XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

How did you experience the whine? Like, just turned on out of the box, or you stressed it somehow first?

 

turned on -> had whine... now it is completely gone. I now try to stress the laptop "a little" by playing a blu-ray in the backround while installing software.

All I can say so far: Very good looking, very fast. Extracting a 10GB Blu-Ray took 37 seconds.. my P170HM needed around 68 seconds.

 

I have mine since this morning too, and so far everything is great. No real whine at the moment, just a very soft "tickleing" in the power plug area, but so soft that I heard it only because I went there with my ear to investigate possible coil whines.

Now in the process of setting everything up and try to get used to windows 8.1. Need to look for all the solutions proposed here for the various problems, first of all the blurriness.

 

Started with my review:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...30-haswell-2014-top-configuration-review.html

Give me some time to get the results

 

Blurriness will happen if the app you're using only scales by essentially zooming in its rendered output, which means even text will blur. I noticed that with a lot of installers I had to run when first setting up my system, and that's a limitation of those apps, not something wrong with your system or even something that can be worked around, short of running the panel at 1600x900 and disabling scaling, but that eliminates the benefits of QHD+.

Remember to disable splendid mode in Mobility Center!

 

The customer service rep is wrong, as happens all too frequently. Dell publishes procedures for how to replace all components of the system in their Owner's Manuals for customers, including procedures far more complicated than a hard drive swap. The only way your warranty is "voided" is that your replacement drive won't be covered, and if somehow you have a hardware problem that Dell could argue resulted from the hard drive you installed, then the resulting damage to the other areas of the machine wouldn't be covered -- but I can't imagine a scenario where that would happen.

Dell even offers parts-only dispatches for customers who want to install warranty replacement parts themselves, so they can hardly void your warranty for opening a laptop yourself.

 

Not sure if you can get a bootable flash drive that way. What you COULD do is grab an image of the main partition before you even boot it once, which WILL capture its state before you go through the preliminary setup steps. But why is everyone so hung up on this recovery partition? Why not grab an image for that specific system with the customizations you want or do a clean build from scratch if you ever need to do a generic restore and get rid of the Dell add-ons?

 

Yeah, I knew this too, but there are things I don't understand. See this screenshot

Almost everything is crisp and clear, but then the images of the firefox icons (home, bookmarks,...) are blurred and the arrows of the folders are messed up, but they are not even the same..! Do you have any experience of this?

 

I see the same thing. I'm betting the reason for the icons is that Firefox doesn't currently include higher-resolution assets to use in HiDPI scenarios. The folder arrows are probably a bug, but I see that myself. I expect both will be addressed soon, but in the meantime keep in mind that it's still early for HiDPI on Windows, plus Firefox is a free app after all. And it still renders webpages in HiDPI better than Chrome even after a bunch of tweaking on the latter.

 

My installation is failing as well. Which driver did you uninstall? And did you go under Device Manager to do it? I can't find "Touchscreen" or anything like that listed. Thanks.

Edit: I have QHD display.

 

Good to hear it finally arrived. Looking forward to your review.
When making your review, could you possibly show us how the touchpad (mis)behaves. I have not seen this in any review.

A shame about the coil whine though. I thought that Dell would have resolved this problem by now (I read several times that heavy abnormal coil whine was solved by replacing the motherboard)
Ah, just read in your review the coil whine's gone :thumbsup:

 

Mhh I might talk to Dell about it then... but right now I have other issues.

Just tried playing a game on my external display via HDMI.. unplayable and laggy while it works fine on the laptop. Also there is no way to have only scaling on laptop and no scaling on the external screen.. which makes a non-qhd external screen unusable. Or you use the laptop with FHD which makes everything blurry on the laptop.

 

Ok, there's some confusion going on here. Libra, why did you quote a post about the firmware update and mention having to uninstall the Intel 15.x driver before installing 16.x? Those drivers pertain to Wifi and have nothing to do with touchscreen firmware.

is250, you shouldn't have to uninstall anything to the touchscreen update; it's firmware, not drivers. The touchscreen is listed under Human Interface Devices and appears both as a USB Input Device and HID-compliant touch screen, but again there's nothing about a firmware update that can be done through Device Manager. You should just be able to run the firmware update just fine as long as you download the right update for your type of panel. I didn't have to uninstall anything.

 

Well I just made a support ticket because of the coil whine. Right now I am working only with the battery and there is no coil whine. But as soon as I start charging it will be back.

 

Apple products have a coating on the glass called an oleophobic coating and this helps avoid fingerprints. Are you certain this machine does not have a similar coating that may me adversely affected...?

 

Coil whine only happens when the battery is fully charged and running on the power adapter. Running on battery (or adapter while charging the battery) makes the system as it should be... totally silent and a pleasure to work with. With coil whine it is more than annoying, I cannot work with it longer than 30 minutes... getting my old Studio XPS back from it's shelf. Coil whine seems to be common with this machine (and other Dells). Maybe some people do not hear the sound or are just accepting it. Several other forums are reporting this issue as one can read in this forum. Changing the mainboard does not solve the problem.

Please keep us posted....

