Dell XPS 13 2015 Skylake Infinity Display Owners Thread

Notebookcheck just posted another review of the new XPS 13. Check it out!

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-2016-i7-256-GB-QHD-Notebook-Review.155081.0.html

 

Hi,

I found a solution to use a 4k display with the XPS 13. I confirmed that both the Monoprice USB-C Male to DisplayPort Male:

http://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=12908

and the

VisionTek Products USB 3.1 Type C to Displayport Adapter (900817)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0157RVTDW?

will both deliver 4k (3840 × 2160) at 60 Hz with the XPS 13.


The key was to disable MST on the monitor and not to plug anything into the display port OUTPUT on the monitor. Then I was able to get 60 fps on the monitor at 4k.


So, the adapters are using a legacy mode that has limited bandwidth, but the bandwidth is sufficient for one 4k display @ 60Hz, not anything more than that. As soon as I would plug in a second display, the resolution or frame rate would drop.

Hopefully the Dell Thunderbolt Dock (TB15) will solve this and allow two 4k displays @ 60Hz. Until then, both of these cables will work.

 

Good News!

Dell will be releasing a BIOS update in mid-December that will fix the high power consumption of the PCI-e drive as per LaptopMag:


http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/dell-xps-13-battery-life-fix

Happy for the QHD+ owners as the xps 13's biggest problem, which has been the Dynamic Backlight Control embedded in the actual panel made by Sharp, is now a thing of the past. That, and the PCI-e drive power consumption fix really makes the laptop arguably the best ultraportable yet again.

 

I received the laptop on Monday (9350, i5, 8GB RAM, FHD, 256GB) and I have to say I am impressed with it. What a sweet little, well built device. I cant believe I havent heard the fans except when installing the big Win10 update and some software. Incredible! I have waited for such 13" PC laptop for 10 years. I can only hear very very quiet coil whine (similar to HDD drive noise but audible only when my ears are next to the keyboard in absolutely quiet room - normally I can not hear it and I am pretty sensitive to electrical noise).

On second charge I was able to get 10 hours of wifi usage with about 10-30% brightness (keyboard backlight off, power saving mode) - installing sw, setting up stuff with new PC, browsing Edge & FF (tens of tabs opened), emails, 1 hr of spotify. I believe it is going to be better with time. My average consumption is about 4,5 - 5 W, therefore it seems about right to get 10 hrs with 56 Whr battery. If I turn the brightness up, turn on keyboard illumination, balanced mode, play some YT video, then of course the consumption goes up (can get over 12 W). Battery wear level was about 1,4% which is perfectly normal.

I usually use my laptop with 70-100% brightness (glossy types) but on this device it is the first time I dont need to turn to brightness up. I believe there is a big difference between level of brightness needed between glossy (especially touch glass) and matte types of screens - with the matte you can comfortably work with lower brightness even indoors in well lit office. It is about as bright as my old Acer aspire 3810T (but this one had glossy screen and I regularly used it with max brightness).
My type of FHD screen is SHP1449 (according to HWinfo64) and it has the CABC too (as tested with tylerwatt's test), but I havent noticed it yet in any real world scenario.

I havent been able to update the VGA drivers (some failure), but everything works fine, BIOS is 1.0.5.

What bothered me most out of the box was the touchpad which may be silky smooth and fine but has some initial lag (bothers me for fine/small movements) and most of all the scrolling is not consistent - sometimes it skips back a few rows when I release the fingers, sometimes not. I will try others drivers and setttings or the setup described in this thread when I get some spare time to play with it.
The keyboard is a bit shallow - but it is as good as it may be for an ultrabook - and I am sure I will get used to it very quickly.

Yeah and the speakers are wonderful for such a small device!

 

Does this solution work for two HD monitors at 40hz each?

 

Monoprice has 12% off right now with the code "DEC12" .... FYI

 

Hi, I'm new here. Just bought 9350 QHD i7 256GB 8GB model.

I am wondering if I set the resolution to 1920 x 1080 on the QHD, would I get the same battery life as the FHD model? Reason for buying the QHD model as it is at the same price as the FHD after all the discounts, i7 processor and the DBC issue.

Thanks!

