S-XPS 1645 AC Power Throttle Issue Investigation

This run-around reminds me of the first year of the Vista-Nvidia driver fiasco. Both sides pointed fingers at the other until finally Nvidia conceded the issue and fixed its drivers. Dell is slow-playing the issue here on purpose.

 

I was told the opposite, that the laptop was intended for gaming and multimedia, by several different reps.

This isn't a dedicated gaming laptop like the Alienware ones are, but it's not like it wasn't designed with gaming in mind, especially throwing in the 4670 into there. If it really wasn't designed with gaming at all, you'd think that they'd just settle for something way less powerful or even (ugh) an Intel GMA or something.

Do you mean aesthetic build quality? Or actual reliability? Because if you mean just looks (cheap plasticness, etc.), I'll agree, but if you're referring to reliability, then you're off base.

I still have my Asus laptop from 2 years ago. Not a single problem with it from day 1, not nearly the same level of problems I've had with Dell.

Not to mention, according to this study ( http://gizmodo.com/5406415/laptop-reliability-study-asus-and-toshiba-come-out-on-top) Asus and Toshiba are ranked as having the least failure rates for laptops. Obviously that study isn't the end all of everything, but they make some pretty reliable laptops.

 

I needed a spare adapter anyhow, found a PA-4E on ebay for 33 bucks that didn't involve 90 bucks to ship to Canada.

Overall I am pleased with the laptop so far. Throttling is an annoyance. but I have been using my 150W PSU from my GEN1 Inspiron XPS..

the 90W limitation may be due to limitations of the motherboard.. if the DC converters on the motherboard are only rated for a certain wattage, hammering double that power through it may cause some undesirable issues. but the fact that the PSU friggin' cooks when you load up the laptop is not a good thing!

Great troubleshooting so far though! I am sure dell is reading this thread daily... Hopefully they figure something permanent out..

 

Really? That's too bad...I was strongly considering the Asus 15 inch i7 laptop. Still half debating whether to return my laptop at the end of the 21 days. What's so bad about the Asus laptops?

 

If their description of ultimate performance isnt enough to see thats there is something obviously wrong with this laptop. They do actually mention gaming in the xps 16 "design page" where i highlighted in red.

My experience and others, the dell support you call cant be trusted. Not only its something different each time or way off base. But its junk like that, Theyre just trying to shut you up saying that hoping ya will take it, dont let them. there might be some good ones out there, but how would you ever know?

 

No next day in home service?

I think only lenovo and dell have onsite service.

 

If by 15 inch i7 you mean the Asus G51-J, avoid it at all costs unless you love having your shiny new gaming notebook BSOD on you while playing games. They haven't been able to resolve the issue for at least 1.5-2 months now and I doubt they ever will.

I had an Asus G51-X2A before and it had subpar build quality. Cheap plastic, terrible cooling, aesthetically ugly, the worst display quality I've ever seen in any laptop. Furthermore, Asus neuters it's notebooks despite what chipset it may have. For example, the Asus g51-x2a is a PM45 chipset based system that technically should support quad core CPU's but it doesn't, its limited to dual core only. Why? Because Asus did it to differentiate it from their quad core offerings.

Lastly, Asus has no next business day service like Dell. You have to mail your system in to a depot for any little problem it may have. Bottomline, steer clear of Asus.

 

Next Week I'll be receiving my 1645 with my 130W adapter. Thankfully ThrottleStop will seemingly solve all my problems . I look forward to the day when this thread will be closed

 

This thread is about to overtake the Owner's Lounge in length...

 

Nvidia is going through the same thing again with Win7 64 bit. I've had so many BSOD's of late on my desktop I switched to Windows 7, that I am glad I purchased a new HD to install Win7 on and now have a dual boot machine that at least has a usable WinXP boot. Makes me glad this Laptop had ATI.....and I wondered at first whether to go with the m15x for the 260m.

 

They're good laptops and are currently ranked alongside Toshiba for having the least number of failure rates in laptops.

Asus laptops aren't as nicely "finished" (cheaper finish to them I guess) as Dell or Apple laptops, but they're still pretty good considering you pay less for them.

 

I've played Dragon Age, Crysis & Mass Effect with settings maxed (exception being Crysis) for several hours and I peaked at 87C on one CPU core the others haven't gone higher than 84 (strange) and the GPU topped out at 87 as well. At least for me. I think anything under 100C is within the safe range.

 

Whoa. 3 hours 94 deg? I've played for like 7-8 hours straight and never hit 90.

