**The Official Studio XPS 1645 Intel Core i7 "Owners Lounge" - Part 2

Yes the SXPS16 has 2 SoDIMM slots.
It can have 2*4GB for *GB RAM.


Im sure 2*8GB for 16GB would work if you had a couple of spare 8GB SoDIMMS lying around. But although 8GB SoDIMMS do exist, they are currently ~$2000 each.

 

hey guys, big problem.

ON BATTERY!

When im on battery, like 15% left... and I change brightness of my screen, the screen turns sometimes yellow, blue, green and turns off.

Plugin the AC back in doesnt help I need to restart...

Thats not normal is it? Could it because I use ATIs latest driver?

Check here: http://www.riccardo-ulpts.com/dell.jpg

 

Please anyone had this problem before?

I also connected my samsung via HDMI and this happened:
http://www.riccardo-ulpts.com/dell2.jpg

Sometimes swtiching between HDMI and RGB helps getting the screen back, but only sometimes...

 

my mate had the same exact problem on his SXPS 1645 w/ RGBLED. They replaced the screen a couple of times, the mobo, and tried re-installing windows and everything. In the end he just got it replaced because of the problem.

 

Damn, U sure its the exact same problem? I dont wanna go through loads replacements.

I hope they still have XPS 1645s ready I dont want a different laptop.

 

I don't have an RGB screen, but I vaguely recall something about taking out the battery and then holding down the power button for a few seconds. It did something like reseting the bios which if I remember correctly, fixed problems with funky colours on RGB screens.

Though, perhaps an RGB expert would know better, as this is just a thought that is tumbling around in my head

 

i posted a picture he took for Dell previously on another thread, check it out
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/516205-studio-xps-1645-rgbled-red-pulse-issue-2.html#post7136023
This is what happened to him, constantly.
Best of Luck.

 

why does my HDMI not really display 1080 on my TV? I have a tv that displays 1080i. IDK if i/p makes a difference. But there is also a border going around my TV on all resolutions.

 

Turn down your overscan. The option is in the CCC under "Scaling Options".

 

I have the same issue as Uruha... what does "CCC" mean?

 

ATI Catalyst Control Center

 

Thank you!

 

No matter what I do, I cant launch CCC!

 

Well, I only have it on low battery. Did it happen for him all the time or under certain conditions?

Anyone else heard or experience this? I might try to run Ubuntu later to see if its the same case.

 

Completely uninstall all ATI drivers, then re-install. That should fix your problem. It happens on occasion.

 

What is a good 3DMark06 score for our XPS1645 (740cpu) with 4670amd card all baseline settings?

I just got 7109 as a first run.

 

edited: problem seems to be fixed now and battery is recognized/loading again.

 

Just got my display changed, still doenst work with battery at low levels. tomorrow getting mobo and battery changed. damn...

 

I mean could u guys test (XPS 1645 RGB LED) if you have any problems with the screen turning green/blue/pinkish running at Battery Level below 20% ?????

 

No issues from me - all the way to 5%

 

Damn... Well lets hope its fixed now. I got my mobo replaced and I HAVE 5700 Series ATI!!! HAPPY. Now I only need to check if that issue is resolved.

Thinking that the 5700 Series produces less heat and consumes less power I hope it will all be good!

 

nice

though it did take you how many replacement units?

 

First thing you should do is go get yourself some thermal paste (mx4 preferably) and change it. My temps never pass 69c for gpu nor cpu with mx4 and zalman nc2000 before they were 84c with cooler. Mind you i am overclocked before overclock they never passed 79c

 

Hello guys, I have a question re. monitor outputs. I'm looking to purchase a large HDMI monitor to my Studio XPS 1645 along with another VGA monitor. Will I be able to use the two screens along with the laptop monitor? If not, is there some software that will be able to utilise all three screens? Thanks!

 

Yep should work no problem

 

Thanks guys, im still a bit scared to check if monitor performs correctly uner 20% of battery :-( i might just pretend that it works until a new XPS comes out and I want a complete replacement

Aout the thermal paste, des it really do a big difference?

 

Made a huge difference for me. With stock paste + cooler and Overclock gpu temps were 80c with new paste they are 68c.



They say a picture says a thousand words. This is after 3 hours of starcraft 2. Now you tell me, do you think a change of paste is in order .

Some gaming notebooks have problems keeping there temps below 75. This 1645 sure doesn't

 

Hello

I've had my XPS1645 for close to a year and the fan noise going constantly has been my biggest issue other than the heat.
I have the 130W power supply, I use my notebook a lot to watch Blue-Ray movies when I'm travelling.
I've noticed in the last few weeks that from time to time (usually when I have the notebook on my lap) that movies will occasionally skip, but more worrisome is that the actual image becomes distorted, like multi-color pixelation. I've watched the movies on other machines with no issue, and I've even tried to rewind the movie to the part that displayed the image problems and it's no longer there. So it's not the movies, it's the machine.