 

To my knowledge, changing resolution mainly affects on performances but not so much on battery life. To make it simple the screen will drain as much battery, the only gain is because you'll need a little less power to display things. I think it's nt worth it, it would be bad to not have the use of the QHD display!

And if 1080p is good enough to you, remember with the 1080p version you'll have a mate display and will have better battery life (especially because you don't need to set brightness very high with this kind of screen)

 

Thanks for your reply, but I have gotten the QHD screen already mainly because of the DBC fix and upgrade to i7 processor and at same price as FHD i5
If it doesn't helps to reduce the battery drain that much guess I will set back to 3200 x 1800.

 

Well, te easiest is you to try! Give us a feedback.

 

I tested the SSD and the results seem to be better than from Notebookcheck tests (particularly the Crystal disk mark test). AS SSD is similar. Curious how is it going to change with the new BIOS update coming mid December.

 

Somebody has said turning off pinch to zoom fixes a lot of problems on a lot of touchpads, I would give that a try.

 

The best thing really is to test it yourself cause nobody ever tried testing battery runtimes with lowering the display resolution and see if there is any difference.

I'll tell you one thing though, you really should set your display at its native resolution, otherwise it will always look bad. It will look fuzzy and kind of blurred. Having had two QHD+ laptops, the Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro and the 9343 XPS 13, I have seen this phenomenon. Even with my 4k Dell monitor, whenever I don't set it at its native res, even with 2560x1440 @ 100% scaling, the display looks fuzzy & blurred. This is mainly the reason why I returned my QHD+ 9343 XPS 13, and went for the 1080p variant since the apps I mostly use need 1080p and can't and/or would not scale properly at QHD+.

 

After four years with the toshiba portege z835 (which somehow still weighs less then any recent decent notebooks), I've finally made the plunge and ordered the dell xps 13 through the cyber Monday deal! In addition to the dell advantage 5% back, I also went through ebates to get an additional $123 off that $950 price. Excited to start using this computer, and relieved that dell is addressing loss of these bugs that are surfacing (like the nvme power bug and the cpu bug). I'm not sure what to expect from this CABC issue... I find it weird they would only release the fix for the xps 15. Hopefully I'm one of those people who doesn't notice it

 

This definitely helped on my old X1 Carbon, which had touchpad problems after I upgraded to Windows 10.

 

There was a Windows 10 OS update last night. Only been using it for a day but the touchpad has yet to 'snap back' a few lines while scrolling, and overall feels improved.

 

Microsoft store has their QHD Dell XPS 13s running on 720p, since it's 1/4 of the resolution of QHD. It's like how UHD relates to 4K.

Scaling was pretty bad at full resolution.

 

What was the original SSD that you upgraded?

 

edit wrong thread

 

Hi all ..
I just bought the Dell XPS 13 9350 .. I DO want to uninstall all boatware that I do not need .. can you help me with that
Here is the list of the preinstalled apps



Thanks in advance

 

Everything that starts with Dell can go. Plus Intel Security Assist.

 

Thanks

 

Got my FHD XPS on order, due 17th December.

Trying to get some info on the USB C adapter. The one linked to in this thread on Dell US is:

http://accessories.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&sku=470-ABQN

I saw the HDMI wasn't working for some people - is this resolved?

Here in AUS the only one I can find available is this:

http://accessories.ap.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=au&l=en&s=dhs&cs=audhs1&sku=470-ABNL

Is it the same adapter? At the bottom of the page it says:

Compatibility
This product is compatible with the following systems:
XPS 12 (9250)

Also on the XPS page on the Dell site here:

http://www.dell.com/au/p/xps-13-9350-laptop/pd?oc=y51of93au&model_id=xps-13-9350-laptop

it shows what looks like the same adapter but says "coming soon".

I'm confused! Are these all the same adapter?

 

I used the 3.5mm audio output for one of the first times today. It's important to note that the Dell Audio/MaxxAudio Pro preset applies to the headphone jack.

Noise floor is on the higher side, and I'm definitely able to hear some slight electrical interference. Can't say I wasn't disappointed for a laptop this expensive, but I also kind of expected it. Keeping MaxxAudio on makes the soundstage seem really small. It also just sounds like a treble & bass & volume boost, which doesn't necessarily result in better audio. I much rather prefer having MaxxAudio off when listening to music. I did find that some earbuds with a bassier profile sounded better with MaxxAudio on, though.

