XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

No lags on COD. But it isn't on high settings, just a few things are on or high.

Using HWM, which tends to show lower temps than a few other progs.

 

x2. Is it a single use type of coupon? If not, would you mind sharing? Thanks.

 

FWIW that's actually very good.

That actually puts it closer performance-wise to a 760M than a GDDR3 750M, at least for this benchmark according to notebookcheck.

This
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

versus this
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

Would still be great to see another 2011 score. Seems reasonable to expect around 3000 or so (vice the 2700 on 750M GDDR3).

 

May I ask to owners to use HWinfo64 in log mode while you are playing games, so a CVS will be created and you can post in this forum.

Instructions:

1) Download HWinfo64:
http://www.hwinfo.com/files/hw64_426.exe
portable version (this version does not need to installation)
http://www.hwinfo.com/files/hw64_426.zip

2) Launch your game, and come back to windows then you can launch HWinfo (remember to set logging mode), in this way GT750m will be logged

3)Come back to your game and play normally

4)Send CVD file in this forum, if CVS file is to big or file extensions is not allowed you can use 7Zip, Winzip or Winrar.


This file will record all information such as the clock of GPU and CPU their load and their temperature throughout the time that you have played.

 

I can confirm the touch screen fix does NOT work.

 

i was one of the lucky ones - 9 days from order to shipping (mid tier shipped from California)
Regarding the Dell rep's explanation - THEY DON'T KNOW AND THEY MAKE IT UP .
I am still loading programs and setting mine up. No problems with it. Really sweet machine! Some are critical of the touchpad, I like the way it works.
The one thing i really wish was better is the speaker quality. Fine with the volume on the low side, but distortion starting at medium level is a bummer.
Battery life with normal use (browsing and some video play) not wonderful. Seems like 4 hours is max.

I read a bunch earlier in these pages about 1920 x 1200 and scaling to 100% or 125% or 166% or 200%. I spent a lot of time looking how to achieve those settings and can't see where to adjust the scaling. Can someone walk us through that?

 

@el3ctronics :

if u had to chose just one between xps n mbp (256/8gb) what will be ur pick and why?

do other guys make theirs choices or not yet?

 

Something my wife got in the mail about a month ago from them. Unfortunately it was a 1 time use thing.

 

So now I'm waiting on my replacement laptop. Sucks because Dell support may not be able to get me a new machine until the ship date posted on their website (which currently stands at December 2nd). In the meantime, I thought I'd reformat this sucker just to confirm it's 100% faulty wi-fi hardware and not software. In the process, I've run into a couple problems:

1) There's a partition on the hard drive labelled "PBR image." It's 6.97 gigs. I assumed this was a Windows 8.1 restore image, but when I go to the restore page in settings it says "could not find the recovery environment." Is there not a recovery "disc" embedded on this hard drive?

(As a caveat to this, I split up my C: partition on the 1 TB hard drive into a C: and D: drive. Some of my programs, like iTunes, D-fend and Carbonite, expect files to be in the same place they were on my old laptop with two drives. Could this have confused Windows?)

2) My partition software (EaseUS) reports that my 1 TB hard drive has a capacity of 931.51 - correct. But it shows the second drive (C400 RealSSD m RAID disc device - presumably the mSATA) only has a capacity of 8.02 gigabytes. That's supposed to be 32 gigs, right? Did I get shafted on this machine? Anyone else get the same reading?

Very confused. It doesn't really matter since I'm in the process of exchanging this machine for a new one, but I want to make sure we're all getting the correct sized mSATA.

 

Did you spend any time looking via Google? If so, you might have found this: How to Make the Windows Desktop Work Well on High-DPI Displays and Fix Blurry Fonts

 

OK. So I download the Synaptics driver from their website. After removing the Dell one and installing this one there was really no difference in the behavior of the touchpad. My biggest complaints being the dead spot at the bottom of the touch pad, the cursor jumping back after a lifted finger, and the constant missing of the two finger scroll when doing a two finger scroll from the bottom edge of the touchpad (this may be up or down depending on how you have your "reverse scrolling direction" option set). Scrolling from the top edge always works - from the bottom edge I'd say it catches it maybe 50% of the time (or less).

