XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

No, coil whine is a very persistent noise similar to the "mosquito ringtone". The electrical crackle you describe is still there even on my revised motherboard, but as you say, your ear has to be very close to the laptop to hear it, and I've heard that noise on lots of laptops and other consumer electronics. I'm not an electrical engineer so I can't explain exactly what it is, but experience tells me that it's completely normal.

 

cheers, my 1st was really loud with that, 2nd not so bad and this ones got the crackle but you don't notice it.

 

Is it possible the electrical cackle is from the hard drive? I am going to try and replace the hybrid drive with a SSD after Dell tech comes and replace my motherboard / keyboard / trackpad.

Also, does any1 know of a hard shell case I can buy for this laptop?

Thanks!

 

I have the noise despite having the 512GB mSATA SSD, fwiw. It's definitely not the sound of a spinning drive though.

 

Are you saying that the 'coil whine' you've been talking about is the "mosquito ringtone" rather than the sound that sounds like HDD noise or current flowing?

 

Yes. That's the coil whine that basically everybody has been talking about. Maybe people are describing it differently, but the coil whine that's been discussed is a persistent (and consistently pitched) noise that occurs while the laptop is plugged in and not charging. The other noises are more intermittent, much quieter, and not correlated to whether the laptop is charging.

 

Oh my... I'm really confused now. I certainly don't have any constant "mosquito ringtone" but I do have high-pitched noises only when I'm on AC with the battery pretty much charged and I stress the CPU with browsing or scrolling. jphughan, are you saying that your "coil whine" is present even if the laptop is idling doing nothing? Also, are you saying that "your" coil whine is much louder than what I have? Because then it must be pretty damn loud. But I don't understand because my noise is certainly correlated to the charging status and doesn't happen on battery only.

Let's see if we can clear this up. My coil whine is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_dWBdrI46Q
Do we all agree?
Thanks.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by ‘mosquito ringtone" but my coil whine is the same as pintycar's, which is the one in the youtube video. It's like HDD noise or current flowing but goes away when on battery. The noise also seem to respond to users scrolling window action when it's present.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_dWBdrI46Q
The youtube video above had been posted from the very beginning of this thread to avoid any ambiguity of the definition of 'coil whine' .
At least, users have only uploaded noises like this onto the youtube for 9530 and m3800 noise and I think most of us are referring to this noise when we say 'coil whine'

 

Anyone else have a wrinkle or bumpy texture on their palm rest? I have had this laptop for about half a year. I do not game that much but the location of the wrinkles is where my palm is when I am using WASD. Since this laptop was fairly expensive, I would not expect this kind of cosmetic issues. Anyone else have this experience? I'll have a picture attached for reference.

 

FYI Amazon has a very good price on the new 8949sLV model.

 

I am getting (ready) to pull the trigger on the top-tier system (QHD+SSD) seeing as there might be some hope that some of the major issues have been dealt with.
In any event - I was wondering if anyone knew of an upcoming price "drop" or other discount that was soon to come, or is "normally about to be offered" soon ?
I would be buying from dell.CA, btw.
Thx

 

The noise you're demonstrating is separate, and my system has that even on its new motherboard -- though several other systems I've used have had that as well, including a Latitude E6430 I've got with me here and the Precision M6300 I had before I got my XPS. The Latitude is quieter than the Precision and this XPS, so maybe it has to do with the power requirements of the system? In any case, that's not the coil whine issue that most people here have been talking about. The coil whine we've been talking about is a persistent, constant-pitch tone that occurs even while the system is idling, not a "garbled" noise like the one you recorded. It's quieter than your noise, but its persistence and higher pitch keep the aggravation factor up despite its lower volume. I also notice that on my system, your noise gets much quieter and less frequent when I disable the built-in display, whereas the coil whine that the revised board eliminated for me persisted even if I was using external displays exclusively.

A quick Google search would have enlightened you as to the "mosquito ringtone", but the coil whine I used to have until I got the new motherboard sounded a lot like the 12 or 15 kHz tone in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrewnzQYrPI.

