Aaron44126

The provided AC adapter for the Precision 7680 is not USB-C, it is the standard Dell "barrel"-style power connector and it plugs into the left side. If you don't mind connecting two cables, you are free to connect the stock AC adapter to the system and use a dock at the same time. When you do so, you do not need to rely on power from the dock. You can connect a single-cable dock like WD22TB, or just one of the connectors for the WD19DCS, and the system will still run fine. You only need to connect both of the WD19DCS connectors if you want "single-cable docking" (no standalone AC adapter connected). .....Do note that connecting only one of the WD19DCS connectors might also cause issues if you plan on using a high-bandwidth display setup (i.e. multiple 4K displays). A Thunderbolt dock like the WD22TB should be able to handle this over a single cable, though.

This sort of issue popped up semi-regularly on NBR back when these systems were "old enough to have GPU replacements done" but not yet "really old" (2015-2018 timeframe?). There isn't a whole lot of discussion of the pre-7000 series systems here on NBT.

This is a common problem with an "unsupported GPU" in this system. You should be able to set the brightness level in the BIOS. If you're running with Optimus / graphics switching turned on, it should work but you might have to use the Intel GPU driver package from Dell, not the one built-in to Windows or from Intel's web site. If you're running with Optimus / graphics switching turned off, I don't know if there is really a solution to this. 😕

I have not had this problem on my system since I disabled “c states for discrete GPU” and also enabled “Intel maximum turbo boost 3.0”, which supposedly disables NVIDIA Dynamic Boost 2.0.

Dell has made 330W power adapters for Alienware systems and you can plug one into these systems and it will work… but not provide any performance uplift. (At least, that was the case with Precision 7770.) You can provide feedback but I don’t think Dell wants to push the power envelope higher on these systems. It would require larger size for a bigger cooling system as well — and they have been trying to *shrink* the chassis with each successive generation. In any case, Dell is aware of feedback happening on this site, but they are also aware that the power users that typically visit here don’t represent the majority of Dell’s business customers. (We are due for a chassis refresh next year, and with 18” 16:10 systems starting to become normal to see, I’m hoping we will at least see that…)

This is normal and has been for the past several generations. If you check in NVIDIA control panel "Help->System Information" you will probably see that the power limit is the same between the 4000 and 5000 cards. Performance could be better with the 5000 GPU if you are doing something to take advantage of its extra capabilities (more vRAM, more tensor cores, ...), but otherwise there is no reason to expect it to be much "faster" than the 4000 GPU.

5480 and 5680 are now available for order in the US. https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/workstations-isv-certified/precision-5480-workstation/spd/precision-14-5480-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/workstations-isv-certified/precision-5680-workstation/spd/precision-16-5680-laptop

Dell Precision 5480 and 5680 support pages are up, so those systems are presumably launching soon. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/precision-14-5480-laptop https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/precision-16-5680-laptop

(@Ionising_Radiation) I just realized that Dolphin has a more robust "bookmarks" system that is entirely separate from "places" left bar thing that you can pin things to. It's just sort of hidden away by default. To access it you have to manually configure toolbars and add the "Bookmarks" button. From there you can easily add folders to the bookmarks list (Ctrl+B), and using the "Edit bookmarks" function you can sort them how you like, group them into folders, and even add custom icons. And if you have a folder full of bookmarks, it will let you open them as a set of tabs all at once.

That is not too bad a price as far as new motherboards with a high-end CPU go. Only you can decide if it is "worth it". Motherboard replacement is not a difficult job (if you're already comfortable with a repaste), just a time-consuming one. I replaced the motherboard in my Precision M6700 once and it took me an hour or so. Just follow the steps in the service manual and set up something to keep your screws organized.

Sounds good, then just a matter of finding the motherboard that you want for a not-killer price ...! Of course Dell has the full replacement steps in the service manual and you'll be repasting as well, but it sounds like you're comfortable with that (I see that you've actually done it in this system already).

AFAIK, the only differentiating factor between the different mobo versions is the CPU, so if you drop in a different motherboard everything should "just work". Minor concerns I can think of: Intel vPro may or may not be enabled on your new mobo. There is a one-time process to set up vPro which is done the first time that the motherboard is powered up (typically at the factory, but I've seen techs do it after a motherboard replacement). Probably, you don't use or need vPro, so this doesn't matter. The system service tag will change. The Windows product key is "burned in" to the BIOS, so you might have to jump through hoops to reactivate Windows if you're using the stock OEM install. (You can pull your current Windows product key with ProduKey. Note on antivirus false positives.) One more thing: If your workload is already multi-threaded, you might find that going from six cores to eight cores doesn't help as much as you'd think. You should check and see what your CPU power usage is like and if you are power throttling. The 6-core and 8-core CPUs probably have the same power limit, so if you are already hitting that regularly, then you will find that going from six to eight cores means more threads running but each at a lower speed, so about the same amount of work being done overall in the end. This would be because the system has to spread the same amount of power across more cores, so they can't run as fast. Running at a lower speed is more power-efficient, so there would be a modest performance improvement from adding cores, but we're talking about something in the range of 5% and not like 33%. (If your workload is not multi-threaded then this upgrade probably won't help at all.)