 

Ah crap.. I hoped a motherboard change would fix it. Yes you are right, on battery usage it sounds normal. According to google it is a common problem (also in desktop systems). :/

 

Maybe common, but this machine sometimes "screams" and it's normal sound is a clearly hearable whining. A motherboard change on a brand new system without knowing for sure they have solved the problem in a new revision of the board/power handling will only give you a damaged machine (scratches etc.)... yes I have some experience, service people often do not threat the machine as if it is there own....

 

Did you try the registry fix ?

@edit: in cmd.exe (ran as admin):
reg add HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Processor /v Capabilities /t REG_DWORD /d 0x0007e066

 

Yes, did not work for me :-(

 

Did you notice any other weird problems with the XPS 15? For example right now it feels laggy as hell although I am not doing anything. It even freezes during writing this text.

 

No, beside coil whining and sometimes loosing it's WiFi connection it performs very well. Maybe it is downloading patches in the background... or the pre-installed anti-virus is doing it's initial scan (it does not ask if it should).... that made my machine also laggy in the beginning.

You should also apply the touch-screen/pad firmware update from the Dell site... really works...

 

For those concerned about the noise, heres some more info. No Fix at the moment. It is suggested the noise comes from the new intel processors, and that a registry command has fixed it on various other laptops, I tried it on the 9530 and unfortunately no luck.

xps 13 - electrical noise - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community
XPS 15 9530 - Noise problem? - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community
Frequency whine on newer ivybridge generation intel processors/graphics - Internal Hardware

Other suggestions:
Turn off Dell audio !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you want Amazing fps in battlefield 4, then turn the Resolution Scale down. (20 fps before, 160fps after)

 

But why only when fully charged and on power adapter... the CPU explanation makes no sense to me.

 

Hey Folks, like most of you I've been following this thread from the beginning, and now figured it's time for me to chime in. I picked up the top-tiered model about a month and a half ago and have been thoroughly please with this laptop. It's super fast, has an elegant look and it is everything I hoped it could be.

Regarding some of the issues people have reported, I don't seem to be experiencing any problems that have made me want to return it. I did find a single dead pixel, but only because I put my face six inches from the screen. Other than that, I can't see it at normal distances, so it doesn't bother me any. My trackpad does have dead spots in the very far corner and has seen minor discoloring (which was easily cleaned off). As for a coil whine, I have it but can only hear it if I put my ear near the power port while plugged in. Seems somewhat normal to me, but that could because mine isn't loud.

I did have the chance to play a few games. I'm not a gamer and actually only started to play games, partially because I never had the hardware to play with reasonable performance. I did experience throttling while playing Far Cry 3. To investigate what was going on I downloaded software to monitor my performance and it appears throttling occurs when the GPU hits 80 degrees Celsius. I tried the program Throttlestop to see, well...if I could get the throttling to stop. When in use, no throttling occurred but, my GPU and CPU temperatures increased to ~85 and ~90 C, respectively. I immediate stopped because that's way too high for me. This was also at the lowest settings and resolution possible. Room temperature was about 69 F. I did however get greater than 100 fps at these settings but it just seemed the temperature was holding it back. In my opinion, this kind of makes sense because this is a laptop and a super compact one at that! I hear Core i7 Haswell also runs relatively hotter than previous generations. I tried a cooling pad and that helped a little but still got throttling. I really wanted to see if I can make this work, so I bought a ~10 inch diameter fan to see if I can cool this sucker down. I set my laptop on a milk crate with the fan inside, directly facing the bottom of the laptop (~4 inches away). Sure enough, I was able to cool my laptop down about 10 -15 C, so GPU and CPU temperatures were ~70 and ~74 C, respectively -- with no throttling what so ever! I was even able to increase the screen resolution to 1080p and video quality to medium settings to achieve reasonable performance at 40 - 50 fps. Although it's a little inconvenient, I have to finish this game I started

That's all I have to report for now. Hope my contribution helped.

 

What did you use to clean the trackpad, and how effective was it, i.e. how uniform is the cleaned area with the rest of the trackpad that wasn't discolored in the first place?

 

Some people may hear the sound subjectively louder / have work environments where the whining sounds even louder. Fact is... why whining in the situation charged/power adapter. The machine is too expensive for such a "feature".

 

You tried updating the firmware on your touch screen? I felt like it helped.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

It helped against the touch screen "freezing" after some time and let the touch pad reacting much better. Whining is still there...but you are right, after installing the patch it seems to me the whining sounds different.

 

I just used clean rag with warm water, and it seemed to clear it up pretty good. I'm not nervous to try anything else

 

I listened for it at a bunch of places (work, home, friends home, etc.) and still only hear it when my ear is directly on the computer. I have heard this in my other laptops. I don't doubt it's loud for others or that this is not a problem. I'm just sharing my experience with the laptop. If it were noticeable for me, I too would be disgruntled for paying a high price for such a feature.

 

resolution scale.. what?

Right now I have a problem with quakelive where in full screen mode I get rly bad fps and in window mode (same resolution as fullscreen) gets constant 250 fps.