 

This is not entirely off topic, cus its about my new sxps1645, but it has to do with memory speed. It should be 1333MHz, but If I look in CPU-Z, DRAM is 658. Not sure how to read this stuff, but I would assume the DRAM is the value Im looking for. Hope I wrong.

 

No but it's pretty damn close. This thread is about the 1645 throttling issues.

That's just the way CPU-Z reports memory. DDR stands for double data rate so DDR3-1333 memory should show up in CPU-Z as running at 666.7 MHz. Your 659 MHz number is down a little bit but it's fairly close. Don't worry, it's not as bad as it looks. You're memory is not running at half of its rated speed.

Intel designs their CPUs to run reliably up to 100C. When you try and go beyond that temperature, they will automatically and gracefully slow down to keep the core temperature from going beyond that level. It is very rare for their CPUs to go beyond that temperature even under prolonged and extreme use. It would take some sort of catastrophic failure like a fan failing or a heatsink becoming unattached from the CPU. Very rare.

Intel offers a 3 year warranty on their CPUs so they make sure that they will run within spec. There was no need for Dell to create any throttling schemes to keep the CPUs safe. They can look after themselves, even when running ThrottleStop.

 

So Why exactly would dell do do this? And let these machines operate within 90W? If it wasn't needed to protect the CPU/GPU then why?

 

Thats what ive been trying to figure out lately, for it had to show up when/if they did testing. honestly theres only been about a 2-3C increase with throttling disabled. Thats doesnt seem like enough reason to cripple a laptop to me. maybe they just realllllly love 90w adapters or something

 

Regarding to Dell technical support told me worrying me a lot is "the 130W Pa-4E is not recommended !! and it might harm the system. So, if i insist using it and later something wrong happens because of this 130W one, you might be unable to return without extra charge and might not include in the warranty"

So in the future if I keep using the not-recommended- 130w AC adapter and some harms really happen to my system, i will have to pay for the extra charge for repairing even if I did purchase the warranty. They even told me they have recoded and kept track off all people who have requested the 130W. I'm afraid they will use this as an excuse (like you have been using the adapter, which is not recommended by us, so your purchased warranty will not be covered)

I would like to try the throttleStop with the 130W adapter, but the fact keeps me hesitating

May be I should return it and wait til next i7 laptops come out from my favorite brand (Sony) or the better one

 

How would they have proof you used a 130W adapter? Can the BIOS store any information like that? Or is there anywhere on the Computer this is recorded?

 

At this point I'm feeling the same way about canceling my order. I also requested the 130W adapter. This whole issue with Dell's posturing & intentional limitations on the Bios, combined with blaming the customer for anything that's defective being caused by the 130W? I don't think so.

 

It sounds like the guys in India working for Dell have a hell of a good time yanking people's chains. You get a new story every time you phone there.

The testing in this forum leads me to believe that maybe their reason to limit these to 90 watts is to save the batteries from abuse and failure. Users have had issues when operating their laptops beyond 90 watts (way beyond in some cases) and then switching to battery power. That makes more sense than throttling these to keep the CPU safe since the CPU is plenty safe already and the GPU can take care of itself too.

The bios can detect when you have a 130 watt adapter plugged in so it's possible that a flag is set and saved for future reference when you make a warranty claim. Anything is possible these days. Any over zealous company can monitor and record any sort of data they want.

 

I think what they mean is they have a record of the transaction where they replaced your 90w adapter with a 130w adapter for your main adapter. There's a huge communication gap a lot of times between india and US, and the reps show it. Its not about how good the english is, its if they understand or not.

IMO even if they did have a bios flag, I really dont think the reps are smart enough to know how to check and see before warranty'ing anything like that.

Im still wondering what Dell's deal is, its like they dont want money from us in the future. The reps are so clueless they send about anything, or say anything for that matter. Being so behind the scenes on this "throttlegate" issues is very nerving as well. Really it cant be this hard to make a laptop work, other companies do it with better success. I cant see how this issue is that much upside for them to necessitate such a huge short coming.

 

I think the battery theory is a good one considering Dell had some exploding battery issues a few years ago. Plus out of the thousands of people that buy the 1645, how many are really going to push it enough with games to notice it throttles? The same even applies with an enthusiast system like the M15x, not many people would have noticed it had throttling issues had I not tested for it.

 

It's just simple, if you have requested to replace the 90w one with 130W, you will (probably) return the 90W one to them. That imply that you are using the 130W one for charging your system.

