New Dell XPS L521X (Ivy Bridge)

And in our opinion, those who actually purchased a new XPS 14/15 have thrown their vote away. We can and will continue to voice our displeasure because 1) this is not the "owner's lounge" and 2) the new Dell XPS line is overpriced and under-delivers with regards to its specs.

Risco, according to your sig you went from an L502x to the L521x. If you did, and those were your respective configs, then you overpaid. Because unless your new XPS 15 was only £500 it was not -- as you claim in your other "overpriced" poll thread -- a substantial upgrade but rather an incremental one. Going from a 525m to the 640m, not good enough. Going from 8GB RAM and 640GB HD to 8GB RAM to 750GB HD, not good enough. Going from the B+RGLED to the current screen, not good enough. If you're happy with the buy, congratulations. But you did not get your money's worth. That's not a matter of opinion. You overpaid for an under-spec'd device. It's that simple. And now several users are complaining of problems from throttling to wireless issues, and the ODD making unnecessary status checks to slow boot times. Can these be fixed? Probably and they most likely will be. But no device is worth what Dell is asking for with those specs.

Convince yourself if you need to, but those of us who know value and quality and can see the overall market with better options will continue to post the truth in the hope that newcomers realize they are better off holding out until Dell realizes the error in its marketing and lack of customization, fixes the current crop of issues, and lowers their prices. Someone who offers an opposing viewpoint is not a troll. A troll is someone who waits under a bridge for that opposing viewpoint to come by and then ambushes the speaker.

We post on this board because we are fans of Dell, and until Dell respects its fan and user base, we are not going anywhere.

 

Now THAT is a good price.

 

I'm surprised they didn't cancel the order. Did it ship?

 

Let's not push our luck or give them any ideas, first receive the laptop (do a review, enjoy the laptop for like a week or two) and then brag.

 

@ xnap30
It's in pre-production but I already received the order confirmation (not the Order Acknowledgement). As far as I know Dell MUST complete the order after confirming it by law.

@ dp3000
Yea, right But you should edit your post also because of the quote.

 

You cannot use teething problems as a reason, especially when the biggest issue already has a fix on the way. As to my own specs, I had a 1366X768 screen and no SSD both of which would have either been costly upgrades or not possible as the L502X does not support MSATA. Also, it has be determined that these new laptops run cooler and have better battery life due to Ivy Bridge. So you see, for me these are substantial upgrades and the same could be said for others in my situation.

What you fail to understand is that value is perceived as well. Do you not think these people can make their own mind up as to whether it is expensive? There are plenty of other laptops out there, I can assure you anyone spending this kind of money has done their research.

As to the thread, it is supposed to be an information and discussion thread. There is no need for pages and pages of repetitive statements that serve no purpose other than to lower the quality of these forums. You and certain other people clearly have NO intention of buying, so why continue to post? I get it, you are pissed because the laptop is now out of your budget and you cannot afford to purchase. However, please do not insult the intelligence of people to make an educated decision.

 

Um, you are perfectly able to put an SSD in an L502X.

 

Umm, not an MSATA and certainly not as a caching device.

 

We will see that when we know about how the models are doing and when we see the sales in 6 months. Bill challenged me to find the quality of this laptop and how much it costs for dell, i will do it, i do not forget my promises.

 

Agreed, 6 months will give a fair indication. Anyway people don't need to be told if something that costs as much as this laptop is expensive or not. They do however have a right to know about any known issues, such as slow wifi or throttling and overheating etc. In the same breath, they also should be informed about the build quality and battery life etc. Things such as the above mentioned help people make an informed decicision. Constant, reptitive moaning about pricing is something the consumer can decide for themselves.

