XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

Coil whine was incredibly annoying, more of a screeching sound Probably sounds like a dying bird with its beak taped shut. I have the noise that the old CRT TV's make that doesn't bother me but then I have the screeching sound on top of it. This sums it up Dell Precision M3800 static noise issue 'Coil Whine' - YouTube

 

Can u show me where exactly I can find the forground fps settings? I think this could be the cause of my troubles with some games (window mode = 250fps, fullscreen = 120fps.. same resolution + settings). ?

 

Partitions / Rapid Start Technology

Hi!

I recevied my XPS (Top tier) yesterday. I think it has a weak coil-whine and one dead pixel. But otherwise it works ok.
When I investigated the SDD I found whole 7 partitions! I tried to find out what are these are for.

1. ESP (500 MB, FAT32, boot): EFI System Partition
2. DIAGS (40MB, FAT32, hidden): ?? (is empty)
3. - (128 MB, msftes): Microsoft reserved (needed by Windows, Microsoft Reserved Partition )
4. WINRETOOLS (490MB, NTFS, hidden, diag): ?? (280MB of data)
5. OS (460GB, NTFS, mstfdata): The Windows partition
6. - (8GB, hidden): The Intel Rapid Start Technology partition
7. PBR Image (7,7GB, hidden, diag): The Recovery Images

Now I have some questions:

1. The DIAGS and WINRETOOLS:
a) What are they used for? Or, when are they used?
b) Which partitions can be removed without problems?

2. The iRTS Partition (No.6) is only 8GB big, but I have 16GB RAM.
a) Is this used anyways or just dead space?
b) In the BIOS I saw in the help, that the Rapid-Start-Technology does not work with 16GB. Is this right?

3. Does the recovery CDs/Stick recreate all of these partitions?

Does anybody know this?

Regards
Sven

 

Ok. I'd have to agree, that's pretty annoying.

 

I think he might be referring specifically to a setting within World of Warcraft, rather than a global setting that affects everything.

 

While I can't answer all of your questions, I can give some insight on a couple of things.

First, doing a recovery from the on disk partition, or recovery DVD/USB will probably restore all of your partitions to their current state. Second, changing the disk partition structure may prevent you from doing a recovery using either the built in recovery partition or recovery media DVD/USB stick. Many times, these vendor specific recovery options require the original partition structure of the disk to be intact in order to work.

If you don't care about doing a "factory restore" and would rather use your own backup and restore tools, then you can certainly mess around with deleting partitions you feel you don't need. This topic has been covered, and perhaps someone else can guide you as to how best to proceed.

Intel Rapid Start is hit and miss in it's default configuration. The computer takes a long time to wake up and sometimes fails to do so. I think it's fair to say, it doesn't really work. I disabled it in Windows, and now my machine wakes instantly every time, as opposed to taking 15+ seconds and sometimes failing to wake at all.

 

I have a somewhat unique laptop case/sleeve request. I commute by motorcycle, and my laptop goes into a bag with all my stuff that gets strapped to the rear seat via some buckles. These buckles tighten to hold the bag such that it doesn't move. however, I am also worried about these buckles pulling on the laptop and torquing or bending the laptop to conform to the seat when it is in the bag. I am therefore interested in a laptop sleeve/case that may be semi-rigid. Despite this fact, the bag isn't all that big overall, so I am still interested in keeping the weight/size down as much as possible. Anyone have any suggestions? I would greatly appreciate it.

 

These look pretty nice Laptop & Tablet Cases - Thule and although they're designed for the MacBook Pro, they may just work for you.

A quick search on Amazon also yielded these results: Amazon.com: semi rigid 15 inch laptop case

 

I'm worried about macbook pro (retina) cases fitting. I already tried the viper one and have to return it for that reason. Otherwise, that Thule looks ideal!

 

I guess really all you can do is either find a bricks and mortar shop that carries them and try before you buy, or buy online, making sure the return policy suits your needs, just in case. Good luck!

