Dell XPS 15 9570 benchmarks + temps

Well my 9570 is due for delivery today so I figured I'd start a thread and lay out the groundwork so i can test it out today. I plan on doing this in several phases. I'll get temps and some benches totally stock, undervolt and get temps, repaste with temps, repaste+undervolt and get temps, and then finally I'll do iunlock's mod and get temps and benches.

I am open to running benchmarks that are requested provided I have the benchmark and time to run it. I'll also try to put up a few pictures of the repaste and iunlock's mod. Also let me know if you want me to put stuff in the spoiler boxes to make this thread look less jumbled.

Specs of my 9570:
CPU: i7-8750H
GPU: 1050 Ti Max-Q
Ram: 16GB DDR4 2666MHz
SSD: 512GB 960 Pro
Screen: FHD
Battery: 97WHr

Stock Benchmarks with windows power slider at "better peformance" and dell fan settings set to "optimized":
Time Spy - 2492
Time Spy Extreme - 1158
Fire Strike - 6840
Fire Strike Extreme - 3454
Fire Strike Ultra - 1748
Sky Diver - 21648
Cloud Gate - 27919
Ice Storm - 98789
Ice Storm Unlimited - 96910
3DMark 11 Performance - Cannot complete at stock
3DMark 11 Extreme - Cannot complete at stock
Unigine Heaven Extreme - Cannot complete at stock
RealBench -
Cinebench R15 -115.2 fps, 1203 cb, 174 cb
PCMark 10 - 5173
PCMark 8 Home Accelerated - 4148
PCMark 8 Work Accelerated - 5497
PCMark 8 Home Conventional Battery - 6:38


Thermals:
Please note I am using an older version of Prime95 (28.7 build 1) and doing Small FFTs.
Undervolt settings are -170mv on the cpu and -145mv on cache for all undervolt tests.



I am also highlighting in red areas that I consider troublesome.

DIMM throttling:
So the 9570 has issues with DIMM temperatures. Once it measures above 62C it throttles the CPU to 800MHz. Putting thermal pad between the ram and the case helped me to avoid throttling but there isn't much headroom. Other users are cooling the sensor itself to avoid throttling.

Check out @abujafar's findings:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...benchmarks-temps.817970/page-29#post-10767160

 

Undervolting:

As you can see from the results above, the biggest bang for the buck temp and performance wise is an undervolt. I won't bore you with how to do it, but if you're a novice you can find plenty of guides on youtube. I like to steer people to @Eason's post on ultrabookreview.com to support a fellow NBR member:
https://www.ultrabookreview.com/10167-laptop-undervolting-overcloking/

I will tell you that I had good luck testing the stability of my undervolt with realbench stress test to quickly get me in the reasonable numbers. I solidified my results by running AIDA64's stress test overnight to ensure it would be stable. So far it's way more stable than when Dell shipped it to me. I can actually run 3dmark 2011 and Haven benchmarks.

Every CPU is different in how it will respond to undervolting (otherwise intel would have the lower voltage already applied), however here is where I ended up:
CPU core -170mv
CPU cache -145mv


Repasting:

I noticed some really good temp drops/higher clocks with repasting, especially when combined with an undervolt. You can see my results above.

I will post some pictures on the repaste, but there are a ton of guides out there so I won't go over that. In my application I used Kryonaut thermal paste for the CPU and GPU and I replaced the stock Dell VRAM thermal pads with K5 Pro. While K5 Pro is not anywhere near as good as my Fujipoly thermal pads, it's better suited for the uneven and quite frankly piss poor heatsink. It allows the memory to make contact with the heatpipes in the areas that were previously not even close to touching.

One thing I did notice (and have in pretty much every XPS I've owned) is that the heatsink was bent slightly. Another quality issue with Dell. I took my time and very very very carefully bent it flat. I won't go over this here, but if you try it on your own be careful. I can't stress enough how easy it is to bend those heatpipes and cause real damage to it.

 

Iunlock's mod:
Credit goes to @iunlock for all of his work on the 9560:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ures-benchmarks-xps-15-9560-kaby-lake.802345/

Pictures:
Sadly just the one to show where I placed the heatsinks for the Mk5 variant of the iunlock mod. I have pictures of the others but since results were less than desirable I decided not to post them.



I don't have a picture of the thermal pad on top of the ram/heatsinks but that's only because they are stuck to the bottom cover. I used 2mm cheap thermal pad for the ram and vrm heatsinks.

Results:
So this has been a total struggle. Here are my attempts and there is a chart that shows the results in a 30 minute realbench stress test when compared to the undervolt+repaste+ram padded with cheap thermal pad.

