XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

So far I have received 3 XPS15 and none had Adaptive brightness enabled by default, because the default power profile is Dell.

 

I have a Latitude E5430 for work, certain software makes the system crank up the fan to max pretty quickly on it as well. Keep in mind that the Latitudes are much thicker, my E5430 has a giant side vent on the left as well as two smaller sets of vents on the front. These move air much better then the vents on the XPS15 which are solely located on the bottom.

 

This is what bothers me. When I contacted Dell customer care, they ultimately dismissed my issue saying this laptop is not meant for games like GTA4. At the same time, there are people who doesn't have this problem. I hate having to think that my $2000+ laptop is defective.

 

Thanks, will do. I didn't see that in the wiki.... but perhaps that is common knowledge and I am just showing ignorance

Thanks!

 

I would strongly recommend using the older but signed version I mentioned instead of disabling the signature check....

 

Hahaha.. It's got a GPU.. But wait! Don't use it!! Man what is up with these guys.

 

Well GTA games in particular have always been very poorly optimized for the PC and thus have required far more horsepower to run smoothly than you'd expect would be necessary for the graphics it presents, so it's entirely possible that a GT 750M wouldn't be sufficient for GTA IV. But yeah that's still a pretty unfortunate answer.

 

I am selling my XPS 9530 super high model with 512GB SSD for 1400Eur in germany. Anybody interested?

It has a non used guarantee and works good. I had no problems besides the normal DELL like features.

F*** you DELL. You really really suck.

 

It would be extremely helpful if DELL could give us an NVIDIA Bios Update without throttling the GPU to 135Mhz in dependence of the mainboard temperature!! This is so annoying!!

 

Run FurMark and it will FPS collapse within 3 minutes....

 

In their defence, they did replace my motherboard and reinstalled Windows multiple times trying multiple driver installation sequences before giving up finally after some 4-5 hours of troubleshooting. After the motherboard was replaced, the CC guy called me to find out if that solved the problem. When I told him it didn't, he said he will escalate the issue and get back to me in 4 days. I had a suspicion that this is just an excuse to tell me finally that its a problem with the game. As promised, he called after 4 days. This is how the conversation went:

CC Guy: We had our technicians check the laptop for the same games (GTA4, BF4). We also faced the same issues here. I am afraid that its a limitation of this laptop.
Me: (At this point I became very angry. I wanted to ask him how can my 6 year old HP DV5 1015tx laptop can run the same GTA4 game without any problem).
CC Guy: What is your next course of action?
Me: What else can I do? You can close the case.
CC Guy: (He said something about refund. I remember hearing the word refund. Then he mentioned about Alienware. I think he was recommending to upgrade to Alienware). I can see that you love your laptop very much. I want to ask you what is your next course of action.
Me: You can close the case (I was so angry, but didn't say anything).
CC Guy: Please wait while I transfer you to my supervisor for feedback.

Waited some 3-4 minutes after supervisor came on phone.
Supervisor: I assume that your problem has been solved as per your satisfaction (some line like that).
Me: The CC guy told me it cannot be fixed since these laptops do not support such games.
Supervisor: Yeah, its a limitation with these kind of ultrabooks. (He said something else about ultrabooks).

Hung up.

I should add that even though my problem wasn't solved, the CC guy was amazingly helpful and friendly.

May be they are right, these games are not supported...I don't know. I am tired of having to spent significant amount of my time fixing issues with the gadgets I buy (not just this laptop, most of the gadgets I bought in the last 5-6 years had major issues). At least Dell is better in that I don't have to pay several visits to service center or wait weeks to get the device back. I paid $2300 for my car. Its a 17 year old car, if that has problems I can understand that. I paid the same amount for this laptop because to me the gadgets I use are more important than everything else. So when these kind of things happen, I am not sure what to do any more. It shouldn't be jphughan who has to follow up with the team to fix problems that shouldn't have existed in the first place. I don't really understand how its ok nowadays for every company to launch partially tested products. Its as though they have employed us their consumers as testers who pay to test their products, give feedback, get them resolved and live with those defects.