 

Hi love my machine, but sometimes when I wake my computer from sleep all my open desktop app are no longer clickable. I checked the event viewer and it said win32k "a multi-touch device reported inconsistent contact information. These usually means I need so sign out to fix it" event ID is 264. Thanks


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Alright, and what about disadvantages ? ;P For example a technician which makes scratches on my laptop? Or cooling/thermal compound which doesn't get replaced or replaced badly? Any idea how Dell answers to a "bad technician" ?

Thanks

 

I was planning to place an order this week having seen the helpful update you posted on Friday regarding the motherboard replacement.

However, from further posts I understand that there are 2 separate noise issues, only one of which is solved by the new motherboard.

It seems the revised motherboard fixes the “mosquito ringtone” noise, but does not fix the “scratching” noise when scrolling as shown in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_dWBdrI46Q

As I understand it, you are saying you can put up with this “scratching” noise?

From the video it looks like it would be a annoying noise to live with on a day-to-day basis with every mouse scroll making a noise – especially when having paid so much for a top spec laptop (512GB SSD version).

Do we know how widespread this “scratching” noise is on XPS 15 or M3800 – most units vs. a minority of units?

 

No, this tech was absolutely amazing. He handled my laptop more carefully than I probably would have myself if I'd done the swap, and since he shared the disdain about Dell's thermal compound application strategy that others have mentioned here, he makes a point of carrying Arctic Silver with him to use instead of what Dell provides, and he applied it perfectly.

How Dell answers to a bad technician I'm sure varies on a case by case basis. When I had a particularly bad experience a while back they offered to replace the system (it was brand new), but that wasn't feasible because I had to prep that laptop as a gift for my sister, and fortunately the cosmetic issues created by that tech were minor. But if a tech just scratches a part, I would imagine Dell would offer to replace that part -- but of course if a tech created the problem in the first place, having another tech perform another service might not be the best idea, unfortunately. I just got extremely lucky with the tech I got.

Correct, there are two noises, and the "scratching" noise persists -- but as I said, I've encountered this noise on many other laptops, usually those that are paired with high-wattage power supplies, which leads me to think it's more prevalent/noticeable on laptops with higher power requirements. Therefore I don't consider it an issue with this specific laptop, nor do I really consider it a bothersome issue in general. Most people aren't constantly scrolling up and down as shown in the video, and frankly your brain just learns to tune out repetitive sounds like that. I'd gotten to the point where even the coil whine noise wasn't very noticeable to me anymore. I only got the motherboard because hey it was a free fix and I also thought it might solve the garbled audio issue, which it didn't, so that appears to be an issue that will require a driver update.

If you order an XPS, my prediction is that you'll notice the scratching noise right away because you'll be on the lookout for it, but if you actually use the system for a week or two, you'll find that it won't bother you much if at all. And if it does, you'll still be well within the return period. Of course that's more or less what I said about the coil whine noise, and while some people shared my view in that coil whine ideally wouldn't be there but was in no a way a dealbreaker for them on a system that still doesn't quite have an equivalent in the market, others couldn't stand to live with it and claimed that the only reason I could possibly hold my view was because I was a shill for Dell, so your mileage may vary. Good luck with your decision.

 

Talking about this hard drive-like scrolling noise... It used to be very strong in my computer, whenever the internal GPU was in use. However, it seems to have (almost completely) disappeared.

Was it the A06 BIOS? Driver updates? Battery degradation? I'm not sure, but now I only have the high-pitched mosquito coil whine left.

Will it reappear in the new board? I hope it won't.

 

To my knowledge, this is incorrect. The "coil whine" issue is not persistent and will come and go based on both the charging status of the battery (ie, present at full charge while plugged into AC) and the load on the processor.

Persistent noises coming from the laptop regardless of processor load and AC power status are not characterized with the "coil whine" descriptor, even if they may be electrical in nature.



On a different note, I spoke with Dell warranty chat a few days ago about the new motherboards detailed in the Dell forum as being ready to go. They authorized a replacement board to be shipped out. As of today, the Dell rep informed me that the US-region board is not yet in the warehouse and ready to be shipped. There's about a ten day lead time on that particular part (other regions have been released).

