Dell Precision 7670 & Dell Precision 7770 owner's thread

[alittleteapot]

7 hours ago, Aaron44126 said:

I'm working on switching from Intel RAID to Storage Spaces (so that I can disable Intel RST in BIOS) and if that doesn't fix it, I'll see about using tools like this to determine if I have a bad drive.

 

I vaguely remember having similar problems with using the BIOS to make RAID striped arrays from my drives, but I've had no reliability issues with either 2 TBx3 or 4TBx3 striped from Windows Storage Spaces, and that's running lots of Hyper-V VMs on them - I just remember that I had to use a few PowerShell commands to set it up properly.  The fact that three of the NVME slots are on the same PCI channel on both the 7760 and 7770 make it feel very natural to put them in a single logical Windows Storage spaces pool.

[Aaron44126]

17 minutes ago, alittleteapot said:

I vaguely remember having similar problems with using the BIOS to make RAID striped arrays from my drives, but I've had no reliability issues with either 2 TBx3 or 4TBx3 striped from Windows Storage Spaces, and that's running lots of Hyper-V VMs on them - I just remember that I had to use a few PowerShell commands to set it up properly.  The fact that three of the NVME slots are on the same PCI channel on both the 7760 and 7770 make it feel very natural to put them in a single logical Windows Storage spaces pool.

 

Thanks, and yes, I am familiar with Storage Spaces and had been using it prior to getting the Precision 7770.  Hoping that it is more reliable.  I normally don't have bad data drives doing BSODs...  I'd rather expect straight-up read errors or hangs.

 

What is weird is that it was working fine for the past few months... and now it is not.

 

(I just finished moving all of my data from the RAID array to an external drive.  The transfer ran for about 7.5 hours to a USB 3 drive.  I'm about to do the Storage Spaces setup, and then I will work on putting the data all back.  I could have just blown it away and pulled from my NAS backup, but I think that would have taken even longer.......)

[Ionising_Radiation]

I thought I'd apply @win32asmguy's trick to the 7560 (now with an RTX 3080). The NVIDIA PCF device is not available on the 7560, but the power limits can be changed in Afterburner, for a maximum limit of 122% (so 90 W × 1.22 = 109 W). I see typical power draws of around 105–107 W now. 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

On 1/3/2023 at 3:41 PM, 1610ftw said:

For some reasons there seems to be a rather wide range of efficiency with these CPUs with some CPUs easily consuming 15 or even 20% more power than others. Getting up to 26K and beyond on a limited power budget may depend very much on a user hitting the silicon lottery

 

i run through 6 x 12950HX and can confirm the silicon lottery is a thing with these new cpu's,

i had my mind made up by the fifth 7770 unit that i will not be keeping the platform,

when the sixth unit arrived it behaved completely different then any previous unit I had before,

it didn't run crazy hot out of the box, it was still idling high in default config but it is relatively low at 70c,

further testing the cpu it is able to withstand a significant undervolt and remain very stable unlike any cpu before,

as hard as it is to believe i am idling below 30c doing simple daily tasks,
that was not achievable with any of the 5 units i tested before,
despite my efforts i was not able to idle at acceptable temps,

with some units i was able to get to around 36-40c idle,

as soon as i added my 3 M.2 drives temps shoot to 50c at idle,

my current system is populated with all 4 M.2 slots and still maintains below 30c idle throughout the day, for this sixth unit so far I didn't touch Dell's paste yet, all other systems I had no choice but to try and replace Dell's paste and later on liquid metal application for both CPU and dGpu to try and get some stability (i tried with just CPU and both CPU and dGpu LM TIM), 

from what i can see now with my sixth system experience all my previous attempts were no more than a Band-Aid remedy for a broken leg, i cant explain the variances only report my first hand experience and impressions from the past few months with 6 units with 3080Ti and 12950HX, 

 

[1610ftw]