 

nVidia Inspector has an option to limit the FPS. I play BF4 with FPS set to 30 without any throttling. I tried 40 fps as well without noticing any problems for around 30 minutes.

 

Can someone tell me if there is a way to disable the webcam/microphone from the BIOS? What about the discrete GPU?

Thanks!

 

spotted 2 dust specs today when i had a full screen white background. both up the top right where the close button lives, you can see one each side of the panel. oh well they can send me a new laptop and keep sending them until they get it right!

anyone got a none national rate uk number to call as I would rather not pay to ring them when i have included mobile minutes.

 

This has been asked quite a few times in this thread already, so I'll start you off with my reply to someone who already asked this question. It seems your partitions are in a slightly different order, but this should start you off:

Now, to your specific questions:

Dell Diags are used when you call Dell to troubleshoot certain issues; WinRE Tools are used when you're having OS-level issues, if you want to restore from a system image, etc. You can delete the first (though it's tiny) but not the second. But then all you have is a tiny amount of free space on your disk that you can't add to your OS partition since it's not directly adjacent to it.

Rapid Start doesn't work if you only dedicate 8GB to it. I have no idea why the Dell factory image creates an 8GB partition on 16GB systems, and frankly I have no idea why they enable Rapid Start at all on systems that only have an SSD installed because the benefit is practically nothing and it's been shown to have issues resuming correctly. This is covered in the XPS 15 Wiki. But if you wish to devote more space to it, you could in fact set up Rapid Start on your 16GB system. I did for a while but disabled it because it was all drawbacks and no benefits on my system, so instead I deleted the Rapid Start partitions and the factory restore partitions and allocated the reclaimed space to my OS partition.

The factory image restore partition likely would restore all of these partitions (haven't tried it myself), but my understanding is that the USB recovery media is just a vanilla Windows 8.1 installer, which would only create the default partitions at their default sizes -- plus you'd have to install drivers yourself. But most XPS buyers don't get recovery media included.

 

No, and no. But the discrete GPU only runs when requested by a particular application. There might be a way to disable it entirely in Windows, but I haven't looked into it. If you're planning on running Linux, I don't know how the discrete GPU is managed there (and I do know it takes some effort to get everything set up correctly), but people have discussed it earlier in this thread.

 

After AnandTech published their XPS 15 review, I could tell based on the LCD results that they'd tested with splendid mode on. I reached out to the author and thankfully got a reply back! He was indeed unaware of splendid mode and has just completed re-testing the laptop, the results of which have been published in a new article (also linked in the original): AnandTech | Dell XPS 15 QHD+: Revisiting the LCD Results.

In addition, I've also finally found the right people within Dell to raise this splendid mode issue with, and they're currently revisiting whether splendid mode should be on by default in the factory shipping configuration.

 

I'm currently running a huge lightroom export which is maxxing out the CPU.

However, looking at the disc access in Task Manager, it's using Disc 0 (the hDD) a lot, but there's no activity at all on the SSD (Disc 1).

a) why isn't the machine using this as a cache for the HDD?
b) why is it only showing Disc 1's capacity as 8GB?

 

I admittedly don't have direct experience with these cache setups, but my understanding is that when the SATA controller is running in Intel Smart Response mode (to use the SSD as a cache), you don't see the SSD as an independent disk. You may want to check your BIOS settings. As for why the capacity is reported as lower, if the SSD is in fact being used as a cache despite appearing as a separate device, that's probably the amount left over after the amount that Smart Response has reserved for itself (and after what Rapid Start has also reserved if you have that enabled). You can manage the amount of the Smart Response cache using the Intel Rapid Storage application.

And as for why there's no activity on the SSD, it could be either because the SATA controller doesn't report activity that occurs on that cache unit correctly (or maybe just doesn't report activity going on within the space reserved for Smart Response) or because what you're working on simply isn't using the cache. I don't know how Smart Response decides what amount of storage to use as a read cache and what amount to keep open as a write-back cache.

