9370 coil whine confirmed

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but just received my 9370 and coil whine is still there!!!

You do have to put your ear next to the keyboard to observe it, and a little better than my old 9350, but you do wonder what Dell had been doing all this time *not* to sort out the single most annoying problem on their XPS 13 line.

Now, the machine otherwise is impressive, better on all aspects! Just the coil whine...

 

strange mine doesn't have coil whine. i have 2 other xps 13 2017 model with coil whine so i know.
I haven't had time to use it much yet but when its plugged in charging the fans are too loud and it gets hot. Not happy right now
does your get hot and how loud is the fan?

 

My coil whine is just a bit better than my old 9350 but definitely there if you put your ear next to it.

Having said that, the machine is otherwise solid, and I wouldn't return it just for the coil whine.

My doesn't get hot nor noisy, my old fan is a lot noiser.

I'm just very disappointed with Dell overall, quality control almost non-existent on older models, everyone at work with a 9350 now suffer different problems. 9370 seems to be better made, but let's see...

 

I retract what I said re: fan noise, when plugged in, this thing never stops spinning the fans!

 

There are some recent BIOS / driver changes that have caused my fans to run very frequently on a 9550. You may be suffering the same on the 9370...

 

Sorry, more negative comments -- despite the fans spinning like crazy, the whatever thermal solution/material they claim works wonders simply does not! The bottom of the laptop is proper hot and the keyboard less so than my 9350 but still rather warm to touch.

 

same problem as me i see
did you talk to dell. I think we need a new bios update

 

another problem
when i'm scrolling on websites my screen brightness changes...like lots of white on screen then scroll down and a picture which is darker comes, whole screen goes darker.

 

ah, not have that screen problem...

again, I am just SHOCKED at how bad Dell quality control is!

looks like we have also another long cycle of bios updates to look forward to.

I'm not too optimistic on fan noise though, even with fan spinning mad, surface temp really gets high.

 

Hm thats the automatic / adaptive brightness adjustment done by Dell like on my 9350 maybe, weird, they did a bios update for the 4K version allowing you to turn it off I believe. Look in the bios to turn it off maybe.

Does not bother me anymore, but I thought the removed it or allowed you to switch it off...

 

Thanks. "Dynamic Backlight Control" to off in bios did the job.

I know I said lots of bad things about this laptop, but the screen is beautiful!

 

Thanks guys i'll turn off dynamic blacklight controls tonight when i get home. It was really bothering me yesterday. How do i get into bio's again?
Used the laptop about 1 hour yesterday and heat and fan seemed much better then first day i used it. Something is strange tho seems the fan are either total off or full blast.
Also the cpu core speed seems to be jumping up and down too much when doing nothing.

 

F12 then select bios config or sth to enter to bios -- then it is in the video category I think.

After that, the display will be much brighter.

Fan spinning also got better here, reckon it is to do with windows installing all the major updates, and indexing files -- still thermal management is not ideal.

 

Think i found our problem. more testing needed but try disabling windows defender. my temps went down 5+ in most temp sensors showing in HWiNFO64

also the display is 100 times better without the Dynamic bs control thingy

 

nevermind this laptop just runs too hot doing nothing...i don't know if i should keep it or send it back. what is some good alternatives?
ps the coil whine is still there

 

I now have wifi issues too -- once it woke up from sleep and couldn't find any wifi network at all for 15 mins or so, had to restart to make right, other recent video on youtube also mentioned similar problems re: wifi.

Thermal and coil whine are super annoying indeed -- I am just seriously disappointed with Dell on treating its customers like idiots, and for so long as well! most of us have 9350 at work and 100% of them now have problems, one of them wouldn't even boot and some needs manual intervention (such as pressing on the corner of LCD panel) just to boot... They do have something great on picture and paper, but are seriously cutting corners on build quality!!!

 

This is interesting:

Seems even the i5 suffers from thermal and throttling problems, the guy reckons there is no chance for i7, i.e, it will heat and not reach optimal performance at all.

 

make sure you put power mode on recommended setting. I had set it to best performance when i first turned on the laptop and it was heating up like crazy and fans full blast, just surfing the web watching youtube videos. Now its all good, was really hating the laptop there for a while.

I actually bought this laptop to use with my eGPU because the other xps only have half the thunderbolt 3 bandwidth. Anyways i did a half hour cpu stress test using my laptop cooling pad and the temps was actually a little better then my XPS 15. After half hour cpu stress, temp was 82 on xps 13 and 81 on xps 15 but the 5-6 other temp sensors where an average 8 degrees lower on the xps 13.