1 hour ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

 

i run through 6 x 12950HX and can confirm the silicon lottery is a thing with these new cpu's,

i had my mind made up by the fifth 7770 unit that i will not be keeping the platform,

when the sixth unit arrived it behaved completely different then any previous unit I had before,

it didn't run crazy hot out of the box, it was still idling high in default config but it is relatively low at 70c,

further testing the cpu it is able to withstand a significant undervolt and remain very stable unlike any cpu before,

as hard as it is to believe i am idling below 30c doing simple daily tasks,
that was not achievable with any of the 5 units i tested before,
despite my efforts i was not able to idle at acceptable temps,

with some units i was able to get to around 36-40c idle,

as soon as i added my 3 M.2 drives temps shoot to 50c at idle,

my current system is populated with all 4 M.2 slots and still maintains below 30c idle throughout the day, for this sixth unit so far I didn't touch Dell's paste yet, all other systems I had no choice but to try and replace Dell's paste and later on liquid metal application for both CPU and dGpu to try and get some stability (i tried with just CPU and both CPU and dGpu LM TIM), 

from what i can see now with this system my previous attempts were no more than a Band-Aid for a broken leg remedy, i cant explain the variances only report my first hand experience and impressions from the past few months with 6 units with 3080Ti and 12950HX, 

 

 

And this is why soldered CPUs are so annoying - you have to play the silicon lottery with a whole laptop and not just with a CPU - looks like you went all the way to find your golden sample 🙂

[MyPC8MyBrain]

1 hour ago, 1610ftw said:

looks like you went all the way to find your golden sample

unintentionally that's what happened, i didn't plan on going through six units,

 

first 3 7670's were all overheating eventually I gave up even with Dell kindly replacing the unit 3 times with zero issues, after a while i decided to give the 7770 a try, the first 7770 unit had an odd issue with dGpu, it would start lagging out of the blue for no apparent reason, they replaced it a day after it arrived with the second (fifth unit) the fifth unit had an issue out of the box where screen randomly flickered in patches in various stages even boot, that was also reported to customer service and immediately replaced with the sixth unit, by the fifth while waiting for the sixth unit I already made up my mind, I had no plans on keeping the last replacement knowing what's expected, the sixth was more of a customer service procedure I was not even going to open the box, just send it back and be done with it, as luck would have it I did open it and was pleasantly surprised,

[Rippchen]

13 hours ago, Ionising_Radiation said:

I thought I'd apply @win32asmguy's trick to the 7560 (now with an RTX 3080). The NVIDIA PCF device is not available on the 7560, but the power limits can be changed in Afterburner, for a maximum limit of 122% (so 90 W × 1.22 = 109 W). I see typical power draws of around 105–107 W now. 

Sweet side note, this is also working on Zbook Fury 15 G8 and so the RTX A3000 is running at 90W instead the 80 😊

[1610ftw]

2 hours ago, Rippchen said:

Sweet side note, this is also working on Zbook Fury 15 G8 and so the RTX A3000 is running at 90W instead the 80 😊

 

@win32asmguyshould at least get a member of the month award for that find - lots of users now with more GPU power 🙂

[alittleteapot]

8 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

as luck would have it I did open it and was pleasantly surprised,

 

The variances of this CPU architecture are just crazy.  It's likely a well-kept industrial secret just what this variance is; and it's not exactly an easy thing to figure out and isolate, either.  Maybe... Cinebench R23 raw numbers, out of the box, no mods or repastes, to establish some sort of baseline - if you have a record of doing that on all five laptops, that could establish some sort of metric for min and max spec of the same CPU doing the same thing.

 

I think in order to get any sort of wafer yields, Intel has to broaden the criteria at which the individual cores are tagged as acceptable, and the lithography processes are getting so fine that minor atomic variances in the materials are greatly affecting the semiconductor efficiency at turning logic into heat.

 

This makes me (and probably many others) really curious to see a Ryzen Pro-based professional mobile workstation, and see how those numbers vary.  On the other hand, some secondhand stories and firsthand exposure with Lenovo Ryzen based laptops make it look like there's still a learning curve on executing just the basics with this architecture.

 

 

 

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

without getting into too much technical details here are few elements you guys should consider if you value your precious space, my system drive was bit too big for my liking, something was reserving or occupying too much space, turns out shadow copy already made a snapshoot or some backup (about 9gb), then i realized shadow copy is also reserving too much space on each drive (i don't use shadow copy at all i use Acronis for snapshot backups), if you are like me and do not use shadow copy issue the following commands in command prompt to regain your drive space,

vssadmin delete shadows /all

 

after the above to be on the safe side one can also restrict  shadow copy reserved space to minimum

(change both /on & /for and issue for each drive in your system)

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=c: /for=c: /maxsize=320MB

 

there is also another nonsense reserved space element that can be disabled via PowerShell command
(this one alone freed 17GB on my system drive),

