New XPS 16 - Bios question

Great forum here guys, thanks.


I just purchased a new XPS 16, 1645, 5730, 6gb ram, 500gbhd.
The bios was a09, way old

Question: Does this mean I have an old system? Shouldn't I have at least received one with an A10 bios on it?

It's warm, usually around 50c, and gaming is 90c I think, Starcraft 2.
I bought it for Starcraft 2, and I haven't upgraded/purchased a laptop in a long time. I'm still using my 700m, debating whether or not to return it.

It's heavy too! Well, I guess anything is compared to what I have now.
It's faster, but not OMG fast. Browsing the internet, what I do for work, is about the same.

Thanks!

 

A09 is not way old, It was the newest one when I got mine, that was end of June... and there hasn't been much change since then. I guess Dell didn't update it for you, did you order it online or bought it from a store?

It doesn't mean anything, you can update it to A11 whenever you want, some of us are sticking to A09 till now, I personally believe that A09 is working well and the other 2 updates are not really worth it.

My XPS idle temperatures are in the 50's, when gaming end of 70's, had a low 80 once. 90C is high for an XPS with 5730, are you using HWMonitor? How did you get those temps?

There are few things to know about XPS. It's a high performance/gaming laptop, even though many might disagree. It's not made to be a lightweight laptop that you carry around which doesn't get warm either. With those specs, you can't expect it to use it on your laptop and say it's heavy and warm, its place is on the desk, same as any laptop with such specs. Browsing the internet and other light use of the laptop won't let you feel any performance change from an old Pentium 3 laptop. It's faster because you can play SC2

 

If HWMonitor says 90C for your 5730, you have the hottest 5730 of anyone on the forums, no contest.

Dell may give you a hard time (by hard time I mean a restocking fee) if you just say that it's hotter than you like. If I were you I'd install the latest BIOS update (A11) and see how it performs. I would think it will throttle, but someone claimed it fixed a temperature problem with their 5730. Worth trying.

If A11 doesn't help, return it. No point of keeping a new laptop that doesn't perform correctly.

 

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Bob if you don't mind me asking where did you purchase the laptop? I'm just curious because I noticed you have lots of separate temp readings... I don't have a GPU reading and I got a 5730 too :S

I have a similar system purchased less than a month ago (albeit with an SSD) and it also shipped with the A09 BIOS. Judging from posts in this forum it seems like A09 has had few issues, so unless you have inherent problems (like the temperature issue you may be facing) it's probably not worth updating the BIOS.

On a side note, Starcraft II runs decently on this machine... I haven't updated to the latest ATI drivers for compatibility reasons with a couple of applications I run, but even then on mid/high settings and full 1080p in windowed fullscreen I don't usually drop below 40 FPS in multiplayer gameplay.

 

Hey Jnkw,

I bought it from Dell, new, about 2 weeks now.

Yeah, the high temps are from playing SC2. We have pretty much identical systems. You have the SSD, I don't.

 

See if the temperatures get as high when you add the following below to Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt:

Or enable vsync. framerateglue simply limits menus to 30 fps and frameratecap limits the game to 60 fps.

 

Yeah, there's a big thing going on where people are having their GPUs fried by SC2 because their menu system doesn't idle the GPU like it should. What he wrote here about the framecap should fix it. For more info, check out this site: DailyTech - Hot Starcraft II is Frying Graphics Cards, Blizzard Issues Temporary Fix

 

The first few comments in that article are true. Basically, it's the hardware to blame.

The laptop shouldn't get that hot running ANYTHING.

 

True. It only seems to be a problem with overclocked cards, and laptops (which all, not just Dell, tend to have barely adequate cooling solutions).

 

Hey Jack. Your XPS seems to run more or less like mine did before I removed the dust cover. If you remove that, you should see a temperature decrease of about 5C when idle, maybe closer to 10C when under load.

These temperatures won't trip the A11 bios, which is what you should use.