Aaron44126

Double-sided works fine in all slots.

7750 was definitely offered with a 4K display. There is not a different variation of the motherboard to support a different type of display. You should be able to just replace the display panel and the display cable. Don't try to use an adapter. Find the 40-pin version of the eDP cable designed specifically for this system. What I am not sure about is if the display enclosure / "lid" is the same between the two different types of displays. Also, I am not sure if the display is attached to the display enclosure with screws, or with adhesive. You can check on that last one easily enough by just removing the display enclosure bezel. (Open the laptop as far as it will go and then just carefully pull off the bezel starting from the one of the bottom corners. It is attached with a little bit of adhesive but mostly plastic clips and can easily be snapped back on.) My Precision 7770 display panel was attached to the enclosure with adhesive. When Dell replaced the display for me, the part that they got was a full top lid (display panel + enclosure as one part). I have checked a Precision 7530 and Precision 7560 and those both had displays attached to the enclosure with screws, but, someone on this forum had an in-between system (Precision 7540 I think?) that did use adhesive and not screws. If it is attached with adhesive then I think it'd be a pain to replace, you'd have to get new adhesive strips and then work carefully to align the panel properly when putting it in.

Windows has a "kernel" just like Linux does. It is found at "C:\Windows\System32\ntoskrnl.exe" (which you can inspect for the build date & version number) and is reported as the "System" task in Task Manager. It is updated as part of the monthly patching process when needed.

Well. That didn't last long? One of the few "features" of Windows 11 that was actually something of a draw to me is being killed. https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/5/24091370/microsoft-windows-11-android-apps-end-of-support

Nothing new here, they already have a 16" Precision 5680 with RTX 5000 and Intel 13th-gen CPUs which has been available for about a year. The 5690 is basically the same thing with a CPU refresh. Since we haven't seen any hint of 14th-gen HX workstations from Lenovo or HP either, I think that @yslalan has identified the reason... Intel is not producing workstation versions of their 14th-gen HX CPUs, so everyone has to skip this generation.

I have had non-stop trouble with the audio driver in my Precision 7560, with headphones in particular. To get around this I am just now connecting my headphones via USB, which bypasses the Realtek/Waves audio system. (I also disable "audio enhancements" for the USB-connected headphones, you can set that in the Sound Control Panel.) If your headphones do not support USB connection, you can use a simple external DAC like the Apple USB-C/3.5mm adapter.

Note, I have found that the GPU can actually be on when this activity indicator says that it is off. You have to use NVAPI to check and see if it is "really" on or not. Anyway, if it gets stuck on you can "fix" it by going to Device Manager, disabling the dGPU, and then enabling it again. That seems to kick it into powering off properly. (On my Precision 7770, I had to do that after every reboot.)

https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/the-new-precision-workstations-are-here/ Precision 3000 and 5000 refresh announced. 7000 is MIA.

I have actually never tried using Dell's reset tool... I just do the Windows install directly. Use the tool here to make a bootable USB Windows installer. (If you want Windows 10, it looks like they have taken the wizard tool away but you can download an ISO image and then flash it onto a USB drive with Rufus.) Also drop onto the USB drive any drivers you might immediately need after the install to get online (i.e. Wi-Fi). Boot the installer, delete existing partitions on the disk and install Windows. Get online and run Windows Update once, it should pull in the remaining drivers. Install any Dell tools that you might want (i.e. Dell Optimizer). Alternatively, if your Windows install is working you can kick off a "reset" right from there which will erase all data and set up a fresh Windows install. I think it is in Settings -> Windows Update -> Advanced options -> Recovery.

I strongly recommend to just disable capsule updates and just apply BIOS updates manually. It would be one thing if Dell could be trusted to vet these properly, but as we can see... To note — After a BIOS update package has been downloaded and installed from Windows Update, it will attempt to upgrade the BIOS at every reboot if the current BIOS version is less than the downloaded package version, even if Windows Update is paused. So, you could take steps to roll back to an earlier BIOS version and find your work undone the next day. (To stop it from doing this, you'd have to roll back the driver for the "Firmware" device which you can find in Device Manager.) The timing for listing BIOS updates on Windows Update is sporadic. If Dell rolls a 1.19 update that fixes this issue, it might not show on Windows Update for multiple days, or weeks (if ever).