 

@Risco: I have a question for you. Besides the built quality that seems to be exceptional, are you happy as a customer with Dell. Do you think they heard the public concerns? I see that you almost paid 400-500 pounds more for a laptop that has throttling issues. I would not be satisfied with a 10%

 

There are no issues with the i5 and throttling, only the i7. Secondly, Dell were very quick to respond with regards the issue. While the fix has not been released, the fact they actioned on it so quickly proves they listen. Also all the other makes available to me tend to throttle or have issues. The Sony 2012's throttle and have orangegate screens, plus you cannot use nVidia drivers without hacking. HP have a horrible, horrible reputation for build quality in the UK and the Envy is unvailable here and also has orangate. Asus have terrible customer service, and poorly calibrated screens. I owned an Asus N61JQ, which I paid about the same for when it came out. It had a shocking screen and rediculousy bad battery life along with a constant cpu whine..The Lenevo is a tank, and has bad battery life in comparison plus questionable build quality. Samsung are notriously bad for supporting their products be it laptops, phones or tv's etc., and they have heat issues as well as throttling. Need I go on?

 

I am an XPS15 owner.
This is my very first laptop.
Is it value for money?
The answer is no.
Take the wireless issue...For that price it should work great straight out of the box.
Lucky for me i came here looking for opinons.
What about the ones who do not look up forums like this.
They would not know there are problems with the product.
The throttling issue is another problem...I do not play games but for a product like this it should just work.
The bottom lines is,Dell is selling a premuim product that has issue and right at the moment is not worth the money.
My next laptop will not be a dell

 

Are you so sure that i5 model hasn't throttling issue?
XPS14 has same problem of XPS15 and it uses i5 ULV procs

 

Only as much as Bill said there was no issues with i5.

 

I don't understand why you would want to use an msata as a caching drive.
You could buy a 32gb class 10 sd card or a fast usb drive and use it as readyboost for the added speed.
Or you could swap out your odd with an ssd?

Or you could just upgrade your xps 15 l502x hdd to a full blown ssd for a couple hundred. The ssd prices have been dropping so fast these couple of months. You can find them for .75cents/gb or less sometimes. And I'm talking about good quality ssds. Last week there was a 128gb samsung p830 ssd for $88... That would blow the msata out of the water.

 

XPS14 uses only i5 ULV and has same issue.

 

Maybe you could test it so we would know for sure.
it´s possible that the i5 doest throttle if the throttling problem is power related, since only the i7 can pull the power necessary to trigger it.

The ulv on the 14 can trottle duo to the same reason, if the machine was underpowered or over protected in the same way

Something tel-me that all this throttling issues are somewhat intel fault in the sense that their processors can exede their power limits and cause throttling if this is not taken into account by the manufacturer.

 

A 512GB SSD, which is only just enough storage for me is around £330 in the UK. A class 10 SD card is not designed to withstand multiple writes and rewrites demanded by a windows operating system. Then you have the 1080p screen, which is hard to source nowadays. It would cost me at least £500 to get my machine up to spec. As it is, I can sell my current one for around £300-£350 and get a slimmer machine, better display, better warranty, faster and bigger hdd, faster gpu etc + accidental warranty for the same price I could have laid down for a similarly specced competitor.

I am talking about the XPS 15.

Very true!

I will be quite happy to test. Also trust me, if it becomes a big issue I will be making a lot of noise about it. I can be your best customer if you treat me well, but your worst nightmare if you mess me about.

 

I have the machine, and while it does throttle, its been very good so far. Luckily I use two laptops, so I can wait patiently for the BIOS fix to see if it works.

I'm guessing people are coming to this thread to decide whether or not to buy it, so differing viewpoints are helpful

 

I've done some major cleanup and removed a huge bevy of posts here: the hope is to now guide this thread in a productive direction for discussion. If you have a problem with another user's post, use the Report feature instead of hurling insults or calling "troll." Or if you really can't stand someone, click on their name, View Profile, and add to your ignore list.

Now, let's avoid personal attacks, and carry on

 

thank you i agree lets just share info solution and thoughts about the system if some one post things you dont like do like me ignore it or report it

 

Been using my unit for about 5 days now, and I can honestly say that I am very pleased with this notebook.
After doing some extensive research I have come to the conclusion that this particular model fits my needs perfectly. The slim and durable form factor is great for an architecture undergrad and I can easily see myself carrying it around campus along with textbooks and doing the occasional Archicad/Autocad or gaming etc, since I already have a constantly upgraded desktop at home there really is no need for me to get "as much hardware for the money as possible" per se. surely there are other alternatives on the market, however none of which fits my needs as perfectly as the XPS does. Sony VAIO was initially a very enticing option but from what I've read the heat issues are far worse than what I have been experiencing on my personal unit.