One easy way to test it though would be to re-run the Lightroom job after going into Intel Rapid Storage and disabling Acceleration (aka Smart Response) and comparing the time the job takes.

 

Has anyone played Rome Total War II on their machine. I just purchased it the other day & was getting some dreadful performance the little bit I tried playing.

 

Nice work!

 

As an addendum to what jphughan said, the way the smart response works is that files that you use often...system files, application launch files, etc., are what gets cached. When you launch an application, the system checks to see if the required files are in the cache and loads them from there, instead of from the HDD. This is of course much faster.

Exporting something in Lightroom doesn't exactly fit the criteria. Lightroom itself is probably located on and loads from the cache. Perhaps some of the files you're working with are also loading from the cache, if you've previously opened them. Exporting them won't use the cache at all.

 

You might have to tweak your settings a bit. What resolution are you playing? What detail settings? This game is probably pretty demanding at the highest settings. You might just have to tone it down a bit to make a huge impact on performance.

 

From what I've read, Smart Response also allocates SSD storage to be used for writes, so that your data gets written very quickly as far as you can tell (as long as you don't exceed the buffer capacity) and then the data is transferred from the cache to the spinning disk in the background later. In that case a Lightroom export might fit the criteria, but like I said I don't know enough about how Smart Response decides to allocate its available cache capacity. But a comparative benchmark should definitely clarify whether it's delivering any benefit for that workload.

 

That is true, however due to the nature of the export operation, I think it might be exempt from the rules that govern how Smart Response works. This is taken from Intel's technology brief on the subject : "Intel Smart Response Technology differentiates between high-value data (application, user, and boot data) and low-value data like that which may be caused by a virus scanner or other similar one-touch data. One-touch data typically does not benefit the user from caching, and therefore is not inserted into the cache. Purely sequential data streams (example: streaming a movie file from disk, or large file copies) may bypass the cache, since these often consist of a large amount of one-touch data unlikely to benefit from caching."

I believe the example of the large Lightroom export operation might be seen as similar to streaming a large file, or a large file copy, which would exempt it from being cached.

More from Intel's brief here: Intel® Smart Response Technology: Technology Brief

 

Thanks for the answer anyways...

But what will happen, if I delete the WinRE Tools? I would assume that Windows will still work but I cannot perform certain administrative tasks. Can I do these tasks if I boot from a Windows 8.1 USB-Stick?
Are these tools installed by Windows or Dell?

Ok, I think I will disable it...

I investigated (but not tried) the Recovery media. It seem it will restore all partitions with it's data.
Anybody used the recovery media already?
Maybe I will have to use it, if I messed up my system during my (now following) installation phase...

Cheers
Sven

 

Just to clarify, Smart Response is where it uses the SSD as a cache, and Rapid Start dumps memory to the SSD on hibernate so it recovers quicker?

If so, if I disable Rapid Start (I don't care how long it takes to boot really, just want the best performance possible when it starts crunching) will more of the disc be available for Smart Response?

 

Yh. Smart Response uses the ssd as a cache and Rapid Start uses the hibernate partition on the ssd for the memory dump and puts it in a deep sleep state, well.. more like power off but for quick resume (not worth using all all).

If you disable Rapid Start and delete the partition, you are able to use the entire ssd as a cache drive, which is what my setup is at the moment.
In the Rapid Storage application, you will have the option to specify a particular size greater than 18.6gb or have the option to use the entire disk.

 

Is there any chance you can bring their attention into why throttling happens, please?

 

WinRE is installed by Windows, not Dell -- though it seems the Dell version is 200MB larger than the standard Windows version. I don't think it can be deleted, and if it can things may break. For example, I know that it's absolutely required if you want to use BitLocker. And if you delete a partition to the left of the OS partition, you can't extend your OS partition to use that capacity anyway without third-party partition rearranging tools. Are you really worried about those few hundred MB?

