Dell XPS 13 2015 Broadwell Infinity Display Owners Thread

Hi guys

I read here and there that the M2.SSD shipped with has a sata3 interface.
Do you think that the M2.SSD with PCIe from Samsung would work there ?

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8006/samsung-ssd-xp941-review-the-pcie-era-is-here/2

Thanks

 

Ok, but I am being far. Dell is responsible for the product they sell. I had to do a work around out of the box in order not to be stuck at 0.6Ghz. That leads to believe the product has been rushed and not fully tested.

That's what I am saying, the system should be responsive and I am not talking about the workflow that I do on my desktop, just regular browsing, listening music, etc.

How do I confirm that I am running 100% scaling?

 

I can't seem to enable remote wake from Intel smart connect technology. Do I need to do something specific first?

 

Go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Display, click "let me choose one scaling level for all my displays" and make sure size is set @ 100%: http://i.imgur.com/jadpC7J.png

 

How about unplugging it. Let it reach 45%..plug it in. It should go up and stop and 90%.

 

Something weird happened today. My CPU no longer goes past 0.6 GHz, no matter what I'm running on it and no matter what Power profile I choose. I even set up the Minimum CPU frequency to 100% and that doesn't do anything.

I upgraded to the latest BIOS yesterday, but the laptop worked fine afterwards. Anyone ever heard of something similar? It has never happed to me before with any of the laptops I've tested or owned.

 

Guys, does anyone still have the touchpad issues where its just not snappy, and sometimes unresponsive when scrolling on webpages. respond please.

 

I found the same thing happened to mine! I installed the A01 BIOS last night and noticed the laptop was chugging today. I also installed the "Command | Power Manager" utility. I thought maybe it had something to do with it, so uninstalled the power manager and rebooted and I'm back in business now.

 

I think I'll stick with my Macbook Air 11in till Dell irons out the bugs. Or there is a 20% off sale.

 

And it started happening again, even with the Power Manager uninstalled. I've rolled back to the A00 BIOS, hopefully this will fix it. Seems good so far.

 

And now back to 0.57GHz ... argh! So slow!

Edit: Another reboot and it's back to normal. *sigh* Seems a bit random

 

Wow, that is sharp indeed, but almost too small to be honest.. I'll stick with the 125% and see if I can adjust. Are you running 100% on the FHD display?

 

Core i3 users with the 500mhz max cpu speed should check out these threads:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/xps-13-i3-performance.770398/
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/19616394/20722489#20722489

 

I had the 0.6ghz issue before, go to powerplay and advanced. There change back to 2.6ghz

 

Did anyone get the Dell Adapter? Trying to get my hands on the Dell premier sleeve, but cant find it here in Europe. Any place that sells it online and ships international?

 

Yep, it's totally random and happens both on battery or when plugged in, but I've only noticed it lately. I rolled back to the initial BIOS versions and that changed nothing, and I also remove Dell Command Power Manager to no avail.

I've went to Power Options, Advanced and set the Config TDP level to 15W at 2.20 GHz and that seems to do the trick for now. I wonder if it will take a toll on battery life though, as the CPU's frequency now jumps between 0.8 and 2.2 GHz even with the laptop idle.

 

The tdp det to 0.6ghz is actually 7.5w and not 15w, so it's incorrectly marked in the powerplan.

 

(1) my battery does only charge to 99,5%
(2) there is no time-calculation in windows, (it says, e.g. 67% but not 6 hours 55 minutes)
(3) occasionally, it gives message "power adapter not supported" (if I put adapter out/in again, problem disappears)

Somebody has similar issues?

 

As of now you can only use SATA III M.2 drives. I'm not sure if this is a hardware or software/firmware limitation or not though...

 

Thanks Clabern.

I have not seen this written anywhere in Dell specs. Is there somebody that tested it ?

Can somebody look what is the connection behind (where is connected the SSD) in windows system manager (to have an idea of the hardware behind so we can verify ?).

Thanks

 

Just checked the video with the SSD replacement procedure on youtube.

Interesting thing, the connector on the motherboard has only one key (=for PCIe AND SATA cards).
M2 SSDs :
- 1 key = PCIe
- 2 keys = SATA (the liteon ssd in XPS13 2015 has 2 keys).

