New Dell XPS 15 (L521x) First Impressions Review & Pictures

The new motherboard that Dell replaced has A04, I will not update it, I will get a new replacement next month.
Something is wrong with your Laptop, I have a few pages opened and AIDA64 opened the fan stay mostly off. Check the temps which should be mid 50 degrees, when the temp is 60 degrees the fan kicks in. I am impressed with the fan so far. I used to have an Asus, the fan was on all the time, even with low temps.

 

I've tried starcraft II, no throttling. I don't even feel much heat from the laptop when gaming.
I've also been bringing my laptop to places far from the router and my torrenting speeds are still averaging around 900-1MB/s

This is the speed i get in the furthest position from my router (seperated by 4-5 walls)


This is the speed i get right next to my router


I got the mostly the same results from my late 2008 macbook pro in the same position ( +/- 1 mbps of course)

 

Here are my temps: http://i.imgur.com/mYyhN.jpg

Just turned the laptop on and no programs are running. It's about 70° F in my office. The fans are going pretty good right now while typing this post.

Edit: Tonight I will run some CPU and GPU intensive apps/games to see how high the temps get. I don't know if I have the throttling issue that some people are talking about. Haven't had time to mess with it. I'm getting curious if my l521x throttles as well. Can someone please recommend some good tools and benchmarks to easily test this?

I'm very happy with the laptop, so I'm not complaining. There are a few things I am hoping get fixed soon, like the blu ray drive making noise for no reason, my wifi still doesn't work right, I've been using a Verizon 4G USB modem since I bought the laptop, and the fan does seem to be going far more often than I think it should. If my temps continue to idle around 66° - 68° C, should I have that addressed? I'm still on the A04 BIOS and I'm assuming the newer BIOS made some adjustments to when the fan kicks in and at what temp the CPU throttles. Where can I get more details on what changes were made to each revision of the BIOS?

Other than that, my screen is beautiful, so I got lucky there. I posted a video on Youtube about a month ago showing the problem I was having with the wireless. I still want to do a full hands on review of the laptop when I have time since there are still not very many videos of the l521x.

 

I received my USB WiFi adapter from Dell last week. Thank you Lorna! That should get me by until they find a permanent solution for the wireless card.

I do have a few questions about CPU throttling. I loaded up a few games over the weekend, and the laptop started beeping at me pretty quickly. I checked the CPU temperature and it was around 85° C and running at 2.1GHz.

http://i.imgur.com/5j30G.jpg

I closed everything and the temp went back down to about 55° C. My question is, I don't think I've ever seen my l521x run at 1.2GHz or 3.1 GHz. I checked the power settings and it was set to "High Performance". How does that work? Also, my fans are always really loud.

Lastly, I am still on the A04 BIOS. Can somebody please point me to details about what changes were made to the A05 & A06 BIOS? I'm probably going to update this week but it would be nice to see the change-log beforehand.

Thanks.