Precision 7560 & Precision 7760 owner's thread

[Aaron44126]

Just now, Rinconmike said:

Do I just delete it in device manager?

 

No, it will come back.  Right-click on it and choose "disable".

[Rinconmike]

14 minutes ago, Rinconmike said:

Do I just delete (uninstall) it in device manager?

ok I disabled it. 

 

I then turned off turbo boost 3 in bios.  Booting and in windows.  I now need to try booting a second time to see if it crashes again.  In device manager, I have two entries of the framework.

 

one is disabled and the other looks fine.

 

EDIT:

 

Booted a second time and into windows.  Still the two entries.  Wonder if I should delete the disabled one.

 

EDIT 2:

 

Booted a couple more times to include hooking to dock and works.  I did not delete that disabled entry yet.

 

Looks like @Aaron44126 you were correct on disabling that.  I wonder if it is a different driver for the NVIDIA Platform Controllers and Framework depending on if you have Turb Boost 3.0 on or not.

 

[Aaron44126]

Cool.  So, with this configuration I would be worried about updating the NVIDIA driver.  It could cause the device to become "enabled" and then BSOD again.

 

(But at least now it is even more clear that there is some connection between that driver, Intel Turbo Boost 3.0, and the crashes.)

[Rinconmike]

I think it’s should be safe uninstalling the disabled one. I recall a user noting he had two and uninstalled the one with the exclamation mark. I forget if that was on this group or another (I did not search).  I might try that too.  Maybe it is different entries in device manager depending on if Turbo Boost 3 is on or off. 

 

Edit:

 

It was this post by @heikkuri on removing the extra entry.  Maybe he had no issues if removed after the first boot.  I will give it a try.

 

 

 

[heikkuri]

Turbo Boost 3 was not present in early BIOS versions so NVIDIA Platform Controllers and Framework did work without any problems. When Turbo Boost 3 is added to the BIOS settings it will be always active This breaks the NVIDIA Platform Controllers and Framework. Solution is always to disable Turbo Boost 3 and then later BIOS updates do not change any more the selected status.

 

There is only "one" NVIDIA driver. You can't make Turbo Boost 3 and NVIDIA Platform Controllers and Framework  work together at the same time in Dell Precision 7X60. In May there maybe a new BIOS version, which will remove Turbo Boost 3 setting from BIOS so we are back to where we started.

 

When you disable Turbo Boost 3 you may see two NVIDIA Platform Controllers and Framework in Device Manager. One broken and one working OK. In this case I have removed the failed device.

 

I have never experience any blue screen after disabling Turbo Boost 3. Personal track record is more than 50 devices.

 

Usually There is just one working NVIDIA Platform Controllers and Framework after BIOS setting change.

 

I use only Windows 10 with NVIDIA 527.25 downloaded from NVIDIA web portal in all Dell Precision devices. RTX Desktop Manager works like it should. In Dell version it's missing etc.

 

Next NVIDIA driver version maybe 528.89, which supports ADA versions. Let's see when we get the first 7X80.

 

I forgot one problem. Dell Command | Configure Application (DCC) does not support Turbo Boost 3 setting. So it's only manual work, if you want to use latest BIOS and disable Turbo Boost 3.

 

 

 

Edited April 21, 2023 by heikkuri
One more comment

[Rinconmike]

I updated one of my Kids 7560 from Bios 1.14.0 to 1.21.1.  I forgot to check in the bios if Turbo Boost 3 was on or not.  I checked after the update and Turbo Boost 3 is on.  In device manager, the NVIDIA Platform Controllers and Framework is not listed under the Control Panel now.  It was the other day (I checked) and there was no exclamation point.

 

This system has an RTX 3080 in it.

 

I never asked, why disable Turbo Boost 3?  Just to be able to use Nvidia Dynamic Boost 2.0? 

 

My reason was just to try and solve the exclamation point next to the NVIDIA Platform Controllers and Framework in device manager.

[Aaron44126]

1 hour ago, Rinconmike said:

I never asked, why disable Turbo Boost 3?  Just to be able to use Nvidia Dynamic Boost 2.0?

 

I have not tested in-depth on my Precision 7560, but on the Precision 7770, I did test it and found that Turbo Boost 3 enabled causes maximum dGPU performance to notably drop.

[Aaron44126]

I was running a big data processing job on my 7560 and the fans were running full tilt for about 24 hours.  Now that they have settled down, the right fan has some sort of periodic rocky grind sound going on when it is running at low speed, that wasn't there before.  Great.  I see a heatsink assembly replacement in my near future.

[Ionising_Radiation]

Could there be any reason why my GPU is stuck at 480 MHz, and apparently power-limited? GPU-Z screenshot attached. It happens randomly while gaming, and my framerates plummet. 