That said - after about **two hours** of fiddling with the registry entries for the Synaptics driver, I've got it mostly working to my liking. There is still a bit of a dead spot at the bottom, but much less than before. This also seems to have mostly fixed the two finger scroll from bottom edge problem. I'd say it catches 95 to 99 times out of 100 now, as long as you're pretty good at getting both fingers moving onto the touch surface at nearly the same time. If one finger leads too much - forget about it.

One thing that really helped the overall scrolling performance and speed was the ability to turn on "coasting" in the Synaptics driver which seems to have been disabled in the Dell version. Coasting restores the speed and "snap-to" scrolling I was used to on the touchpad on my old computer (a Dell Studo XPS 16 with a Synaptics touchpad).

As for the cursor jump back problem, this is almost definitely related to having tapping enabled. That said - the touchpad on my old laptop never had this problem. By reducing the TappingSpeed parameter from 200 to 150 the issue is almost gone. While values lower than that work even better, tapping becomes much more difficult. Unfortunately, that parameter also affects two finger tapping and anything lower than ~140 or so makes two finger tapping almost impossible.

Synaptics, Dell, and Microsoft really need to figure this crap out. They are obviously using that TappingSpeed to determine what is a tap and what is pointer movement. They need to incorporate movement. Any tap (no matter how long or short) + movement should never register as a tap - and it sure as heck shouldn't move the cursor back to where it was before the movement. It's just plain stupid.

Edit: I should add that the Synaptics driver has also changed many of the default gesture actions in Windows. I'm sure those are controlled by the registry settings as well but they are all in hex and I really don't want to trial and error these things. I may try re-installing the Dell driver and see if I can play with it's registry settings to get the same scroll and bottom edge behavior I've gotten with this one.

 

I'm right on the verge of considering getting the premium XPS 15. That being said

1. Is there anyone who is not having trouble or was able to fix the problem with the touchpad?

2. Is there anyone who is not having trouble with or was able to fix and is no longer having trouble with the touchscreen issue?

3. Is there anyone who bought the premium who is getting anywhere close to the 11 hours promised? Or anywhere close to say 7.5-8 hours?

 

I'll do that in three hours when I'll be home

By the way about temp, as I was monitoring my craphic card during bench I noticed this :
GPU Core Clock [MHz] : 1058.2 / GPU Memory Clock [MHz] : 1249.7
GPU Temperature : max 74°C but mostly around 65°C

I Think it is not too hot and Graphic card was on utrbo during the whole bench !

 

Hi XPS 15 Owners.

The new Dell XPS 15 is a very interesting machine for me.
The thing that makes me think is the screen resolution in daily usage. In 2012 I tried out a Macbook Pro Retina with Windows 7 on Bootcamp. The resolution was nice for photos and the OS X. But most of my used applications these days do not support this high resolution and were hardly usable.
So my question to the owners: how do you handel the resolution in applications / avoid too tiny windows?

 

This is 3D mark 2013 Your score is as good

 

Just ordered the 91Whr XPS 15... Fingers crossed.

 

3DMark 13 plugged (fire strike see link for detail)
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/1667786
3DMark Score
2008.0 3DMarks
Graphics Score
2076.0
Physics Score
8116.0
Combined Score
846.0

3DMark 11 plugged
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4702HQ,Dell Inc. XPS 15 9530
3DMark Score
P2991
Graphics Score
2748
Physics Score
7392
Combined Score
2436

3DMark 11 unplugged
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4702HQ,Dell Inc. XPS 15 9530
3DMark Score
P2711
Graphics Score
2473
Physics Score
7258
Combined Score
2227

3DMark Vantage plugged
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4702HQ,Dell Inc. XPS 15 9530
3DMark Score
12615.3 3DMarks
Graphics Score
11100.1
CPU Score
21363.6

 

1) I am not having any problems with my touchpad. I can two finger tap and scroll and it registers 99% of my touches. Gestures work all the time for me too. It even registers taps at the bottom of the touchpad too.
2)My touch screen is working 100%, no graininess, no flex point, very bright and works every time I touch it and I touch it allot, been a W8 user since RTM in 2012 so use touch more than most
3)Battery report tellms me I am averaging about 8 hours.