I have to admit that after receiving my laptop and being thoroughly satisfied with the build quality, the exceptionally good tn panel, the overall sturdy feel of it it as well as having a lot of the issues addressed through personal hands-on experience, I almost stopped looking at this forum. But I'm back and would like address some of the commonly discussed topics.

Not a lot of people are talking about this but the battery is very good and I managed to squeeze out 5-6 hours of moderate usage with the brightness at 50% for my first battery calibration.
The designed capacity is roughly 66600mWh
My particular model came with 68420mWh after an overnight discharge cycle. wear level is of course at 0%.
Dell have incorporated a "desktop mode battery charge" option that will supposedly reduce the battery degradation over time which is a nice touch. However I still recommend getting BatteryCare so you can better manage a 2-3 discharge cycle per week in order to maximize the lifetime.

Wifi connectivity is great at short distances, however I noticed a slight drop in speed when I went down to a lower floor but that is to be expected. Apparently a lot of people are experiencing problems but I doubt it is anything that can't be solved with a software update. download speeds peaks at about 1.6mb/s

Now onto heat and the throttling, my personal experience so far is that I haven't experienced any. with normal in doors ambient temperatures I was able to play a lot of games comfortably without any noticable drop in performance or hiccups . All the tests were done on hard surfaces without any extra cooling solutions such as cooling pad etc. The games that I have been able to test are Darksiders, Skyrim, GTA EFLC, From Dust , Tribes Ascend and Diablo 3.
All the games performed well for the given specs and the absolute max CPU and GPU temperatures that I have experienced through an in-game monitor are 83C and 85C respectively, even at 100% usage.

Now most games aren't optimized to fully utilize modern CPUs to their fullest but I can at least confirm that gaming is not a problem on my part, it takes about 20 seconds for the internals to cool down to an acceptable 58C after shutdown and will from that point decrease at an exponentially slower rate until it reaches a stable idle temp of ~49-51C.
at which point the fan noise is nearly inaudible, it will however kick up a notch once the internals reach 60C. So I guess one should strive for an idle temperature below that.

Another thing I like about this laptop is the keyboard, it took a day or two to adjust to the spacing and layout but I was very quickly able to regain my wpm which I did not expect from a non mechanical keyboard.
Typing on it doesn't feel very tacktileish which I really like coming from cherry mx red key switches on the k90.
it isn't for everyone but I personally like it a lot.

I cannot comment on the sound since I mostly use my ear or headphones for superior aq and isolation but the little that I have heard sounded on par with most commercial speakers on the market.

The synaptics touchpad works great after some quick sensitivity and option adjustments on the pre loaded software, which was easy and pain free. actions like scrolling and pinch zooming worked very well. But I feel like the inertial scrolling feature could have used a lot more polish. I always dislike the lack of software integration when it comes to trackpads, in this case it works great in most windows essentials and other commonly used programs such as photoshop etc but was literally downright unusable in steam. perhaps something to improve upon in the future.
Chrome integration was almost flawless, can't speak for other browsers.

This is about it, will update with more impressions after I get to spend a little more time with it.

 

So you're basically saying that the lithium battery should be completely discharged? I really need to see a source saying that - and let it be good one. Because I'm pretty sure that completely discharging the battery will cut the life of the battery dramatically! But I would like to be convinced otherwise.

 

where do I say that exactly? yes it should be completely discharged every ~30 discharge cycle so that the battery is properly calibrated.
and by completely I mean leaving it to hibernate after the no battery automated shutdown and wait an addition 4 or 5 hours (no longer) before charging it to back up to full.
If you are referring to normal everyday charging however then it shouldn't drop below 20%, I'm sure there are plenty of battery maintenance guides on the internet to fill in the gaps.

 

I believed that the battery never should drop below 20% and that it was simply best never to let it be completely discharged. Maybe that was for batteries without low-voltage warning.

Never mind. Found apples guidelines for battery maintence. Seems that you are right even though I had never heard of any battery calibration before. But good to know. Thanks! We'd better stick to what the big apple tells us to do

 

I have one of these on order for £586.80 delivered in the UK. Looks like it was a mis-price as I see others here have taken advantage of it too. Fingers crossed Dell will honour it, money has been taken, so far so good.

