Dell XPS 15 9570 benchmarks + temps

It's power limiting anytime you have the cpu + gpu in use.

 

Alright, results are in for the repaste and undervolt+repaste. Results look pretty worthwhile to me. I can get the CPU to run at 3.4ghz on all 6 cores while running prime95!

Sadly any GPU work really lowers the cpu clocks. Average temps are much more respectable now, in fact I may see if I can mess with the power throttling now to see where temps go. Sadly unlike the 9560, I couldn't get the max fan speeds to go down at all. Thankfully it doesn't seem to be too loud even when running full tilt. The 9575 is much louder.

 

@custom90gt I was expecting these results.
Repasting did help too.

I would suggest now to also try the performance plan, change the settings you mentioned in the BIOS and also, before doing the iunlock mod, blast a fan over the VRMs and see if it helps under stress.

 

I will do a performance plan after I do iunlock's mod and test it with the same settings. I don't have a fan that I can blast over the VRM so that's sadly not going to happen.

 

Unfortunately, I am going to be out for work this week. I will use a regular house fan pointed at the grills. Just to move some air and see if it helps.
If you saved the logs of realbench, please upload them somewhere, like pastebin.

 

I have like 30 different logs, what are you curious about? I don't mind looking through them if you're looking for anything particular (ambient sensors, etc).

 

I would like to figure out as much as possible about the causes of the power limits before starting to mod anything.

Like in your case, I feel that in some of your runs the PL are induced by a power saving/balancing strategies more then VRMs-temp induced temps.

 

It's not power savings, it's Dell's power throttling control, which means short of modding the bios there is no way around it. I'll look at the logs and see if I notice any trends.

 

Well, if that's the case, you might also try to remove Intel's DPTF and see if something changes.

 

I'm more comfortable with bios mods.

This may help show what I mean. These are graphs I created from my Prime95+RTHDRIBL and -170 undervolt runs. It shows Core clock/100 to help normalize the numbers and then all of the temps.

Full run:


Before and shortly after throttling happens:


What happens is the CPU wattage goes from ~60w to the dell standard of ~42w. The other temps however don't seem to correlate with it however sinking them will let us know if they do play a role.

Also throttle stop shows the limit reasons as "EDP other" and PL1.

 

Do you mean change bios setting or hacking the bios firmware???

 

Changing bios settings with EFI shell.

Btw my previous post I put in some graphs for you.

 

Thanks for the graphs. From other data that I have seen, I had already noticed that there was one Ambient sensor running hot. If that's the source of throttling, perhaps iunlock mod should do the job. If the problem is the CPU package, like your graphs also suggest, then iunlock won't be enough and we should go liquid metal on the CPU.

EDIT: it's good that with repasting-undervolting you managed to reduce throttling to a 40W state instead of the 15W state.

 

I haven't had any of the 15w states which leads me to believe the VRM mod will likely be worthless on this laptop. I don't know if Dell altered the displayed values, put the sensors in better areas, or actually improved the vrm on it, but I don't have that issue it seems.

Liquid metal will not help the throttling. When undervolted and repasted it isn't temps that seem to be causing the issue but the power draw of the CPU itself. If we could undervolt more it would draw less power and throttle less, but that's not possible. The only way around it would be to modify what the computer sees as the power reading from the cpu (with the bios switches).

I still plan on sinking everything with iunlocks mod because I like stuff to run as cool as it can, I'm just not convinced it will change much this time around. We will see.

 

Maybe, or maybe it's that CPU package/Ambient.

have a look at the realbench data.

 

Thanks for all the work guys.

Do you recommend re-installing the Dell Power MGMT application after a fresh install? I do wonder if using the "optimized" fan settings squeezes more juice.

Custom, did you do a line or spread the paste first with a card?

EDIT: Also, sorry for the noob questions, but what is K5 exactly? Is it this? https://www.amazon.com/viscous-thermal-paste-replacement-Aspire/dp/B00UTX7K2E

When I re-pasted, I did see the thermal pads but didn't do anything with them. Do you mean you pop them off, apply that stuff, then put the pads back on?

 

The majority of the throttling is cpu power draw, I can assure you of that.. You are right about real bench, it does throttle and it seems to be the DIMM sensor, have a look:

I should clarify what you see in these tables.
CPU 0 core clock, CPU package temp (C), CPU power usage (w), and the other Dell sensors.

