Dell 17r N7720 SE - user review

I believe getting that adapter means you got the video card with DDR3 memory.

 

The PSU wattage has nothing to do with the GPU memory speed. All 17R SE models have the same GT650m card with 2gigs of DDR5 memory.

If you have an i5 processor, you get a 90W PSU. The i7 configurations get the 130W PSU to handle the extra power draw. You will not get a speed boost, lower temperatures or any other benefits by using a 130W PSU with your i5 laptop. Arguably, if you somehow managed to cool your laptop well enough to do some major overclocking, you might need the beefier PSU, but my bet is you'll hit the built in temperature limits before maxing out your PSU.

If you check a couple of posts back on this thread, it's been reported that even the i7 model will not draw over 100W.

 

i would DEFINITELY GO FOR a 130W adapter......to say nothing else is pure rubbish.

(YES...it has nothing to do with GPU memory).......it just give you more among of current and that you need especially when you play 1080p HIGH shader-games with turbo bost (cpu) and turbo mode (gpu) kicking in.

i use a 130W adapter to my OCd 9400 and also to my SXPS16.....................WAY BETTER !

 

Well the i5 model has a 35 watt CPU versus the i7 model with the 45 watt one. You cant OC the CPU other than turbo boost and the GPU OC wouldnt be enough to warrant the 130 watt adapter on the i5 model. Keep in mind that 35 watt is the max TPD of the i5 and that should be the most watts it would ever draw. It will probably stay around 25 watt during most games. 90 watts should be plenty for the i5 model. 130 is probably overkill for the i7 model seeing as how it would only draw 10 extra watts on the worst case scenario.

 

Insufficient power being provided to the system is often the cause of random lockups.

 

A Dell engineer has been today to install a new DVD drive and it still looks to the DVD drive when playing MP4's and AVI's off the hard drives. It also does it when opening Dell support centre.

The Dell engineer checked everything and couldn't help but agreed it was an error.

Dell Inida have just rang saying it may be in a further BIOS update or I may need a new motherboard.

Not good.

 

Did you try re-installing windows at least before doing that service call to Dell? It might be hardware related, but it can also be well software related, and the only way would be to do a fresh install of windows 7... i guess this would be the best thing to do... and by a fresh install, i mean NOT a crappy Dell recovery... i mean a real install from the Windows 7 DVD.

 

Yes I did a clean install and upgraded to a SSD at the same time. No change. I tested it with no software except clean W7 from DVD. No change.

 

New Nvidia Graphic driver out today and installed.

I am back up to a windows experience of 7.2.

Download and enjoy.

 

Strange, reading the release notes, it seems they only added official Win8 support and updated some 3d profiles / SLI support. You'd expect they would mention tweaking general performance... Although, wasn't 7.2 the standard of the Dell supplied drivers, before v306.23 lowered the win exp score?

 

you mean 306.97 ?

 

My i5 uses up to 20 W when playing modern FPS (with NPCs etc), about half of TDP. Unless you are stressing CPU to the max, there is no need for more powerful adapter, although it does not hurt. My 7720 with i5 drew nearly 100 W in total when pushed (FurMark + Prime, 130 W PSU), but since it had audio hardware issues, this might have been some sort of bug.

 

oohh man..........i have a sxps.16 with LESS CPU power use and i "feel" the difference when i plug in my 130W adapter vs 90W.


DELL and many other PC company's have always ship to small adapters to people. the screen, cpu, gpu, hard drive, etc, need more current then just 90W in high shader 1080p games.....

(im not talking about average usage of your PC here...im talking when you play for ex BF3 in 1080p and all eye candy enabled!

 

Will our Dell inspiron 17r SE be able to play the future games like GTA V , Assassins Creed 3 , Far Cry 3 ,Dishonored , Call of Duty: Black Ops II .?

Plz reply ...

 

It should be able to run those games, probably not at the highest graphics settings, but it should be playable over 30fps i am sure.

 

Yes, but certainly not on max settings. Maybe all low at 1080P and maybe you will get 60 FPS.