I'm pretty sure it's overheating, but not sure if there is permanent damage to the GPU or if this is just a symptom of overheating?
I have 12 days left on my warranty and called Dell today to talk about the overheating issue. They are sending a tech, but only to replace the motherboard and the heat-sink fan.

Any suggestions, ideas?
Thanks!

 

I think that's a good start. It might fix it for short/longer term but if you don't apply paste yourself and clean the fan area, sooner or later it may start warming up again (if that's what's happening).

Download a tool to monitor your temps while watching BDs, see where they go up to.. throttlestop in monitoring mode is a good one but there are many others you can choose from. This way you can see if temps and/or something else is the issue.

 

cheers mate, that looks awesome. is there a guide on how to apply it? and get rid of the old paste?

 

I think the issue might be (was in my case) due to the dust clogged in between the fan and the heat vents. There is some space in between both and most of the time when it overheats or does anything funny like not able to play HD movies after 10 minutes, i open the laptop up to find a big clog of dust just sittin there in between both BLOCKING THE ALREADY BLOCKED AIR FLOW. Once i clean it and the heat vents, my idle temps drop from 55-60 range to 40. I think that maybe the issue, but if you did clean it and the issue still persists, then ...

 

Here you go

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...ging-thermal-paste-as5-studio-xps-1645-a.html

Which thermal paste you use is preference. IMO Arctic Mx4 is the best

Newegg.com - ARCTIC COOLING Arctic Cooling MX-4 AC-MX4 All-Around Thermal Compound

But if its your first time do not get Arctic Silver 5 it is conductive and if you get it somewhere you don't want it you could fry your mobo

 

I used CPUID and here are the results withe notebook sitting on a wooden desk (presumably better flow than on my lap while sitting in bed).


I am not sure if these results are ok, or on the high end. I will try later with the notebook on my lap too see how much higher they go.
I'm just concerned that the graphics card has been compromised and that a motherboard replacement won't address that, and it will fail when my warranty has ended. Is there any way to test the integrity of the card?

 

I wouldn't be too concerned with the max values. Unless you see the current values at that level during normal use (not gaming or any other extensive programs), this shouldn't be an issue. When I run games, my laptop will achieve these max values but some minutes after exiting the game, the coolers will progressively cool the laptop to it's regular ambient temps of ~50 degrees Celsius, and the current value will go down to its respective value.
Did you run games or any other strenuous programs while CPUID was open?

 

Nope, I only played a BD movie, which is where I have recently started to notice picture corruption, which is not actually part of the movie and seems directly related to the notebook's operating temp.

I wonder if replacing the thermal paste with Artic Silver will help?

Thanks.

 

Cleaning out the fan and applying some thermal paste dropped my usual ambient temperature from over 60 down to about 45-49. I can't suggest what type of paste it is, though, because I had a Dell technician working on my machine and I didn't see what type he used.

He originally came to replace my motherboard and exchange my 90W AC adapter for the 130W one, but then found that the replacement motherboard had burn marks and ultimately put the old one back into the computer. He'll be back in a few days with another motherboard, a replacement heat sink, cooling fan, and hard drive (because mine kicked back several failures during the diagnostics he ran).

 

**VERY IMPORTANT**

I was trying to install windows 7 service pack 1 and encountered an error saying some required components are missing and a windows reinstall will fix the issue.

I researched and came to realise that Driver Sweeper deletes some folders in windows that doesnt let us to install SP1.

Here is the Link. Restore those files from the backup and you will be able to install Windows 7 SP1

 

Im getting error Code 800F081F. Will your fix help this?

 

Just incase anyone is curious playing around with this (BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS)):

https://lwn.net/Articles/429812/

I ran some tests and it reported that:
- MSR 0x199 fails
- C1 auto-demotion enable function fails
- Both the C1 and C3 auto-demotion functions are disabled.
- The SMI freq and latency on my system was 1830us, while 'ideal' should be less than 150us.

Quick look at the MSR 0x199 shows it's for IDA, using Unclewebbs tool it shows all the values as zero (probably because it fails at BIOS level). But I don't know if the nehalems use this considering they have Intel Turbo Boost.

The other options this seems to give is loading Intel reference settings and then booting into Windows to see if anything 'works better', but haven't tried that yet.

 

Using BITS, I also discovered that there is a newer version of the CPU microcode out (ver4), where we're on ver3. I'm trying to make a BIOS mod with everything fixed.