 

Do you have the bigger battery?

 

That 8GB partition is likely the hibernation partition required to use Intel Rapid Start; the hibernation partition must live on an SSD and must be at least the same size as your total RAM -- you have 8GB of RAM, correct? The remainder of the drive is likely hidden from partition apps because it's used as a cache, not actual storage.

 

It seems that DELL has given names to the various version of XPS15, so the middle model now is called GOLD, while the Top model is called PLATINUM.

 

quick and simple question:

does this thing have HDD/charging activity lights?

 

Are you using the Dell touchpad drivers? Can you do a two finger scroll from the very bottom edge of the pad?

Have you run any software to tell you what your actual battery capacity is?

 

Touchpad seems to have a few quirks that people notice, but others are fine with it. I suspect as with many things, there will be an adjustment period and then the quirks won't be quite so irritating. The touchpad overall feel apparently isn't quite up to MBP standards, but it is what it is. For the touchscreen, I posted a fix I found from the XPS 12 thread, and I got one person saying it fixed the issue and another saying it didn't, so it seems YMMV. Can't speak to battery, but most people posting here seem to be judging battery life off of their activity when they first get the machine (installing lots of apps, etc), which isn't exactly a typical workload.

Also, I see this was your first post here. I know with a thread this long it's tempting to skip it all and just post to get your question answered, but that duplication of questions and responses is partly WHY this thread is so long. So please peruse the thread a bit.

Scaling in Win 8.1 seems to be much improved over before, and apps seem to be getting updated slowly but surely, but worst case when you're working with a problematic app you can just drop your resolution to 1600x900 (perfect 2:1 scaling, so no artifacts or blurriness) or 1920x1080, which would based on the math cause blurriness, but people have reported that the display is so pixel-dense that it's not an issue.

 

16 gigs of RAM, but that makes sense. Is Intel Rapid Start separate from my normal hibernation file?

 

I think I'm returning this laptop. I think part of my distaste is the lack of dedicated page up, page down, home, and end keys, but the rest is related to the quality of the trackpad and the typing feel of the keyboard.

 

Has anyone been able to get any numbers on the color gamut of the screen?? I've been trying to find information everywhere but I still haven't seen any actual tests/numbers for it.
I like to know how much of the sRGB and AdobeRGB that the screen cover (%).
Anyone?

Cheers
Henrik

 

Yes, Rapid Start hibernation requires a specially configured partition, not just the regular file that sits on your hard drive, but that partition also has to be at least as large as the total amount of RAM in your system, so unless you added extra RAM yourself, an 8GB partition wouldn't be for Rapid Start in your system. But you can check for the Rapid Start partition by reading the setup guide for it here for MBR and here for UEFI.

And if you want to see what else the mSATA drive might be doing, here's the guide for Smart Response: http://download.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/intel_smart_response_technology_user_guide.pdf

 

You didn't have to look very far; sRGB coverage was mentioned more than once in this very thread, such as here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...-15-haswell-owners-lounge-52.html#post9446475. For Adobe RGB, someone in the M3800 thread mentioned 72%, but another poster suggested that that could have referred to NTSC instead, so who knows.

Fyi, I dug that up by searching "XPS 15 Haswell sRGB site:notebookreview.com" in Google. That "site:" restriction if you don't know about it is a hugely useful tool since it confines Google search results to pages on a certain domain.

