Precision 7720 Owner's Thread

I'm on my 5th replacement from Dell. Gone through three 7710 and now two 7720. Also several motherboard and gpu replacements along the way. When will this machine be stable?

1. When graphics goes to sleep, the machine crashes and restarts back to Windows 10 login screen. Only happens with switchable graphics on. I have dual 4k monitors on TB16 dock and configured BIOS to run external displays with the Nvidia P4000. This occurs every time machine sleeps and is not random. Tried graphics drivers from Dell, Nvidia, and Windows Update and it occurs on all of them.
2. Displays sometimes do not wake from sleep when connected to TB16 dock via DP and mDP connections. To avoid this from happening, I connected one display to the DP port and another to a DP to Thunderbolt adapter to the Thunderbolt port on the TB16.
3. Bluetooth randomly drops connection to mouse/keyboard and I need to toggle off/on.
4. Fingerprint reader sometimes does not work on boot and I have to log into windows with password before it is recognized.

Received reimaged nvme drive from Dell, same issues. Did a fresh install of windows rather than the Dell image with same issues.

 

Have you tried the conventional dock? The connection ports are all directly extended from notebook and not through emulation like TB16. I have been all the while with PR02X and not having issue. Recently I bought TB16 but gave up after few hours, it just cannot replace the old dock in video output (I am using high Hz monitor).
Somemore TB16 requires additional power supply at the 77x0 itself so it is not convenient.

 

This sounds very much like a problem I had - it would go full blue screen when the system went to sleep. If I turned off sleep mode, no problems - when I set it to go to sleep after 30 minutes, blue screen, and never when I was actually using it. I analyzed the kernel dumps to blame the P4000 GPU as the culprit, and after multiple calls to tech support, they sent a tech over to replace the GPU, and never a problem since.

 

You have exactly the 7720 I have, except I have a single 2TB Samsung gumstick. In my previous post, I mentioned that the GPU was causing the system to crash in exactly the way that you describe. The way I diagnosed this was to install Windows Debugger, which had the ability to read the C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP files that Windows generates when it bluescreens. Every crash dump involved the nVidia driver making some power-related API call. After that it was just a simple matter to convince the Dell technicians that they needed to send a person over and install a new GPU... OK, that was not really so simple, but that was the solution to my issue.

On a completely unrelated issue, I was running 4-5 VMs on this laptop - a development database server, a test/QA VM I'd use to update a spreadsheet, several Development VMs... and when I'd step through the code inside one of those VMs, the performance was excruciatingly slow. Even though the RAM is there, these laptop processors REALLY don't like switching between all these VMs. Now, I have only one VM running at any one time and another to spin up for presentations, and everything else is installed right there in the host OS. This really helped my productivity

I have this thing docked to a normal Dell Dock, not the TB16, and I actually find it pretty stable and problem-free. The fingerprint reader doesn't seem anywhere as usable as the fingerprint reader on my aircraft carrier laptop (an old HP EliteBook 8770), but I keep the lid closed most of the time anyways, so it's not a big deal to me.

 

Dell has pulled out bios 1.90 from their website. 1.84 is the latest now.

 

Similarly, they pulled 1.15.4 from the 7510/7710... I imagine from Intel claiming that their Spectre/Meltdown CPU microcode patch has issues causing undesired reboots.

 

With the PR02X dock I don't recall having any issues, but I can only drive dual 4k monitors at 30hz which is unusable.

This is very promising. I always knew it was GPU related but this confirmation is great. The machine is going to Dell advanced resolution center tomorrow where they are going to replace the GPU. If that doesn't work then they are going to build me another new machine. I also have an issue which my 7710 had, with a line of hot pixels at the bottom of the screen, only visible with the switchable graphics turned off. Attached is photo that shows this line when doing the display test.

 

I had them pull a bios update last year when I reported an issue with the graphics and their engineers confirmed. It was removed the next day. I wonder if my case I reported yesterday to the REC may have caused them to pull that bios.

 

Pretty sure things have been coming at them from all sides causing them to pull that BIOS. We installed it on four machines and (at least) two of them are now experiencing periodic BSODs. Intel has explicitly told everyone to halt rolling out the update until they can get a fixed (and more well-tested) version out.

 

Interesting. I'm running the 1.90 BIOS on my 7720 with no issues. Well, not any more than the usual interface stutters due to MS' botched hybrid graphics stack with Optimus systems, and randomly delayed system sounds. System feels like a $500 bargain-basement system, but otherwise it's fine...