Dell G7 7700

Anyone else got a dell G7 7700? I have one with the 10750H and a 2070 Super. The thermals on this thing are abysmal and there is no way to underclock the damn thing. I havent found much info on the 2020 series so im trying to gather info on what experience other people are having with this machine

 

I was just looking at this one but with the 1660Ti as I don't really do any demanding gaming. Just really after something good and portable for regular usage but with horsepower to do on-the-go video editing when I have to. How's the screen on it, by the way?

 

So i have the 2070 super and the screen is actually pretty legit. Call of duty runs awesome however I learned you have to turn off turboboost or the laptop keeps throttling the gpu. Its stupidly annoying but once you turn it off the laptop becomes insanely power and insanely hot.

 

Hm, well, that kinda defeats the point of buying the laptop for mostly CPU-based workloads like video editing and rendering. I was kind of hoping the 1660Ti would give a bit more thermal headroom but it seems that it's the CPU itself that's inadequately cooled. I've heard some people have had success with getting undervolting to work. This was supposed to be a side-grade rather than up upgrade as it's fairly similar to my current laptop but with much better battery, keyboard and trackpad but if I'm going to be taking a step down in performance, it doesn't seem worth it.

Does it get hot even at idle or with CPU-only loads or is it only under combined loads it does that?

 

It actually idles pretty high. It idles higher than my Area 51M does and thats saying something. The undervolting on the laptop is locked by dell but im looking at a way to get around that and it requires some bios modification but people are saying once you get the undervolting going, the laptop becomes quite stable and works really good.

 

Ouch. How did they manage to screw it up so much? This is the guide I found. I haven't looked at it closely as I haven't decided to buy it yet. I'd be curious to know how you get on. I wouldn't mind losing a little bit of boost but not a lot. Annoyingly, I only have a few days to decide as there's a really good sale on that puts it at $1800AUD which would be a fairly good deal for the specs. Certainly cheaper than anything else I'd be able to find save for the Australian equivalent of the RP-17 but there are a few issues I have with that.

 

If you are ok with doing the work to get the undervolting running then it will be a good laptop and give you what you need. I'm still working on it because for some reason it wont let me boot from a usb even with secureboot off. Its very annoying

 

Not really filling me with confidence here, haha! I'll give it another day or two to do some more research and if I do get it and it's unsuitable, I'm sure I'll be able to return it. I've not got much on at the moment with the pandemic so arguing with Dell customer service is probably not the worst use of my time.

 

Honestly i can do the comparison for you. I have an Alienware Area 51M which is going full throttle with no issues. The cpu and gpu are slightly undervolted and it still runs warzone at 100 fps. Compare that to the G7 and quite honestly the G7 is trash but mine was a gift so i cant really talk that much bad about it. In my opinion it really needs to be undervolted to be used and that being locked makes it not worth the time and effort. Look into Dell Outlet and get a used one of go MSI creator series if you are looking to do content work.

 

I can confirm that the undervolt works if you follow the second half of the guide that you posted. I found it on reddit but the one you posted it written a lot more clearly.

 

Oh, really? That's great to hear. So CPU thermals are more under control now? And I know there are much better creator focused options out there but this is more to supplement a PC I'm going to build once Zen 3's out. It's far more for general use but with the capability to do some editing on-the-go when I need to which does happen.

 

So its still idling higher than expected but gaming wise its not throttling anymore. I undervolted it to -100 and even undervolted the 2070 super to about -50. FPS is a little low but i havent really fine tuned it yet. For the most part its a lot of work to get a laptop to where I want it to be because I'm holding the Area 51M as my standard and it was ready to go out of the box

 

I don't mind doing a bit of work to save a buck. Really, if this was regular price, I wouldn't bother but if I can get it working at this double sort of sale price, I feel like it's worth it. What idle temp are you getting? Would you be okay running a quick CPU workload for me like Cinebench or something and telling me what kind of temps/any throttling you're getting?

 

Sorry bud I've been busy with work for a bit. I'll try and get something done tonight hopefully.

 

So I have a G7 17" 7700 and feel fine with how it idles, but I use my machine indoors in sub 73 degree air conditioning most of the time so I don't witness throttling or loud idle either. Most of the time the laptop is silent while working and only gets loud while gaming or opening tons of applications. I did recently disable the accelerometer in Device Manager to stop throttling when I have the laptop sitting at an angle on a stand or tray though.

I am wondering about the LED lights though. The LEDs will randomly start cycling through all the colors on me while I'm using the computer. Games or just web browsing, etc. Then it will stop and go back to my set color theme again. Is there a reason why the laptop randomly chooses to cycle through the colors on it's own?

 

Buggy software most likely. See if there are any updates through the Dell updater application or on their support website.

 

Ran both Dell Update and Support Assist and did not find any updates for anything. I thought it might be triggered by an action like how Razer accessories respond to certain games by changing colors/patterns of LEDs during the game and maybe Dell did one just for web browsing or something. lol

 

Update: Haven't noticed this issue yet, but there was a BIOS update in June this year that came out so that could have fixed it, but no way of telling since I haven't witnessed the issue since.