 

Yes I do.....

 

That's exactly the problem jphughan :/ The only things I can find is "thoughts and speculations" and some numbers on the dell homepage.....but it would be nice to have them actually confirmed by someone sitting with a calibrated system in hand...

 

Did you read the post I linked? That guy, the guy he quoted, and bokeh (the guy mentioned in the quoted post who got a pre-release M3800 for testing) all used a professional calibrator to get their results. This panel also apparently comes out of the box with a Delta-E of less than 1, which is phenomenal for ANY display, never mind a built-in laptop panel. Dell's UltraSharp factory-calibrated panels only guarantee a Delta-E below 4!

 

Oh I'm sorry jphughan, I thought the post you pointed at was one that I just read a few minutes before my post so I actually didn't look at it since it was one of the many speculations....I wonder why I saw that post and not this one in my search....
But now that I did I think my question has been answered
Thank you kindly for your help....heading over to dell to order now
....now I just have to figure out the best msata disk (as system disk) to buy to switch out the 32Gb/1Tb setup it comes with...
I'm sure I'll find that in here too....after going through the ~2000 posts we have here

Cheers

 

I posted in the M3800 thread about that. The Samsung PM841 would be fastest since it appears to be a repackaged 840 Evo, but it isn't officially sold as a retail product (though you can find them on Amazon) and therefore wouldn't get firmware updates from Samsung. The only other good option would be the Crucial M500, which comes in both 2.5" and mSATA formats in a variety of capacities. The M500 is also guaranteed to support the Windows 8 Pro eDrive standard, which means BitLocker can use the native encryption on the SSD rather than having to do it all in software and filling the entire drive with ciphertext; making the SSD think it's completely full can nullify some of its garbage collection routines, though I've used TrueCrypt on a non-eDrive SSD and haven't noticed any degradation, I believe because encryption-aware TRIM picks up the slack. The PM841 MIGHT support that (a recent firmware update to the Samsung 840 lineup added support for eDrive), but we don't have confirmation of that yet.

Fwiw, the SSD you get if you order the 512GB mSATA model from Dell is the Samsung SM841, which uses MLC rather than the TLC flash found on the PM841, suggesting that the SM841 MAY be based on the 840 Pro. I just ordered a PM841 that I'll be installing into an Inspiron 14 7000 that will be going to my sister since Dell didn't offer SSD configurations for that system, but it has an mSATA slot.

 

Folks, I am trying to figure out whether to buy new XPS 15 with Haswell i7 CPU, but I have to know before I can commit: can it handle Civ 5 and Xcom: Enemy Unknown in at least 1080p?

 

Can you guys comment on the glossiness of the glossy screen? I got through about 30 pages in this thread and gave up looking for answers. I will be using this in an office setting, in the daytime, with natural light through windows 10' behind me and overhead artificial lighting. I currently have a mid-range older HP laptop with a gloss screen and it makes for a perfect mirror, but little else, and makes me want to ring the neck of whoever though the idea of a glossy screen on a laptop was a good idea. I swore I'd never touch get another one, but I like the specs of the computer. So for those of you that aren't in a dark editing room or a basement and use this thing in a room with windows, during daylight hours, how is it? Will I be looking at a reflection of myself and the lighting all day instead of this fantastic resolution?

 

It's been likened to the glossiness of a Retina MacBook Pro, so if there's an Apple Store near you or someone who has one, maybe you could check one out as a reference? The consensus on the rMBP is that it's glossy but not absurd the way some early glossy panels were, so you'll see some glare but probably not as bad as you're used to. In the M3800 thread there's a photo of an M3800 next to the rMBP as well. Others have also suggested using a matte display overlay if you can't handle the gloss but still really want this system because nothing else out there is quite like it.