Like you guess, They might have something stating what part# you are using for your system somewhere to investigate

 

Uncleweb, this really makes sense to me. I just had the issue with the black screen. Today, I had been using the system for normal use with AC plugged in (no battery attached) and then it's getting very hot to touch. So I decide to use the battery , which had about 36% power left instead and i think it should be enough to buy time for cooling the AC. Then i pull the AC out to give it a rest. Suddenly, my screen turned black but the system's still on. However, I could not do anything to get the normal screen back. I needed to shut the system down and reboot again.

Has anyone suffered this before?

 

The guy I talked to and told me about this claimed to be one of the technical supporters level 3, they might know about how to keep track off.

The first person I spoke with was a woman (just rep i guess), who told me she would be willing to replace a 130W for me if i insisted, What a difference in term of knowledge

 

I've been in contact with Dell trying to preorder a Studio 17 with the i7, the model isn't out in Finland yet. Do you think they'd just ship it with the 130W adapter right out of the bat if I asked?

 

Well I ordered my 130W seperately, So U would just send it back with the 90W adapter if I have any problems So, only if they have some tool to monitor and record what adapter is currently being used then it won't matter. AND the only way the 130W would in any way become "harmful" is with ThrottleStop....So I have no idea why they are saying it's dangerous.

 

I'm trying to figure something out. I would assume that when I see the gpu and cpu temperatures go up that the system is pulling more power. But I've tried two games, Titan Quest and Sins of a Solar Empire.

With Sins of a Solar Empire, my GPU and CPU temperatures run around 65C with a gpu load of 30% and CPU load of 22%. And my clock modulation is at 100%.

With Titan Quest, CPU and GPU temps run about 60C. GPU load is 30% and CPU load is 24%. Clock modulation is almost always 87.5% and will drop down to 25%. I've seen it hit 12.5% once.

If I assume power consumption rises with temperature then I should see clock modulation also drop with Sins.

I do have my powerplan set to balanced but powerplay is set to max performance. This is also on AC.

 

Interesting talk about the power supply (adapter) potentially causing damage to the notebook or it's battery. The current rating on the power supply does not mean that it "pushes" that current to your sytem, it means that that is the maximum current that it has available for the system to "draw" from. if there is a design flaw in the charging circuit for the battery or the voltage regulation and distribution in the notebook then possibly the added available current could cause a casualty on the system. but looking at it the other way, most likely such a flaw will put to much demand on the 90 watt power supply causing it to fail after a period of time not to mention it getting hot enough to cause damage to whatever it is sitting on. Since we have not heard of any burning 90 watt power supplies, most likely the 130 watt supplies should not be a problem.

 

With Titan Quest: it's like a chicken and egg problem. Is the processor running cool because it's being throttled (we're throttling from POWER, not heat, as far as I'm updated)? Or is the processor running cool because it's not stressed, thus it's underclocking/throttling to save power as it should do in such situations?

~Ibrahim~

 

If modulation is active, It looks very likely its throttling. The multipliers will drop to 7x to throttle for power. So it would be unclear then, But if thats not enough to limit power it looks like they then activate modulation to drop power even more.

At 7x multiplier and 12.5% modulation, the processor is only running at 3.8% of its potential.

 

I'm also having serious throttling issues of some kind on my XPS 1645 with an 820 CPU..

Playing Dragon Age gets so jumpy that even the audio starts skipping as well as the video. I have a 130 watt power adapter connected and I am running Throttlestop but the problem still happens. It's much worse if I turn the display brightness up to max but more playable at 50% brightness. I have Windows set for High Performance.

Here is a screen shot when dragon age is jumpy in a window with all the monitoring utilities open. It seems strange that the CPU is only about 33% utilized even though the game is clearly not taking advantage of the full CPU power.

 

activate throttle stop. Then close your screen to make the computer sleep. Then after a few seconds open the screen to wake it back up. start game enjoy!!!

Some reason, there is issues with the keys being pressed causing what you described (huge fps issues). It doesnt appear to be throttlestops problem, but a side effect when disabling dells throttling.

 

An external keyboard also seems to fix this issue which makes it look like to me that it is some sort of keyboard driver issue.

If the Clock Modulation is dropping down to 25% or 12.5% in the log then that is an excellent sign that the bios has a major problem and needs to be fixed. If the multiplier has already been lowered to 7, there doesn't seem to be the need to use any clock modulation at all let alone this much to control power consumption. At 12.5% your high performance laptop will be performing like a laptop from about 8 or 9 years ago. That's unacceptable.

When you stop gaming, how long does it take for the clock modulation to return back to 100%? In the Latitude series this was taking 10 to 15 minutes for both the clock modulation and multiplier to return to normal.