Correct. Rapid Start does not affect boot time (though Win8 Fast Boot does and is on by default anyway, totally independent of this); it only affects resume from hibernation time. I guess it should be called Rapid Resume, but whatever. In any case, on a fully SSD system the benefits are non-existent unless you want to be able to hibernate AND use Intel Smart Connect simultaneously -- and even then I'd argue that the unreliable resume drawback outweighs the Smart Connect benefit.

I've offered to present them a list of the things I've noticed as well as read about here. Haven't heard back yet though. But as for throttling, except the cases of severe throttling that turned out to be caused by an issue with the thermal assembly in that particular unit, I wouldn't expect that to go anywhere. First of all, throttling doesn't seem to apply to all of these systems like the list I'm compiling, and second, even if it did affect all systems, it wouldn't be a glitch that would have a relatively simple fix. That would likely be an entire design change. The only possible exception I suppose would be if the issue could be resolved with a BIOS update containing a new thermal map set to kick the fans on earlier, but even that would be a design tradeoff between a quiet system and avoiding throttling that only some people seem to experience. My list at present includes only obvious mistakes, recommended changes to the out-of-box config (like splendid mode), and QC issues -- not issues that seem to be hit-or-miss (other than QC) or that could arguably be the result of a design decision/tradeoff.

 

FINALLY have my top tier machine! So far so good. I've only had it for 15 minutes but I am SO HAPPY! I have been without a computer for nearly a year now and I have been so limited in my productivity.

Now to go through it and start tearing it down (fresh windows install). I appreciate the wealth of information in this thread, but truth be told, I hate it. It's ridiculous to have so many different subjects in ONE thread that is quickly approaching 500 pages. Yeah, you can search through it, but you'll have replies that posts/pages apart (highly annoying). Anyway, rant off, now to enjoy my machine!

 

Remember that we do have an XPS 15 wiki. If you can't find something in the wiki and can on this thread, remember to add it to the wiki!

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

Have a look at the wiki! Everything is mentioned there.
I'm on my phone so I don't have a link but you only have to search for wiki in thread.

Sent from my Nokia Lumia 720 using Tapatalk

 

Can I be massive pain and ask if anyone has an idiot-proof guide to disabling intel rapid start and shrinking the partition please?

I want all 32GB to be available to smart response.

 

Full disclosure: This may not necessarily be idiot-proof since I haven't done this myself (don't have the mid-spec version), but this should be about right based on my knowledge of Windows and these applications in general. Here goes:

1. Open the Intel Rapid Start application in Windows and turn it off.
2. Uninstall the application.
3. Go to Computer Management > Disk Management. Right-click the Rapid Start partition and select Delete.
4. Open the Intel Rapid Storage application and under Acceleration, you should now be able to allocate the freed up SSD capacity to the Smart Response cache.

 

I can only see an 8GB partition on the SSD called "OEM Partition".

 

Typical, I've just had the machine refuse to come out of what I assume was hibernation...

It got to 10% so I shut the lid and left it while I showered and got dressed, then I came downstairs and plugged it in, opened the lid, the lights came on the keyboard and the fans spun up, but nothing else happened. I left it for a good 10mins and nothing, I even tried closing the lid again and leaving it and it wouldn't even sleep, the fans stayed on but there was no hard-drive or processor noise. So I had to long-press the power button to kill it and boot it up.

Just lost a load of progress in a game I was playing, and several photo-edits I was working on.

Anyone got any idea what went wrong? I haven't even started playing with the quick start application yet! I wouldn't mind if I had and I'd messed it up.

 

Congratulations on your new machine! I hope you get as much enjoyment out of it as I have out of mine.

 

Disable Rapid Start. It doesn't work properly and sometimes is unable to wake the computer properly.
Just go into the Rapid Start application (it resides in the taskbar) and shut it off. Then your computer will sleep/hibernate normally and wake up like it should.

 

I would add a step 0:
0. Disable Rapid Start in the BIOS

darrenham - this may be the cause of your problem, if you didn't disable it in the bios, it may have looked for rapid start partition when resuming....