 

Cool, thanks! I may give that a shot since both of my sisters when I showed them this machine separately said, "Wow, this is really nice! But what's with the touchpad? Isn't this brand new?" I don't really care much what others think of it except that they're right on principle that a brand new very high-end laptop shouldn't look like that after literally only a few hours of using the touchpad using clean hands.

 

Could be temporary ... but after having installed the new firmware for two days the whining seems to be far less dominant... weird!! Patch is only relevant for touch screen/pad.

 

Sorry the Resolution scale is an in-game setting. Isn't quakelive browser based? Try launching the browser with your nvidia card, right click icon -> Run with Graphics processor -> Nvidia.
Also set your preferred graphics processor to Nvidia in the control panel?

I'll give it a shot later

 

I did the the prefered gfx to NVIDIA and it also runs as NVIDIA. It is REALLY WEIRD because in window mode the game runs fine at 250 fps. If i switch to fullscreen it starts lagging around like hell. Window & Fullscreen are set to the same resolution.

 

After running the firmware, it was installing fine but then at the end it gave me an error saying, "No touchscreen detected." Now my touch display does not work at all.

I tried running the tool again (after restarting my computer) but it says I have the latest firmware installed. My touchscreen still does not work.

Any ideas??

 

I assume you chose the correct update for the resolution of the panel you have, correct? If so, explicitly choose "Run as administrator" for the updater (by right-clicking it) even though that should have been automatic. If that doesn't work, it's unlikely but possible that the internal touchscreen connection was interrupted during the update due to an imperfect physical connection, in which case if you can open up the chassis, try disconnecting and reseating the connector. If that fails, you may have bricked your touchscreen due to the update going haywire for some unknown reason, in which case you might need a replacement display, which could take a while if you have QHD+.

Do you even see the touchscreen listed in Device Manager under Human Interface Devices?

 

I do see touchscreen under that category. And yeah I downloaded the correct update/firmware. I didn't run it as administrator the first time (the time it ended with an error) but on the 2nd try I did. But it immediately says I have the latest firmware installed.

 

Try shutting the machine down entirely rather than just restarting if you haven't already? Otherwise there may be some sort of argument/switch you can specify when running the executable to force the firmware update to install even if it detects an identical or newer version is installed.

UPDATE: Upon running the setup file with a /? argument, there seems to be a command that may work for you: "/v FRESHINSTALL=true". The problem is that while testing the EXTRACTDRIVERS and extract_all options, I haven't found a syntax that actually does anything despite playing with variations in colons, quotes, spaces, etc, so I'm wondering whether that argument actually works for this file. But if that fails, try these as well:

/v:FRESHINSTALL=true
/v FRESHINSTALL = true
/v:FRESHINSTALL = true

 

wow, i dont know what this new firmware update did, but my screen is on the blink now, literally..it blinks every 4 seconds or so. ?

 

Ok, well the audio garbling/corruption/squelching issue reared its ugly head again yesterday while watching a random YouTube clip, and I found that i could again consistently reproduce it using a particular spot of a particular song. So I resorted to downloading reference audio drivers from Realtek here, which have a slightly newer date and higher version number than the one on Dell's page, and that made no difference. It worked fine until I rebooted, just as I saw when I reinstalled the regular Dell drivers. I emailed Realtek support about this, so we'll see if that goes anywhere.

For copyright reasons I don't really want to post the song in question as an attachment here, but if someone could PM me who would be willing to play this file on their own XPS 15, I'd be grateful for their testing time just to rule out a hardware issue, which I consider unlikely given the behavior but still possible.

 

and blinks every time i use touchpad...im wondering if the setting i used way back to prevent the touch screen from sleeping, is somehow not playing nice with the new firmware update

 

Well, my XPS also has issues, but luckily the firmware update did not let the screen blink while using the touchpad. Coil whining is enough to get crazy )

 

Might be stupid question but is the firmware update permanent? Meaning if I reformat my computer / clean install Windows 8.1, would the touchscreen revert back to older firmware? Hopefully it will work after that. It seems I'm not the only one having problems from this update.

 

Firmware won't change as a result of wiping your system; it's like a BIOS update. I suppose it might be possible to reflash the original version of the firmware back, but that would require the updater app to allow downgrades (not sure it does) and Dell to provide the original firmware (which they don't seem to as of now).

 

I don't have time to read these few hundred page thread, but i have few question:

1. How is the Wifi of this Haswell xps 15? I have seen a video on youtube state that this model have same wifi issue as l521x.

2. Hows the heat when playing a game? l521x was unble to handle crysis 3 more then 5 minutes, it reach over 80C (graphic card).

3. Hows the screen scaling? does everything look too small?

 

We created a wiki for new people. It'll answer many of your questions. XPS 15 Wiki

 

I'm getting a system exchange. The touch display is bricked. Hopefully the system exchange will fix the whine coil noise as well.

 

Fix of the coil whine will only happen if Dell has changed something (hardware, firmware or driver). I do not think they already have.

...but... the touch firmware update definitively has changed the whining in a positive way. It still whines, but less irritating. I would say... it is workable now. Although I totally cannot explain how THIS firmware can affect the whining sound.... Starting to enjoy my XPS now ... a little ;-)