XPS 15 (Haswell) Owner's Lounge

Hello guys,

I want to ask something regarding the GPU throttle on the laptop. To me it makes sense for the GPU to throttle because it reaches a temperature threshold. What I do not understand is why after throttling, which results huge temperature drop, the GPU isn't increasing its clock rates again. In my case when the GPU throttles the GPU clocks won't increase unless I restart the video game (which essentially restarts the GPU because when you exit to windows the nVidia Optimus system shuts the GPU down completely if I am not mistaken). Is this an Nvidia driver bug? or a Dell XPS 15 bug? Or this is the way the Nvidia cards work? Can someone with a different Optimus laptop let us know what happens when his GPU throttles? Thank you.

 

This is weird, the plug is as thick as it should it just go all the the way in

 

Hello again,

Any quick way to test the NFC capability of the laptop? I get this message at windows event viewer log: "The driver \Driver\WUDFRd failed to load for the device ACPI\NXP5442\2&daba3ff&1." but the driver seems loaded in device manager. So, I just want to test if the NFC works. Thanks.

 

BIOS A03 is out, don't know what they changed, will try.


Fixes
- Modify Batman feature - battery charging threshold feature. ( ...maybe a coilwhine solution?)
- Update the F9 hotkey function for some multilateral input method.

Enhancements
- Improved System BIOS stability.
- Support Realtek USB-to-LAN dongle(REL8153-VB) PXE boot.

 

Thanks for the update. No luck, same coilwhine as before.

 

Maybe it is possible to stop charging at 95% (BIOS setting) now, so the whining won't start. I cannot test this at the moment but will do later.

 

Aha. I shall try that now. I was already thinking that the solution might be along those lines so thanks for suggesting that. I'll report back in a while after I've managed to discharge the battery a bit.

Thanks!

 

I'll be surprised if this works because I think the whine has to do with the fact that the battery is no longer being charged, not that it's at any particular level, in which case disabling charging at a lower level wouldn't change anything.

 

Well, A03 says it's fixed, so give it a try.

 

Coil whine still there (at 88%). But the battery is not charging. So at least that IS fixed.

 

Thanks! .... but shame on the coil whine :-( mine has that too.

 

Well I must say that I don't dislike it that much. It's sort of nice to know when it's thinking given that it doesn't have a HD LED or anything that tells you if it's doing something or not haha. But yeah, seriously it's a shame because it would be completely silent otherwise considering that (the top tier) doesn't have a mechanical disk.

 

Updated my replacement system with the new BIOS A03 and still have noticeable coil whine. I have called dell to return my original and replacement system. They offered me $200 to keep my system, bringing my total paid for the top tier system down to $1,572 including tax. Even at that price, I still told them I would like to return. No restocking fee.

 

Nice -- and looking at the changelog I think it's just so cool that our systems apparently have a "Batman" feature. Yes I know it means "battery manager", but come on, they even capitalized it!

Now the only thing I wish they had was the "Charge to 100% once" button from Quickset that they have on some other models, including my sister's Inspiron 7437. I plan to have my system stop charging at 80% (just like the Tesla Model S by default, incidentally) and not start charging again until about 40% (good level for exercising Li-ion cells), but it would be handy to not have to go into the BIOS if I ever wanted to top my system all the way on certain occasions. Oh well, the Inspiron 7437 that has this feature actually doesn't have the Adaptive charging strategy; it's all manual. So I guess you can't have everything in one place. At least they've finally fixed a feature that until now has been broken.

I'm also curious whether the Adaptive mode has been fixed. If anyone who almost always has their system running on AC power wants to leave it in Adaptive mode and report back in a few days/weeks whether they see their battery being allowed to discharge while plugged in, that would be cool to know.

EDIT: Looks like you can't set a minimum charge level below 50%. Oh well.

 

I updated the video driver 2 days ago and no problem since! Not sure it is just not just a coincidence yet but so far so good!

 

I see that the battery charge configuration options are Adaptive, Standard, Primarily AC Use, and Custom. I would appreciate a brief tutorial on the differences among the first three. Thank you!

 

There's no documentation I can find that goes into the details of each mode. Standard of course is straightforward (charges any time it's plugged in up to 100%), and Custom allows you to prevent the battery from charging until it's depleted to a certain point and then limit its maximum charge level. I'm betting that Primarily AC Use lets your battery drop pretty far before charging up again and then stops charging before it reaches maximum. And then Adaptive would monitor how you use your laptop and adjust its strategy accordingly, though I have no idea how long it waits when it sees new behavior to switch to a new strategy, what the possible strategies are, etc.

The average user should just leave it in Adaptive for a while and see what it does, which is probably why that's the default. If you want to test Primarily AC Use to see what it does and report back, that'd be nice too.

 

Hmm, that's strange. People who've got replacement adapters didn't report any changes. I wonder what the relationship between your old adapter and the new unit is. Maybe a possible fix?

 

Hello All!

Just wanted to let you guys know that I ordered my new laptop yesterday. I ordered the Dell XPS 15 from Costco.com (the one with the 1TB HD/32 GB SSD). Here is the URL to Costco's website:

Dell XPS 15 Touchscreen Laptop | Intel Core i7 | 2GB Graphics | Quad HD+ | Backlit Keyboard

I have been trying to read reviews for that specific model but for some reason Costco doesn't list a model number so the best I could do is search for Dell XPS 15. So far the reviews seem good.

One thing I am worried about, however, is the text size since the display is Truelife QHD+ (3200 x 1800). Believe it or not I like lower resolution displays when it comes to reading text because the text is bigger. I am afraid the 3200x1800 resolution will result in very tiny text.

Does anyone know if using Windows to increase the size of the text (Right-click->Screen Resolution->Make text and other items larger or smaller) addresses the issue of having tiny text?