However, he authorized a new replacement laptop without me asking which has the new board installed. The laptop is being shipped out tomorrow. Kind of crazy. I'm hoping it doesn't have any QC issues, but regardless I'm very surprised that they're going to that length to solve the issue.

 

You're correct that it's not persistent in that it occurs under every condition at all times, but it is a constant pitch, not the "garbled/scratchy" noise that ZoomsDay recorded. And fwiw, my original motherboard only stopped whining when it was charging or disconnected from AC. When it was plugged in and not charging, I had coil whine regardless of CPU load -- but I know from reading here that that's not true of everyone's unit.

I'm in the US and got the revised board, so maybe there aren't any in the warehouse that would serve your area? Or maybe they're waiting on more stock. Glad that Dell is taking care of you though.

 

I have had my 9530 since last November and have been pretty happy with it. I have been wanting to go to 8.1 pro (for bitlocker), and decided to take that opportunity to get a 500gb msata and just wipe it clean and start over. I went with minimal drivers and no dell software, and everything is working great - except for battery life. Battery life was never great but now it is unbelievably bad. I can pull up the meter and watch it fall. Maybe 45 minutes at most, whereas before I would get at least two hours. I have tried tweaking the power plan, to no avail.

Does anyone know which Dell software or driver helps with this?

 

45 minutes is incredibly low. I get 7+ hours on 91wh battery so with 61wh expect atleast 5 hours. Try installing everything again using dell system detect, especially the a06 bios.

 

45 minutes!? At a rate like that there should be something obvious in Task Manager that's hammering your CPU and/or disk, and Win8's Task Manager (after you click More Details) is much more granular and informative than earlier versions. What do you mean by "minimal drivers"? Have you confirmed that Device Manager doesn't show any unknown devices or the like? You really should install all of the drivers appropriate for the hardware in your system; the application footprint is what should be minimal. In any case, there's no magic driver/application that you need to install in order to get reasonable battery life. I did a clean install and can get several hours out of my battery.

 

HI there,

I'm new to the forum and considering buying the XPS 15 9530. I want to use lightroom and photoshop CS6 mainly. I read that photoshop was not displaying correctly (the dial boxes, icons, controls are barely visible, too small) So i'd like to know if this has been corrected or not.

Is someone here using photoshop and lightroom on this laptop?

Secondly, can I use a 2nd monitor at home to develop my photos? No compatibility issue?

Thanks a lot!

 

Actually, the noise that most of users here report is this “scratching” noise. You can search the noise regarding xps 9530 and m3800 on youtube and this is the only kind of the noise you can find.

As the reason why some user stands out all of a sudden to clarify that this 'scratching' noise, I'm not sure.

But I would analyze this way: If I work, speak, defend and vouch for Dell. When I finally find out that there is really no fix, it would be humiliating to admit that what I have defended for is wrong. I probably would find a way to cover my own mistake, such as by suddenly re-defining the noise problem users report to bring us to a conclusion that 'coil whine' is fixed and Dell is a reputable company and I'm still right all the way.

 

If memory serves from reading this forum (and it may not), Lightroom 5 worked fine, but Photoshop was the problem. I believe Photoshop CC was updated to deal with HiDPI properly on the Windows side, but I don't think previous versions have been updated, and knowing Adobe, they probably won't be if they've already updated a newer version without also having updated the older one. Using an external monitor at 100% scaling (i.e. anything short of a 4K display) resolves the issue because the source of the problem is using a high scale factor in the first place -- though if you want to use it concurrently with the QHD+ internal display by having Windows 8.1's per-display scaling enabled, you may have unfavorable coexistence experiences for reasons explained in the Multi-monitor Setup article on the XPS 15 Wiki. The GPU zooming described there would likely be especially annoying when working with Photoshop.

If on the other hand you'll always be using either external displays or the internal display but never both at the same time (which is what I do due to my desk layout), then you'll have no issues when using external displays, and if you need to use an older version of Photoshop with the internal panel, you could temporarily drop to 1600x900 and log off and back in to reset the scale factor. How inconvenient the latter solution is depends on how often you'll be using Photoshop with the internal panel together, and of course you unfortunately lose the benefit of HiDPI in the first place with that solution.