DISM /Online /Set-ReservedStorageState /State:Disabled

 

after the above on my 256GB drive i regained over 10% back, my other larger drives also regained the same percentage,
 

for those of you who want more space back disable swap file with the following command,

powercfg /H off

to clean up all event logs at once (place below in a batch and run as admin)

for /f "tokens=*" %%1 in ('wevtutil.exe el') do wevtutil.exe cl "%%1"

to purge auto update cache (put below in batch and run as admin)

net stop wuauserv  
for /d %%X in (%Windir%\SoftwareDistribution\Download*) Do (
for /D %%I in ("%%X\*") do rmdir /s/q "%%I"
del /q /f "%%X\*")
net start wuauserv

 

and finally i also prefer disabling paging file through windows GUI settings
run  > sysdm.cpl

navigate to advance tab and click on settings,

on settings switch to advance tab and click on "change"
uncheck "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives"

then change radio button to "no paging file" and click on set,

that's it you are now directly using your expensive ram properly instead of paging data on the drive,

 

Enjoy your space saving with cleaner and much faster system 

[Aaron44126]

1 hour ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

(i don't use shadow copy at all i use Acronis for snapshot backups)

 

Acronis True Image uses Volume Shadow Copy to create a storage snapshot before executing a backup.  (This is also true if most or all other programs that allow capturing a drive image while the system is running.)  This is what basically allows a consistent "point in time" backup to be taken while you continue to use the system.  If you shrink the VSS space, make sure that your backup still works.

 

You can also look at System Restore and see how much space is allocated to it.  Old control panel -> System -> System protection -> (Pick a drive &) Configure.

 

I generally allocate at least 10% of space.  Being able to get old versions of files back through the "Previous Versions" tab on any file properties has come in very handy on more than one occasion.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

22 minutes ago, Aaron44126 said:

Acronis True Image uses Volume Shadow Copy to create a storage snapshot before executing a backup. 

that may be true for the windows environment application, in my case i don't use the full blown Acronis application for many years now, I use only the rescue boot iso image, my user profile is on D drive so i end up backing up just system drive once in a blue moon as my personal data is never overwritten or updated etc., occasionally I will copy my personal data to an offline drive here with me,

[TheVlad]

On 1/4/2023 at 6:26 PM, MyPC8MyBrain said:

i would try to confirm the m.2 drive with another system at this point before you start pulling hair.

 

I finally managed to do this. I did put the SSD into another system, formatted it, and transferred some files to it. It definitely works. Astonishingly, now I can see these files on the drive in the "Browse for folder" window on an newly created module, when I come to the part where I am supposed to install the drivers for the SSD installer supposedly does not see...

Now is definitely a moment to start puling hair I think, or... 

 

On 1/4/2023 at 7:10 PM, Aaron44126 said:

1) I'd also check to see if it is visible from your working Windows system as a second drive. 

 

2) I wonder if there is some Dell BIOS security thing that has been put in place that prevents other drives from being recognized.

 

3) If you put the original SSD in there and go through Windows setup to the point of picking a drive to install on, does it show up as an option?  Or do you get no drives in the list in that case as well?

1) Yes, drive is also visible from pre-installed Windows 10 managed by my corporation

2) I wonder that to... Or perhaps even a hardware switch somewhere on the board?

3) Win 11 installer does not see the original Kioxia drive either

On 1/4/2023 at 8:26 PM, win32asmguy said:

 

Maybe try re-enabling RST and check in the RST boot option ROM to see if any kind of array or JBOD entry is defined? I am unsure but it may interfere with using the same slot in AHCI mode.

I don't know how to do this? I did try all 3 options for the storage mode, none of them works.

 

What I also tried is:

- Updated BIOS to 1.8.0
- Removed Dell provided drive

- Placed my new drive in a new slot...

- Went trough all of BIOS options again, trying to find anything that would stop OS from installing...

 

Now I am absolutely out of ideas

[MyPC8MyBrain]

1 hour ago, TheVlad said:

I don't know how to do this?

you will first need to activate raid in bios, then you should have a secondary raid management screen you can hit hot key combination to enter the console the same time you can hit F2 or F12 for boot option or entering the bios, i don't recall the key combo to enter the raid menu on the dell 7770 (i think its Ctrl+R during startup) it should be listed in bios when you activate raid how to enter raid management console, from there you should be able to enable disable RST,

[win32asmguy]

6 hours ago, alittleteapot said:

The variances of this CPU architecture are just crazy.  It's likely a well-kept industrial secret just what this variance is; and it's not exactly an easy thing to figure out and isolate, either.  Maybe... Cinebench R23 raw numbers, out of the box, no mods or repastes, to establish some sort of baseline - if you have a record of doing that on all five laptops, that could establish some sort of metric for min and max spec of the same CPU doing the same thing.

