precision Precision 3480, 3580 & 3581 Owner's Thread

[sangemaru]

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?

 

 

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

[Aaron44126]

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.

[sangemaru]

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.

[sangemaru]

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.

 

Putting in that indium-gallium.

 

The beast in all its glory.

 

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

Wireless card.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

Edited February 14 by sangemaru
Adding in details

[sangemaru]

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.

[raptorddd]

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.

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.

[PHVM_BR]

On 2/13/2024 at 11:19 AM, sangemaru said:

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

RTX 2000 Ada = RTX 4060

[sangemaru]

On 4/9/2024 at 5:05 AM, PHVM_BR said:

RTX 2000 Ada = RTX 4060

 

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

[PHVM_BR]

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.

[sangemaru]

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.

[PHVM_BR]

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.

 

 

[sangemaru]

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.

[sangemaru]

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.

[sangemaru]

On 8/20/2024 at 2:09 AM, PHVM_BR said:

PTM 7950

Thanks @PHVM_BR on the Honeywell pad recommendation, I hadn't realized this product existed, I'm meeting with a vendor to pick one up today.