The final option would be to external displays and the built-in display together and set BOTH to 100% by disabling per-display scaling. Then you could put your Photoshop tools on the external panels (where they'll be sized properly) and put the image you're working with on the built-in panel, where it will get the benefit of HiDPI. Of course anything ELSE on the built-in panel would be miniscule at 100% scaling, though, which is why the Photoshop CC update apparently sets up the app to respect the scale factor set for the display when sizing its UI elements but ensures that the actual image is always drawn 1:1 (and I believe sets the default zoom level to 200% rather than 100%).

 

Sigh, here we go again. First, differentiating two different high-pitched noises based on YouTube videos is shaky at best, which is why I tried to describe clearly how the noise that I used to have was triggered, as distinct from your noise, which I have already stated is still present on the revised board. Second, if you read the very first post of the Dell Communities forum on this subject, that post says "A high-pitched scratching/screeching noise is produced from the power button area ONLY when the power is plugged in and the battery is fully charged". Granted that user used the word "scratching", but the user also clearly states that it happens only when the AC is plugged in and the battery is not charging. I was able to reproduce your noise whether I was plugged into AC or not (though it also doesn't happen every time I scroll a webpage in either case), and as I said above, your noise varied based on whether the built-in panel was on. The noise that the new board eliminated for me NEVER occurred while running on battery power, but (for me) always occurred while plugged in and not charging, regardless of what I was doing with the system.

I'm unclear how you draw the conclusion that "most users" here are talking about your noise that is most consistently reproducible via scrolling. I've read this thread, the M3800 thread, and both of the Dell Communities threads on coil whine (one each for the XPS 15 and 13) all from Post #1, and most of the discussion I've seen has been around a noise that goes away when you're running on battery power or plugged into AC and charging. But more than that, I'm unclear what your angle is here. I said I had one noise that occurred under the aforementioned conditions and that got fixed with the new board. I also said that on the new board, I still have your noise. And just because you don't have the first noise, you now accuse me of refusing to admit that I'm wrong, covering up my "mistake", and unfairly promoting Dell? If you're going to mistrust what I say, then I don't understand why you've been asking me for information and clarification recently.

 

Hello,

I want to order this laptop, but still have some questions in mind, hope you guys can help. Thanks.

1. Is the noise problem still there? Anyone suffer this problem when purchase recently?
2. If Dell Tech decide to replace any part of the laptop, is this free? (I never use Dell before, not sure about there policy).
3. Can we watch 3D movie directly on this laptop?

I hope you can share your experience. Thanks!

 

Service and parts are free during the warranty period. After that you'd have to pay. That's how a warranty works pretty much everywhere....

Both the Intel and NVIDIA GPUs are capable of stereoscopic 3D for movies or games, but for movie playback you would need appropriate software (it's not included, probably because there's no optical drive anyway) and in either case you would also need a 3D display/projector attached, and obviously appropriate glasses for that display/projector. The built-in panel is NOT 3D-capable. The only laptops I know of with 3D-capable internal panels are Alienware systems, either the 17 or 18 (maybe both?) There may be more, but that is an extremely rare feature, probably because 3D hasn't even gained real traction in the TV market. If that's important to you though, I imagine you'd be most likely to find that feature in high-end gaming-focused laptops.

 

I have this exact 'scratching noice' problem and I reported it here long back. Glad I am not the only one. Mine is the 2k SSD model.

I found this video about coil whine in gaming machines.

 

Lightroom 5.6 and Photoshop CC (latest edition) works. If you're using CS6, you'll have to set up a photoshop manifest file to get it to scale properly. Google "high DPI photoshop manifest scaling" for instructions. It's not bad.

Yes, very much so. The laptop is actually very well suited to both programs, especially with the high dpi screen. The calibrated color representation is very good as well. Performance is strong in Lightroom. Photoshop will start to lag when you're dealing with multiple masked layers but I would expect this out of any machine short of a dedicated graphic workstation.

Running a second display is no problem. I actually run two external displays as well as the laptop display at the same time and it works perfectly.

 

Can you please tell me what resolution your monitors have and what kind of scaling you chose?