[Aaron44126]

6 minutes ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Could there be any reason why my GPU is stuck at 480 MHz, and apparently power-limited?

 

Check BIOS settings and see if you have Intel "Turbo Boost 3.0" turned on.  They added it in a BIOS update at some point and some people here are saying that it defaulted to on, which I would argue is inappropriate.  That "feature" causes havoc with max power on the dGPU if I turn it on in my Precision 7770.  (I haven't done testing with it on the 7560, but I don't have a beefy dGPU in that system.)

[Ionising_Radiation]

12 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

Intel "Turbo Boost 3.0" turned on

It's switched off for me. There appears to be another setting, 'Adaptive C-states for Discrete Graphics' which was on. This forum thread suggests that the same problem as mine (sudden clock speed drops and hence framerate drops) is caused by it. I have now turned it off. 

I'll see if the problem resurfaces after this. 

[Aaron44126]

2 minutes ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

There appears to be another setting, 'Adaptive C-states for Discrete Graphics' which was on.

 

Oh yes, I tested that one as well on the 7770 and it was also measurably bad for dGPU performance.  (It "sounds" like a good idea, I don't know if they didn't implement it properly or what.)

[Ionising_Radiation]

18 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

I'll see if the problem resurfaces after this. 

It does resurface. 

 

Grrr. There's plenty of thermal headroom...

[Etern4l]

3 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Grrr. There's plenty of thermal headroom...

 

Referring to the GPU-Z screenshot you posted earlier, the CPU was at 100C and GPU at 74C. That's pretty toasty, I'm sure Dell starts throttling things down at that point, and probably fair enough. Clearly, they (Dell's BIOS+VBIOS would be the precise culprits I imagine) prioritise the CPU, so just harshly downclock the GPU. I'm not sure why you thought it was power limited at 53W.

 

Obviously you must have undervolted as far as possible already. What I would try in your shoes is actually downclock the CPU (and perhaps the GPU) to keep the perfomance at a slightly lower, but steady level. Setting lower temp/power targets might also be an option, doesn't work as well in my experience.

[Aaron44126]

1 hour ago, Etern4l said:

I'm not sure why you thought it was power limited at 53W.

 

GPU-Z is reporting "power" as the performance cap reason, it would seem that the BIOS or something else in the system is not allowing the GPU to draw more power.

 

Has it been doing this "forever" or is it a new issue ...?

 

[Edit]

What do you have the "thermal mode" set to?  I have been noticing on my 7770 that the GPU sometimes gets temporarily throttled if there is a heavy or even moderate CPU load going on and the system is set to the "high performance" mode.  (This issue seems to be more pronounced under Linux for some reason, but now looking back I think it must have been happening sometimes on Windows too.)  The default "balanced"/"optimized" mode seems better about this.

 

Basically I guess I would suggest, if you are using "high performance" mode then try the "balanced" mode, or vice versa, and see if the behavior is better.  If you are using any other mode then I would expect GPU throttling for sure.

 

[Edit 2]

Oh, if you are experiencing this issue, maybe just switching thermal modes would be enough to kick it back to normal behavior, so maybe try that too.  If that does help, it would probably be possible to script a fix to just watch the dGPU power state and give it a kick if there is high GPU utilization but a low power state.  I'm assuming it is dropping down to P5 or maybe even P8 when this happens ...?

[Etern4l]

That's weird, but certainly possible. Either way, I'd bet a good amount it's just a form thermal throttling according to hidden parameters set by Dell. I updated my earlier answer with a suggested solution.

 

Edit: Yes, a less aggressive performance mode might also help, but in my experience with Alienwares at least, the effect is minor, if so - that might not be enough.

[Aaron44126]

I also updated my post above with an idea.  But if you want to downclock the CPU as @Etern4l suggests, if your game is more GPU-heavy than CPU-heavy then you can just toggle Turbo Boost off and I have a post with a number of "easy" ways to achieve that linked in my sig.

[Etern4l]

Turning turbo off would be unnecessarily harsh. I'd hope ThrottleStop or XTU are functioning properly, so you can just set a -1 or -2 core ratios. This works because of the hugely non-linear marginal power cost of those final few core ratio points. There are somewhat similar tools on Linux, which I haven't had a chance to use because of desktop BIOS.

 

For a concrete example, I'm running my 13900K at 53/43 ratios resulting in temps under 80C under full load (mid eighties under CB23, where it hits over 40K). Were I to let it run at the stock 55/43, temps would hit 90-100C and performance would actually decrease due to the resulting throttling behaviour. HTH

 

Edit: one other thing worth trying would be a repaste with the Honeywell phase-change paste/pad. No risk unlike with LM, and probably similar results.