 

Great, thanks jphughan!

 

Hey people, I always thought following this thread would be enough..... but it seems we all missed the A04 bios update which dell published on 21. april (not mentioned yet here in the thread)
... will boot to windows now and flash.....

 

OK, maybe it was not a good idea to compare it to my old E6500, but the point I was trying to make is that in an office with various other makes/models, I have the sexiest notebook by far, but also the noisiest (no exaggeration). Its actually become an office joke, something like 'hes making his final approach now, all clear for landing. When I'm not doing anything its whisper quiet, but literally the the first sign of anything even remotely graphic intensive, (and im not talking rendering or anything with number crunching) just rotating a wire-frame model, the fans go full spin. On the plus side, it totally drowns out the coil whine All jokes aside, I would expect that kind of noise if I was gaming but not the basic kind of tasks I am performing. Perhaps I need to take into consideration the higher screen res, but it still feels as if something is not right with the cooling.

Anyway, appreciate the feedback, and thanks for all your contributions to this thread and wiki.

 

It was mentioned in this thread on the very day it was released, back on Page 511; you just need to check in more often.

 

I am suprised.
I had the issue, with A02 Bios my system was throttling the GPU to 135Mhz ... and i was testing this a thousand times.

With A03 my GPU is not throttled anymore!!! only the boost is turned off after a while setting gpu to 941Mhz

WOW

Interesting is also, with a parallel CPU stress, after a while the CPU is limited slowly down to 1600MHz
I have not seen this effect before bios update!!

 

Can anyone else who experiences persistent throttling confirm this? If so, perhaps Dell gave the GPU a bit more preference on the thermal map rather than CPU performance at all costs? Also, any reason you're not testing the new A04 BIOS?

 

I think the thinness of the notebook and the GPU require some compromises. There are few/none notebooks with quadcore i7s and a dedicated GPU in a 17mm case. I get it, I want it to work better as well, but even the rMBP throttles....

I understand your complaint, but it seems that the tech today isn't ready for what we "want"

 

So did you just update? I am confused with the sequence of your posts

 

I like your co-workers -- "making his final approach now", that's awesome.

As for the issue itself, check the normal culprits of driver updates (Intel and NVIDIA), application updates, and the just-released BIOS update if you haven't done all that already, since at least according to the one report above, the thermal map in the new BIOS update has been adjusted somewhat. Failing that, does this happen when the GPU is placed under even brief, slight load by ANY application, or just one in particular? If it's global, I'm definitely surprised to see the fans kicking on under small load, especially since when I played games for long periods, the fans would come on, but not loud enough that I'd expect jokes from co-workers and definitely not as loud as I hear when a BIOS update is installing.

One other thing you could do is use an application to monitor your GPU temps, especially if you can find someone else here to test their system with the same application. If your temps climb a lot faster than theirs, then could indicate a hardware issue. But if not and the behavior isn't isolated to a specific application, I guess it's normal for this system.

 

Yeh, its a fun office

Its pretty much only when using CAD, rest of the time its whisper quiet, but what was surprising to me is just how easily it would go into max cooling. I can open up something like sketchup, draw a simple cube, then rotate it a few time, and the fans spin up to full speed. As you suggest, hopefully drivers and firmware will be able to improve this, because right now everyone on the office can work out what i'm doing just based on the speed of my fans

 

Ok, i could fix the GPU throttling issue.
Instead of throttling down the GPU to 135Mhz, the GPU is now throttling down to 915Mhz according
to the GT750M specs. After a while, running the CPU Burner, the CPU is now throttled to 800Mhz.
But this is only the extreme case.
The only thing i did was Bios update from A02 to A03.

So back to coil whine.
Lets place an order. Who from germany wants to participate?
I will try some of those:

PCMC135T-2R2MF Susumu, PCMC135T-2R2MF Datasheet 1,9$ at digikey
PCMC133E-2R2MF Susumu, PCMC133E-2R2MF Datasheet 500$ for 500pcs -.- hmnn

Invalid Request
Invalid Request

 

@dragontas: I send you an PM.

 

Hello!