I used RW-everything to dump all the ACPI tables both with, and without, the BITS fixes. After comparing each ACPI table, I've found that all the changes made by BITS are in the SSDT table. There are some pretty significant changes, as the compiled file went from 3 to 11kb in size. I'm trying to integrate the fixed SSDT into the BIOS, but I can't find the original SSDT table anywhere. The only SSDT file I can find in the entire BIOS is 161BE597-E9C5-49DB-AE50-C462AB54EEDA.PEI, but it doesn't match the original or the modified table dumped by RW-everything. I'll have to mess around with it a bit more, and perhaps acquire some help/advice from Kizwan.

I've tried to let the Phoenix BIOS tool do the update for me, by selecting the RE-everything dump I made during the session I booted with all the BITS updates, and unselecting the 'don't modify ACPI tables' option. However, it fails on re-assembly, saying that BIOSCOD04.ROM is 3 bytes too big, even though that there is nothing in BIOSCOD04 that should be changed. I looked at the .rom file, and there were 10 extra '0's at the end of the file, so I deleted 4 of them to shrink the file. The BIOS would then re-assemble fine, but flashing it resulted in a bricked laptop... Oh well, a quick crysis recovery and I'm back online.

I've also fixed some errors in the DSDT, but they were fairly minor.

 

The 161BE597-E9C5-49DB-AE50-C462AB54EEDA.PEI file contains several SSDTs table. Based on my observation on one notebook (my Dell), RW-Everything only dump the last SSDT table. This SSDT table can be found in 161BE597-E9C5-49DB-AE50-C462AB54EEDA.PEI file too. The trick is, the header of this SSDT table is different. That is why you can't find it in the 161BE597-E9C5-49DB-AE50-C462AB54EEDA.PEI file. Try select from offset 0x8C in the SSDT file & find it in the 161BE597-E9C5-49DB-AE50-C462AB54EEDA.PEI file.

You can put the fixed _PSS control method (performance state or P-States) in DSDT but you'll need to removed some unimportant entry from DSDT to prevent the file size too large for successful reintegration with BIOS image.

I can dump _PSS SSDT file but I'm unable to find it in any BIOS modules. Probably the one in BIOS modules still in compressed format or the _PSS SSDT was generated by CPU microcode. The easiest way is, like I mentioned above, put the fixed _PSS control method in DSDT.

MSR 0x199 is for:-

• Target performance State Value - bit 0 to 15
• IDA Engage - bit 32

​

Our processor doesn't have IDA feature. IDA only available on Intel Core 2 processor (Santa Rosa processors).

 

even if that's all going little over my head, sounds like excellent news. Hopefully you get it working.

I was looking at this microcode stuff under Ubuntu and found it's much easier to update there, did this yesterday and it was successful (latest from the Intel download site). But as soon as you reboot, those reset back to defaults from BIOS so it wasn't really worth it. It's also a live version so any mods I do disappear as soon as I unplug it.

Anyhow, another piece of news is that when I enabled C1 and C3 auto demote and ran the option to make it Nehalem (I can't remember the exact tab text) - the 4k read/writes on my SSD go up a lot (to the levels I saw when I disabled C6). Now I don't have to do that and have Turbo with good 4k writes/reads.

 

Kizwan,

Thanks for the help. I ended up grabbing AIDA64, and now I know what you mean RE the different SSDT tables, where RW-Everything only finds one. I'll have to look at them closer to figure it out, but now I'm a step further.

RE the microcode, the _C00.PEI (the only C0x.PEI) file contains a 0106E0, 0106E1, 0106F1, and 0106E3; but no 0106E5. How could this be, that it doesn't even have the right microcode? Is it safe to just overwrite one of the unneeded sets of code?

 

This is an example how to put the _PSS control method in DSDT:

Code:

[B]    Scope (_PR)
    {
        Processor (CPU0, 0x00, 0x00000410, 0x06) {}
        Processor (CPU1, 0x01, 0x00000410, 0x06) {}
        Processor (CPU2, 0x02, 0x00000410, 0x06) {}
        Processor (CPU3, 0x03, 0x00000410, 0x06) {}
        Processor (CPU4, 0x04, 0x00000410, 0x06) {}
        Processor (CPU5, 0x05, 0x00000410, 0x06) {}
        Processor (CPU6, 0x06, 0x00000410, 0x06) {}
        Processor (CPU7, 0x07, 0x00000410, 0x06) {}
    }[/B]