The other thing i noticed will doing these tests is both xps13 and xps 15 both throttled around 3093ghz
my xps 15 is i7 should have done 3.5ghz and my xps13 is i5 should have done 3.4ghz missing some 400-500mhz
the temps did not look to bad so i don't know why we can't get the extra 400-500mhz

 

Interesting finding.

I am calling Dell to see if I can switch mine for one of their secretive 9370 versions with the intel wifi chip -- read somewhere that their replacement came with an intel wifi card.

 

just called and tried to get this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/7ssehy/xps_13_9370_updated_config/?st=jd0939c6&sh=56eb8db7

but was told they can't...

going to observe wifi behaviour a bit more and decide whether to return

 

I also changed my power mode setting to the recommended settings the fans rarely come on which is so much better when doing anything on the laptop.

 

If they come with 2 different wifi cards i'm thinking you can change the wifi card and it might not be soldier onto the board. I'm pretty sure its cheaper to make the motherboards without the wifi cards soldier on. I can't find any internal pictures of the laptop. Have you tried opening the back of it to see for sure. I'm not having any issues but if its changeable i might change mine to. I'm going to open mine in the next week or so to upgrade the SSD, need more space.

 

Ya man makes a big big difference. Stupid me i set it to best performance as soon as i turned on the laptop and i was hating the experience and i was about to return the laptop, now its all good.

 

On battery and recommended setting it is rather quiet, but when plugged in the fan is just constant - which setting are you on when plugged in?

 

Mine is set to better performance for both battery and plugged in. The fans rarely cut in even when I am watching Netflix for me that is a huge plus when you don't have to blast the volume just to hear what they are saying.

I have the i7 8550U cpu, 16 gb ram, 1 TB SSD, maxed out specs and no coil whine

 

I have the next one down, half your SSD.

I can probably live with the coil whine, but wifi is seriously not cutting it, wake up from sleep and no signal again!

I am on better performance when plugged in and just browsing will trigger the fan.

 

one little request, when you guys say no coil whine at all, can you try to observe again for me by putting your ear close to the left of the keyboard when plugged in? if power is not plugged in, there is almost no coil whine for me, but when plugged in and putting my ear closer it is fairly audible.

cheers!

 

Put it on Recommended when plugged in also. For day to day surfing and videos its good. If you do heavy work stuff then you will need a cooling pad.
I actually have all my laptops on "never sleep" on battery and plugged, maybe thats why i don't have any issues with wifi. I've been doing this since the xps15 came out, 2 years? maybe and no issues.
They all have coil whine, some better then others. Mine happens on left side also when i move the touch pad up and down.

 

Thanks for getting back.

Yep, wifi seems to be related to sleep only so far, let's see what happens...

Guess you are right, tested quite a few 9350s and they all had various degrees of coil whine, but was REALLY hoping 9370 would sort the annoyance out all together.

 

I'm still having fan too loud and heat issues with charger plugged in. talked to dell and they said they will pass it on to Engineering team.
To everyone who's having this issue plz contact dell and let them know so they can work on it.

 

same here with mad fan -- it might well just be the whatever new thermal design they come up with just can't cut it...

dell engineer came yesterday to fix two of my 9350s, with different problems, long story but both are in worse state then they were before! so do watch out VERY CAREFULLY when they are at it!

 

Just watched a bit of Amazon Prime and look at the sort of temps I am hitting -- note the throttling at well!

 

Do me a favor plz

with laptop plugged in. close all problems. just open task manager and HWINFO64
don't touch anything, keys or touch pad for 4-5 mins
let me know if something weird happens around 4-5 mins of idle

 

OK, interesting, after 4-5 mins, as soon as I open Chrome and type this post, CPU temp hits 98c and immediate throttling!!! during the 4-5 mins idle, all is normal though -- I really really start to hate this machine.

 

I got the 9360 back in December and returned it because of coil whine. Now I've got the 9370 (waited for 2 weeks until it finally got shipped from China to UK) and I can confirm - the coil whine is still there. At first I didn't notice, as the first evening the charging cable was not plugged it, but the next day after I plugged it in the coil whine started like a damn orchestra. Without the cable plugged in and with battery settings set at "Battery saver" or "Recommended" I can barely hear it even with my ear pressed to the laptop and I believe that should be the "acceptable level", but the second I plug it in starts and never stops. Touching the screen, downloading files (this especially), watching videos, even scrolling web pages - I can hear the coil whine from 5 feet away. Such a disappointment. Disabling TurboBoost in BIOS lowers coil whine by around 70-80% to an "acceptable" level, but based on benchmarks, there is a loss of around 40% in performance.