 

I do recommend putting dell power mgmt software on as it is there to prevent your laptop from nuking itself. I tried optimized fan settings and it throttles down to the same 42w cpu package power when running prime95+the gpu.

I did a small ball in the middle of the GPU since it's a square die (like a small grain of rice) and then the line down the middle of the CPU since it's an elongated rectangle.

Don't ever be sorry about asking questions. That's the stuff but I wouldn't buy it just cause I used it. I used it because the dell heatsinks are not very flat. In all honesty the stock stuff is fine because the ram doesn't get that hot anyway. I'd just use the stock pads if that's all you have.

What I did with the K5 was removed the old pads (saved them in case I ever sell the laptop) and then put a bit of k5 in it's place. It's kind of a pain to apply and an even bigger pain to take off, but it seems to work decently.

 

The DIMM sensor? you are at 62c. Not a big deal, right? CPU package and the first Ambient are much higher.

What I believe is that the CPU power draw might be limited because of the Package/Ambient temps as a security measure.

 

In both instances of realbench the second DIMM hit 63 is when power package was educed from 40 to ~30. The other ambient temps were higher previously to throttling so it's not them causing it.

When running prime95+RTHDRIBL it power throttles from 60w to 42w on the cpu because of Dell's design, the ambient sensors get hotter as the run goes on but after the throttling happens.

 

Well, I see your point. Not 100% sure but it might be worth to pad the DIMMs then...

 

I'll give it a shot before I do iunlocks mod. Maybe it'll be enough?

 

Awesome, thanks for the feedback. I'll most likely just stay with the current pads for now, unless I start seeing more guides on it.

As to the DIMM, how are you guys keeping it so cool? That thing gets scorching hot for me when I play a taxing game like far cry (unless the reading is wrong, which I suppose is possible). This is from the FF15 benchmark on high.

 

Sadly I don't know how to keep the DIMM cool yet, we were just discussing sinking the RAM...

I updated the first post with a table, let me know what you guys think (or if I made any errors, lol).

 

I believe it was @pressing who mentioned the dimm throttling on reddit? I can't find the post of course.

 

Interestingly I don't know if it was the paste or just the chip itself, but the nvidia chip stays pretty icy cool. Under full load, the thing barely breaks 70 for me.

 

Mine is similar. These 1050ti max q chips seem to run pretty cool. I will eventually undervolt/overclock it to see how it does.

 

Awesome posts @custom90gt - thanks for the detailed updates here.

9570 i7 performance sux out of the box. Your repaste and undervolt mods show some good promise. I think the strong undervolt shows how well Intel has progressed with the old Skylake platform.

A few thoughts:

1. Undervolt of CPU "core & cache" probably should be identical for typical 6, 7 and 8 generation CPUs per unclewebb. The CPU might default to the lower of the core or cache undervolt (or entirely ignore the undervolt after some time). You might see that in Intel XTU but since ThrotttleStop writes some of the same registers, that might not be a 100% reliable check. Intel has not public documentation here.

2. The "power limit" throttle might be misleading and simply a thermal flag, a result of temps hitting a Dell threshold. For example:

- 77C on the old VRM temp sensor (not sure if that is still applicable on the 9570)
- 6?C on the DIMM temp sensor (not sure if that is root cause in the 9570)

For sure temps in the 60s are not going to cause issues in the DIMM arena. But it will be difficult to get that sensor to be below 60C all the time without bypassing (you could test the sensor's resistance when warm and soldier in an appropriate sized resistor).

3. In the 9550 & 9560, I could bypass PL throttling by just boosting package power limits (short & long) and the corresponding times. This only worked in Intel XTU. You can boost wattage by a "reasonable" amount (+10 or +20 watts) but if you try a silly boost of say +50 watts the laptop will just ignore your changes. Of course the vrm will produce precisely 0 watts of additional power but this trick may remove some artifical throttling. Not sure if that will work on the 9570 and not sure if the registers are the same (using the 9560 registers could brick your system but I suspect they are the same). Also, you need to monitor temps very carefully as this bypasses a lot of heat protection. Finally you could ditch XTU and do this via ThrottleStop, but you need to find & change the third registers via something like RW-Everything.

4. There is a point where the XPS will really power limit throttle as you mentioned, particularly when CPU & GPU are used together. If you can keep the VRM well below say 90C, the mosfets can output near max wattage; a bit above 90C output falls off a cliff.

