Dell XPS 13 2015 Skylake Infinity Display Owners Thread

Response to #1: The slow write speed is not due to throttling. The specs of the PM951 256gb are roughly 1500MB/s read, 300MB/s write.

Response to #2 and #3: Correct. With the driver update my write speed went from ~150MB/s to the expected ~300MB/s. I do have the correct 4300 Intel driver installed. I don't have patience for repeated display driver errors that kill my productivity. I paid $1400 for the laptop. I expect working display drivers on Day 1 and also $1400 worth of "next gen" NVMe SSD performance.

I'm not knocking the laptop as a whole, it is the best ultraportable out there IMO. Just wish the issues were resolved and that Dell didn't skimp on the SSD, because really that's what they did.

 

i heard that due to the new w10 update yesterday the touchpad is working fine now most if the time. can anybody confirm this?

 

It's certainly better, but they still have some ways to go. Despite the precision trackpad now being managed directly by the OS, its performance is still surprisingly inconsistent across different applications, you can never quite predict how it's going to work. Every app has its own trackpad quirks, and lag appears and disappears at random. The central trackpad settings also don't seem to have much effect on things like scrolling speed across the board. It's confusing.

Chrome is at least usable now, but it's still not very fluid and so not a good daily driver. On the other hand, scrolling in Firefox is smooth as silk (and generally it's ahead of the browser pack again on Windows IMHO).

Even Microsoft can't seem to get it right with their own apps: so Insider Hub has completely broken scrolling on the messages, which also can't be zoomed, Outlook is still horribly laggy when scrolling through the Inbox, Word seems to operate in a universe of its own when it comes to zooming or scrolling through Reading mode, and so on.

 

Does anybody know any store in Europe that sells that? Not only Dell does not seem to ship to Europe from amazon.com, but even if they would, shipping and import costs would be huge.

 

I have a 9550 now, but I'm debating going down to the 9350. Has anyone tried putting DDR4 ram in it? The CPU supports it, so I would assume the mobo does as well. If I could have a 9350 with a nvme 950 pro and ddr4 I could be swayed to downsize

Are the trackpads the same between 13 and 15? Because the trackpad on the 15 is excellent. On par with my 2012 rMBP but not as good as the newer force touch rMBPs.

 

Ram is soldered on in 13

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The RAM is soldered on in the 9350..

 

DAK if Dell has previously added more configuration options for XPS laptops after the product initially appeared? (I'm asking because the XPS15 options in Europe are currently more limited than those in the US. )

 

What is the difference between the Microsoft Signature Edition and the Dell one? If I reinstall the OS, is that basically the same thing as the MS edition?

thx

 

MSE doesn't have the bloatware.....If you re-install with the recovery (disk) you will have as received 9350 configuration.

 

Sorry, I don't understand what you typed. Are you saying that if you do a system restore on a Signature Edition with recovery discs created using Dell Backup/Restore, your Signature Edition will then contain all the bloatware from Dell?

 

I think he just meant if you bought the classic Dell version, even if you restore, you'll keep Dell "bloatwares".

If you have the Signature Edition, of course if you restore with the save included you won't get Dell craps.

So if you want to clean up your Dell version, just install W10 via USB

 

Hey guys,

Just curious -- who all has tried running AS SSD with either the Samsung 850 Pro NVMe driver or write-back caching disabled in Device Manager, and are the results much better?

Thanks,

Steve

 

Makes sense. I am curious though, if you do a factory restore through Dell Backup/Restore on a Signature Edition unit, will you get the same clean OS or will the Dell restore utility install all the bloat.

 

Well I guess if you download Dell backup/restore on their website you'll get Dell bloatware whereas if you use the factory reset given with your Signatur Edition unit you'll keep the clean edition. I don't understand your concern haha

 

I bring this scenario up because I'm planning on replacing the PM951 ssd with either an SM951 or 950 Pro. If I create the factory restore image / discs and then do the restore onto the new SSD, will it be a clean install, a la Signature Edition, or the bloated up Dell install?

I attempted to try this a couple days ago with a 950 Pro. I'm an idiot and forgot to load the Intel RST driver from a USB disk in the Windows install menu when installing Windows and instead just set up the SSD as AHCI. I gave up and put the 950 Pro in my desktop, at that point I realized my mistake and didn't feel like putting it back into the laptop So I will try again the right way with likely an SM951

 

So it just depends on what unit did you buy?

 

Right, I should've clarified, sorry. I bought a Sig Edition from local Microsoft store.

 

Does everyone's AC adapter get really hot?

