Dell XPS 17 (9720)

This article or section does not follow the
Laptop page guidelines
.
Reason:
Missing function keys section, hardware table needs some adjustments, some sections need to be reordered (Discuss in
Talk:Dell XPS 17 (9720)
)
This page applies to the Dell XPS 17 (9720) and the Precision 5770, that are the same hardware.
Hardware
PCI/USB ID
Working?
GPU (Intel)
8086:46a6
Yes
GPU (NVIDIA)
10de:25a2
Yes
Wi-Fi
8086:51f0
Yes
Bluetooth
Yes
Audio
8086:51c8
Yes
Touchpad
06CB:CE7E
Yes
Webcam
Yes
Fingerprint sensor
27c6:63ac
Yes
SD Card Reader
10ec:5260
Yes
Installation
Before installing it is necessary to modify some UEFI Settings. They can be accessed with
F2
when booting.
Change the SATA Mode from the default "RAID" to "AHCI". This will allow Linux to detect the NVMe SSD.
Disable
Secure Boot
. This may be re-enabled at a later point. See
Secure Boot#Using a signed boot loader
.
Dual boot
Please note that changing from "RAID" to "AHCI" can break the default Windows installation and require a complete reinstall. Usually running windows own startup repair utility however fixes this issue in most cases. Another alternative is to follow this
guide
.
The reinstall can be done through the Dell recovery in the UEFI if needed.
Once you used the startup repair utility or have reinstalled, Windows should boot normally in AHCI mode and without error. Then one can proceed with typical dual boot setup.
Thunderbolt
The following thunderbolt devices have been tested:
Device
Working?
Comments
Dell WD22TB4
Yes
–
Dell WD19DC
Yes
–
Audio
Sound Open Firmware
is required, and allows full functionality.
Microphone
The laptop has several mic channels and the appropriate channel has to be unmuted before the mic will work. Run
alsamixer
, press
F6
, then in sof-soundwire:
Select
Playback
(
F3
)
Under
Playback
, select
rt714 ADC 22 Mux
and set it to
DMIC1
Select
Capture
(
F4
)
Make sure
PGA5.0 5 Master
is unmuted and and the two
rt714 FU02
channels are unmuted
Make sure both the left and right microphones for the PGA5.0 channel (use keys
;
and
'
) are selected. Other than the above mentioned channels in
Playback
and
Capture
, none of the other channels appears to able to influence recorded audio.
Touchpad sluggish/sticky
As in previous XPS 17 iterations, some users may find the touchpad is sluggish or sticky occasionally. Previous tracking bug
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/618
but it is not root-caused yet.
Touchpad is significantly more stable in X than Wayland. X will rarely exhibit an issue where only the top left quadrant of the touchpad is usable, for a short amount of time (and is fixable by a reboot).
Using Wayland, if the lower 20% of the screen is exhibiting significant tearing during pointer travel in that area, add the kernel parameter
i915.enable_psr=0
to resolve this.
Power Management
See
Hibernation
for kernel parameters & initramfs configuration.
S3 Sleep: Not supported. S0ix however works reasonably, losing ~ 0.5% per hour. "RAID" needs to be changed to "AHCI" for S0ix to work.
NVIDIA's open source driver does not support power management as of July 2022. Installing the proprietary driver is needed for
NVIDIA Optimus
. Once the proprietary driver is installed, no additional configuration is needed and it automatically turns the GPU off when not in use, reducing battery power usage by 7-12 watts per hour.
Firmware
Dell
provides firmware updates
that can be installed automatically using
fwupd
(or one of its graphical frontends such as Gnome Software or KDE Discover). User reports not receiving UEFI and some other firmware updates this way when there were newer versions available for download.
Alternatively, firmware updates can also be installed from the UEFI directly by connecting to Wi-Fi, or even installed manually by downloading them from the support page and placing the
.exe
file on a FAT32 drive or the
EFI system partition
, then selecting the file in the "BIOS update" page after pressing
F12
at boot time.
It is possible to install custom
Secure Boot
root keys in the UEFI and use them for Secure Boot with Linux.