Does it work with any monitor (using the same port)?

Windows will automatically update the BIOS if it has downloaded a BIOS update package for your system from Windows Update. If you do not want this to be a possibility, go to BIOS setup and turn off the option for "capsule updates".

Huh. Yeah, maybe, this makes sense. I do doubt that there would be a Precision 7000 system without vPro and ECC and such features. And yeah, NVIDIA doesn't have anything new to offer yet, and I doubt that you could get much more out of a 14th gen HX CPU than you could get out of a 13th gen given the power constraints in these systems. So it could be a good year to skip, and that could explain why there has been no mention of "7690"/"7790"/"7890" showing up on certification sites or in the Dell parts list.

About the same for my Precision 7560. I haven't measured it, but it definitely takes several seconds between pressing the power button and anything showing on the display.

I used M6700 as my primary for a full ten years. Amazing system. I never got the chance to see the M6700 with the RGB LED screen, but I heard that it was amazing. I chose the regular WLED screen when I got mine because I wanted Optimus support. I really am pinning my hopes on Framework to make modular/upgradeable laptops a thing again. I hope that they are able to offer more options for the Framework Laptop 16 available over the next few years.

The system wants to bring in cool air from the bottom and push hot air out the back. The "rubber foot" running the entire length of the system at the back creates a barrier that makes it hard for the hot air going out to be immediately re-absorbed by the cooling system drawing air in from the bottom. If you remove that tape, you might create a situation where hot air is going out the bottom of the system on the right side (as pictured) and then being sucked in by the fans on the left side again. Maybe with a cooling pad there would be so much air moving around that it wouldn't matter much... I don't see much benefit though, blowing air across the heat fins is the main thing that gets heat out of the system and those are only on the side with the fans.

OK, I guess I interpreted your post above wrong. The M6700 (what I built this for) had probably five or six different speed levels that the EC would select in automatic mode, and one of them was above "0" but below what "manual medium" would produce. It also had one higher than what "manual high" would produce so I ended up switching EC back to automatic mode when I was running intense workloads.

Yeah, there is where consistency mode could come into play. It might not be the behavior that you are looking for, but you could set the RPM threshold to 2500, and it should lock you in at the 2200 speed (when the EC selects it). It will "unlock" the speed and allow the fans to rev up if one of the temperatures exceeds the upper temperature threshold. I would normally set the upper temperature threshold pretty high, like 95 °C, so the fans only spun up when it was really necessary. I mostly implemented this because I hated the on again / off again behavior of the fans in the M6700. It makes a very obvious sound when the fans power on after being off. This way, the fans can be locked at a low speed but never turn off.

You could achieve this with Task Scheduler and see what happens. DellFanManagement.exe supports command line parameters so you can tell it to enable EC fan control, disable EC fan control, set a specific speed, and so on. (Run it from the terminal with a junk parameter like -? to see what the options are.) Running DellFanManagement.exe from Task Scheduler requires you to use the checkbox for "run with highest privileges" so that it can load the BZH driver. You should not run DellFanManagement from the command line while the GUI app is running. Running it from the command line will cause it to do its job and then unload the BZH driver while closing, which would then make the GUI app unable to issue any EC commands. You can also try using SpeedFan which allows you to set more complex fan behaviors based on temperatures. You could have it keep the fans off until the CPU reaches a certain temperature, for example. The requirements for using SpeedFan are: You have to check a box in SpeedFan config to enable Dell fan support. You have to have automatic EC fan control turned off, or SpeedFan's fan changes will keep getting overridden by the EC. (DellFanManagement can do this, from the GUI or from the command line.) Note also that while SpeedFan supports granular fan curves, when used on a Dell laptop you will still be limited to just three fan speeds ("off" / "medium" / "high"), so really you can just set the fan curves to 0% / 50% / 100%.

Consistency mode is there to allow you to select an RPM that the EC normally picks and "lock it in", if the EC sometimes picks something other than the manual choices that you would prefer. For instance, on my M6700, the manual "medium" set it to around 2200 RPM, but the EC in "automatic" would sometimes set the fans to around 1900 RPM which I would prefer. So I would put the RPM threshold at 2000 RPM. When the EC selected 1900 RPM, EC fan control would be disabled without actually changing the speed, so it would be locked at 1900 RPM.

