Aaron44126

I've never had mine crash from high temps (it should throttle down to bring the temperature under control) but I have noticed that after many months, the fans will definitely be running higher under a moderate load, and a cleaning will bring it back under control. I recommend cleaning 2-3 times per year (especially if you run loads that tend to invoke the fans... less important if they are off most of the time).

Thanks for joining/posting and welcome! 😄 I am coming from Precision M6700 (Ivy Bridge / ten years old) and waited for Alder Lake for similar reasons. I've been wanting to upgrade for a while but basically didn't want to hop on Intel's recycled 10nm+++++ architecture if a "new" architecture was only 1-2 years away. I understand the predicament. I'm thinking waiting just one generation for Raptor Lake won't do much. Since this is a new chassis (for Precision 7000), Dell is likely to reuse it next year, so basically I am expecting something very similar to Alder Lake but maybe available in a 8P+16E configuration, and NVIDIA Lovelace GPUs, and maybe one or two small surprises from Dell but otherwise basically the same as the systems that have just launched. Lovelace will have a node shrink so it will perform better than Ampere, even if the performance boost on the mobile side will not be as great as on the desktop side (because NVIDIA can't continue to crank up the power limit like they are doing on desktops. We'll probably see an AD103 or AD104 GPU constrained to ≈130-150W, lifted from a desktop card that wants to run it at 300W+. All that said, I don't think that you're necessarily "screwed". it stands to reason that even if you purchase a Precision 7670 or 7680 with these "issues", it will perform much better than your Haswell-based ZBook, and if you so choose, you will be able to improve it further with tweaks like we are figuring out here (repaste / undervolt / adjust power limits / etc.). So I guess it is back to what I have posted elsewhere. Some expectations adjustment is needed for the modern MWS market. Despite the power/thermal limitations, the system is still faster than its predecessors. We have entered an era where desktop CPUs and GPUs are going in that won't be able to reach their full potential due to thermal/space limits. I wish things were a bit different, for sure, but it's still workable. (There's also the sad state of lack of competition for proper MWS systems, especially at the 17" level. The available options are Dell, and... MSI, I guess.) ...Don't know what to make about the fan lifespan comment. I have multiple Precision systems that run the fans 24/7 (at low speed) for years and I've never had a fan fail on me. Yeah, this is new for Precision (7000) with this generation. I have a Precision 7560 (2021 system) and I have taken the screen out just to check the display connector, it just took a few minutes. I guess my issue with this change is not just the fact that it's mildly more troublesome to replace the screen. It's that it's significantly more troublesome to even experiment. I'd be interested in checking a mini-LED panel to see if it would work, but even confirming the display connector position or trying to hook the eDP cable up to a mini-LED panel outside of the chassis would require undoing the adhesive to get the stock panel out. ...I get that Dell has no reason to care about this, really, since >99.9% of Precision owners will never care about taking their display panel out. But I'd like a laptop like this to be able to be fully disassembled and reassembled just by taking out screws and unsnapping things (other than having to repaste the heatsink if you take it out which obviously can't be avoided)... No "one-way" disassembly, please. Oh yes, I do miss the ePort for docking. The Thunderbolt docks have never really done it for me. But that's something that is never coming back. I would also like more status LEDs like you say, seeing the hard drive activity indicator is something that I miss in particular. (Can't say that I really miss a 2.5" SATA drive bay, though. While it's a bit sad to not be able to reuse old drives, I can definitely see how those are an unnecessary use of space at this point and sort of had to go.)

It is Intel Rapid Storage, implemented at the driver level, not hardware.

TBH I have warmed up to Apple a lot over the past several years. I use an iPhone X (that's a 2017 phone and it's getting iOS 16 this month — I love how they support the phones with OS updates way longer than you see on the Android side). My kids have iPads (best "tablet" by far, the Android tablet ecosystem seems to have sort of died...). I use Apple Watch and I love it... granted you have to have an iPhone to use it, but . I have an old Series 3, but I will be picking up a Series 8 when it launches in the next month or so; the body temperature sensor system is a pretty cool improvement, and while Android Wear platform is slowly coming along, it seems like Apple Watch has a definite leg up on anything else on the market in terms of breadth of capabilities. I use Apple TV as my streaming box (supports all streaming services & a very wide array of TV/audio technologies, no ads like are starting to pop into Amazon Fire Stick & Google TV platforms, no content distribution issues like Roku periodically runs into, ...). I see macOS as a potential way to get off of Windows without dealing with the hassle of limited app compatibility on Linux. (I have some core apps like Quicken and OneNote with no viable replacement on Linux and no good way to get the Windows version working either, without resorting to a full Windows VM... But they have fully supported macOS versions.) Apple's M1 and M2 platforms are really pushing the envelope in terms of computing potential and energy efficiency. In the end, though, I can't get behind Apple's laptop hardware. No removable battery or storage (let alone memory or GPU). The addition of the "notch" with the camera irks me (even though it does add some screen space for the top menu bar). Heck, even no numeric keypad on the 16" system when there is definitely space for it drives me crazy. There's also the fact that the situation for running Windows games is actually better on Linux than it is on macOS (mostly thanks to Steam Proton) and I don't really trust Apple not to break compatibility with old unupdated apps basically whenever they feel like it. So, I continue to be stuck on Windows. My two cents. End of rant. Anyway, if you want to talk about MacBooks there are certainly plenty of forums dedicated just to Apple stuff. If Apple chatter started showing up in the "Other manufacturers" section here, I'm sure @Reciever would revisit having a subforum for it.

There was an Apple subforum, but it had zero posts after almost six months, so it got deleted...

Thanks... I haven't had issue with "mutli-quote" (I just click the quote button and it adds it to the end of the post that I am working on), but add-quote-after-posting that you mention is a little bit tedious. I just start a new post with the quote and cut/paste it into the edit window afterwards. Understand all about busyness. I have a number of projects (both for this community and otherwise) that I simply haven't been able to find time to work on between regular life stuff...

Noticed this discrete chip with its own connection circled in blue... Any idea what it is?

If you want ECC modules, SODIMM is the only choice for now. Otherwise... if you don't care about price or the potential for a future upgrade, I'd say go ahead and stick with CAMM.

Good to see, but I myself am not confident that I could align the screen properly without a definite physical guide (which there doesn't seem to be here), especially since you "only get one try"... so I'd hate it for being "a little bit off" for the rest of its service life... (I'm the guy who would be pretty particular about this sort of thing. Same thing with applying a glass screen protector on a phone...) And, if I want to just try a new panel and not commit to it (again, not even sure if a miniLED panel would work to begin with)... I either have to have it hanging out of the chassis or go through a more extensive process to swap the panel back afterwards, with new adhesive strips and so forth. A panel swap used to be a five-minute affair. [Edit] Actually you would have to remove the current panel in order to even try a new one, because the eDP connector on the back is inaccessible while the panel is stuck in. I can say, I used the machine some after dark last night and the bright spots are definitely better after just removing and replacing the bezel. Odd, but not complaining. I've been thinking about trying undervolting; I've seen the guides to (re-)enable it at the EFI level, but as I understand it, these days you can't undervolt if you have Hyper-V enabled these days? I definitely need Hyper-V active for some of my workflows. Glad to see I'm not the only one who was initially thermal throttling at 85W. Well, not glad really, that means that the stock paste definitely could be improved upon. But at least our experience there was consistent.

Windows is pretty robust when it comes to file system integrity these days, I personally would not worry too much about this. (I never restore from backup after a crash.) If you want to be safe, open an admin command prompt and run "chkdsk 😄 /f", answer "Y" at the prompt, and then reboot your system and it will run a disk check. [Edit] Uh, the smiley is supposed to be "C colon", or "C :" with no space in between, I can't figure out how to make the forum not put an emoticon there..

So. I took the display panel bezel off. It was pretty standard, held in place with plastic clips and adhesive around the actual panel. I carefully worked my way around with a pry tool. (The left and right sides of the bezel are pretty thin and seem like they could snap if you just try to pull it off with your hand.) My plan was to take the panel out as well and check out the labels and connector on the back. But, I found... ...no metal tabs with screws holding the display panel in. It looks instead like it is held in place by adhesive strips. There are pull-tabs at the bottom (circled above) that appear to be to aid in releasing it. But that means putting a new panel in would require adding new adhesive behind it and aligning it by hand. (There is "wiggle room" between the sides of the panel and the tabs that hold the bezel in place.) ...Yuck. I guess this explains why removing the panel itself is not covered in the service manual. Anyway, the act of removing the bezel and reapplying it seems to have made the backlight bleed problem a good bit less bad. Maybe there's less pressure on the screen and that helps. (Or maybe I'm just tricking myself and I'll notice it again once it gets dark.) Doesn't help with the issue with the "blacks", but I'll stick with the panel for now and see if it still seems like a big deal after a few weeks, or if I get used to it. [Edit] It does look like you can still remove the hinges separately. (I had to replace the hinges in my M6700, one of them snapped after seven years of use...) But the display panel is something that I would say "should" be easy to replace separately. It's not like there's not room for the metal tabs and screws here .... maybe they would have to add a quarter millimeter to hold the aluminum bracket that goes around behind the panel. You "could" source an eDP panel from anywhere but unless you want to go through the trouble of dealing with the adhesive/alignment, you'd have to source an entire display enclosure from Dell to replace the panel. This along with the keyboard are disappointing steps in the direction away from self-repairability.

Poking around with display panel stuff and I realized that Dell has released a driver / color profile for the 4K AUO panel in the Precision 7770.... but it's only available over on the Alienware support page. (Confirming that they are sharing this panel between the Precision and Alienware lineup.) https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=cwkg5 Giving it a try but I doubt that it will make any difference, other than maybe Dolby/HDR stuff as noted on the driver page.

Did you use ThrottleStop to get around 85W PL1? Can you point me to a resource about adjusting the IA AC/DC LoadLine? (Never messed with that before.)

So, I've found myself being dissatisfied with the 4K/120Hz display panel. There are definitely some good things about it. The colors are definitely more vivid than older panels that I am used to (i.e. Precision M6700 1080p, Precision 7530 4K). The fact that it is 120Hz and supports VRR is nice. The bad things basically have to do when you have dark images on screen. This could be when watching a video or gaming and running across a dark scene, or just running "dark mode" applications at the desktop. First off, there is a fair amount of inconsistency in the backlight. I know that some backlight inconsistency is normal for LCD panels, but this one seems worse than what I'm used to. The top left and top right areas are noticeably brighter than the rest of the panel. It does change a little depending on the angle that you are looking at. And I've noticed that you can apply a slight "bend" to the panel just by manipulating the display enclosure and the bright spots will be reduced. I've thought about taking the panel out and putting some cardstock behind it or something to change the pressure level behind it... but I don't think that will really help, anything I do to "bend" the panel by hand to reduce the bright spot in one area creates a new bright spot in another. Also, blacks are just bad in general. This isn't really an issue when "computing" on the laptop, but again if watching a video or playing a game with a dark scene, it is quite noticeable. I'm not really sure how to describe it other than that the blacks/dark areas are "not black" and look a bit strange, and don't blend well with the rest of the image. I thought maybe that is because this is just a bright panel, but it seems the same even if I reduce the brightness level. (...I experienced something similar when swapping in a 1080p AUO panel in my M6700 to replace the LG, and I ended up switching back to the LG because of it.) .....I don't think having Dell replace the panel again would address either of these issues. These issues seemed equally present with both panels that I have used in this laptop; seems to be just the nature of the panel that they are using. So, since I expect this system to be long-lived, I find myself considering replacing the panel with an aftermarket one. I looked on Panelook and there are tons of options (...but not a whole lot that are ≥400 nits and not AUO). Does anyone have a recommendation for a great 4K/17.3" panel that they've seen or used in another system (even if it is not 120Hz)? I might make another thread about this. I noticed that there are some miniLED options out there (i.e. AUO B173ZAN05.0, Innolux HK173VB) but I don't know if such a panel would work in this system... I seem to remember someone trying a miniLED panel in Precision 7530 (maybe @Ionising_Radiation) and it did not work, maybe because the laptop/BIOS didn't know how to provide power to it properly. MiniLED panels are pretty expensive but I'd be willing to go for it as an experiment if I had high confidence that they'd produce a good image; I'm concerned about "bloom" (again in dark scenes) which could potentially bother me just as much as the issues I described with this 120Hz panel. More investigation required. [Edit] I noticed that the service manual doesn't describe replacing the display panel, it just covers the entire display assembly. I'm assuming that replacing the panel alone would be similar to other Precision systems (snap off the plastic bezel, take out a few screws, and there it is) but I haven't actually tried to see... [Edit 2] Regarding the mini LED screens, AUO B173ZAN05.0 is used in the MSI Creator 17 from last year and people seem to like it. The Innolux HK173VB is actually a 120 Hz panel, and cheaper, but I can't figure out what system(s) it is used in. I found a page that lists compatibility with Lenovo, but I can't find any reference of a Lenovo 17.3" mini LED system... [Edit 3] Thinking the Innolux HK173VB panel might just have a mini LED backlight but no local dimming (FALD) like the AUO B173ZAN05.0 panel has. Still better for backlight consistency & range of brightness. I guess I'm going to take apart my 7770 display enclosure soon and confirm that the panel is reasonably easy to remove and has a 40-pin eDP connector in the expected place... and then I might proceed with ordering a swap panel. Looks like it will take 2-3 weeks to arrive from China. [Edit 4] Actually found B173ZAN05.0 for cheaper... but learned that its FALD mode doesn't kick in unless you are viewing HDR content, hmm.

Odd, most of the hot/important stuff is more on the left side... The GPU does occupy some space towards the right side, though I thought the power cable was on the "bottom" side of the system (on the side of the motherboard opposite from the keyboard), any sort of bending that disrupts a connection has the potential to cause a crash. I agree with @alittleteapot — call support (hopefully ProSupport) and get them to send over whatever they need to fix it; if it is easily reproduced like this then it's clearly not a hardware issue and not a software issue. All 7760's should still be under warranty with some kind of "next-day service".

The Intel 6250 card does support 5 GHz WiFi, but it is not a WWAN card (no SIM + 4G access).

The DOO fans circulate air within the chassis and should provide some airflow over the primary SSD slot. The other slots have heat pads to “connect” to the chassis bottom panel.

Yes, Dell provides a heatsink for each NVMe slot whether you order the system with a drive preinstalled there or not. (The tiny screw that you need to mount a drive is also included.) As for aftermarket drives with heatsinks included/preinstalled when you order them, you'd want to be careful there. These are generally not designed for laptops. You only have 2mm or so of clearance to shut the case on top of the drives, so the heatsink would have to be super slim. The "Samsung 980 Pro with heatsink", for example, has been reported not to fit.

Switching from RAID to AHCI is pretty straight-forward. You just have to make sure that the system goes to safe mode once right after you make the switch in the BIOS, and Windows will get everything set up right. Detailed steps: https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-7560-7760-owners-thread.836381/page-64.html#post-11112315

SODIMM is going to have signal issues at higher speeds; we'll probably run into this before the DDR5 cycle runs to completion, as speeds ramp up. Dell is trying to get ahead of this and make CAMM the next standard for laptop memory. (It is currently in front of JEDEC.) Who knows if they will succeed. However, if they do not, we'll probably end up with something similar to what we have with MXM right now — a mishmash of pseudo-standards, entirely custom vendor-specific designs (of which CAMM will be one), and (even more) soldered on DRAM chips for laptop makers that don't want to bother with modularity.

You'll still be able to order a system with the cheapest SODIMM configuration and then upgrade the RAM yourself using any modules that you like, like people are used to doing (...once they make SODIMM configurations available). The downside is, you can only install two SODIMM modules, not four. If you want 128GB, you have to go for CAMM.

The SODIMM configurations (with the CAMM/SODIMM adapter) are not yet available for sale, but should be offered within the coming weeks(/months?). The adapter will not be available standalone from Dell. (You might be able to find it on eBay or other third-party sites, down the line.)

The benchmark above was taken with core isolation disabled and the Intel DTT telemetry service active.

That’s exactly where I spotted it capping at 85W. I’m getting the 15000+ scores at 85W, not 55W. (“Why” is a question I would love the answer to.) I will check on core isolation / VBS and DTT. I have purposefully left things at the default settings for initial testing.

My primary operating environment is Windows 10, but I am running the tests from the stock Windows 11 install with basically nothing extra added. No Process Lasso in the mix. Interesting about the 128GB CAMM. That could be something. I know that the 128GB module runs at a lower speed but I wasn't expecting it to impact performance that much. I don't necessarily mind, if that's the way that it has to be; I'd take the extra memory capacity at the expense of some performance. Still, if a "fix" for it is going to be available, I'd absolutely take it.