Aaron44126

I was a little worried about this. I think that shortcuts in the "Startup" folder that need a UAC prompt will not fire. You'll have to use Task Scheduler. Set up a job to run at login. Make sure to select "Run with highest privileges" and it will bypass the UAC prompt.

There was a similar thing with even "supported" GPU cards in the M4700 & M6700. I think it depends on vBIOS support. Dell's handling of this was a bit crazy. M4700/M6700 launched in July 2012, a little bit before Windows 8's release, and they didn't originally have UEFI Secure Boot support. Around October 2012 when Windows 8 came out, Dell posted BIOS updates that added Secure Boot support, but if you enabled it and Optimus was off then you'd have a behavior similar to what you described. The dGPU would not show anything until Windows was finished booting up. The specific setting involved was actually the "legacy option ROMs" setting, which had to be enabled for the display to work properly pre-boot, and Secure Boot forces you to disable this. I actually called Dell support on this and they didn't know anything about this issue. They came out and replaced my motherboard, which of course did not "fix" the problem once I reapplied the settings. ....Dell did have updated versions of the vBIOS for all of the Kepler Quadro cards that "fixed" this, but they didn't make them available to download; they just showed up in new systems being shipped out. We formed a collection of the vBIOS dumps at NBR so that people with systems purchased closer to launch could use nvflash to "update" their dGPU vBIOS. Long story short. I am not surprised if some older "unsupported" dGPU cards don't get along with Dell's UEFI implementation.

@operator's response above is on point. I also recommend 240W, at least for the 7770. The Intel CPU can pull over 150W by itself at peak so the 180W PSU doesn't leave a lot of headroom. (...If you don't care about absolute top burst performance, which the system wouldn't be able to maintain for very long anyway, 180W would be fine.) If you order 7670 with no dGPU, you will get the "thin" chassis which will only have two NVMe slots usable. (The third slot will be covered by the battery.) You must get the A3000 dGPU or better to get the "performance" chassis with all three NVMe slots usable. 7770 has all four NVMe slots open no matter which configuration you select. I hadn't heard anything about the 12900HX and 12950HX being different with regards to Thunderbolt. That seems odd to me... I have an issue here with the system being unreliable in this configuration (sometimes won't wake the display up, sometimes garbled display unless using an external monitor). I haven't seen this corroborated by anyone else, but I don't know if there are many 7770 users who have tried disabling graphics switching? I have not engaged with Dell support about it yet, but I do intend to.

Nope, this is a platform limitation from Intel at the time. Two cores = two SODIMMs max. Applies to M4800 as well. (You can use "unsupported" GPUs with Optimus disabled, though, as long as the GPU card supports the display type that you are trying to use.)

This is the pre-release thread (...which you are welcome to continue posting in...). There is a separate owner's thread which is a lot more active.

Sidebar — Unclewebb used to visit and post on NBR, if you refer him over here I wonder if he would make an account now that the site is reasonably active...

Likewise, I'm on Windows but I do not consider myself a "casual user" in the least. What's keeping me on Windows isn't performance. It's as simple as: If I were to switch to Linux, I wouldn't be able to run apps that I use. Some apps have open source equivalents that I could try (Photoshop, Lightroom, Outlook, Visual Studio, SSMS) — I've dabbled around and generally found the experience and feature set to be compromised. Some apps that I use heavily simply have no viable alternative on Linux without just resorting to running a Windows VM (OneNote, Quicken, iTunes for iOS device management). Not that I'm not interested. I'd love to give Microsoft the boot. I use Linux in a VM regularly and I used to manage Linux servers, so I am rather comfortable with it. I have an actual list of 25 or so bullet points of items that I'd have to address to switch to it as my daily driver. (Some of those are just along the lines of "understand this better" or "figure this out", but several of them are actual missing apps.) It doesn't seem possible to whittle that list down to 0 right now. For now, the "computing experience compromise" is not worth a few %'s of performance boost that I most likely wouldn't notice. The sort of sad thing is, (aside from gaming) it would be easier for me to switch to macOS than Linux, mostly just because of the apps that I use (most of them exist on Windows and Mac but not Linux). But I can't stand Apple's laptop hardware, so that's not happening either.

I did this without bending the grill by just putting the grill on top of a piece of wood and drilling down into the wood.

Navigate to C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup Note that "AppData" is a hidden folder. Shortcuts dropped in the "Startup" folder will fire every time you log in to Windows.

My Cinebench runs have been with graphics switching on / dGPU powered off. (That’s the default configuration…)

Basically, this option means that the external displays will be connected directly to the dGPU, rather than using the iGPU as an intermediary (as would be the case with the built-in display). There can be a performance improvement in certain situations but it can also cause drawbacks — some apps behave strangely in a multiple monitor setup if different GPUs are driving the different displays.

Even the Dell Outlet systems come with 3 years onsite... My claim is specific to the Precision 7000 line which is 3-year minimum. Precision 5000 and XPS, Latitude, etc. are offered with 1-year. (That's the case in the U.S., anyway, I guess it might not be the same everywhere.)