[Ionising_Radiation]

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Has it been doing this "forever" or is it a new issue ...?

It has been doing this intermittently over the past several months, at least. It seems Halo Infinite is one game where this happens particularly often (it's not even that GPU-intensive).

 

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

What do you have the "thermal mode" set to?

I presume this is the Dell Power Manager thermal mode? It was set to High Performance. I'll change it to 'Optimised'. 

 

2 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

I'm assuming it is dropping down to P5 or maybe even P8 when this happens ...?

Is there somewhere I can monitor this?

@Etern4l, I have downclocked my cores as you suggested: 

[Etern4l]

Cool, good luck. I just run fixed ratios as well since I don't care about single core performance. As long as CPU temps stay under 90C and the CPU is holding the clocks (it probably won't if the temps go too far into the 90s), you should be good. Failing that you can try also down-clocking or power limiting the GPU if possible so it stays under 70C as well. Same story here, you want stable clocks under load. The difficulty, of course, is that in the laptop the two are interconnected. I think any loss from down clocking/power limiting will be smaller than the very noticeable/aggravating performance losses and dips  caused by thermal throttling.

 

Again, with all due respect to Dell pastes (not much of it left TBH), you can probably get significantly more performance out of your laptop with a repaste, especially if the thermal throttling hypothesis checks out.

[Aaron44126]

1 hour ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

Is there somewhere I can monitor this?

 

nvidia-smi will show you the current power state, and I know you can also see it on the screen in NVIDIA Inspector.

  

1 hour ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

I presume this is the Dell Power Manager thermal mode?

 

Yes.  You can also set it in the BIOS setup, and I wrote a command-line tool that can switch it quickly without having to wait for Dell Power Manager to fire up that I can dig up if it turns out that it would be handy.  I think @MyPC8MyBrain figured out how to change it from PowerShell as well.

[Ionising_Radiation]

So it looks like the GPU is going into P3: 

 

12 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

Yes.

The Power Manager mode makes no difference; this power cut was after changing it back to Optimised. 

 

12 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

change it from PowerShell as well

Oh, yeah, I've got that. There's a nice first-party (i.e. by Dell itself) PowerShell package, DellBiosProvider, that hooks into Dell Command | Configure.

[Etern4l]

7 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

So it looks like the GPU is going into P3: 

 

That's the normal/desirable state under heavy load. It's the opposite of Intel C-states: P0 is the lowest, P4 the highest (and I have yet to see P4 in practice, it's probably the equivalent of Intel's short-term turbo boost, with duration on the order of milliseconds).

[Aaron44126]

P3 is not a good state to be in when gaming, that’s what Dell limits you to if you are on the “cool” or “quiet” profiles and it has a huge effect on gaming performance. I bet if you select one of those profiles, you will see it doing the same "slow performance" that you are seeing now, but like, all the time.  You want to be in P2 or better.

 

I think the Dell BIOS/EC is the culprit here but I’m not sure what else to suggest.

 

1 hour ago, Etern4l said:

That's the normal/desirable state under heavy load. It's the opposite of Intel C-states: P0 is the lowest, P4 the highest (and I have yet to see P4 in practice, it's probably the equivalent of Intel's short-term turbo boost, with duration on the order of milliseconds).

Actually, P0 is the best performance and P8 is the worst as reported here. Not all numbers in the scale are used, it goes P0 (P1?) P2 P3 P5 P8. P8 is the low-power “idle” state.

 

I have seen the 0…4 scale as well where 4 is the highest, but this is not what NVIDIA-SMI reports. My system spends most of its time in 4 with occasional drops to 3 when the NVIDIA GPU is busy. (I’ve been doing a lot of measuring on Linux.)

[Etern4l]

42 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

P3 is not a good state to be in when gaming, that’s what Dell limits you to if you are on the “cool” or “quiet” profiles and it has a huge effect on gaming performance. You want to be in P2 or better.

 

I think the Dell BIOS/EC is the culprit here but I’m not sure what else to suggest.

 

Actually, P0 is the best performance and P8 is the worst as reported here. Not all numbers in the scale are used, it goes P0 (P1?) P2 P3 P5 P8. P8 is the low-power “idle” state.

 

I have seen the 0…4 scale as well where 4 is the highest, but this is not what NVIDIA-SMI reports. My system spends most of its time in 4 with occasional drops to 3 when the NVIDIA GPU is busy. (I’ve been doing a lot of measuring on Linux.)

 

Ha, you're right. 

 

Performance State The current performance state for the GPU. States range from P0 (maxi- mum performance) to P12 (minimum performance).

 

This is not the same as the "PowerMizer Performance Level" I tend to look at in the Linux driver.... 

 

Makes sense then - the GPU was throttling a little in P3.