 

I think in order to get any sort of wafer yields, Intel has to broaden the criteria at which the individual cores are tagged as acceptable, and the lithography processes are getting so fine that minor atomic variances in the materials are greatly affecting the semiconductor efficiency at turning logic into heat.

 

This makes me (and probably many others) really curious to see a Ryzen Pro-based professional mobile workstation, and see how those numbers vary.  On the other hand, some secondhand stories and firsthand exposure with Lenovo Ryzen based laptops make it look like there's still a learning curve on executing just the basics with this architecture.

 

I have seen a variance of 200mv on some 12900k chips for P-core and cache factory voltages at the same frequencies. It is tougher to measure on the BGA laptop chips but it does seem like there is just as much variance. Hopefully 13th Gen's refinements will improve it. It sounds like 13900k Asus SP ratings have generally gone up so maybe it will be the same case with 13th Gen mobile.

[MyPC8MyBrain]

time to make it official...

 

 

[SvenC]

3 hours ago, MyPC8MyBrain said:

time to make it official...

 

 

 

XMP works out of the box - no BIOS hacks needed?

[MyPC8MyBrain]

14 minutes ago, SvenC said:

no BIOS hacks needed?

Ripjaws DDR5 SoDimm 64GB kit I picked off Amazon worked out of the box with no issues,

as you can see from CPU-Z above it is running XMP3 with declared clocks,

had to wait 2-3 min on first boot while system was testing new kit clocks,
that followed by a system confirmation that ram changed and that was it,

[MyPC8MyBrain]

13 hours ago, TheVlad said:

Now I am absolutely out of ideas

i would try to redo the usb stick, format it first then populate with a fresh downloaded clean image and MediaCreationTool again, if that still doesn't work ill have another route for you but it will be bit more technical,

[jorgeregula]

On 1/3/2023 at 9:35 AM, jorgeregula said:

Has anyone already tried undervolting by changing settings in the BIOS NVRAM? The parameters for voltage offset are there as well. Does this offer any advantages -- e.g. not being vulnerable to plundervolt?

 

I have now applied the settings in Throttlestop using the normal method

-125 mV on CPU core and CPU P cache

- 90mV on CPU E cache

 

Combined with the GPU power limit at 139% this gave me a 3DMark score of 11247 (10690 graphics and 15969 CPU). Score on stock was 10150, so I'm very happy with that increase! Final preference would be to stick the voltage offset changes in the BIOS. Searching through the dump that was provided here in the thread there are a couple of candidates.

 

 

I tried playing around with the different variables available, to no avail.

 

First thing I tried was to set the cache ratio, since this seems like the most reliable way to get a stable undervolt ( if the cache ratio is high I get BSOD immediately) (note, before attempting any I also enable the overclocking var 0x1D9)

 

Tried it with both the

- Ring Max OC Ratio (0x1E7)

and

- Max Ring Ratio Limit (0x211)

 

And tried with both of them setting them to 37x (0x25 in hex). This causes the CPU and cache ratio to drop to 4x and a 0,4 Ghz on the E-cores and even lower on the P-cores... Since the max value for both var is 0x55 I don't think it is expressed in Mhz but in times x, so I don't know how else to set them.

 

I have not touched the voltage offsets since if I can not change the cache ratio it will cause immediate BSOD I fear -- unless I start really low but that sort of beats the purpose 🙂

[zexspart01]

can someone please assist me to figure out how undervolting can be unlocked in the 7670

 

I did read the guide but after checking the Intel ME, i found a 16.1 version and no csme version is available for that version. I checked some videos using a bios dump tool but it get flagged as a torjan ??

 

One last question is this latter process ask you to pick the ram size to dump the bios (if i understood correctly). I currently own a 64 gig memory , does it literally mean a 64 gb stick is needed ?