 

So you don't have to worry.

 

While charging mine gets fairly warm, yes. I think that happens with most AC adapters though, should get a bit less hot once it stops charging.

 

Anyone tried this touchpad fix?

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...hpad-ptp-driver-with-synaptics-driver.783990/

 

Anyone having issues with the wireless adapter disabling/failing to start? A few times now I've had it just disappear from the device manager or fail to start. Seems to happen after letting the computer sleep/hibernate/whatever. Once I had to actually scan for new hardware and select the drivers again, another time I had to disable and re-enable it.

Anyone experience anything similar?

 

I have not seen this, but the best course of action would be a manual driver update if I were servicing it.

 

Are you talking about the Wifi card ? Cause I get a lot of problems like this... No bluetooth / no Wifi, after restart from sleeping mode.

I already try to reinstall fresh Windows with drivers from DELL.

 

Before you order this adapter...I received 2 of these adapters yesterday for my XPS 13. The ethernet function works fine but HDMI and VGA connections simply won't function at all. When connecting a HDMI device, the laptop seems to detect the screen and shows a second screen in display settings but when selecting the screen as output the laptop screen turns black for a second and nothing happens. i've tried this with 3 different TV's and 2 pc monitors and tried multiple HDMI cables. When connecting a VGA cable Windows won't even detect a connected display.

to make it better, when the dongle is connected to the usb c port while rebooting, the systeem just freezes on a black screen just beforce the Dell logo should apear. I have no idea if this is another intel graphics driver problem but it seems Dell is selling an adapter without proper drivers at the moment.

 

Yea. My bluetooth seems to stay working, but wifi disappears.

 

The 9343's also had this same issue, Google it, tons and tons of complaints about it. It's the craptastically crappy Broadwell WiFi/BT card that Dell uses, and are now putting in our 9350's as well.

The Intel 7265 AC was what fixed the issue for almost everyone, so I ordered one from Amazon and it fixed up my wife's 9343, very nice upgrade. So I put one in my 9350 and while WiFi works great, Bluetooth only works after refreshing the driver. After a reboot or waking, it doesn't work and I have an error for it in Device Manager.

 

Can you tell me how the WiFi range is with the broadcom card versus the intel one ?
And with the intel one compared to another laptop of another brand with a "standard range" wifi ? (I mean how good is the WiFi range of the XPS 13 ?)

Thank you very much

 

Yes, I tried it last night. It will load up version 19 of the Synaptics touchpad software. It's okay. You may prefer it. But I think the touchpad performance has been fixed (to a large extent) with Thursday's fall update. Version 1511, OS Build 10586.3.
Before Thursday I was about to order a Microsoft mouse. Maybe the Sculpt mobile one.

 

I've exactly the same problem, but with Bluetooth... After sleeping mode, I've no Bluetooth anymore, my mouse doesn't work, I need to restart.

After waking I've this bug, but not after a reboot. It's crazy if we need to change the card... And no guaranty anymore after open the XPS right ?

And yesterday I met another problem, impossible to go in sleeping mode... It was just turning off the screen, but not sleeping. Needed to restart to get this function working back. Any idea ?

Thanks a lot.

 

I am planning to buy 128GB SSD- FHD version of the 9350 and afterwards i want to replace the SSD with the SM951 (256gb- NVMe). (SM951 has theoretically better write speeds than PM951).

As far as i know, SSD from 128gb model is M2- SATA and working on AHCI mode.. Would i have any compatibility issues with NVMe SM951?

 

What about the coil whining which was present in every XPS 13 2015 (Haswell). Is it still there in the skylake version? I read through the last 15 pages but couldn't find a singele comment concerning this issue. thx

 

I can barely hear my fan (i5-8Gb-256Gb 9350). I had to put my ear up to the bottom of the laptop to even confirm it was working.

I am still having problems with flickering on my screen though. Tried all kinds of resolutions, drivers, bios changes (c-state disabled did temporarily fix it for some reason) etc.. and come to find out, if I turn my Bluetooth radio off, no flicker, but I still get the graphics driver crash notification sometimes while browsing. Bluetooth on, constant screen flickering. Can't watch any online videos. This is frustrating, as I love using my Bluetooth mouse rather than a trackpad. Never was real crazy about trackpads anyways. Other than that, this thing runs Office2013 like a champ and seems very snappy. With the Bluetooth radio off browsing in edge or firefox is flawless. I did buy an a/c wireless router and am currently connected to both 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz channels simultaneously. Trying to decide if I should send it back, replace the radio, or just wait for better drivers.