UPDATE: Found post with pic: http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...ision-m3800-owners-review-24.html#post9431998

 

Hey guys,

I remember from awhile ago that there was some software to help fix some of the synaptics issues - I just tried installing Two Finger Scroll by MacHater - TwoFingerScroll v1.0.7 update! (two finger scrolling done right! + more) and scrolling is MUCH better imo.

You have to disable gestures in the regular dell touchpad software, and then enable the appropriate gestures in the two finger software. Also, three finger gestures don't seem to be working for me, but I never really used those anyways. There is source code for a few versions ago, but I wish the new 1.0.9 version had source code so we could tweak/update it a bit

Hope this can help some people!

Also, I had the touch screen turn off issue happen to me yesterday - putting the computer to sleep and turning it back on seemed to re-enable the touch screen. I'm hoping by turning off usb-sleep like some posters here said, that the issue will be fixed.

 

Based on the 3DMark scores thrown around from the previous few pages, there will be no trouble playing either of those games either plugged in or on battery (3DMark11 around 2900-3000). Certainly will do better than anything with integrated graphics. Also better than anything with 750M w/DDR3. Only thin/light laptops with a better discrete graphics option are apparently not so great on the build quality front (looking at you, Gigabyte).

 

I have request a return for this laptop. I've noticed the throttling and the wifi issues already. Plus, the hi-res is just to big for a lot of softwares. It is either too small or it is to smudged in.

 

what kind of throttling did you experience and how did you trigger it?

 

Can you say more about throttling?
In which ways it came out and what software did you use to find the throttling issue?

 

I basically ran some 3Dmark as soon as the CPU reaches 90'C, it starts throttles. I had to be sure, so I rank World of Tanks a bit and it throttles at 90'C.

 

Under what physical settings? Were you plugged in? What Power settings do you have enabled for plugged in status?

 

Some throttling is expected. As per Bookeh's observations, it should throttle down a bit, but still be in turbo mode. Can you please provide a cpu freq graph and temp graph to show the behaviour you experienced. Or just a description should suffice. ie. at <90 deg. cpu freq was 3.2 ghz then at >90 deg. cpu freq dropped to 2.8 ghz etc.

 

The Throttling does not mean high temp, also 90° could be a good result for a laptop if it has not throttling.
Throttling means that instead to keep the higher clock on heavy load, the system reduce its clock under the nominal frequency, if it does not use turbo mode is still acceptable.
To verify if your system has throttling you need to use software like HWinfo in log mode, so when you are playing every parameter of your system as temps, clocks and load will be recorded.
Just follow this post:

 

The results of Bokeh for Precision M3800 that uses Quadro K1100m are not comparable with XPS15 with GT750m, in fact GT750m has a clock much higher than K1100m: 941MHz vs 704MHZ, we are speaking of more than 25% higher, so they have different TDP.
If M3800 has not throttling then does not mean the same for XPS15.
Also 3.2GHz is the max freq in turbo mode when only 1 core is used.
There is throttling on i7 4702 if its clock goes under 2.2GHz.

 

Uhh.. of course it throttles at 90 C.
The Junction Temperature of this processor is 100 C. You're somehow pushing it to 90% of the maximum allowable die temperature. I don't know about you, but that seems REALLY high. Where are you taking this temperature reading and using what software?

I haven't even looked at HWMonitor or RealTemp on this laptop yet so I have no idea what kind of temps its pushing, but if it was pushing 90 C on at the core temp, I'd expect it to be very hot to the touch.

 

Could you tell us a notebook that under a heavy load does not reach these temperatures?
Just for example the previous rMBP hits 104°C running only prime95 while it's throttling @1.2GHz.

 

just received mine.
excited, but first things i noticed are:
touchpad is sensitive even though turned it up and it doesnt recognize some of the gestures sometimes. can someone link to the page in the thread about the synaptics touchpad driver.
second is the scaling is very small as well, if you put it to large at 1800p text is blurry in chrome otherwise when in medium or small its very tiny. i know you guys talked about it here too. can i get a link for this too? thanks. and lastly which drivers should i update?