Got Lucky with an XPS 9370 - great performance and temps!!

I ordered a refurb XPS 9370 from the Dell outlet on their last sale (15% coupon plus 10% cash back from topcashback - ended up being about $700 after discounts) and it arrived with physical damage to the thunderbolt 3 port. I contacted Dell and they told me they would send a system exchange. Original system was:

CPU 8250U
16GB
256 SSD
1920x1080
silver

Replacement System:

8550u
16GB
1TB SSD
4k touch
Rose Gold

Not a huge fan of the rose gold but I am not going to complain given the upgrades! Anyhow, I decided to purchase the extended warranty and the Dell reps matched the current sale price at the outlet so I was able to get the 3 year complete care for $287. Initial temps were not bad but I did a re-paste (thermal grizzly) and undervolt. Able to hold steady at 80 degrees on prime 95 26.6 maintaining 3.2 GHZ on all cores. I did an undervolt of 120 on the CPU and 50 on the Igpu. Needless to say with performance like that the rose gold is growing on me! I am really impressed with what Dell has done on the xps 9370 with the cooling and allowing the 8550u to use more than 15 watts. I have a Akitio node on the way for my GTX 1080 ti.

 

That was a nice upgrade. Congrats.

Was the screen shot you posted before the repaste and undervolt? I see it was hitting 98°C and thermal throttling to 900Mhz-1.oGHz on two cores and 2.1GHz on two cores.

 

The low cpu speed was prior to starting p95. When you start p95 the temps will rise until the fans kick in. The laptop will hold steady at 3.2 ghz at around 80c for p95. Did a 30 minute run.

 

Here is a 20 minute run on p95 26.6 with hwinfo started a minute in.

 

Yeah, that is a lot better picture of how it is running.

Does the HWiNFO4 fan control work? It's the little fan control icon visible in your screen shot. If it does, you might be able to manipulate the fans to kick in sooner so you do not have that temporary lag/temperature spike. Dell probably made the fan profile lazy to keep people from whining about fan noise.

 

Nope - fan controls on HWINFO do not work.

 

Is it not working at all? Mine works but when I set it to max, sometimes the fans jump to 9000-10000 RPM from the normal 7000.

 

Cool. (Pun intended.) Does running them full blast make a big difference in temps?

In order for the fan control to work you must select the correct sensor(s) and that may be why it works for you and not someone else if they have not tried different sensors.

 

I don't know how to truly justify temp differences so this is a chart created with my (amazing) observation.
8250U stressed by CPU-Z.
Also I think respin period must be checked in order for the fan control to work.

 

Well, it seems that it does help. Going from less than 1 second, to ~10 seconds, then ~40 seconds as fan speed increases suggests that it helps quite a bit because it takes longer to thermal throttle.

 

The rose gold is honestly worth it just for the superior deck material that never needs cleaning.

 

I do like the deck material. It's just the colors that I am not a big fan of.

 

@Eason How do you clean the normal carbon fiber deck?

 

Microfiber cloth and water or alcohol

 

I just use a microfibre cloth

 

Did you do anything other than a re-paste to get it to hold at 3.2 on all 4 cores? I have done a re-paste with arctic silver 4 and it throttle down to 2.2 and sometimes 2.0 in Prime95. I have tried throttlestop on and off and it hasn't made a lot of difference.

 

Sorry to post here, but can you please dump your LCD's firmware and send it to me? Dell's lcd fw update broke mine