 

Does this give us access to synaptics gestures?

 

I had coil whine in a LX322 Ivy Bridge XPS 13 and a 9333 Haswell XPS 13. Motherboards were changed. Even the revised haswell motherboard made no difference. I've had my new 9350 XPS13 for almost 2 weeks. There is NO coil whine on my computer. But there are other issues. Not least of all a botched BIOS which takes 13.5 seconds to load.

 

Maybe my request is not very clear, so I'll just ask you : how do you find the WiFi range of your XPS 13 with a DELL WiFi card ?

Thanks a lot.

 

It's not a Dell WiFi cad, it's a Broadcom card. It just shows up in Device Manager as "Dell blah blah".

 

I didn't notice any difference in range per se, both cards seem to provide adequate range. It was just the reliability of the Broadcom card that you'll find is the biggest issue.

 

Has anyone been able to hook up an external monitor to the XPS 13? I ordered the USB-C to vga/hdmi adapter and mine also doesnt work. I can connect a screen via VGA but not through HDMI. I would like to hook it up to my TV.


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Been lurking for awhile. I got my $999 XPS 13 signature edition from the microsoft store back on thursday. I had also been following the earlier 2015 model as well. i5/8GB/128GBSSD

There is some quiet coil whine on my computer. It bugs me a minor amount, but I tend to nit-pick at new stuff I buy so don't take that too heavily.
Fan is basically silent.
No issues with WiFi, even after sleeping. I usually use 5Ghz wifi.
Trackpad is excellent, but I'm coming from using a ton of budget windows laptops. Not quite as good as a mac's trackpad though since it does perform a bit differently across applications(edge vs chrome). IMO nothing to complain about. No skipping, tracking is accurate as well as scrolling and zooming.
1080p screen does have adaptive contrast. It's noticeable in daily usage, but I don't mind it at all. Brightness is not an issue either - I usually do 50% indoors.
Out of the box is 150% scaling. Unfortunately Windows scaling still sucks so applications will have blurry text. I had to revert to 100% after trying a couple of supposed fixes to no avail.
Don't have any USB-C devices so I can't test that port. Sorry.

I did have intermittent issues with the speakers. Sometimes they would crackle occasionally when playing music at medium-high volume. It doesn't seem to be doing it now though, so not sure what happened.

Also, my A, V, and R keys have started squeaking when pressed.

I did a crystaldiskmark bench of the drive, about 540 seq read and 140 seq write. Not amazing write speeds, but overall the system is very, very snappy and I have had no issues in daily usage. Keep in mind that lower capacities such as 128GB will suffer from slightly lower reads and writes in general due to the reduced nand chips on the SSD and as a result less channels utilized from the SSD's controller. Maybe a 512GB NVME model might perform better than the 256.

 

You may try this one:
http://www.amazon.com/niceEshop-USB...id=1447634892&sr=1-8&keywords=usb+3.0+to+hdmi

 

Regular USB 3.0 doesn't natively carry out a display, so although that may be an option it definitely won't be the most optimal one.

 

Hi everyone, just got mine, its awesome and am also really keen to hook it up to an external monitor too. Anyone worked out the USB-C options yet?!

 

That is very disappointing to hear! I hoped they have sorted out this problem, unfortunately they did not.

 

FWIW, mine runs completely silent. No coil whine, and not even a whisper from the fan until it (very rarely) ramps up, and then I have to put my ear right next to it to hear it in a quiet room.

Heat and noise management is something that Dell have got just right with this model, IMHO.

 

Mine too no coil whine and perfectly silent! So silent that its dificult to Say if he is running without looking the led if the screen is off!


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If it's just a few programs that have trouble with scaling you can individually disable it under the compatibility tab, and keep it in general. I really hated Win 10 (for me scaling was better with Windows 8.1) until I noticed this. I mean.. it's bizarre that MS can't even manage to get its own things like the device manager to scale properly.

 

How is your battery life? Could you please try to test the average power consumption after fresh restart, when idle, wifi on, BT off, keyboard backlight off and with screen at 50%? Ie with battery bar, HWinfo64 or similar... We can then compare if it is different to NVMe models.

 

If you want to get the old Win7/Win8.1 compatibility 125% zoom, where you don't have blurry fonts, you can follow the steps in this post. That's what I've done for my XPS 15.
http://www.tenforums.com/general-discussion/7423-blurry-text-5.html#post422535

Actually, ignore that. The post underneath in the above link indicates that the latest Win10 release reintroduces the compatibility mode zoom without requiring the registry fix.