I am really wondering. Would like to try (makes a big change to have a SSD peaking at 1.1Gbytes/s.... instead of 450Mbytes/s !

 

There is a guy who claims that Dell XPS 13 9343 works with Samsung XP941 PCIe SSD:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19620329

I belive there are no hardware limitations (i7-5500U has two 2.0 x4 PCIe lanes and M.2 socket used in 9343 is a 'M' key 2280 slot, same as in Lenovo Carbon X1 Gen3) although there can be some BIOS issues, that's why presently it won't accept SM951 PCIe SSD.

 

I did not get it replaced for this. I was going to have it replaced because of the battery issue, but once I connected the battery to the board it worked so decided it was not worth the hassle. MS Store was going to take 3 weeks for the replacement so I did not bother. Maybe I will ask Dell about it.

 

Were they actually updates or just the most recent drivers?

 

I updated my BIOS and did the rest of the updates. No issues so far.

 

My cpu is stuck at 0.78Ghz in Power Saver mode. Is this suppose to be like that?

 

I unplugged it for awhile, then connected, now it says "60% available (plugged in, not charging)

 

Where is the MICROPHONE? Anyone?

 

To left and right of the charging light on the front panel.

 

weird..wasnt it supposed to stop at 90%.
Im waiting for my replacement unit, so I cant try it myself.

 

Anyone else noticed that iTunes HD movies are not smooth (e.g. medium speed panning shots and scrolling end credits) ? Any suggestions on how to improve?

I've tried maxing out all the power settings in my own customer power plan, which inclyded upping the TDP to 15W @2.4GHz, sand setting max 100% CPU. Also disabled Intel SpeedStep in BIOS, and installed the latest Intel HD5500 Graphics drivers. Changed the audio in both iTunes and Windows to 16bit @ 48000Hz which seemed to fix an annoyingly frequent audio glitch.

But it's still noticeable!

Any help or other suggestions really appreciated....

 

Dell Update show me Yesterday (for the first time) an update available and it was the Realtek Audio drivers

 

Has anyone else noticed an issue with their XPS 13 where the front right side palm rest does not sit 100% flat? I noticed with mine that there is about a 1mm gap almost like the frame is warped.

 

I do not have any gaps.

 

How frequent does it stutter? I just started watching Catching Fire for a few minutes and it ran fine.

 

Good thing then because I got a replacement from MS store and the same exact 'issue' persists. I also had another person on this forum message me saying that he notices the same graininess texture on both of his units he bought. So i guess it's 'normal'. I doubt most people even notice it or that it might be of varying intensity on different units although both the laptops I got had it about the same level of visibility.

 

I don't see anything...

Yep, set to 90%, stopped at 60%

 

Anybody else have issues putting the laptop to sleep mode? I've tried both pressing the off-button (which is set to put the laptop to sleep) and going through the start menu. What happens is that the screen goes off, and the computer seems to power down, however the fan starts spinning up again and doesn't rest.

 

Hi guys,

I searched this thread but did not find any mention of it.. but could anybody please report gaming performance for the 1080p model? I'm particularly interested in numbers for dota2 and CS:GO.

Thanks.

 

If I am reading ebook PDF, white background + black text... there seems something WRONG

... it seems there is something moving, yet there is nothing moving.... something seems to becomes blurry, then it is sharp again... my eyes cannot seem to focus on the screen...

I am not sure this is something with coating of matte screen... or perhaps my own subjective perception "creates" the problem... and my obsessing over it recreates the problem...

my wallpaper (blue-ish, black) or just browsing the internet with different colors my eyes can focus normally, but when there is a high black-white contrast something seems "not right."

Also, when I put brightness to max on white background (notepad), the white is not white, it's white with " very very light blue (grey?) clouds covering the screen" the clouds also seem to be travelling on the screen (that is, at least, if I am not schizophrenic)

Am I going crazy? Or is there something wrong with the anti-reflective coating (or the screen in general?)

 

It might be the adaptive brightness auto-adjusting.

 

I just purchased an XPS 13 2015 edition (i7) from Amazon. I was very surprised to receive a Microsoft Signature Edition model especially since the listing on Amazon did not say one word about it being a Microsoft Signature Edition.