Yeah .... AX211 is actually not a PCIe card, it is CNVi, and it relies on support from the PCH to work. I am not at all surprised if you can no longer use a generic mPCIe card in that slot. (AX210 is the generic mPCIe, version but that is not what Dell is using.) Intel should release a BE201 card as a replacement at some point, but it will probably not work in older systems, as it would also expect you to have a compatible PCH.

1. At startup, Dell Fan Management sets the configuration to whatever it was last time that you had it open, and it issues commands to the EC accordingly, even if those match what the EC is already set to. When doing this, the EC fan behavior is "reset" and that will sometimes cause it to turn off the fans for a while. You can also sometimes replicate this by changing the thermal mode in Dell's own tools (balanced to quiet and then immediately back to balanced, or something like that). 2. This isn't a surprise. Dell's fan tables don't necessarily make sense in all systems. I don't think that they put as much time into tuning these as they should. In my Precision 7560 I have observed that "Quiet" often runs the fans higher than "Balanced" for an idle workload, but I use it anyway because "Balanced" is more sensitive to changes in CPU load, and "Quiet" also runs the fans at a lower speed under an "intense" workload.

Wouldn't be surprised if there are select versions of the CPUs that do have the pro features (i.e. 14950HX) that just have not been announced yet. Or, they could brand them differently... Before 12th gen these CPUs were released under the "Xeon" brand. [Edit] Hunting for spec sheets. Example: Precision 5680 spec sheet https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/workstations/technical-support/precision-5680-spec-sheet.pdf Tweak the URL for 5690 and you get a page that asks you to sign in. It seems the file is there, just protected. https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/workstations/technical-support/precision-5690-spec-sheet.pdf Try Precision 7690, 7790, or 7890, and you just get a 404 error. [Edit 2] Just signing in with a normal account got me access to the spec sheets. AFAIK, these products have not been announced yet? [Edit 3] Looks like they have not "fixed" the keyboard layout yet... Home & End still share with F11 and F12. precision-3490-spec-sheet.pdf precision-3591-spec-sheet.pdf precision-5490-spec-sheet.pdf precision-5690-spec-sheet.pdf

How come the service is now officially called "X" but it still lives at twitter.com? (Musk does own x.com.) Confusing...

I still see articles on X/Twitter/Musk on tech sites like The Verge, Ars Technica, etc. The news is just not coming at as fast a pace as it did in the weeks and months immediately following Musk's Twitter takeover. My thoughts... I don't see how Twitter/X can survive, just financially. They have to pay about a billion dollars a year in interest to handle the $13 billion loan that Musk took out to buy them. (Twitter/X is on the hook to make those payments, not Musk himself.) Twitter is not typically profitable, they are certainly not doing better now since a lot of their advertising income has gone away, and adding a negative billion dollars per year certainly won't help. (We won't necessarily see these numbers for 2022/2023, as Twitter/X is now a private company, they don't have to report it.) So, I can really see three possible options. Musk throws in his own cash to keep Twitter/X afloat. (He'd probably have to sell Tesla shares or something, which could mess with things over there.) Musk tries to "renegotiate" the terms of the loans and lower the interest payments or otherwise somehow cut him a break. I'm not sure how well this could go, as banks have got to be now realizing that they made a bad bet, but I've seen crazier financial decisions made by banks. Twitter/X is forced to declare bankruptcy, which would probably result in Musk no longer being in charge of it. In the case of a bankruptcy, I'm wondering if Twitter/X will eventually shrink to something like Yahoo! or AOL, that used to be big names in the "social tech" space but now are a shadow of their former selves. Time will tell. As for Musk himself, my opinion of him used to be positive but has been heavily tainted by this whole thing, specifically with regards to how he has treated his Twitter employees (current and former) after taking over. I do think that he will be sticking around in the public space for many years to come... But if he tries any more new ventures, after seeing how Twitter went (I didn't even mention how he has been actively refusing to pay rent, legal bills, and several vendors) there are definitely many people/banks/businesses who will think twice about doing business with him.