All good. Min quantum 512 still resulted in some dropouts but 1024 seems completely fine. (Can't tell that anything is off from an audio latency test.) No GPU power limit hiccups either, for the third day in a row. Maybe this is finally going to start working properly...

So, PipeWire was originally started as a project to handle video streams, but they added audio support later on. It's not just Ubuntu that is switching to use PipeWire as the default audio server, in fact Ubuntu is sort of late to the party. Ubuntu switched with version 22.10 (October 2022), but Pop!OS switched at version 22.04 (April 2022) and Fedora switched at version 34 (April 2021). It looks like they're trying to unify use cases for PulseAudio and JACK and generally fix some other architectural issues around audio with this transition. In fact, PipeWire supports to protocols/APIs used by ALSA, PulseAudio, JACK, and GStreamer, so it can be used by applications that support any of those without applications specifically needing to add support for PipeWire. Also, PipeWire supposedly addresses some issues with audio over Bluetooth that have plagued PulseAudio, and is also lighter in terms of CPU use. (When I originally tried Linux as a full-time OS back in 2008, I think that the process to move from ALSA to PulseAudio was just getting underway, so funny to see that PulseAudio is now being phased out right when I switch over again...) So, if that is clearly the way that things are going, I am going to start with trying to use PipeWire instead of PulseAudio and find a way to fix the audio drop-out issue. This guy seems to have run into the same issue and the solution appears to have been to change the value for "default.clock.min-quantum" to 1024. The default value is 16, so that's a big jump. I found other threads reporting stuttering issues and messing with the "quantum" setting seems to be a common recommendation. In fact, I found a note here on the Debian wiki specifically saying that because PipeWire has lower latency that PulseAudio by default, it can be "choppy" on systems with a high CPU load, and they also recommend increasing the quantum value. My system doesn't seem to have any sort of PipeWire config file in /etc/pipewire or ~/.config/pipewire, so I can only assume that it is using the default values for everything. I take it back, I found the config files in /usr/share/pipewire. It did have the "min-quantum" value explicitly set to 16. This command will return the current value for min-quantum: pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum You can change the value on the fly with: pw-metadata -n settings 0 clock.min-quantum (value) This page describes how to set up a split-file configuration so that you can adjust your own values and not worry about them conflicting with the config files that the packages wrote out, when the packages are updated later on. You can also run pw-top and it will give you a tool that shows details of connected PipeWire clients, including what the "min-quantum" value is currently. With Firefox as the only client it is reporting a quantum of 512, but if I fire up yuzu (game emulator) it appears to want to lower the quantum to 256. The config is pretty robust, you can set up rules for specific applications. ArchWiki has an example for Discord. What is the quantum, anyway? It's basically the buffer window, and thus audio latency? Best I understand it, it's the scheduling period for drivers and impacts how long applications have to fill in the audio buffer before a dropout will occur. To measure the window, you have to divide the quantum by the playback rate. On my system, PipeWire is reporting that the playback rate is 48,000 Hz, so yuzu's observed quantum of 256 means 256/48000 = 5.3ms of latency (and also a 5.3ms buffer window). The "min-quantum" of 16 means an absurd 0.3ms. ...Since I generally play at 60 FPS, frame times are 16.7 ms, so audio latency of up to around 30 ms or so is totally fine (I'm not going to be able to tell if a sound comes one frame late) and I don't mind raising the min-quantum to 1024 (21.3ms). For reference... What's latency like with PulseAudio? I'm not running it right now so I cannot easily check myself, but I found this blog post where the guy reported latency of 100ms with default values (includes commands to measure it and configuration to lower it). This bug report also mentions 100ms as the default latency. 100ms seems really high to me?? But, if that is right, it totally makes sense that if my setup used to allow for 100ms of latency and now it was pushed down to 5ms then maybe there will be issues with audio buffer underruns that were not there before. The plan for me is, I will see if just forcing PipeWire processes to run on P cores helped, and if not, I will try min-quantum = 512 and see if that helps, and if not, double it until it is good. This big post is sort of me just unpacking this as I figured it out myself, but maybe it will help someone else down the line!