[B][COLOR=red]    Scope (\_PR.CPU0)
    {
        Name (_PPC, Zero)
        Method (_PCT, 0, NotSerialized)
        {
            If (LAnd (And (CFGD, One), And (PDC0, One)))
            {
                Return (Package (0x02)
                {
                    ResourceTemplate ()
                    {
                        Register (FFixedHW, 
                            0x00,               // Bit Width
                            0x00,               // Bit Offset
                            0x0000000000000000, // Address
                            ,)
                    }, 

                    ResourceTemplate ()
                    {
                        Register (FFixedHW, 
                            0x00,               // Bit Width
                            0x00,               // Bit Offset
                            0x0000000000000000, // Address
                            ,)
                    }
                })
            }

            Return (Package (0x02)
            {
                ResourceTemplate ()
                {
                    Register (SystemIO, 
                        0x10,               // Bit Width
                        0x00,               // Bit Offset
                        0x0000000000000500, // Address
                        ,)
                }, 

                ResourceTemplate ()
                {
                    Register (SystemIO, 
                        0x08,               // Bit Width
                        0x00,               // Bit Offset
                        0x00000000000000B3, // Address
                        ,)
                }
            })
        }

        Method (XPSS, 0, NotSerialized)
        {
            If (And (PDC0, One))
            {
                Return (NPSS)
            }

            Return (SPSS)
        }

        Name (SPSS, Package (0x07)
        {
            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x00000640, 
                0x0000AFC8, 
                0x0000006E, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x00000083, 
                0x00000000
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x0000063F, 
                0x0000AFC8, 
                0x0000006E, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x00000183, 
                0x00000001
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x000005BA, 
                0x0000A20D, 
                0x0000006E, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x00000283, 
                0x00000002
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x00000535, 
                0x000094E0, 
                0x0000006E, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x00000383, 
                0x00000003
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x000004AF, 
                0x000087F6, 
                0x0000006E, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x00000483, 
                0x00000004
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x0000042A, 
                0x00007B14, 
                0x0000006E, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x00000583, 
                0x00000005
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x000003A5, 
                0x00006EB5, 
                0x0000006E, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x00000683, 
                0x00000006
            }
        })
        Name (_PSS, Package (0x07)
        {
            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x00000640, 
                0x0000AFC8, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000D, 
                0x0000000D
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x0000063F, 
                0x0000AFC8, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000C, 
                0x0000000C
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x000005BA, 
                0x0000A20D, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000B, 
                0x0000000B
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x00000535, 
                0x000094E0, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000A
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x000004AF, 
                0x000087F6, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x00000009, 
                0x00000009
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x0000042A, 
                0x00007B14, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x00000008, 
                0x00000008
            }, 

            Package (0x06)
            {
                0x000003A5, 
                0x00006EB5, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x0000000A, 
                0x00000007, 
                0x00000007
            }
        })
        Method (_PSD, 0, NotSerialized)
        {
            If (And (PDC0, 0x0800))
            {
                Return (HPSD)
            }

            Return (SPSD)
        }

        Name (HPSD, Package (0x01)
        {
            Package (0x05)
            {
                0x05, 
                Zero, 
                Zero, 
                0xFE, 
                0x08
            }
        })
        Name (SPSD, Package (0x01)
        {
            Package (0x05)
            {
                0x05, 
                Zero, 
                Zero, 
                0xFC, 
                0x08
            }
        })
    }[/COLOR][/B]

The " Scope (_PR)" already exist in DSDT. Basically, just copy the entire " Scope (\_PR.CPU0)" & put it in DSDT.

 

I ended up finding the _PSS in the 4th SSDT table dumped by ADIA64. I'm in the process of matching it up with which SSDT table it is in the 161B...EEDA.PEI file.

 

Wow - this is giving me a headache - really complex stuff guys...
but from what I understand it seems like this could really help out machines out!

Keep up the good work seeker!

 

Apple has finally made a laptop that is more powerful than our XPS16! The new Macbook Pros with a 2.0GHz or 2.2GHz intel core i7 with a Radeon HD 6750M 1GB GDDR5! I assume the 6750 is better than the 5730 since both the first 2 numbers are higher.
ERG! I hate the thought that MBP owners are carrying around a more powerful laptops than my XPS16! Atleast I still have my 1080p display. At least my XPS16 cost me $1000 less to buy, I guess.

 

The XPS16 has been discontinued for almost 6-7 months now - so it really isn't a surprise.

I am sure it is comparable to the new XPS15 though? And still 1000+ cheaper for the dell.

 

No, the graphics in the MBP are quite a bit better than the new XPS15, which is strange, as Apple usually goes for the mid-low card, not the mid-high card like the 6750.

 

pwned..... :-(

well at least it is 1000+ cheaper.....
The new XPS15 was a pretty lame upgrade....
maybe dell can actually try to make their computers a little lighter too....