Safe to buy Dell Studio XPS 16?

The specs along with the look and price really make this an attractive laptop. I’ve been looking for a reasonably priced portable gaming box. This will by no means be a desktop replacement, but more of a LAN party box I can bring with me instead of lugging around my desktop.

I've been looking into buying the Dell Studio XP 16 for the last couple weeks but the number of issues I've seen reported on various forums have made me nervous.

1) Has the throttling issue been fully resolved? I’ve seen various BIOS being released but I’m yet to read anywhere that it has resolved the issue or whether it will EVER be resolved.

2) Does the throttling issue affect all Dell XPS 16s or just particular builds/models?

3) How hot does the laptop get when surfing the web? I know it can get pretty warm when gaming.

4) Anyone have any timeline of when the next version of the Dell XPS 16 will be released?

5) Should I wait until a newer XPS is released or stay away from it completely and get a different laptop?

 

Short answer not really. I don't know about the 1640 but the 45/47 both suffer from power related and thermal related throttling. If you order a 1645 it should now ship with a 130 watt adapter which *mostly* solves the power throttling but exasperates the thermal throttling. There seems to be mixed feelings about the new bios fix for the 1647, but with a bit of wangling you can, apparently, get a 130w adapter.

I believe some version of throttling affects them all. The 1647 with an i5 and a non rgb screen will draw less power and probably generate less heat then an i7 1645 with RGB which'll help.

Mine stays pretty cool when not gaming and gets warmish but not too bad when gaming. I'm not pushing it very hard though.

No idea I'm afraid

Only you can really answer if you should wait. I'd reservedly recommend an XPS 16 to people. It has it's issues but if you like the aesthetics I think it is hard to beat for the performance at it's price. Of course I'm biased here.

 

How's your gaming performance? Does the throttling only kick in when you up the resolution and turn on eye candy?

 

CPU Throttling on the 1647 (i5's) is resolved with BIOS A04 and the free (in US) 130w Adapter.

Dell does have approx 84C thermal limit on the GPU in the 1647, I can pretty much run all day at 82C with prime95 (4 threads) + furmark + ThrottleStop enabled + Full RGBLED Brightness. After a few hours, I do sometimes see the GPU Throttle briefly. The bottom left of the display is a lot warmer than the right bottom side. The 130w gets pretty hot pulling 117 watts during this time.

One other Owner has severe GPU Throttling, he's running a 540m.

In regards to the screen getting very warm on the bottom left, where the exhaust vent is, you can clearly test how far the temps drop running the above tests but move the display's position to about 2-3 inches above the closed position. With the vent not blocked, things improve.

If only Dell had a different hinge design so the display, when opened, didn't block the vent ...

 

I'm not the best person to ask as , from reading the posts in this forum, I don't think I expect a lot. Gaming has been fine I'm still on the 90 watt adapter so, for me, it only kicks in when the power draw gets too high, the couple of times it's happened I've resolved it by lowering the screen brightness!

At the lowest screen brightness I was playing Borderlands with everything turned up and 2xAA @ 1900x1080 and it seemed to run fine.

 

What is the difference between the 1645 and 1647?

Here's the one I'll probably be ordering:

http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/note...9&~oid=us~en~29~laptop-studio-xps-16-anav-2~~

Is this one of the two mentioned above?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=426485

have fun reading

 

Ahh sorry my bad I was under the clearly misguided impression that the heat related throttling problem was worse then it is for the 1647.

Cheers for the correction!

 

Display hinge design and the fact the display does block the vent when opened is a poor design IMO, actually, it doesn't take a "Rocket Scientist" to figure that out - Dell's engineers might want to make a visit to Houston though

The new i5's and i7-620m CPU's helped in the 1647. An ATI 5000 series GPU would also improve things a little with the current design IMO.

 

The 1647 is what you will get if you order any i5 or i7-620m (2010 Dual Cores) Processor. The 1645 will get the i7 Quad-Core Processors. IMO, the Quad Core Processors should not be in the current XPS 16 design.

Basically, if you want a XPS 16, get the new 2010 Processors (i5's or i7-620m) - aka: 1647.

 

So are you recommending the dv6t Quad over the XPS?

 

yeah, unless some owner of the XPS knows better?

the first post after yours said no solution is going to be presented anytime soon for the problems of the XPS.. Dell really dropped in my book, that being said HP isnt perfect, when you read that thread youll see some users experiencing problems, but not as severe as Dell's. And well im happy with mine.
Just PM me if you have specific questions.