But I was not able to find the Intel option under their graphics app to disable the adaptive brightness which is already driving me crazy.

I am going to do a fresh re-install of Windows 8.1 tomorrow (from MSDN, not from the Dell recovery partition), and hopefully I can disable it after I install the Intel drivers directly from their site and not Dell.

 

Is there anyone that owns one that wouldn't mind doing a quick test for me to see if the displays use pwm? I'm super sensitive to light and pwm in some displays and get bad migraines with them like the Surface Pro 3. It's super easy to test, just be in a normally lit to dim room looking at something like this website where it's white on the background and set the laptop to low brightness like 20%. Then turn on your cell phone's camera and aim it at the screen from 3-5" away, so that it can focus still on the text. When you do this, does the image on your phone stay white background like on the system? Or does it seem to flicker, either from white to black/grey for background, or even just black/grey scan lines going up and down the image? Move the laptop brightness up to 50% and then 100% and see if it changes. I'd really appreciate that as that can pretty much rule it out. If you have an iPhone 6 then even better is to record video using the slow motion option and see if there's flickering in the playback.
On some displays, they achieve lower brightness by flickering the LEDs on and off so fast your eyes can't see it. For some people like myself though it still affects us and within 2 minutes of using a system with one of these displays I get the worst migraine. On the Surface Pro 3 which uses this for example, if I aim my phone at it at 100% brightness it looks fine, but as soon as I go to 50% brightness I see the image on my phone flickering, getting worse the closer to 0% I go. So just curious about these ones as I'd really love to pick one of these up if it doesn't have it! Thanks!

Disclaimer! This is just to help in my decision but not be the deciding factor what's said on here. It's more if it doesn't seem to flicker, then I'll go into a store and check it out myself, but if it sounds like it does then I'll probably spare myself the trip.

 

I don't notice the other effect but the cloudy effect is there. I refer to it as 'grainy' but yes, the clouds seem to move when scrolling on white backgrounds because they stay in one place on the screen while the text on which you focus moves!
I don't notice the greyishness but the dots are super annoying.

 

I've had the FHD, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD model for a couple of weeks. I love it, especially the FHD matte screen.

I've had WiFi problems, with the WiFi cutting out at random. A Dell tech replaced the WiFi card, but that hasn't fixed it. They're replacing the antenna this week.

Other than that I think the machine's great. But the problem I have with Dell is their appalling sales service. I ordered a bunch of accessories with the laptop, 4 weeks ago, and none of them have arrived. The reason is that if more than one item is ordered at once Dell sends them all together to save money, and if an item is out of stock, rather than inform the customer, they just delay the whole order. To find out that that was the reason for the delay took about a week of asking. This has happened to me twice. If I ever get more than one item at a time from them I'll order them separately to avoid this happening. There was a delay in the delivery of the laptop too, and Dell wouldn't reply to my emails about it until I was able to get hold of a manager their. It amazes me that a company whose sales are mostly online has such a terrible sales service.

Their tech support can be slack too - a tech said he'd have to look into one problem and get back to me, but never did. The next person I spoke to about it did something and said to send her an email if it didn't work. I sent her an email days ago and haven't heard back. Plus their hold music is just one single instrumental about a minute long, over and over - it drives me nuts.

I think Dell could easily increase their sales a great deal if buying from them wasn't such a bad experience. I only braved their bad service to buy the XPS 13 as it's exactly what I need. Anytime a competitor has something equally suitable I'll buy from them.

 

@Lee M
I have made "your" test with an IPhone 6 and my QHD+ Display: No flickering!

 

Is it to be expected that the laptop seems to drain 20-25 % battery during approx 10 hours of sleep? There doesn't seem to be a hibernate function either, if that could have helped.

And does anyone have a good solution when it comes to avoiding accidentally touching the mouse pad while typing? For better performance I've turned off the delay - is the only solution to switch it on again?

 

Here's the reference I spoke of with someone who's tried a PCIe drive with no luck:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/2w821c/booting_from_sm951_on_dell_xps_13_2015/

 

Does the QHD only reduce battery life? Or does it make also the fans go spin crazy?

Somebody has QHD and computer in general quiet?

 

no screen flickering at all on my FHD version, tested using Phone 6