After a couple days of use it seems that the coil whine got louder (not even sure if that's possible). Throttling is driving me crazy. Just watching Youtube videos on "Recommended" power settings it says that my battery is discharging even with the AC connected.



This is just unacceptable for a 2000$ machine. It feels like Dell tried to achieve the unbelievable and it obviously failed as the technology is just not yet in place...I will be returning mine next week.

 

What is your cpu usage during the idle time?
Mine behaves different. Can you double check and see if your behaves like mine.
At idle cpu usage is around 1-2% but the cpu speed jumps up and down from 900mhz till 3.4ghz to 1.5ghz to 3.4ghz etc just jumping up and down every second.
If i don't touch anytime after 4-5 mins CPU use goes to 25% and stays there and cpu temps go crazy up. It won't stop till i touch a key or move mouse.

On battery this doesn't happen.

 

I am not having much patience left in me neither, all that marketing and look what we have!!

 

CPU definitely jumps up and down during idle, but never gone crazy during that time, I've given it a few more mins after 5 as well, as soon as I launched Chrome it got mad and throttled.

 

Strange? Is your ok on battery?
I'm talking to dell and trying to get to the bottom of this but they don't work on the weekend
I'm sure its a easy fix we just need to find the problem.

 

Very strange! perfectly fine on battery -- actually I will go as far as nothing on battery it is defo better than 9350, runs cool and fan nearly never comes on.

Hope you can work something out with them!

 

You know when we have weird things like this happen on desktop pc first thing we check is the PSU. Could is be the Charger itself? I did notice once it does get hot and i thought i saw a made in china sticker on it or was that the usb dongle. Do you have another charger you can check with? I won't be able to test this till tomorrow.

 

I use a Google 45w charger at work, not sure I witnessed any different behaviour. One thing I'm sure is the Google charger is a lot better since it charges my Note 8 without a problem. The Dell one also charges but would freeze the screen often so I had to unplug immediately so not to fry my phone.

 

Can any of the new XPS 9370 owners please confirm that their laptop is absolutely coil whine free when plugged into AC? I am just trying to find out if all units are affected on one level or another.

If there is a chance to get a 100% coil whine free unit, I'll just keep exchanging them

 

ok its not the charger or the battery.
i'm going to buy a new Samsung ssd today and re-install windows. I'm thinking its a driver conflict. Also when i saw my toshiba ssd half the pcb looked new and clean and half looked old and used, weird?

Also i think i found a way to reduce coil whine, will do more test today.

ps when you open up the laptop be careful the metal is very sharp around the edges. i cut one of my fingers real good. Thanks dell
thanks dell for all the extra work and wasting the one day i have off

 

Can anyone confirm that 9370 Silver/Back 1080p (FHD version) has glossy Edge-to-edge Corning® Gorilla® Glass 4 screen instead of that matte bezel that was on 9360?

 

Ok, from what I am reading here, you can only hear the coil whine when you have your ear to the keyboard. How often do you use your computer like that?

 

That's totally how I use all of my computers. Makes it harder to see the screen, but I think it makes me look cool.

 

Haha, try reading the rest of the sentence next time

"Without the cable plugged in and with battery settings set at "Battery saver" or "Recommended" I can barely hear it even with my ear pressed to the laptop and I believe that should be the "acceptable level", but the second I plug it in it starts and never stops. Touching the screen, downloading files (this especially), watching videos, even scrolling web pages - I can hear the coil whine from 5 feet away. "

Did "5 feet" confuse you? It's 1.5 meters in proper measurements

 

Ok guys quick update.
I tried different charger, Same problem.
I tried without the batter just charger plugged in. Same Problem.
I bought new SSD and reinstalled windows still same problem.
I turned off all the options in bios. Still over heating and fan problems but helped with the coil whine but all those options are important so thats a no go.

I'm sending my Laptop to Dell's Lab for further testing.

 

I have the 4K version, currently running a dual boot windows/ubuntu and I can't hear any coil whine when plugged into AC, even when I stick my ears close to the left side of the keyboard.

I do however get the fan issue (fan starts running when plugged in AC), much more pronounced on Windows than Ubuntu.