 

Thank you for this feedback.

I think I won't have the choice and move to a monthly fee to use CC...

 

For guys using two external displays, could you post the dock you are using? Thanks!

 

No dock required. I have one display connected via HDMI and the other via MiniDP. And if you get a DisplayPort MST hub, you can connect multiple displays just using the MiniDP port. Unlike some DP adapters that just span across multiple displays with the system seeing one ultra-wide display, an MST hub actually presents the displays as independent devices to the system, and most if not all of them support using HDMI/DVI/VGA adapters on their output ports, so you can use an MST hub even with non-DisplayPort displays.

I recommend avoiding a dock if all you want is external displays. USB docking stations require separate drivers (I try to avoid extra drivers where I can since it's just one more potential source of issues) and they also use the CPU and GPU to compress the video signal for transport over USB. That imposes a performance penalty on your system, and I remember USB 2.0 adapters often had low refresh rates and/or showed artifacts on faster-motion content such as games or movies, though this may have disappeared with USB 3.0.

 

Coil whine update:

I was actually one of the first people to purchase and receive this laptop and I was the first person to notice and report the noise that we now know as coil whine.

I rang dell pro support in Australia yesterday and they were really helpful. I sent them a link to the dell community forum and Terry B's post.

They said there was no information about the new board but he was going to email Terry and get back to me. Hopefully I will have something to report next week

 

After following this thread over several months now I finally decided to contact Dell Support in Germany by myself, because I think that coil-whine noise on my machine become worse – or maybe I just got more sensitive to that sound emitted. The conversation between the support guy and me took several mails, but the only thing I got offered was a service case number and the entry on a list, that I will be notified if revised motherboards will be available. He told me of course, as others already reported, that Dell is working on an revised motherboard but he is not able to give me any ETA. I also got told that complete laptop replacement or full refund is not able in my case due to the fact, that it’s not a technical problem but more a design problem. Really guys, I get more and more frustrated with that. Today I noticed that XPS 15 top-spec dropped to 1449€ in official shop, kinda interesting why…

 

That is interesting. I chatted with Dell online last night asking them to confirm if I were to order the xps15 that I would get one with the new motherboard on which the coil whine issue had been fixed. I was told by the rep that this would be the case although I suspect I was simply given an easy answer out of ignorance of the actual situation. I may order one today and play the lottery hoping for a good one and return it before the 30 day return period if any flaws are present.

 

To avoid any confusion, the noise i am referring to in my post is the one the intermittent high pitch noise that comes from the left side of the laptop (close to the power plug) and that appears when on power and stops when on battery.
Based on posts from lenovo users who appear to be complaining from the same noise,this seems to be related to the CPU power management.
More specifically related to the C3 state of the processor.
There is a workaround on disabling the C2 and C3 states from the registry:
see section "workaround" in the following KB

registry workaround

i tried this on my xps15 and the sound seems to have reduced quite a bit.

its an easy addition to the registry if you guys want to try it. you can easily remove it if id doesn't.
i am not sure yet if this affects battery life at all or not, i will post if there are any notable drawbacks.

let me know if it works for you or if the sound is more manageable.

 

if anyone is still looking for a suitable sleeve for the xps 15. I found one from crumpler, The Gimp 15.6" - Crumpler . I haven't seen any other choices.

 

Yep. Mine is starting to do that too, on the front right corner. Where my palm is when navigating with arrow keys. Silicon surface has some bubbles forming. My machine has seen close to 5000 hours of use in a hot climate. You use yours in warm conditions? I've been thinking about having the palmrest replaced, but haven't had the chance to do it, yet.

Only other issue I've had with extensive use is a small backlight bleed-through spot on the display. Only visible when the screen is white.

 

The acme skinny sleeve for the mbpro retina fits perfectly on my xps 15 9530.

 

Did you ever find a solution to this Mark? Am having the exact same issue on the XPS 15 and MYOB support haven't been too much help.

 

Just curious , Did any one buy the snugg case ?
I think the XPS15 is a 1.2 cm wider than the MBP so I am a bit skeptical on buying MBP sleeves.

 

Has anyone experienced burn in on their unit?