 

Black ops i play easily with 50 fps in 1080p.
If you can play bf3 in 1080p with a fps at 35-40. You play most new games

 

How many use latest nvidia driver ??

Is it better then last (crappy) one ?

Fps in games vs xxx.02 ??

 

I am running the 306.97 downloaded yesterday and yes it is better. Can't tell you Fps in gaming, but in video editing the frame rate is much improved.

I just need that DVD drive fixing. They are coming on Monday with a new BUS they say.

 

With the new drivers my index went from 6.9 to 7.2. Not Bad.

 

Ok I'm new to the form and I did some checking and found out that the BIOS for some reason I'm guessing the BIOS or Maybe it's the processor.
The photos are the dell Inspiron 5720 17r at Cosco i73620qm and 7720 se i73610QM at dell.com. And the dell 7720 se windows experience score .
The score is Higher on all but the memory calculations witch on the 5720 is 7.9 and you can see the difference on the memory tests.
I'm not happy with this and the fact the Dell does not support more than
8 GBs witch it comes with.

Can you find a third party bios and where?
That might help the memory speed and capacity for the 7720 SE?

 

How is the HD display on the Inspiron 17r SE as compared to the FHD display on the HP-DV6 7000 .?

Read everywhere and seems that people are praising it a lot for how good the display on the dv6-7000 are .?

How does the HD display on the Inspiron 17r SE compare to it in terms of brightness and contrast .?

 

come on now, dont double post. I answered your question in the other thread.

 

i went back to 306.02...............new driver gave me 4-5 less fps in bf3.

 

Hi can you guys game on your battery??? Mine starts stuttering in battery mode.

 

Check your power profile settings in Windows. By default, battery mode has different settings for CPU and GPU throttling, meaning it's going to behave differently (worse) running on battery power.

 

Hi there,

Just got mine and tried to create recovery discs. Sadly the notebook rejected multiple DVD+RW from same type (TDK DVD+RW 1-4). Those are as old as my old notebook (7 years). Can the age be a reason or is that drive too picky? Anybody with similar experience out there?

 

I had no luck with DVD's.

Success with USB flash drive instead.

 

Hi Guys,

Just wondering, my laptop takes about 35 seconds for my Windows desktop--not fully loaded--to show up after pressing the power button. Is this a normal time frame? If not, what adjustments are there to make the loading faster? Thanks!

 

If you don't have an mSata drive, buy one and accelerate your HDD. Or better, buy an SSD and install windows on this new SSD... boot under 10sec...

Nothing much to do with an HDD for boot times if you don't have an mSata SSD or a real SSD.

 

How much Battery time do you get for Wi-Fi browsing , Lowest brightness .?

 

I had Success with the Memorex 8.5 double layered with the data safe backup.

 

My boot time is only about 8 to 9 seconds with the mSATA drive and rapid start takes about 5 sec to boot up from hibernation and about 20 seconds for the shut down into hybrid nation.
It was a pain to set up the partitions. But I'm sure you could set it up on even on secondary drive or even set the rapid start on a true solid-state drive if you were to partition correctly with the disk utility windows .
I plan on getting a solid-state drive and partitioning so I can use the solid-state drive for the rapid start and boot windows from it. Then use the mSATA drive to enhance the secondary drive which mine actually came with a Bracket for a secondary drive.

 

Can we create a separate thread for just the benchmarks for various games of the 17r SE .?

 

Also if we have an unlocked BIOS in the future could the GPU boost bug be solved .?

 

Most likely it's not exactly a bug, but a safety feature. This is why I've stopped asking about it.

 

The card in it's supplied configuration is listed (in it's firmware) as supporting a boost of up to 835 MHz - but the boost is permanently disabled after an AC disconnect, requiring a full shutdown, AC Disconnect, AC Reconnect, and Reboot before operating again.

That's definately sounding like a bug

It makes sense for the boost to disable under strenuous circumstances (hight temps, for example) - but it should definately trigger again once temps come back down rather than requiring the whole process as above...