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

 

since few of you out there having issues finding CSME that matches our models Intel ME version
(It's not about the latest CSME tools version it's about matching tools to our models Intel ME version),
here is my personal CSME System Tools v16.0 r8 that works with 7x70 in a self extracting archive or rar format
archive pass: notebooktalk.net

 

@zexspart01 not sure why you need the tools in the first place, to edit your bios settings you don't need CSME tools, members on here have figured it all out for everyone, all you need to do is to apply the commands required to activate the features you're after booting from a usb drive with GRUB on it,

the only time one needs CSME tools is to dump bios image initially in order to locate features of interest, the address its located at and the options available, once that's all figured out there is no need to dump another copy with all variable known in advance, you want to follow instructions below to apply them on your system,

 

1. Download grubx64.efi file from v1.0 alpha release available here
2. Get (or format) a blank FAT32 flash drive.
3. Create a folder called EFI. Within this EFI folder, create a folder called Boot.
4. Place the grubx64.efi folder above into the EFI/Boot folder path.
5. Rename grubx64.efi to bootx64.efi.

You should now have a flash drive with one file, bootx64.efi, 
located in the path X:/EFI/Boot (where X is your flash drive’s drive letter.) Time to boot it!

6. Disable Secure Boot in BIOS and Boot Prepared EFI USB Drive

Before your computer can boot the EFI flash drive, you will have to disable the Secure Boot option in your BIOS. 
Then you can access the Boot Menu and select your flash drive to boot into a modified GRUB terminal. 
You should now have the ability to execute the command “setup_var” to read and edit settings of interest, 
which are stored as EFI variables.

 

here are the bios commands i applied on my system

setup_var CpuSetup 0x132 0xAA 	# set IA AC LoadLine LSB to 170 (1.7mOhms) (default 0x90)
setup_var CpuSetup 0x133 0x0  	# set IA AC LoadLine MSB to 0 	     (default 0x01)
setup_var CpuSetup 0x43 0x0 	# CFG Unlock 			     (default 0x1)
setup_var CpuSetup 0x10E 0x0  	# Overclocking Unlock 		     (default 0x1)
setup_var CpuSetup 0xE 0x0  	# Enable ACPI S3 Support	     (default 0x1)
setup_var CpuSetup 0x42B 0x1 	# Enable PCIE Resizable BAR Support  (default 0x0)

 

here are my ThrottleStop Undervolt settings for my current 7770 bin
(below is for reference, do not copy these test your own bin limits than back off from your top limits, for further reference anything above -125 to -150 is considered aggressive undervolt, you don't want to go above that.)

FIVR:
CPU Core        -122.1mV (effective -125mV) with  IccMax 185.00
CPU P Cache     -122.1mV (effective -125mV) with  IccMax 185.00
CPU E Cache     -97.7mV  (effective -100mV)

Cache Ratio > Min/Max value    8/36
Turbo Groups > all performance cores set to 47

 

MSI Afterburner Settings

Power Limit (%) +130
Core Clock (MHz) +200
Memory Clock(MHz) +1300

 

[zexspart01]

Thank you!!!! it works perfectly now ! i was actually looking at the bios dump part and didn't understand that i could use the variables this way.

 

I currently use a 7670 and i guess all parameters are not unique for all systems , but those the iccmax settings help as well ? I didnt touch them yet since most of guides i read usually don't mention it.

 

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

47 minutes ago, zexspart01 said:

all parameters are not unique for all systems

parameters values may vary from one system to another based on the user choice,
but the same parameter exist in all 7X70 bios, Dell also packs one bios update for both models because they are the same,

 

47 minutes ago, zexspart01 said:

those the iccmax settings help as well ?

on my cpu bin they do, test your cpu for what it will accept,

for all -mV values reduce in -25mV increments to find your bin comfort zone,
test each parameter on its own until you find its limit then go back +25mV,
(my bin can accept up to -175mV but I'm not comfortable with that)

 

Cache Ratio and Turbo Groups all play part in your final results, only for these two parameters use the values i posted (if you don't set Cache Ratio properly you will likely find that your system crashes as soon as you try to undervolt P Cache),

[IamTechknow]

Hey for those who unlocked their notebook's GPU power limits, it appears NVIDIA has released driver 528.02 on Thursday. I will install it and confirm whether or not the power limit for my laptop's GPU can be adjusted still.

 

EDIT: Yes I confirm the power limit can still be adjusted, at least from 1-100%, someone with a Precision notebook, update your GeForce driver and check it!

Edited January 8, 2023 by IamTechknow
Add screenshots of good result