Yeah, I generally agree, so I need to spend some time figuring out what the motivation and supposed benefits of the switch are here before I decide if I'm just going to just switch back to PulseAudio, which seems like it would be the easiest thing to do, or if I am going to try to make PipeWire work. I have heard about PipeWire in the context of something that exists to help with the transition to Wayland (...which I am all for, I get the benefit of Wayland, even though I am not using it yet...). I know for example that it can help screen sharing apps (i.e. virtual meeting apps, Zoom/WebEx/etc.) that are written for X11 to work under Wayland. I do not know why there is an audio component to it though. I didn't even know that there was until I ran into this issue. The Reddit post I linked above has a potential solution (adjust the "default.clock.min-quantum" value in PipeWire). Similarly, I don't want to go and make that change without first understanding what that value even does. So. Investigation to follow, when I have time. I'll post what I find out back here.

...Ran into audio stuttering for the first time when gaming after upgrading to Ubuntu 22.10. Maybe "audio dropouts" would be a better way to describe it. Come to find out, they have switched the default audio server from PulseAudio to PipeWire. I had previously added some scripting to make sure that the PulseAudio server runs on P cores only, so I guess I'll do the same for PipeWire, but if that doesn't fix it then I guess I can just switch back to PulseAudio and see if that fixes it. (Sort of a shame because the GPU / power throttling has not been an issue at all over the past two days, likely because of the BIOS settings changes I made on Friday? Fix one thing and now have something new to figure out.) [Edit] Looks like maybe it's not just me.

Confirmed, no S3 sleep in Precision 7560 or Precision 7770 here. Attempts to force it back on have not been successful. (You can edit BIOS variables and Windows will show it as an option, but it still won't work right.)

Well. Decided to go current with KDE Plasma, rather than sitting on version 5.24 which is what Ubuntu has in their current LTS repo, so I went ahead and upgraded to (K)Ubuntu 22.10 and pulled Plasma 5.27 from the Kubuntu backports PPA. (Well, it is Plasma 5.27.4, but they should have 5.27.5 shipped out any time now, it's already in the staging repo...) The upgrade was smooth and everything seems stable so far. I'll look to fully upgrade to (K)Ubuntu 23.04 in July around when 22.10 is going out of support. (I'm already using the 23.04 kernel packages...) I can already see some appreciable differences, for example, it starts "listening" for a fingerprint scan as soon as I touch anything on the lock screen. On 5.24, I had to hit the "enter" key to try to enter a blank password before it would initiate fingerprint scan.

Well, I tried really hard to reproduce this issue "on demand" in Windows on the Precision 7770 and failed. I was ready to start a new thread about this problem, but before I can do that, I need a hard reproduction case. It might be that a longer test session is needed, because I generally only run into this issue once or twice during an hour-long game session and it lasts for maybe 20-30 seconds when it happens. (But that's without pushing the CPU to full tilt, yuzu just pushes 3 or 4 CPU cores pretty hard.) Using the Windows 11 OEM image, I ran 3DMark "Time Spy" in a loop while simultaneously running Cinebench. The result over several minutes was a pretty constant 110-120W power draw on the GPU (with it complaining about still being power-limited), and Cinebench seemed to be the one suffering from low performance, which is I would argue the appropriate behavior. The CPU was stuck at 2.05 GHz (as reported by Task Manager), with all 24 threads running, until I ended the 3DMark test. I'm also taking back what I said earlier about a big dropoff between P2 and P3. I watched the power state while running this test and it was bouncing around between P0, P2, and P3, but performing fine all the while. I guess I'll revise my statement to be along the lines of "When the GPU is in the poor performance state, it can't go any higher than P3" but that doesn't necessarily mean that P3 is bad under "normal" circumstances. One thing is, I noticed that I had "Enable adaptive C-states for discrete graphics" turned on in the BIOS, which I do not want, so I turned it off before testing. That could have made a difference. I know that you (@Ionising_Radiation) also found that turned on, but still had the issue after you turned it off. I'm not sure how that got toggled on because I have tried to be careful to keep it turned off. I know that I had tested with it on before and found that it impacted graphics performance for the worse. I did upgrade the BIOS a few days ago for the first time in a while .....? For kicks, I went and tried turning on "Enable Turbo Boost Maximum Technology 3.0" in the BIOS, because the help text there explicitly states that turning this option on also turns off NVIDIA Dynamic Boost 2.0. For some reason I thought that this also negatively impacted graphics performance, but I didn't find any meaningful difference when running the same test again, so I'll try with it enabled for a while. [Edit] Wrote this cheesy script to help me check on this issue under Linux, grabbing CPU power draw, GPU temperature, GPU power draw, GPU P-state, GPU speed, and GPU utilization. (Took me longer than I thought to find a way to grab the CPU power draw with a terminal command...) Hoping that if I hit the Linux GPU performance issue again, there will be some kind of indication here (high CPU power draw + low GPU speed) confirming whether or not it is the CPU/GPU fighting each other for power....... or if it is something else entirely?