5. For the benefit of others, Intel XTU is buggy. And it should not be run along with ThrottleStop.

 

Wasn't me!

 

Pressing,
do you know if there's any benefit to undervolting the iGPU? Even when doing something intensive that activates the NV GPU?

 

Put some responses in red above.

 

Must have been @Eason

 

I did some iGPU undervolting but that caused some latency issues as documented on the "ThrottleStop Guide". In my music workflow, low latency is most important so I do not undervolt iGPU these days.

You should give it a try on the 8th gen to see if it helps reduce temps and power consumption. Those are big issues for the 9570 so every bit counts...assuming it does not cause other issues.

 

So it looks like the DIMM in AIDA64 actually corresponds with the first Ambient sensor in HWINFO. Not sure which is labeled correctly, but the DIMM in HWINFO seems to correspond with severe throttling. My guess is that's actually a VRM sensor of some type.

 

I thought there was a post and photo here or at Reddit from someone who confirmed DIMM was throttling at low 60s and used some compressed air can upsidedown to make sure that was the sensor. I can't confirm

Of course, the 9550 VRM sensor was mislabeled in a few monitor programs when released (GoNz0 had Aida64 fix that)

 

There was a guy on reddit with a 9560 that padded his DIMM sensor to keep it from throttling, but no one I know with a 9570.

 

benchmarks and stress tests updated: https://www.ultrabookreview.com/20435-xps-15-9570-review-live/

no significant PL throttling after 20 minutes of unigine heaven 4.0 loop; had to run TS bench concurrently to cause PL throttling. DIMM sensor didn't go past 62C, so I wasn't able to trigger VRM throttling either.

 

Good to hear, and I agree with your comments about keeping the bigger battery and adding another m.2 SSD slot, makes sense to me.

 

My 9570 (first XPS 15) arrives this week. Curious for those that have owned other models whether the iUnlock method of channeling fan airflow + heatsinks or the " stacking pads to the use the backplate as a heatsink" ( https://www.ultrabookreview.com/14875-fix-throttling-xps-15/) method is the better approach for cooling the VRM. Thoughts from those who have done both? Perhaps we could test both methods in this thread and put numbers around them?

 

@pressing thanks for sharing your knowledge with the 9550 and 9560. Now we need to make sure which sensor is which on the board and if we can cool that area.
I really didn't expect to have 6*C threshold on the RAM.

Has anyone tried padding or blasting the problematic areas with a fan?

 

Based on what we saw with the redesigned cooling solution for the 9370, is it worth waiting for an update of the 9570? Or is the existing cooling solution sufficient with undervolting and repasting etc?

 

I would tentatively say that it's actually okay as long as you are familiar with TS, undervolting, and using custom TS profiles to keep temps down. The 9370 actually cools worse than the 9360 in some ways, and I am concerned that a future XPS 15 update will take this approach as well (my conversation with dell's engineering team suggests that they are targeting quieter operation with newer XPS models with an apple-like strategy of allowing overheating). The 9370's fan sensor is located outside of the GORE thermal insulation, so the CPU hits 99C and throttles long before the fan sensor realizes it. This is by their design.

 

Where are the processor power options in the energy preferences (control panel)? I only have options for Diashow - energy saving - power button - monitor - battery.

 

Very insightful information. Makes me feel a bit better that I pulled the trigger on the 9570.
I still believe that Dell is gonna wait for the 10nm chips from Intel to propose a new model.
Anyway... we'll see.

 

Gone thanks to godawful "modern" standby

 

My Haswell PC is still on Win 10 1709 - whole options are available.

 

So if you can still adjust CPU in the advanced power plan options, what are you looking for?

 

I was looking for these options in the XPS, but it seems MS changed the power plans with Vers. 1803. I didn't knew that.

 

1. You can enable SpeedShift for good processor power management. For the 9570, there is a toggle in the BIOS to enable. Then you can simply adjust Intel "Energy Performance Preference" (EPP) to favour "performance" (0) or "energy savings" (255 or 100%).

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/dell-xps-speed-shift.796891/

It is better to have the CPU controlling processor power than have Windows do this.

2. You can Download "Dell Command I Power Manager" and choose one of four schemes which proport to adjust processor & fan schemes from "ultra performance" to "quiet".

 

Extremely helpful view. And thanks again for doing the review!