Mk1 - all VRM components with sinks and thermal pad between the copper sheet and all VRM heatsinks as well as chokes. Ram with thermal pad to bottom cover and PCH with heatsinks and thermalpad between the sinks and bottom cover.

Mk2 - all VRM components with sinks and thermal pad between the copper sheet and all VRM heatsinks but NOT the chokes. Ram with thermal pad to bottom cover and PCH with heatsinks and thermalpad between the sinks and bottom cover.

Mk3 - all VRM components with sinks and thermal pad between the copper sheet and all VRM heatsinks but NOT the chokes. Ram with thermal pad to bottom cover and PCH with heatsinks and thermalpad between the sinks and bottom cover. Formed a copper bridge from the bottom of the ram to the copper shield with some very thin copper sheets - this was a just for fun.

Mk4 - all VRM components with sinks and no thermal pad. Ram with thermal pad to bottom cover and PCH with heatsinks and thermalpad between the sinks and bottom cover.

Mk5 - only the VRM near the first ambient sensor padded (5 total) and their heatsinks sinked to the bottom of the case. Ram with thermal pad to bottom cover and PCH with heatsinks and thermalpad between the sinks and bottom cover.

These are the 30 minute Realbench stress test results below which show the ambient temps:




Benchmarks:
I've decided to re-benchmark the system with the -170mv undervolt, repaste, and heatsinks on the VRM surrounding Ambient sensor #1 (same settings as the stock runs for comparison):
Time Spy - 2600
Time Spy Extreme - 1201
Fire Strike - 7048
Fire Strike Extreme - 3536
Fire Strike Ultra - 1759
Sky Diver - 22354
Cloud Gate - 28702
Ice Storm - 99246
Ice Storm Extreme - 97088
3DMark 11 Performance - 9667
3DMark 11 Extreme - 3460
Unigine Heaven Extreme - 1136
RealBench -
Cinebench R15 - 118.9fps, 1254 cb, 171 cb
PCMark 10 - 5249
PCMark 8 Home Accelerated - 4189
PCMark 8 Work Accelerated - 5474

Encoding - I wanted to do a little bit on encoding (or is it transcoding in this case) for people that do that sort of thing. I am a total novice when it comes to this stuff so I will explain the tests I ran. I downloaded a 96fps "honey bees" 4k clip and a 1 minute Elysium 4k clip from http://4ksamples.com. I used Handbrake to convert them from 4k to 1080p mkv using the "H.265 MKV 1080p30" preset. I then looked at the logs to get the time taken. I also converted the first 10 chapters of Deadpool in 4k to 1080p using the "fast 1080p30" preset. I did this twice to show some potential differences. The first time I did it with the modded system including the undervolt. The second time I did it with all of the mods in place except for the undervolt. Sadly I didn't think to do it when it was stock or differences would have been even greater. After all that blathering here are the results:

Modded WITHOUT undervolt (mm:ss):
Honey Bees - 3:32
Elysium - 1:34
Deadpool - 43:03**

Modded WITH undervolt (mm:ss):
Honey Bees - 3:24
Elysium - 1:30
Deadpool - 35:47**

**surprised as I am? I double checked the encoding logs and hwinfo logs and everything is correct. It's amazing what an extra 572mhz x 6 cores will do with encoding. Just imagine how long it would have taken at stock...

Tabulated results:


Looking at those results it may not seem worth it to mod the laptop. I will say that the increased stability was worth it, I had more BSOD's than I could count out of the box. Also with demanding applications it was very much worth it. I would recommend doing an undervolt at the very least as that had the biggest impact.

I ran an hour of realbench and I didn't have any of the massive throttling that I had before. The Dimm temp stayed below 62C the whole time and the laptop bottom was warm but not hot.

Over all I'm pretty satisfied with how everything worked out. It was a ton of work, but hopefully I've been able to help someone else here.

Summary:
If I had to rank order what I think is worthwhile here is how I would do it.

1. Undervolt - by far the best
2. Cheap thermal pad between the ram and case bottom - super cheap and easy to do
3. Repaste - a little more advanced but worthwhile, especially in keeping the max temps down
4. iunlock mk5 mod - basically just try to cool some of the VRM near that ambient sensor - only really if you want max performance, but I don't know if the juice was worth the squeeze so to speak on that one.

 

Awesome project ! I’ll get mine today too.
After your test, i’ll probably do the same as you !

 

So just got my 9570 and reinstalled windows. Sadly prime95 throttles in about 20 seconds, lol. We've got some work to do.

 

Slowly adding results. I still think it's quieter than my 9575 was, and no annoying whistle!!! CPU runs at 2700mhz with prime on all 6 cores. Not terrible but not good by any means.

