XPS 13 i3 performance

I have an xps 13 with i3 on order. Today I saw 2 reports of i3 model being permanently throttled yo 500 MHz. One report on dell support community page and one here in the owners thread. This obviously makes me nervous.

Does anyone elsr have the i3? How is your performance?

 

i wonder why they would do it intentionally if they didnt for the i5

 

I can't imagine this being intentional. And I would hate to have to explain the problem to a phone rep.

 

FYI the solution listed here is to turn off Intel SpeedStep in the BIOS http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19616394

 

So how is the performance after the fix? Is the i3 good enough for basic multitasking (office, surf, videos etc.)?

 

Wanted to report that I got my i3 today, and it had the same issue. I was able to fix it by disabling speed step. Hopefully there will be a fix soon.

 

Any chance you changed the settings in Dell Command Power Manager? I have the i7 version and can see the frequency being stuck to 600MHz when I set temperature management to quiet/silent or whatever it is called in english.​

 

Did not look there - will try that tonight. I don't love my current solution as it hits the battery life.

 

I just ordered the i3 model. Will definitely check for this issue when arrives.

 

I noticed the extremely sluggishness straight out of the box. As soon as the desktop came up after the initial setup, I realized the processor is stuck at 0.57GHz. Looking at the factory-run performance assessment, the CPU has a score of 4.0, so this was stuck at 0.57GHz while still at the factory. Did a bit of fiddling and found the setting to fix this. I reported the problem to Dell but did not share with them the setting to work around it.

So into advanced power settings, under Intel dynamic platform, change the TDP to 2.1. You have to do this for every single power profile under on battery and AC.

The i5-equipped one defaults to 0.6GHz and yet is able to clock up. This leads me to believe something else needs to be fixed on the i3, perhaps a firmware update.

You do not want to disable Speedstep in the BIOS. Doing so your CPU will be stuck at 2.1GHz, great affecting your battery life.

I didn't want to share this with Dell as I want them to find the fix, and not tell me oh there's your fix. How this got past their QA is beyond my imagination. Perhaps they want people to think the i3 is slow as #$!# and sell more i5 that way.

Run the assessment again after you make the TDP change, and your CPU will score around 7.1 where it should be. If you ever reimage your OS to factory defaults, you'll have to redo all this.

There you have it, I let the cat out of the bag. Hope Dell gets to the root cause and not use this as their easy fix. Can't believe I had to convince Dell to do their work - they're gonna capture my system.

 

I'm the one who posted the issue initially on the dell forums: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19616394?pi239031352=1#20733981

I'm glad to hear you found a different fix that doesn't require turning off SpeedStep. Perhaps these machines just need a driver update for the Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework?

 

I don't usually browse the Dell forum. The advice there usually is a canned response from the mods or users who think they know it all (I'm not claiming that I know it all just a bit more common sense I guess).

Took a look there, looks like someone pointed the the owner's thread here to my post about the processing stuck at 500mhz lol. Since no one responded here I assumed I was the only cheapskate who bought the i3

I don't know who needs to come up with a fix, Intel or Dell, but on the i5 it defaults to 0.6GHz and it's able to clock up. This dynamic platform thing seems to be new on the Broadwell platform. Does changing it to 2.1 on the i3 affect battery life, I don't know.

After multiple chat sessions with Dell support, and them wanting to replace my xps13 once again, I finally convinced them to capture my system to further look into it. They owe me for saving them from building another defective i3 xsp13!

 

At least we have the reason to return the i3 if we don't like them. I can't wait for my i3 to arrive!

I was thinking for days whether to order the i5 or i3. At the end of the day, I decided to grab the i3.

How is the overall performance of the system?

 

It performs great. Honestly I don't notice any difference from the i5 with what I do. At least you won't be in for a surprise knowing how to work around this problem. I really love everything about it, except the way off battery life Dell quoted..

 

What is the battery life after doing this?

 

This was an issue for my i3 as well. I disabled speedstep and it was stuck at 2.1GHz. So I did the power management fix and now I never get back to the .57 kHz it was stuck at but otherwise it ramps up and down as needed.

I was seriously considering returning this laptop before I found this fix because it was so slow it was almost unusable for a brand new xps. I still have an m1530 that worked better then this one did.

Is there any official fix from dell for the i3 yet?

 

Bumping this thread because I have an i3 on the way and wanted to see if there was a bios update yet or anything like that in the works.

 

BIOS A03 supposedly addressed some issue in i3 models specifically, although I am not sure if it is the same thing.

 

Is there really that much real world different between the i3 and i5 models? I have the i3 base model now for mostly office, facebook, and some web browsing and it seems to work perfectly fine after I changed the power setting that kept it to .5. Running A3 Bios now as well. Is it worth trading this in (past my return window) for an i5 version? Would I even notice a difference?

 

I have an i3 right now but also have an i5 coming in to test out the very same question. I am going to guess that from a moderate use case like you mentioned, there will be no real difference. I do want to see if there is a difference in the gaming capabilities. The i3 has 1 less eu(?whatever they are called) and I am wondering if that plus the higher clockspeed will make any difference.

 

i doubt that you will get a noticeable difference in gaming performance as the 15w tdp envelope cuts down the combined cpu and gpu performance of the i5 and i7 machines to i3 level anyways.
would appreciate real life performance comparisons though!

 

Any update on how these two different ones compared?

 

Dell canceled my order without notifying me. I realized it and the coupon I had used was expired... so needless to say, I didn't get the i5. I am kinda bitter about it because dell will do nothing to rectify the issue even though the coupon just expired yesterday and I contacted customer service today around 10am mountain time. I really wish I could have ran some real world benchmarks for you guys...