It's also really odd if you toggle between mute/unmute. It kind of feels like there's a pressure when you unmute - I'm assuming this is mostly due to the noise floor of the output. When you mute, there's an odd sort of beep/click where it sounds like the output basically turns off(since the audible noise floor basically disappears). During regular usage, it'll mute/unmute automatically, so it's a bit odd.

I do have a relatively budget dac/amp, the CEntrance DacPort Slim. Normally I have trouble hearing any quality differences between onboard audio on desktops/laptops and the DacPort Slim, but I can definitely tell a difference between the two with the Dell XPS 13. I think it's mostly that slightly higher noise floor that makes everything sound a little bit more muffled and flat than I'd like. When compared to my HTC One M9, noise floor on the XPS 13 is probably 2-3x higher at the least.

I think that a regular user won't really notice any audible difference unless they're in a very quiet room doing comparison listening(like I'm doing right now). The only thing that may be odd/noticeable is the automatic mute/unmuting or enabling/disabling or whatever happens when the headphone output goes between idle and in-use which causes an odd noise to be outputted. I also expect that during regular playback in a typical usage environment, the slightly higher sound floor doesn't become noticeable.

If any of you were wondering, I used my AKG K553 headphones for testing, as well as a set of JLab J4 earbuds. As stated earlier, the DAC/AMP used for comparison was the DacPort Slim.

So for those of you serious with your audio or music production, consider getting a portable dac/amp if you don't already have one.

 

It is the stock one - Samsung PM 951 256 GB NVMe that Dell puts in XPS.

 

Dell will release a BIOS update that will soon add a lot of battery life to PCIE NVME SSD (Samsung) owners...up to 2hrs more.


http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/dell-xps-13-battery-life-fix

 

Hi again
I am having trouble connect to my Samsung TV .. I click connect but I get "We did not get any response from the device". Note I have no problem connecting to my TV using my Lumia 930 - windows 10 mobile phone
Best Regards

 

There's a new driver for Intel 520 Graphics if you manually update through device manager.
Driver version: 20.19.15.4331
It isn't available on Intel website or via Dell update.

Found that it has solved the graphical lag on Chrome browser

 

I am torn between the i5 fhd and the i5 qhd. Is the qhd worth the extra money? The qhd hard drive is also twice the size, will this make it any faster? I am a student and looking at buying it from Microsoft website with a 10% discount. Are there any better or cheaper places to buy it at? I appreciate any input thanks, Ryan.

 

If you need good battery life, get the FHD version. If you depend on specific apps that might not like scaling, get the FHD version. If you are very sensitive to every bit of weight, get the FHD version. If money counts, get the FHD version.
QHD is nice on paper, but except for very specific tasks (if you need a high res screen, I'd say go for it, but if you knew that you need one, I guess you wouldn't ask) the pros don't really outweigh the cons, imho. I didn't have to pay for my laptop myself, but I still went for FHD. The extra 3 hours of battery life just can't be countered by an even-better screen, for me. Quite simply, because FHD on 13.3" is already nice. Not perfect, but really nothing you'd complain about in any way. And it is mate, which to me is a lot easier on the eyes if you work on it for hours, as I often do.

Yes, bigger SSDs are generally faster, but it is unlikely to be something that you will notice in actual usage. Except, maybe, if you get the 128GB version, but even there, the difference is probably marginal in user experience unless you regularly load huge numbers of files or very big files.