I am new to this thread that I discovered after ordering my XPS 15. The order was only at the beginning when I learnt about the coil noise, the kind of thing that really annoy me. I would not have bought it if I had knew this before but as I already bought it, I decided not to try to cancel it as I hope it will be bearable and there are no real alternatives anyway. My unit is now shipped and I will see in a few days how affected it is... Will keep you informed guys.

 

doug either my ears cannot hear it or.... mine does not whine. So their is hope. I would bet most users who have a machine that doesn't are not posting here, so forums generally look like MASH units because this is where people come when they want to fix problems.... for the most part.


best of luck and hope you enjoy your machine.Also, did you guys see there is a new WiFi driver? looks like it was updated yesterday

 

It's still 2 versions older than the current intel release.

 

Thanks I will see !

 

good to know, so we can just download the one from intel?
ill look into that. When looking at the Wiki I didn't see the new intel wireless drivers.

thanks!

 

Intels on version 17 now, I still find resuming from standby can be hit and miss with reconnecting to the network, it will just hand with no networks forcing me to disable/enable the adapter.

Yes you can install the intel driver, pick the smaller download (not the one for sys admins) as the intel softwares not needed on windows 8.

 

did you have this problem with the Dell wifi drivers?

I have not noticed this with mine running the older dell drivers

 

I seem to have had this with all driver versions

I will try the replacement laptop with dell only to see how they go.

 

This was also what I once hoped when I recevied my unit and found that it had coil whine. However, if that's the fact, Dell should provide system swap for that and that should simply solve the problem. The truth is that my unit was sent for repair for a month and was not repaired. Dell also refused to offer me a swap with the reason that the problem is so widespread that it's almost on every unit. Furthermore, from the feedback of early receivers who got full motherboard swap for that, mb swap does not solve the problem as well. And I remembered that there's a user who had mb swap 3 times, all 4 of them have coil whine.

Galaxy Nexus Tapatalk

 

That is interesting. Perhaps my ears don't hear it?I am 30, but don't have great hearing.


I have had my 9350 for almost a week using it for 8+ hrs a day on battery and plugged in.I would think I would hear it if it was there.

hmm, sorry to hear about your machine. This notebook is almost perfect..... thin and powerful with decent battery life and a good screen.Hope the next revision will deal with the few issues it does have.

 

I think it's most likely that you cannot hear it because, so far, many users have reported to not hear the coil whine but none of those who can hear coil whine get a swap and finds the noise gone.

Galaxy Nexus Tapatalk

 

Might make sense if the engineers couldn't hear it as well.

 

Actually I always go for the one for IT Administrators because (in addition to being one myself) that option takes you to a page that includes an option to download ONLY the drivers, which you install manually through Device Manager. No large installer, no extra application junk or anything. Assuming you're comfortable installing drivers in Device Manager, for Windows 8.1 64-bit, the correct package for that would be the file ending in "e164": https://downloadcenter.intel.com/De...1, 64-bit*&DownloadType=Software Applications.

And the Intel software technically isn't required for any OS except Windows 2000 and earlier. There is however an app required to use Intel WiDi in Windows 7 and 8 .0 (if you're one of the 3 people on earth that has a WiDi-enabled display, congratulations) but WiDi is built into Windows 8.1, so no app is required on that OS.

 

Not true. There have been people who got replacement motherboards/systems and found that their replacement was whine-free. But there are others who've gotten replacements around the same time and found that the replacements were just as loud or even louder.

 

I have a WiDi adapter, haven't used it with this machine yet. Are you saying it wont work w W8 or just that we don't need the extra app that w7 does?

Thanks for the link to the driver. ill test it out.

installing a driver with the "have disk" button isn't that challenging

 

I read that. I am not expecting a system that has no noise at all, actually I am hypersensitive to high frequencies (light hyperacusis) therefore I can hear a coil noise on almost every electronic device if I look for it, on my actual laptop I have to almost put my ear on it but there is some noise (Asus).

My hope is mainly that the noise isn't too loud, in any case I won't be working the whole day on the laptop and if it really bugs me I will try a refund (but as I have no legal right I don't think I will get it) or sell it after a while if something equivalent ever comes out.

