still haven't found anyway to avoid that with my M6700. Was interested to know if the Win 10 forced updates treat a manufacturer image any different from a clean Win install on a 7720. The Dell support page suggests installing the Dell chipset driver after a clean install.

Thanks for answering.

 

Honestly, this laptop is pretty amazing. I have it paired with a Gigabyte Aorus 1080 Thunderbolt and use it primarily for Coding, Security, and Gaming.

Can anyone comment on the 4k Screen. Couple of questions:

1. How is the quality of the screen?
2. How effective would you say to partition a 17" 4k Monitor into 4 1080p Monitors
3. Can you use the Screen from the 7710?
4. What's required for the swap from the 900p Screen?

Thanks In advance!

 

Has anyone gone for the WX 7100 option? I'd be using this under linux, so going amd for the open source driver stack is appealing. Any heat issues?

 

No heat issues with the WX-7100 and it works well, but Nvidia seems to have the better supported drivers right now.

 

Have you poked at it in linux? It sounds like the amdgpu driver is in a place where things should pretty much just work for most amd card, but I could see the workstation card being a separate beast.

 

nVidia has better drivers for CUDA/OpenCL support. The AMD stuff is easier/better for gaming because you don't have to install proprietary drivers. It's all in kernel. The open source AMD drivers don't support OpenCL ATM and having both installed can be a PITA. If you aren't going to be doing compute, CUDA or OpenCL AMD is the way to go.

 

Have you tried the WX-7100 with VR? I tried with the Samsung Odyssey and had flashing screens both on headset and laptop.

 

I have tried it with an Oculus Rift, but not the Samsung. The CPU and RAM requirements from Samsung are pretty beefy - "AMD Radeon Pro WX 7100. In terms of CPU, you’ll need an Intel Core i7 or Xeon E3-1240 v5 or better, along with 16GB of RAM"