No. The minimum warranty for these systems at purchase was 3 years. I don't know how the warranty could have run out, unless there is some sidechannel way to buy them with a lower warranty level?

Yes. I don't think that Dell uses the same display cable between 1080p and 4K, so the easiest way is probably to swap the display assemblies (the entire top part of the laptop containing the display, display cable, webcam, etc.). See: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/precision-17-7760-laptop/precision_7760_sm/removing-the-display-assembly?guid=guid-ac654c1c-830a-46f7-9a27-1f1a4fbb6cbb&lang=en-us The directions request that you remove a large number of components including the system board. I don't think that this should be necessary, if you can just get to the hinge screws (pictured in the link) and pull the antenna cable out. (There might not even be an antenna cable if you don't have WWAN?) I watched a tech do it on my Precision 7770 and he just had to remove the bottom panel and the heatsink. He was done in 15 minutes. If you do have to remove the system board, then just swapping the system boards between the two systems would be faster. (You cannot replace the CPU by itself, it is soldered onto the system board.)

I haven't had time to look at this at all so I will ask you; Do you know how to code these voltage changes into the BIOS (setup_var) so that you don't have to use ThrottleStop to activate them? (This will be required to use undervolting + virtualization features at the same time.)

IIRC @ATAN has no dGPU in his system so it might be easier to fit in a custom solution. (Though I agree, this would be quite the project.)

All Precision 7560 systems should still be under warranty for another 18+ months at least. I think there is some warranty transfer thing you have to do to change ownership? I haven't ever actually done it myself. I'd say, check up on that and make sure that the seller is willing to go through with it. (Then, if the machine arrives with issues, you can just make a warranty claim through Dell.)

I'll try it out sometime and see how it goes for me...

Did you try it? I know that some people have messed with this and the system will report S3 sleep mode available (powercfg) and let you try to use it ... but it will not resume properly.

Here's an article getting into the weeds on Ada Lovelace performance, vs. Ampere and RDNA2. https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/11/02/microbenchmarking-nvidias-rtx-4090/

There was some chatter about this in the thread earlier (@Light, I think), so... You can now order Samsung 990 Pro (up to 2TB) from Samsung or Newegg (and maybe others). Didn't quite make the October release. Samsung's site shows November 21 ETA. (4TB version won't be out until sometime next year.)

I suspect that its the latter. A1000 should be able to play a 4K video file. Anyway, there's also no reason to invoke the dGPU for video playback if the iGPU can do it fine, which seems to be the case here. (I typically shy away from installing extra codec packs unless you have a specific need for them. Windows supports a pretty broad set of common codecs on its own these days and VLC can play anything else you run across.)

2. I don't use sleep, but this is probably "Modern standby" (which no one seems to like) at work. Unfortunately, there's no way to go back to S3 sleep in this system (AFAIK). Use hibernate instead? 3. This is normal stuff from the Intel GPU. A few settings to disable. First go to Settings, System and turn off "Change brightness automatically..." at the top. Next, go to the Intel Graphics Command Center, System, Power, and turn off adaptive brightness and anything that says "power saving". 4. Don't go to BIOS to change the optimized/quiet setting. Use the Dell Power Manager app. You can change it on the fly while the system is running. (I don't know about Dell Command Update offering the same update over and over again. I've heard other users complain about that before. I don't use it, I just grab updates individually by hand from the support site. I have RSS feeds set up to be alerted when new ones drop.) Finally.... 1. I will echo @MyPC8MyBrain here, these noises seem like a hardware issue. Contact Dell support and they will either start swapping parts out or just replace the whole thing. I can say that this is not happening with my 7770 (and I am pretty sensitive to high-frequency noise).

Settings for Windows 10 ..... If you are on Windows 11 it might be slightly different. Settings app -> System -> (scroll down) Graphics settings Under "Choose an app to set preference", select "Microsoft Store app" and then "Photos". Click "Add" and set it to use the high-performance GPU. (Note: The default video player is actually "Moves & TV", not "Photos" -- might want to do that one too.) Close out any running sessions of the app (might have to kill it in Task Manager, Photos likes to stay running after you close all open windows) and then give it another try. It should use the dGPU for playback and maybe it will work better.

I think the GPU will be the most interesting thing with this generation. It probably won't be "twice as fast" but even with the same power/thermal constraints, a node shrink means that you can get more work done with the same amount of power(/heat), so a non-trivial improvement is a pretty sure thing. (How much, exactly, remains to be seen... but it'll definitely be more than A5000→A5500.) Also, for those into gaming, DLSS 3 is super interesting and offers the opportunity to (nearly?) double the framerate in supported games. The CPU upgrade looks kind of "meh" as you said. (Maybe this is why Intel launched 13th gen with a press release rather than a full video presentation.) But, Dell might also have a surprise in there for us. (Past unexpected "nice surprise" examples would be things like the aluminum back display enclosure for Precision 7740, or the 120 Hz 4K display panel in the Precision 7760.)