 

Well I'll probably run PCMark 8 a round or two and then call it a night while I prime95 to test potential undervolts

 

Agreed. I just got mine as well.
Prime95 is tough but at least the CPU doesn't collapse to the 15W/800Mhz state.

Realbeanch stress test seems to be the most brutal and the one that causes the PL throttling also in your results.

 

@custom90gt the max temp will always be 97c because the Dell Fan Management doesn't start the fans right away. It has like a 5-10sec delay.
This is done to avoid "making noise" when only a short heavy-load happens.

 

Well I would be curious if a repaste will help distribute the heat faster and allow the fans to turn on before it gets up that high.

 

Great thread! Thanks for taking time to run tests. Curious to see where this goes.

 

@custom90gt what are your gut first impressions?

 

Thanks for these. Wishing for better cooling.

 

This used to depend on the power profile used and didn't occur with the highest performance setting which one could select after installing one of those Dell Command things (not sure Power Manager or Configure). But lately windows updates have messed with the power profiles so I'm not sure.

 

Has anyone tried out those new Graphite pads on this baby yet?

https://www.innovationcooling.com/products/3m-5519-thermal-interface-pad/

If I recall correctly, they are even here on NR in some thread.

Sent from my SM-N950F using Tapatalk

 

My gut impressions is this is just like my 9550 and 9560. Great hardware but really needs help with cooling. Overall build quality is still really good and I think it will be a fun machine for those who don't run strenuous programs for hours at a time. Undervolt seems stable at .150 on cache and .180 on cores but that isn't enough to get the 6 cores under the package power limit so I may have to modify the bios for that...

Oh yeah it doesn't do the annoying windows hang that my 9575 did. And Nvidia drivers are so much better than AMD.

 

My 9570 is so unstable I can't even use it on the desktop before it freezes or crashes hard every few minutes. Hopefully can sort it with a BIOS update and clean install.

 

Interesting, I don't have any issues but I put on 1.1.4 before I even booted into windows. I also didn't boot into the stock windows as I did a fresh install. The only issue I have is I can't run Pcmark 8 creative benchmark, it exits in pass 2 but the log doesn't tell me much.

 

Well damn it keeps restarting while trying to run 3dmark 11 stock... Guess I'm going to call it, it's not going to complete 3dmark 11 at stock...

We will see if it runs it with an undervolt. Trying Heaven now. Some Dell worshipers aren't going to like that, but they will just ignore it anyway...

LOL not going to run Heaven either. Of course it restarted the second I walked out of the room after I had been keeping my eye on temps.

I updated the first post with these new fun findings. I believe the thermal cowboys found an issue with the 9570.

 

Can we add some notes as to what version of Prime95 and which test (Blend vs Small FTTS) so we can have some consistency?

 

Will do. Who runs blend for testing the CPU?

 

Updated initial post with prime95 and realbench versions. Also Heaven completes with an undervolt so I'll put that in the second post since it can't run it at stock.

 

@ custom90gt @abujafar what about coil whine ?

 

None that I've been able to hear on mine.

 

Great post. Thank you for doing this. I know you can't run a test, but I am very curious if running a 9560/9570 with an eGPU would significantly lower CPU temps. Theoretically, you'd be splitting the CPU heat between twice the cooling area (since the discrete internal GPU wouldn't be on), and that should really help temps. I'd love to have a 9570 with an eGPU for serious gaming but still have the ability to travel easily for work presentations and such.

 

The thermal conductivity doesn't seem ultra, anything particular about them?

 

It has been shown that an eGPU helps with temps while gaming because the dedicated card isn't running. You will still want to undervolt because the cpu gets toasty even when it's a CPU only load (as demonstrated in the prim95 vs prime95+rthdribl tests in the first post). If we can resolve this restarting when gaming or running 3dmark then I'd recommend it. If we can't then I'd look elsewhere.

 

I will do eGPU tests in my review. BTW I was able to finish unigine heaven without repaste/undervolt by changing to AHCI mode and swapping SSDs.

 

Interesting. I already am on AHCI mode with a fresh install but still on the stock 256gb Toshiba ssd. Perhaps it's a fluke? Mine didn't restart until the 25th scene out of 26, it may have finished if I tried again?

 

I found a decent post on the 9570 with 1080 eGPU.


https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/8koj1i/just_received_my_xps_15_9570_and_i_have_an_aorus/

He only uses Rocket League as a benchmark but it is better than nothing.

 

@custom90gt Can you please include in your first post which power profile you are using to run the test (windows power profile and dell's power profile)

 

The recent windows update had overheating issues with some SSDs. they should have released a patch.