I've just noticed the Windows 8 taskbar is quite substantially burned in and visible on dark black backgrounds i.e. full screen movies. I can see the entire taskbar outline, bar, tray icons etc and also some program icons quite detailed visually. It looks like it may of occurred sometime ago as some icons that were previously pinned but I've since removed, are now ghosted.

I know there are various colour/conditioning treatments that can be done, but can anyone recommend one that they've tried that works?

 

There was one or two people that mentioned this (quite a while ago).
You'd have to search this thread for burn in, or image retention.

I am saddened to hear that you have this issue - as that is a deal-breaker for me.
There's nothing worse than trying to enjoy multimedia content on this (very expensive) laptop, and seeing burned-in after-images of previous windows/icons/taskbars, etc getting in the way !

There's no fix for it if the images are truly burned-in - but if they are recent images - it could just be image "retention" - and that would go away with time - (if you could live with it until it finally dissipates).
From your post, however it seems like you are seeing images of icons from your tray that have long since been removed - which tells me that it is more a case of actual burn-in.

We'll see what others come back with on here.
I am hella-hesitant to order one of these now.
(I have returned other high-end laptops in the past for image retention issues - as that is unacceptable in my opinion - at this price point).

 

Wow, full-on burn-in? On a modern LCD? I had that happen on an Inspiron 9100 almost 10 years ago due to the background image I used, but I haven't even heard of LCDs burning in recently. Dell will of course cover that under your warranty, but if you want to try something that might get rid of it in the meantime, look for stuff designed to break in or fight image retention issues on plasma TVs since they're more susceptible to those issues than LCDs (although even they are very resistant to those issues these days unless you leave a static image on the display for hours on end). Those things are usually packaged as a set of images you run as a slideshow or a video you would set to loop. Good luck and definitely report back.

Out of curiosity though, do you have your display set never to turn off, and perhaps also have your screen saver disabled? Not that you should expect burn-in with those settings, but they certainly wouldn't help. And on Win8 I've noticed my display is turned off 1 minute after I lock my workstation; I'm not sure if that's a hard-coded value or a fraction of the configured display timeout, which for me is 15 minutes, but that too would help fight burn-in (and save energy) -- though not if you never lock your workstation.

 

I didn't find many reports of burn in/image retention like I have it, but I have generically searched for LCD burn in fixes but thus far no methods I've tried have yielded noticeable results. I will search this thread to see if any specific methods worked, as I'd rather not waste time, seems a conditioning process takes several hours.

 

Yeah its pretty visible. I can just about make out the date on the taskbar as to when it happened!

I am using the standard Dell power plan which turns off the display regularly, as well sleeps the laptop after short idle periods, admittedly, I don't have a screensaver, but as the laptop turns off the display, I figured this cancels it out.

I do use my XPS 15 9530 on a daily basis, and for work, so at least 8-10 hour per day. The taskbar is always visible, so I guess its the one element that would get persistent, but it is pretty well ghosted, not just a icon but literally the entire taskbar, some parts are more outlined, while on other parts I can easily make out icon details I.e. Filezilla icon.

I've tried methods like setting a white background as the screensaver overnight, colour cycling videos etc, nothing seems to have made a difference.

I will use my warranty if nothing works, but I'm waiting for the new mobos to be available to fix the coil whine, so I'd rather hang on get both done at the same time, seems my unit would be completely disassembled anyway.

 

I received new XPS 15 with i7-4712 and noticed that right off middle on the screen there is a bright spot (only visible with bright background and disappears with black or other dark color background). I don't know what is this called a stuck pixel or a hot pixel or a dead pixel. Anyway, what could be actual reason for this and how to correct it. Is it permanent hardware problem or could be fixed with software techniques such Jscreen? Any help is appreciated as it is a minor problem but very annoying.

 

Hi everyone,

I received my XPS 15 this morning but i am very disappointed by the touchpad of this laptop... The middle of the touch pad is like a dead zone: I can't move the cursor or tap to click in this area! I have contacted the hotline and the Dell guy said to me that it is normal but i really think that it is an issue. I would like to have the opinion of an xps 15 owner before complaining again to Dell.

Thanks