 

not to disagree with anything you're saying, but i just thought i'd provide another perspective.

if, like me, you haven't bought a new rig in a long time, then the new tech will be that much more alluring
i'm coming from a clevo p150hm that was meant for gaming until the radeon 6990m melted and ruined that purpose. i've had this laptop for 5 years.
w7 > 10
sandy bridge (i think) > skylake
nontouch > touchscreen
other stuff i may not be considering as well

it's really quite rad to make all those leaps.
i know your quibble is strictly between qhd and fhd, but just looking more broadly,
to own a device with all of that brings quite a smile to my face.

it's easier to justify since on cyber monday dell put out a deal for an $1150 i5 qhd. didn't realize what a price reduction it was at the time.
i don't think you'll find much beneath 1400, but i could be wrong.

the bios battery fix might bring the xps13 qhds to 8ish hours? who knows
we'll just have to wait for results to come in from individuals.

it's truly an individual decision though. could i probably do with out touchscreen?
i have for the last five years;
there's no reason why i couldn't. but as out of touch with the tech as i am, i'm still at heart one who really enjoys it in the same way that car junkies appear to obsess over minutiae.

basically, no one can tell you what you need the laptop for; only you know that.

 

The Notebookcheck review ( http://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-13-9350-InfinityEdge-Ultrabook-Review.153376.0.html) mentions the possibility that Dell will release a XPS 13 9350 with an i7-6600U chip and 1TB SSD. Any chance that they would also upgrade the graphics to Iris (HD 540)?

 

Thanks for the response. Do they make an i5 fhd with a 256 gb hard drive?

 

It's a bit difficult to find the US, although there was a black friday deal last weekend for $949.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)

As you can see, i7 6600U is hd520 ! You'll need 6650U to get hd540.

 

Hi all
I have the i5 QHD+ model and when i play a 4k youtube video in full screen

it freezes a lot ... is this normal ?

Best Regards

 

nope, the i7 6600U ships with the HD520, they can create other chipsets that would be named I7 6650U etc with an Iris, but an iris pro generates too much heat for an XPS 13...if you insist for having it in an ultrabook you'll have to wait for the 2016 macbook pro 13"

 

Yes the HTML5 and chrome combo sucks watch the video in Microsoft EDGE web browser and tell me if it still freezes....

on chrome 4K youtube cpu usage 90%...
on Edge 4K youtube cpu usage <10%...

 

Microsoft figured out a way to stick the HD540 in the Surface Pro 4. If only Dell would do that in the XPS 13, this would be the perfect machine for me. I guess they didn't want to take away sales from the XPS 15...

 

You guys seriously overplayed the Chrome problem to the point where I would've never touched it. I just tried it out of curiousity and it hasn't given me a single issue. Touchpad is fine, no lag. I'm sure 8gb ram helps, but I think it's perfect.

 

In my laptop (not XPS) it plays perfectly only in Chrome.

 

For chrome, it is laggy because it is using VP8 codec which is not hardware accelerated. Get h264fy addon.

 

Hi
I am looking for ordering the i7/16gb/ 1 tb. Will this still weigh at 2.9 lbs or heavier than that? Also anyone owning this configuration, what is the battery life? Are there any issues with this configuration?

 

Hi all,
I've read through this thread re: hard drive upgrades.

I collect my i5/8gb/128hd tomorrow. I want to upgrade to a 256 or 500 gb HD. I dont need massive speed increase, but would be more concerned over battery live.

What do people suggest now that you've had your computer for a month or so?

Thanks. Andrew

Sent from my LG-H812 using Tapatalk

 

This. The touchpad on this XPS 13 is still better than all of the other trackpads I've used on Windows laptops. Sure it's not as fancy as on edge, but it's accurate and works great.

 

This works fine
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147399

 

Mine is also fine. Only issue I have is that occasionally, two finger scroll won't register and it will just move the mouse cursor instead. But it only happens occasionally so it is not deal breaker for me.

 

omg .. no problem with EDGE .. damn thanks for the tip

Best regards

 

Any idea if we could attach this to the thunderbolt port in the xps 13 or 15?

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Thunderbolt/Dock/OWC/Thunderbolt2-Dock/


Sent from my LG-H812 using Tapatalk

 

thanks for raising this;
i'm in the market for something similar. cheaper, hopefully.

i suppose what is ideal is going to be unique for everyone.
in any case, i've had my eyes on this for a while:

http://www.amazon.com/Juiced-System...75754&sr=1-1&keywords=juiced+systems+ethernet

6 usb 3.0 & ethernet.
ideally, i'd like another port (hdmi/vga) for my monitor, but i haven't found anything around in this price range
that includes such options alongside usb ports and ethernet.

anyone spot a usb+ethernet hub?