 

Cheers,

My only issue now is that I don't see a rapid start partition, just the 8.02GB OEM Partition.

 

Do you know what else I've noticed? Whenever I right-click for a windows dialogue, every hover-over-option group opens to the left instead of the right even when there's tonnes of room to the right.

Does that makes sense?

Something like this: http://i409.photobucket.com/albums/pp172/ham_aka_stam/rightclick.png

Any ideas?

 

Not required, but can't hurt. But no, Rapid Start hibernation won't occur if the partition doesn't exist. In fact the application won't even install if the partition isn't there.

Then maybe you don't have one. On the factory build it's the rightmost partition on the disk, after the factory image restore partition (which is itself after your OS partition). If you've only got one partition after your OS partition, it probably isn't Rapid Start.

 

I'm looking under disc 1 though right? The mSATA, not the physical disc?

In Disc Management, Disc 1 is showing as only 8.02 GB.

 

As I said, I don't have direct experience with the cache model, but if the cache does in fact appear as a separate unit, one easy way to test it would be to disable Smart Response (under Intel Rapid Storage > Acceleration). Then restart, whether you're prompted to or not. If you then see that that disk all of a sudden has more storage available, then yes it would appear that the 8.02 GB partition is for Rapid Start, in which case deleting it will allow you to re-enable Smart Response with more capacity available to be dedicated to it.

 

Disabled Smart Response, but the mSATA is still only showing 8.02 GB in Disk Management. It's also a partition that cannot be removed.

Also, possibly unsurprisingly, the machine runs like a dog without smart response.

 

Did you restart after you disabled Smart Response? I added that via an edit after my initial post. Disk Management doesn't update its disk information unless you reboot or do a Rescan Disk operation.

The performance issue isn't surprising given what Smart Response does, though after you turn it back on it may not initially be as fast as it was if it has to relearn what it should cache. But if you did in fact restart and the SSD capacity still hasn't changed, that surprises me. How large is that disk showing in total? Not the size of that one partition, but the size reported in the tile to the left of the partition map?

You can probably delete that partition using the Command Prompt tool diskpart by using the "override" switch, but what also makes me wonder is that the Rapid Start partition doesn't appear as an OEM partition; it should just appear as a Primary Partition. I suppose it's possible the Dell factory image does something to change that, but I kind of doubt it. I think the factory image restore partition DOES appear as an OEM partition, and I also believe it's about 8 GB (I don't have one anymore, but maybe someone else can confirm), but I wouldn't have expected that to be placed on the SSD rather than the spinning disk.

 

I did reboot, yes.

The Disk is showing as 8.02GB on the tab to the left and the partition itself.

I'll screen shot my partitions for you, one sec.

 

Here: http://i409.photobucket.com/albums/pp172/ham_aka_stam/partitions.png~original

And yeah, the HDD was running at 100% for a few minutes after rebooting after switching Smart Response back on, but now it's gone silent again.

 

Ok, the factory image restore partition is definitely on your main drive. I'm surprised that disabling Smart Response and rebooting didn't reveal more storage, but maybe if the BIOS has its SATA operation set to Intel Smart Response, it always hides the 18.6 GB minimum for Smart Response regardless of whether it's enabled. If you want to test THAT, disable Smart Response AND Rapid Start, then go into the BIOS and switch the SATA mode to AHCI. Note that there's a possibility that Windows won't boot anymore after that. If that happens, just switch it back and you'll be fine. But if it does boot, check Disk Management again and you should then definitely have the entire capacity of the disk shown.

But either way, if you want to get rid of Rapid Start, open Command Prompt, then enter these commands:

diskpart
select disk 1
delete partition 1 override

Confirm that the partition is in fact gone in Disk Management, then you should be able to increase the Smart Response allocation (perhaps after rebooting again).

 

So that 8GB I can see is the Rapid Start partition? But this is a 16GB machine...