The slightly irritating thing about it is that the boost (which is over 10%) makes a significant difference in FPS for most games, especially when played in stereoscopic mode... Arkham City is a good example...

Just wish Dell would supply a bit of official feedback about it

 

Does anyone know how to make stereoscopic 3d sbs movies like an .mkv file work on this computer? I have the 17r with the 3d screen. Thanks.

 

I know what how it "works", I'm one of the first to write about this and document the problem. Still, it's minor. Maybe at some point Dell will fix it, but I would rather have it working as it does now, then not working at all with system shutdown like some other manufacturers have.

 

@c_man Yeah, guess it is better than nothing... I'm in the habit of a doing a full shut-down, un-plug and start-up every time I want to game since I use the machine for work and run frequently on batteries. A bit annoying but at least start-up times on this awesome machine are fast.

@guitarlifter Cyberlink PowerDVD (included with the machine) will play SBSes. Drag-and-drop the MKV onto the player. Just make sure you've done the standard 'Enable 3D Vision' (via the start menu shortcut) once.
BTW: 3D movies look awesome on this machine!

 

Ok then. I tried to do it, and it the program just keeps on crashing. The weirder thing is that when I even try to play a regular, non-3D MKV file in PowerDVD, it still thinks it's a 3D movie and crashes. Thoughts? Is it a settings issue or what?

 

Odd indeed; working nicely on my side... Check if there're updates available for your version of PowerDVD? (It'll usually automatically notify you on starting up PowerDVD if you're connected to the Internet)

 

Sorry about that. At that time I could not find any other way to solve it and after, I just moved on.

 

King is dead. Long live the king! One 7720 returned to the factory, a new one arrived with i7 instead of i5. No problems with sound this time around. I'm a bit puzzled about overheating though. During 3DMark tests temperatures reach high 60s, when playing STALKER Clear Sky in full HD, they hover around 80*C mark. However, when pushed to the max running Furmark, the temperature rises quickly, tiny artefacts appear here and there and upon touching 90*C, GPU downclocks to 770 MHz, then CPU gets throttled down to 1000 MHz, then to 800 MHz and a few seconds later the whole laptop starts to behave erratically and shuts down. Can anyone else replicate this issue? Cheers! Interestingly, no problems in games and other 3D applications. 99% CPU trick works fine.

 

One more thing. The laptop arrived with Samsung M8 1 TB 5400 rpm drive instead of Seagate 750 GB 7200 rpm. Subjectively, it is slightly slower, particularly under heavy, multi-access load. On the other hand the drive is quieter and does not vibrate/hum like Seagate. I don't mind lower performance since SSD will be added shortly.

Oh, there is a nice 7720 with 3D screen, mSATA and dual 7200 rpm drives going for about 760 quid at the moment at UK Outlet. Been sitting there since yesterday.

 

Well I have 9.6. Why would Dell give mean outdated version when 12 is out? I'll just download that and install it. We'll see what happens there. Does that sound logical?

 

Running MSI Kombustor, I can slowly push the GPU temperatures to the 90C mark. At that point, I see the GPU downclocking intermittently to 770 MHz and back up to 835Mhz as it tries to cool down. Also, it seems GPU utilization intermittently drops down from full 99% usage. I've left it like this for about 30mins and get no artefacts or erratic behaviour. I definitely wouldn't expect a shutdown. As far as I can see, the system is designed to downclock and avoid going over 90C, and should be stable even at this temperature. Anyone else can confirm this?

 

I had the Dell engineer back out to try and fix my problem with the DVD drive being activated all the time and even with a new BUS and dvd the problem still exisits. The engineer has given up and the file is closed. I apparently will be contacted by Dell shortly.

These 7720's don't seem very reliable. What will I be offered when Dell rings?

 

You have thermal problems. Most likely due to bad paste. Games are far less demanding then Furmark. 99% trick works as the CPU will never boost to full power.

 

i never reach over 72C (on some core) on my i7 in max gaming BF3 (GPU around 60C) !!!!!!!!!

thats the meaning of new applied ARTIC SILVER 5....yeh man ! :thumbsup: