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Precision 3480, 3580 & 3581 Owner's Thread


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Kicking it off with my own machine. Not quite top spec, I need to bump up its available RAM and SSD, but good enough.

 

CPU says it can take up to 96GB of Memory, spec sheet says 64GB. I'm dying to stick two 64GB sticks in it, though.

 

Bought it to play with self-hosted Language Models, and because the CPU is a huge upgrade on my old Ryzen 7 4700U 8-core. 

 

From the get-go, I have problems with sleep mode, and the Windows 11 interface is sluggish when switching between desktops. I desperately miss Linux, but I'm worried about installing it onto this one, I'm running nVidia on my desktop Linux computer and it's not great, I'm terrified to get into the Optimus/Bumblebee nightmare again, so toughing out Windows for now.

 

For the curious, I've attached the CPU-Z report here.

 

Any others with this machine out there?

 

image.png.8c1537bcae73cd91f8fa20db3bfc0e75.pngimage.png.743d95d4b0278fc8b08c9f49b9c9e836.pngimage.png.72e25a771beaa571b9aae898ad16f446.png

 

Pic sources: Dell Precision 3480, 3580, and 3581 mobile workstations unveiled with 13th gen Intel Raptor Lake processors and up to RTX Ada Generation graphics

PRECISION.txt

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2 hours ago, sangemaru said:

From the get-go, I have problems with sleep mode, and the Windows 11 interface is sluggish when switching between desktops. I desperately miss Linux, but I'm worried about installing it onto this one, I'm running nVidia on my desktop Linux computer and it's not great, I'm terrified to get into the Optimus/Bumblebee nightmare again, so toughing out Windows for now.

 

I ran Linux for a few months on the Precision 7770 (Alder Lake 12950HX + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti), with Optimus enabled, and no real issues running emulators or Windows games through Steam+Proton ... other than the dGPU sometimes not wanting to actually power off, or the CPU and dGPU fighting for power causing performance inconsistencies — both problems that I also had on Windows with that system.  I think that with Turing and later, NVIDIA support for graphics switching on Linux has improved a good bit.  So, try it out if you want, it might be just fine.

 

I don't think there are 64GB SODIMMs out yet, but there are 48GB, so you could probably install two to get 96GB in this thing if you wanted to.

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Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 (personal) • Dell Precision 7560 (work) • Full specs in spoiler block below
Info posts (Windows) — Turbo boost toggle • The problem with Windows 11 • About Windows 10/11 LTSC

Spoiler

Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch, 2023 (personal)

  • M2 Max
    • 4 efficiency cores
    • 8 performance cores
    • 38-core Apple GPU
  • 96GB LPDDR5-6400
  • 8TB SSD
  • macOS 15 "Sequoia"
  • 16.2" 3456×2234 120 Hz mini-LED ProMotion display
  • Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3
  • 99.6Wh battery
  • 1080p webcam
  • Fingerprint reader

Also — iPhone 12 Pro 512GB, Apple Watch Series 8

 

Dell Precision 7560 (work)

  • Intel Xeon W-11955M ("Tiger Lake")
    • 8×2.6 GHz base, 5.0 GHz turbo, hyperthreading ("Willow Cove")
  • 64GB DDR4-3200 ECC
  • NVIDIA RTX A2000 4GB
  • Storage:
    • 512GB system drive (Micron 2300)
    • 4TB additional storage (Sabrent Rocket Q4)
  • Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021
  • 15.6" 3940×2160 IPS display
  • Intel Wi-Fi AX210 (Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3)
  • 95Wh battery
  • 720p IR webcam
  • Fingerprint reader

 

Previous

  • Dell Precision 7770, 7530, 7510, M4800, M6700
  • Dell Latitude E6520
  • Dell Inspiron 1720, 5150
  • Dell Latitude CPi
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15 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

I don't think there are 64GB SODIMMs out yet, but there are 48GB, so you could probably install two to get 96GB in this thing if you wanted to.

 

I hadn't realized there are 48GB sticks available, thanks for that heads-up. I see they're a bit pricy but Lord, it's super tempting.

 

15 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

So, try it out if you want, it might be just fine.

 

 

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I guess I'll bite the bullet.

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  • 2 weeks later...

So I had been feeling a bit unsatisfied with the thermals on my machine. Not only would I run into a Power throttle around 35W (as reported by ThrottleStop), but I noticed I was getting thermals up into the 90s as well. I went ahead and opened it up to take some pictures and replace the paste with some HeatSpring Indium-Gallium thermal interface.

 

Had a lot of cleaning and polishing to do on the heatsink sections for the GPU and CPU. This is the GPU side.

20240208_012631 (2).jpg

 

Putting in that indium-gallium.

20240208_012309 (2).jpg

 

The beast in all its glory.

20240208_005957 (2).jpg

 

Intel CPU on the left, nVidia GPU on the right. Notice how massive the i7-13800H chip is.

20240208_010142 (2).jpg

 

I had to do a lot of polishing to clean the gunk off. Also caused some scratches.

20240208_012637 (2).jpg

 

As you can see, Dell went about liberally applying thermal paste. Lots of run-off. Blue shroud fills in for missing battery. Would have been interesting to fit a 2.5" SATA HDD in there, but there are ribbons and other components underneath and no connector that I could see for SATA.

20240208_005121 (2).jpg

 

I got a surprise in that I wasn't expecting my machine to have a WWAN modem. Can't wait to use it.

20240208_010123 (2).jpg

 

Unfortunately, the heatsink pressure is really poor, in fact I had to double-layer the HeatSpring TIM to get contact, using a single layer resulted in barely any contact. See the flattened section there. That's what all of it was supposed to look like.

20240208_012128 (2).jpg

 

Wireless card.

20240208_010021 (2).jpg

 

Tiny 512GB SSD. Literally tiny. Can't wait to upgrade it. I have an ADATA XPG SX8200 2TB waiting to arrive.

20240208_010034 (2).jpg

 

This is the dedicated heat spreader for the secondary SSD. Frankly, quite impressive.

20240208_013535 (2).jpg

 

The backplate. Every single screw has a retaining clip. Love it.

20240208_005129 (2).jpg

 

This is the small battery option. The blue shroud to the left covers empty space. If this battery ever gets low, I plan to upgrade with the bigger 90+Wh version.

20240208_010102 (2).jpg

 

The nVidia RTX2000 Ada Generation (Mobile). Basically an RTX4050 Quadro.

20240208_010046 (2).jpg

 

Notice the literal dumping of thermal paste from the factory. Heatsink is easy to remove, and carries retaining clips for the 7 heatsink screws, but NOT for the two fan screws.

20240208_005113 (2).jpg

20240208_010145 (2).jpg

20240208_012146_001 (2).jpg

Edited by sangemaru
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Oh btw. The key to power on this machine is clearly controlling thermals. MMIO 'lock' brings up the MMIO PL1 from the 32-37 range which seemed to correspond to a cap on available power based on temperatures, all the way up to 82, which seems to be the max power. Basically if you can keep the CPU cool, you can keep drawing PL1 max as much as you like.

TS max power.jpeg

TS MMIO lock.jpeg

TS package power.jpeg

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  • 1 month later...
On 2/14/2024 at 1:35 AM, sangemaru said:

Oh btw. The key to power on this machine is clearly controlling thermals. MMIO 'lock' brings up the MMIO PL1 from the 32-37 range which seemed to correspond to a cap on available power based on temperatures, all the way up to 82, which seems to be the max power. Basically if you can keep the CPU cool, you can keep drawing PL1 max as much as you like.

TS max power.jpeg

TS MMIO lock.jpeg

TS package power.jpeg

for the heatsink pressure i had 2 heatsinks and the springs in both were different materials not the same stiffness i chose the stiffest and also tried to stretch them all for higher presurre.

dell precision m4600

i7 2760QM

8GB ram

MX500 crucial SSD 500GB.

win 10 21H2

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  • 3 weeks later...
33 minutes ago, sangemaru said:

 

Oh, sweet. I'd only looked at raw performance, didn't realize I had the full 128-bit, 3072 cores.

What is the TGP that the Nvidia control panel reports?

 

Performance will depend on TGP.

 

I believe that on the Precision 3581 it should be limited to ~50W.

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  • 3 months later...
On 4/26/2024 at 9:58 PM, PHVM_BR said:

What is the TGP that the Nvidia control panel reports?

 

 

nVidia reports 45W TGP.

 

I wish I could undervolt this machine. Right now it's impossible to not thermal throttle. I unfortunately had to replace the indium-gallium foil because the lack of pressure was making it not cool the chips properly. I switched to Thermal Grizzly conductonaut, which I promptly regretted, because after some time it bonded to the GPU section of the heatsink. I replaced with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut paste and the machine is doing much better now, but still thermal throttling.

 

Performance is good, but if I could control the multipliers and voltage of the CPU especially, it would be much better.

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On 8/13/2024 at 9:02 AM, sangemaru said:

 

nVidia reports 45W TGP.

 

I wish I could undervolt this machine. Right now it's impossible to not thermal throttle. I unfortunately had to replace the indium-gallium foil because the lack of pressure was making it not cool the chips properly. I switched to Thermal Grizzly conductonaut, which I promptly regretted, because after some time it bonded to the GPU section of the heatsink. I replaced with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut paste and the machine is doing much better now, but still thermal throttling.

 

Performance is good, but if I could control the multipliers and voltage of the CPU especially, it would be much better.

From the 12th generation onwards Intel removed the possibility of undervolt from H series CPUs.

 

For laptops only HK and HX CPUs can have their voltage adjusted.

 

Try PTM 7950, in addition to excellent performance it should correct small imperfections in the heatsink contact.

 

 

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UPDATE: I was getting absolutely abysmal performance and battery life on Windows 11, and my system was unable to reliably suspend - battery life was catastrophic.

 

I switched to Linux, where performance is amazing, even on battery, but where battery life was even worse than Windows. I was getting 2-3h on Linux and 4-5 on Windows.

 

Happy to report that I'm now up to around a 4-5W power draw and over 12h battery life. In a nutshell, what I had to do:
- disable RAID in bios - this prevented the system from suspending and prevented SSDs from entering low power states, as well as prevented CPU Packages from entering C10 (THIS ISSUE WAS ON WINDOWS AS WELL)

- blacklisted ethernet card - though unused, this kept using up 4w of power on its own.

- nvidia card worked well starting with Linux Kernel 6.8.0-oem, i'm currently on 6.10.3-generic and still works well. Prime on-demand mode.

- switched system to Balanced performance mode on battery, which enables EPP (SpeedShift)

 

UPDATE2:

I ran into high power use again and noticed the pcscd (smart card) process used up a lot of power. I disabled this to re-enable package c-states.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Update: Purchased a very well priced Fibocom FM350-GL from an eBay seller (this is the Dell DW5931e 5G M.2 WWAN card), stuck it in, works out-of-box in Ubuntu 24.04. Installation was super simple as the antennae were already waiting for me and the Dell Manual has the color codes for the cables.

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