 

Unigine heaven 4.0 - basic: 3066

I am experiencing frequent hitches of the GPU becoming activated

 

I got a Heaven score of 1119 on extreme with the undervolt.

 

xps 13 9370 i7/16 w mantiz venus + GTX 1070

 

You know windows doesn't use power profiles per say now right? I am on the "better performance" portion of the slider. The Dell power settings are set to "optimized."

 

Well now this is very strange. Let me update the drivers. (edit: noticed it was set to "optimal power" mode)

edit: still getting significantly better graphics score on the XPS 13!

 

I don't think we know exactly what the Dell Command-Power Manager settings do. According to the brief descriptions in the selection page, the settings provide more aggressive fans and more aggressive processor mapping. They seem to change registers that the user can not access. A while back, I printed out a bunch of CPU registers to search for changes but got nowhere.

"Ultra Performance" certainly maps the fans louder but frankly I've never seen anyone report better performance over say "Optimized".

SpeedShift settings should override most (all) CPU settings for "Windows Power Options", and might override CPU settings for "Dell Command Power Manager". I'm almost positive SpeedShift has no ability to change fan mapping but I haven't read the Intel tome in a long time.

Ideally, performance would be maximized with SpeedShift enabled (with EPP=0) and Dell Command-Power Manager at "Ultra Performance." But as the Dell XPS is so bound by thermal constraints, power constraints, and Dell's throttling schemes, this is a balancing game and "lower performance" settings may perform better in the real world.

 

I know that. I wish I could know exactly what all these modes imply in terms of under terms of fan curves/power limitations/etc...
Is there some reference somewhere?

edit: @pressing we basically wrote the same thing at the same time...
Thanks for the insights.

 

FYI - Detailed photos of the cooling solution in the updated Razer15 follows. Lots of thermal pads attached to one big copper plate. . .

 

They are said to not deteriorate over time like thermal paste. And it is always nice with new tech. Does not seem to be sold in Europe yet though.

 

Going to put in some updates today. I've tried running Heaven and 3dMark 2011 5 times each and at stock settings it failed every time (system restart). I'm over it, strike for dell there.

I did find that my system is 12 hour AIDA stable at -170mv on the cpu and -145mv on the cache (-150mv causes failure). Will run some temp tests today and then probably repaste and see what happens...

Any other benchmarks you would like to see either at stock or undervolt before I repaste?

 

Well sadly I didn't give people time to respond to the above question, but repaste is done!

And the results look actually really really good. I'm excited to test more. Sadly the wife is sick today so my attention can't be focused on the XPS more than her, lol.

 

Actually, I was writing you to just go ahead and repaste! Curious to see your results.
Which thermal paste did you use?
Very happy that you say there's an improvement!

PS. Hope your wife gets better.

 

Thanks for the well wishes for the wife!

Funny you were going to say that, I am surprised I made it 3 days without repasting!

I used Kryonaut on the cpu and gpu. I thought about conductonaut, but on my 9550 and 9560 it was only ~2-3C cooler than kryonaut.

I actually used K5 pro in place of the vram thermal pad. Second time using it in one of my systems, I'll keep my eye on ram speeds.

Sadly the heatsink had a slight bend in it as is tradition with dell. Not as bad as my 9550s were but still there. Taking 2 minutes to carefully (very carefully) work out the bend and it looks pretty good. Dell really sucks at making improvements, talk about slapping lipstick on a pig (i7-8750h in a 9550 basically).

 

Interesting. Didn't know this product.

Did you take pictures of all of these?

 

Most people don't use it, it's not near as good as my fujipoly pads, but for dell's screwed up heatsink design it works well. Also the vram doesn't need anything too spectacular on the XPS...

Take pictures of the bent heatsinks? Like all that I've ever had? Sadly I didn't get one of the 9570. It's bent in the middle so it forms somewhat of a V shape. The problem is the outsides of the sink are further away from the motherboard if that makes any sense.

 

Have you tried using the Dell performance mode instead of the optimized mode?
I have the feeling that the dell's 'optimized mode' throttles components to stay around 80c for long-term loads.

 

I have not. I wanted a somewhat standardized run through. Since I started with optimized on the stock tests I will keep it there for the rest. Do you notice it hitting higher temps? The problem really seems to be power throttling that is keeping the temps in the 80s. I can probably modify the bios settings to fix it, but that will come later.

 

Totally agree with you on this and I appreciate what you are doing.

I have the feeling that it's not always a power limit throttling. It definitely is on realbench.
Gotta look carefully at HWinfo64 logs.