 

That is what I was thinking. The laptop is going to try and draw what it needs. so if it needs 90 watts, it will try and draw 90 watts. if it wants 110 watts, it will try and draw that. IF you have a 90W PSU and try and draw 100W from it, you will peg the PSU at it's absolute maximum capacity.. This is NOT a good thing to do. Typically speaking, you should not run power supplies at their 100% maximum rated capacity. This is why the 90W unit gets so hot when it's running.

I have a 150W and the BIOS does see that it's a 150W. I imagine the PA-4E will be seen as 130W in the BIOS as well. using a power supply as a current limiting device is stupid. The power supply is there to provide power being drawn and itself will not increase power consumption by the device attached... Dell will have a real hard time voiding warranties based on someone using a larger power supply with the same Voltage, connector and sufficient current rating.

That's like a motherboard manufacturer saying that you can only use a 200W power supply in your desktop PC.

I hope they figure something out.. until then, Unclewebb's application works like a charm.

 

Well someone earlier said that they got an approximate date as the 21st of January 2010 or so for a BIOS update or some official fix. So all we can do is wait and see.

 

Ok, that's good. I thought you got one free from Dell

 

Would this mean that they have ways of watching everyone who has "Accidental" insurance? How would they know if it was "Accidental"?
IMO if a power supply is going to fry a laptop the "chosen ones" (knowing this would cost dad a lot of money) would just put a different end on the cord rather than secretly devising a way to void a warranty with software/bios flags.

 

Personally I think its that VERY BRIGHT blue light at the end of the plug. If you could turn that off, I bet the power supply would have enough juice ...

I tried putting liquid paper on it to block the light ... did not work ... same thing with tape ... did not seem to get any more wattage though ... :laugh:

 

You are funny.=)

 

Ok guys, I just talked to my friend, who is a computer engineer (hardware) and one of the team members of HP Envy project. He said getting a 130W and new Bios like uncleweb said is the right way to solve this problem and the system can run at full capability . However, he said doing so will cause so much heat to the system (like 1640 had)that the palmrest might not be able to touch. He said HP Envy 15 suffered this problem too, but the designer decided to put more fans in it and take the optical drive away. Despite doing so, Envy is still hot if the system have been running intensively for a long time due to the design concept, thin and sleek design (just few places where the hot air can flow out of the system)

Basically, if Dell really wants to solve this problem, not only providing the 130W AC and new Bios is enough, but also redesign the SXPS 16. So it's a big deal for them. He also said he knew this throttle and adapter problem long ago because he was curious how Dell could reduce heat on SXPS 1645 compared to 1640 even if 1645 one has i7 processor.

What do you guys think of his opinion? I think he is no biased because he also told me not to buy HP ENVY 15 as well. He told me to wait til HP ENVY 17 comes out, which seems to solve many current problems of Envy 15.

 

I thought they fixed/reduced the heat by moving things around inside.(so not right under rests) I never seen a 1640, but heat was the first thing everone wanted to know about from the first owners.
How hot did the cpu on a 1640 get? the same as a i7? need to compare these to see if they just slowed it down to reduce heat.

 

42C while playing music and web surfing, 65C max when gaming ( dont know my gpu temperatures though )

i think the i7 gets a LOT hotter, but that's just because its a damn powerful processor

 

I just chatted with dell for returning. What they told me

 

This sounds quite plausible. From my experience, playing games on their max settings with a 150w PSU adn ThrottleStop running, the laptop does get quite hot but certainly not too hot too touch. It seems its more the left hand side of the laptop, mainly around the speaker area that gets hottest. The left palmrest is warm too, but to a lesser degree. The right hand side isn't too warm. I guess this is probably because the GPU is situated on the left hand side.

 

Then why is it that with ThrottleStop and a 150w adapter, I'm getting 40-50fps on max settings with Dragon Age and 40fps with High settings in Crysis?

We are only facing issues with performance when gaming because Dell have purposely contrived to make this so by CRIPPLING the laptop.

 

"You will face performance issues when the system is used as a gaming system"

so what are they saying to Alienware owners that have performance issues?
"Oh i'm sorry, you will face performance issues if you use games not authorized by dell for use on this system"

 

Can someone give me the link to the 150 W adapter for EUROPEAN adapter (2 pins i think )?
Think im gonna call dell trying to get one adapter, i have decided to keep my xps and go for the throttlestop because it seems to be great and most of the people seems to be satisfied, is that correct?

If the dont give me an adapter, i will send back the laptop could it work?

 

Why would they care if they have your money?