It is Linda Yaccarino, who used to be "chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal". https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/12/23721107/twitter-ceo-linda-yaccarino-elon-musk-nbc https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/twitter-users-fear-new-ceo-will-end-musks-commitment-to-free-speech-on-platform/

I was actually just looking at discussion on this. Dolphin will already squirrel away ".directory" files in a different place if you make a change on a folder that it can't write to. An option to have it do that for "all folders" would make a lot of people happy. There's a bug on the subject but it doesn't look like it is getting any real movement.

Yeah, Wayland is super interesting. I tried it briefly during my time with GNOME, and aborted mostly because it didn't work well with VMware Workstation, as under GNOME it would not allow VMware to "capture" shortcuts like Alt+Tab or the Windows key. KWin has its own solution for that, though, you can just disable global keyboard shortcuts for a given application. I'm very interested to give Wayland a go on Plasma when it is ready enough that KDE and distros are comfortable enabling it by default. Hoping it is there by the time that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS drops next year. That's kind of gross. But, macOS does that with ".DS_Store" files so nothing I haven't seen before. I wonder if it will read these ".directory" files even if that option is not checked, so maybe I can just have them sitting around where I want custom options set, rather than "everywhere" ....? I'll think about it. I actually have a small list of such things for various projects that I am considering taking a stab at. Not quite ready to get into that area while I am still sort of getting up and running on Linux. But, the Debian package system makes it easy enough to fetch the source code for a package and pull in all of the dependencies that you need to build it so it shouldn't be too hard to start messing around with stuff like this.

Replying over here so as to not throw the Precision thread that far off topic ... I have found KDE to be a bit "rough around the edges" compared to GNOME, but over all, the level of customization that it offers makes it a real "power user" DE which is exactly what I was looking for. I was only on GNOME for about a week and sort of ran into lack of choice about some things bothering me; the "who's computer is this, anyway?" issue is part of what drove me off of Windows to begin with. I'm currently still on Plasma 5.24 (which is default for Kubuntu 22.04 LTS), but I plan to upgrade to 5.27 in the next few days. Reading about the progress towards 6.0, I'm getting pretty excited about that even if it is a ways off yet. In a way, it seems like this is a good time to hop on, with 5.27 being "stable" for a while I will have time to sort of get used to things and then decide how aggressively I want to follow the latest releases once the 6.0 train gets going. I have some examples of the "rough around the edges" issues above. Konsole has a good example. I would go to settings, make a new "profile" so I could adjust the appearance to my liking, and save it. If I relaunched Konsole, my newly added profile and settings would be gone. Turns out you have to add the profile (with no changes), save it without changing anything else, immediately close and reopen Konsole, and then it will "stick"? That worked for me and I haven't had to mess with it any more since then. My opinion on Dolphin is ... meh. It's fine, better than Windows File Explorer and probably better than Nautilus or Nemo or other Linux file managers that I have tried so far. But it is no Directory Opus. I feel like a "power user file manager" on Linux is still a hole I haven't figured out how to fill yet. Some things I can do in DOpus that I haven't figured out how to do in Dolphin are: Have a subfolder of bookmarks so that I can open a certain set of folders in tabs all at once. (I can probably fudge this with a script or folder full of symlinks or something.) Using the "Details view" mode, have a custom set of columns and sorting that it will remember ... for a particular folder only. (For instance, I want to see photo metadata columns but I don't want those columns sticking around when I am in non-photo folders. Also, certain folders I would like to have automatically sorted by the file "modified date" and not the filename.) If I have a folder full of videos, I want to be able to see how long they all are, but I can't get Dolphin to show me the "duration" of video files in a column. (I can add the "duration" column from the "Audio" group, but it just shows blank for .mp4 files. It can show the duration in the F11 "Information" panel, so it does know how to fetch it...) Interested to hear if you know any tricks that I don't along these lines. But overall, I've managed to work around most of the things that really bothered me and I don't see myself switching off of KDE any time soon. I saw some discussion on how it has stuck around for so long and not fallen subject to the barrage of forks that GNOME has undergone over the years, and I think that there's something to that and they have a good trajectory going.

I did an in-place migration from Ubuntu to Kubuntu. Turns out that I love KDE...

Sigh. Case in point. (This game isn't that graphically intense, but I'm usually seeing a pull in the 50-80W range from the GPU. It's an emulator so it is pretty CPU-heavy. It had to be running at around 10 FPS for a few moments before I managed to grab the screen shot, I was full screen so the indicator wasn't shown...) Haven't taken the time to do testing on the CPU power limit yet. Maybe this weekend. @Ionising_Radiation Still good with the NVIDIA platform controller thing disabled? Have you had time to play any more?