As I said, if I knew that before buying it I would not have bought it for sure. Now after thinking about it, there is absolutely no laptop with identical specs at this weight except the MBP but it's a Mac then and it has it's own issues (ghosting, hot keyboard...)

I am still impatient to get it as it seems to be an excellent laptop that problem excluded.

 

Small correction: It was Windows 8.1 that built WiDi into the OS; you'd still need the software on 8.0. But assuming you're on 8.1, here's Intel's handy dandy video for getting it running: Intel® WiDi Software Setup for Windows* 8.1.

 

Great thanks!

WiDi is a cool tech that is underutilized

 

I agree. I just have trouble justifying the cost of a receiver when a similar amount would buy an Apple TV, which works as a receiver (for Macs) AND a media hub. I know there are Windows apps that can impersonate a Mac to stream to Apple TV, but I never know how long Apple will let those last. Plus frankly I'd rather not have yet another box and its associated cables in my entertainment cabinet. It's too bad Apple has only opened up AirPlay audio to third parties. If they'd also open up AirPlay video, it would probably become the standard given that it's the only spec with a large installed base at the moment, and then we'd start to see things like TVs and receivers with native support for it. I know, dream on.

 

Complete and utter BS. A 750M is more than capable of playing GTA IV. Dell has completely ruined this laptop with shoddy technical design and QC. It's a shame as it's a great design concept and has great potential.

Now that I've said that I'm sure the Blade 14 I ordered will be DOA.

 

My system has coil whine but the levels are so low that it's not audible more than 95% of the time of usage. Occasionally it does flare up, at which point it becomes noticeable, if I'm in a very quiet room then the flared up coil whine becomes annoying, but the flare ups have never lasted more then a few minutes in duration so it hasn't really been an issue for me.

I've also had my 9530 for 8 days (bought it last Saturday) and have noticed that the coil whine levels have actually decreased over time. The first time I started this thing up the coil whine was very noticeable, though not annoying. Over the next few days the coil whine levels reduced to a point that it's simply not audible anymore unless you pressed your ear right up to the power cord area.

I'm 30, and my wife can't hear it either (same age). Also I'm very sensitive to high-pitch frequencies, I hear coil whine in practically everything. I can hear the coil whine from our TV, the wireless headphones we use with it, the CFL light bulbs we use in our home, and even from the refrigerator. So theoretically speaking my 9530 does have coil whine but it's a non-factor for us.

 

yeah I cannot hear mine and I teach high school biology and asked a couple of my students to listen for it and they could not hear it on battery, or plugged in or plugged in with 100% battery.Not sure, but it does not seem like my particular 9350 has it. (yet. perhaps?)

 

Can someone link me to the latest Intel Wireless Driver for this laptop? For some reason I can't seem to find it at all.

 

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Se...ductProduct=Intel®+Dual+Band+Wireless-AC+7260

 

Just ordered top tier from amazon ($1999.99, ag solutions seller) after which i stumbled upon this seller on ebay selling top tier for 1800:-

Dell XPS 15 Touch i7 4702HQ 512GB SSD 16GB DDR3L | eBay

Something seems fishy with the price. Should I cancel my order and order from this link? Need urgent help. What do you guys suggest? Thanks.

 

Recommend ebay. Got my top tier there for $1499 refurb and it has been flawless. No tax and backed by ebay money back guarantee.

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

 

Now that GoNz0 has caught your fish, I shall teach you how to fish:

1. Go to www.intel.com.
2. Select Menu > Support > Downloads and Drivers > Browse for Drivers.
3. Select Wireless Networking under Product Family, then Intel Wi-Fi Products, then the appropriate Wi-Fi adapter, then click Find.
4. Select the appropriate OS in the results window to constrain results to those applicable to that OS. Click the driver you want in the results.
5. Modify Step 3 as necessary to find other drivers you may need (GPU, chipset, etc).

Fyi, pretty much every vendor's site has a header called either Support or Download that takes you to a driver download page.