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    Does XPS 15 (9550) support intel Vt-d?

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by kousuke, Feb 28, 2016.

  1. kousuke

    kousuke Notebook Guru

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    Greetings!

    As above, is there a bios option to enable intel VT-D? Dell uses both CM236 and HM170 chipset for XPS 15. I'm assuming HM170 is used on i5 systems while i7 get CM236 chipset which support VT-d? Can anyone confirm this?
     
    kousuke, Feb 28, 2016
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  2. iMeee

    iMeee Notebook Enthusiast

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    I have a i7 XPS 15 and yes it supports VT-d.
    However I don't remember if it's activated out of the box in the BIOS.
     
    iMeee, Feb 28, 2016
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  3. SonyHome

    SonyHome Notebook Geek

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    When I went into BIOS to change the HD mode from Raid to AHCI I believe I saw that virtual support was turned on by default. I have BIOS version 19.
     
    SonyHome, Feb 28, 2016
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  4. kousuke

    kousuke Notebook Guru

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    So i pulled the trigger - My XPS 15 i7/FHD/512SSD/85Whr arrived today
    Yes, VT-D is enabled by default in BIOS. I reckon it must have CM236 chiptset

    CPU-Z could not supply chipset info

    I will try to verify if VT-D is really working through VMware

    It will be great if anyone can confirm this
    Just in case anyone is wonder the point about Vt-D
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input–output_memory_management_unit#Virtualization

    Vt-D is Intel's implementation for direct I/O access to PCIe - theoretically, you could assign GPU to a VM environment. For example, windows VM gaming on linux host

    for Vt-D to work properly, the CPU, mainboard chipset and BIOS must support all support this feature for properly implementation

    http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/VTd_HowTo
     
    Last edited: Mar 1, 2016
    kousuke, Mar 1, 2016
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