However, this version only comes with the 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M, rather than the 2GB 640M. Not sure how much of a limiting factor this will be? Does anyone have any thoughts?

 

What I'd do is not even open it, sell it for it's full value and use the money you made to get the higher spec configuration.

 

Really, would it be that much of a bottleneck?

I'm not sure if I can be hassled to sell it, as it would probably only sell for around £900 and once you include ebay/paypal fees on top, there'll be less than £800 in the pocket.

 

Oh, I can't really comment on the graphics card, I just meant if you were concerned about it you could sell it on and upgrade to the higher config with the money you make. Even if it's not much it's still something

 

Ok thanks. I won't be doing anything too demanding on it, at the most I'd probably want to watch 1080p video and some light gaming (I won't be trying to play Battlefield 3!), so hopefully it should be good enough for that.

 

I love the people with these condescending remarks. I think I speak for myself and several others when I say that this notebook is certainly not out of my budget. I'm more upset with the lack of customization and the fact that Dell forces me to buy options I have no use for like Accidental Damage and blu-ray. I can buy the $1699 config, but then there's no easy way to upgrade to 16GB RAM, since they made the 2nd slot so hard to access. I can also buy the $1999 config, but then I'm stuck with a 5400rpm drive from 2003.

In my opinion, Dell's business decision to have zero customization is boneheaded. It has nothing to do with it being "out of my budget". I don't even HAVE a budget to be honest.

 

So I am pretty sure I am going to go with the $1699 version and it does say next day shipping is this accurate because I need the laptop before I leave for college but I want to wait as long as possible to see how the throttling and wifi issues are handled (and maybe just maybe a coupon or sale). If Dell does stick to its word and ships it the next business day and from then itll be shipped to my house in 5 to 7 business days then i can wait a bit longer but if its taking Dell longer to ship these laptops then I may need to order earlier.

 

The ones sold on SMB do not have ADW, and are significantly cheaper.

Also, there are very few 1TB 7200 RPM 2.5 inch drives. They have a significant price premium on them.

 

Strange that here in Canada, the consumer XPS are cheaper than SMB!

The only i7 model sold on MSB is the same as the $1699 version on consumer side, but sold at $1800 and still is without ADW

 

XPS 15 review by Laptop Magazine:

Dell XPS 15 (2012) Review | Mainstream Laptop Reviews

They like the screen and the speakers, but there are no actual figures for the screen aside from brightness!

 

Am I missing something? The cheapest i7 is $1799 on the US site and is an even worse deal than the consumer page.

Also I don't need 1TB. That's the problem with Dell's dumb upgrade options. I wouldn't go without SSD on any computer. That's why it would be nice to have the option to go with a cheapy 500GB HDD and swap it with SSD.

 

I have no idea where you are looking but the 1699 config is 1399 on SMB without ADW.

The Dell Online Store: Build Your System

 

Any news yet about the bios update which should fix the throttling issue?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...ps-15-l521x-owners-lounge-65.html#post8716170

 

So you are happy paying 500 pounds for the same specs(only better batery life and worse screen) but better quality right?

 

How about you guys take the discussion of "value" to the Is The New Dell XPS L521X Overpriced? thread

 

Just picked up my Asus N56VZ-S4022V yesterday guys

Love it.

I wish you all great happiness with the choice you make, whether it's a Dell XPS 15 or something else.

 

Let me answer for him: Yes, he is. Trust me... He is.

 

Where are you based? I've been waiting for that model to be released in the UK since March!!!

 

All those who bought from the UK Business side on Friday night for a certain price.....

Mine has just been shipped... Should be here by Thursday or Friday.

 

If I wanted to see the Dell XPS 15 up close before I buy, what are my options? Will any Best Buy's have it on their display counters?

 

Congrats, I know I paid like double lol but I am happier as it had the specs I wanted.

 

Good to see that they honoured the price!

 

That would vary by store. My best buy is ty and only puts out messed up laptops and macs out on display to touch.

Best option is to call in and ask if they have one on display