More generally, has anyone ordered this laptop from Costco and care to share you thoughts/experiences?

Thank you!

 

Hey guys,

I want to mention something regarding the coil whine. Actually is more of a technical question. Some people (including the untrained dell engineers) always mention that this might be caused by a particular power state of the processor. High pitch noises have been a common thing in some laptops in the past and most of the time C3 power state was responsible. Even the untrained dell engineers provide a tip to force the CPU never go into C3 power state. This is the typical trick using the bluetooth antenna. Of course they just read the text from their trouble shooting guide, the have no idea what is C3 state. This troubleshooting guide is old and refers to similar problems that some other dell laptops had.. Anyway.. my point is that the C3 power state is an energy saving state and I would expect that the CPU is going in that state only if you use it lightly or not at all. In case of my XPS15 the coil wine appears when I use the machine normally or heavily, which means the C3 power state that the Dell engineers will tell you on the phone is BS. If they ever tell you about this and they ask you to modify your bluetooth settings just tell them to go educate themselves or get a new job.

Besides all the above I would like to mention some observations. I have 4 different kinds of coil whine:
1) This one sounds like mechanical hard drive seeking but it is a coil shine (I only have an SSD drive, so there is no way I am wrong)
2) A very loud coil whine that you can hear it from far away that happens like once in 5 days.
3) A very silent coil whine that you realize it only if you turn your ear and move very close towards the keyboard and might start and last several hours.
4) A medium-volume coil whine that happens once a day and it lasts several minutes or hours.

The medium to loud coil whines usually stop if I run an application that does something heavy, More precisely, every time the coil whine starts I run a code I wrote that calculates FFTs using all the processor cores. The funny thing is that during the runtime, and only if my application uses all the available cores, a 5th kind of coil whine starts which is the second loudest in the list. But when the application finishes the all coil whines stop.
OK this post is getting silly, we paid 2000-3000$ and we are talking about coil whines... I just thought that this information might be useful.

Thank you.

 

jphughan, This question is addressed to you:

I'm merely curious, what model of this year's XPS 15 do you own? Do you own one of the top two? If so, I'm curious to know if you opted for the bigger battery or not.

 

I am pretty clear i don't have the coil whine. I have held my ear to the laptop itself and all i hear is a slight whirring and mid/high pitch that is coming from the fans. Maybe we should have some list to put into the shipment date, coil whine or not, type number of the psu and type of laptop (on the onderside and tier). This way we can see of there is any correlation on the coil whine.

 

Now also on the A03 bios enjoying the long awaited battery management.
As others reported: Coil whine is the same.

Just wanted to respond to your "different coil whine noises":
It is the load and the interrupts the processor sees. Changes over the day, are because something is beginning to run in background. For example indexing or something else.
I use windows and linux here. The sound is different. Because the cpu govenors (load/frequency control is different). In general I feel win 7 more noisy (may be the cpu switches more often to one sleep state). When some very low -priority background task is running, e.g. a file indexer (locate db for example under linux), the noise changes.
I tried under windows (throttle stop) and also under linux (some kernel boot parameter) to restrict the CPU to fall into deeper sleep states as C3. No chance to affect the sound. Actually I have the feeling, that it both (windows + tool or linux kernel) should work, that the c-states are somehow hard-coded in the haswell cpus or the try of software to affect it is blocked by the bios. I can not really meassure differences in power consumption with (both win7 + linux) when trying to restrict the cstates >3 (haswell goes down till c7).

With all the clock settings (intel CPU tuner software) and different govenors and voltages and load conditions. I can say: The whine is definitely the CPU and not the internal graphic as some suggested.
I hoped the battery charging is the last resort. But it is not. The only left thing we could hope (and because dell sells to mainstram users, dell will never unlock the bios settings for having direct control to c-states)
People accept it - if dell will not open the advanced bios/chipset settings as usual on good desktop boards,

we will NEVER EVER see a cure for the whine. - Live with that an buy you some headphones.
- or we need a bios-hacker but the damn UEFIs are encrypted today. - I hate modern times

aahhh I forgot, still the ACPI tables are not fully corrected, still some IRQ/resource conflicts which windows or linux work around (so normally will not affect anything, but it shows that the programming is not good).

---my old posts with some information about PSU (page 360) and somewhere the thing's I tried with intel XTU--
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/735403-xps-15-haswell-owners-lounge-360.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/735403-xps-15-haswell-owners-lounge-455.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/735403-xps-15-haswell-owners-lounge-289.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...3-xps-15-haswell-owners-lounge-294-print.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...3-xps-15-haswell-owners-lounge-266-print.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/735403-xps-15-haswell-owners-lounge-455.html

 

I have the top spec version and haven't swapped any parts in it, so yes I have the larger battery.

 

With the system plugged in and set to Primarily AC Use, the battery icon in the taskbar always reads Fully Charged (100%).

 

How hard is it to replace the stock 1 TB HD (mine comes with a 1TB + 32GB SDD) with my 256 GB SSD?

 

Fairly straightforward; I replaced my 1TB HD with a 1TB SSD; the whole move took me a short evening including the process of cloning the HD to the SSD. The instructions for opening up the machine and replacing the drive are very easy to follow. Just go easy on the Torx screws as they are easy to strip.

 

I'm betting it will gradually fall. It may take a while to self-discharge since the system will still power itself off AC, so the only drain will be from natural loss of charge over time.

 

You might want to read the XPS 15 Wiki. The Common Complaints section has information about scaling. The bottom line is that on the QHD+ display, the default 200% scaling mode makes text appear the same size it would be on a 1600x900 display (just a lot sharper), but not all applications support scaling. The ones that do should be perfectly fine for you (assuming 1600x900 size on a 15" panel is ok, if not you can go above 200%), but the applications that don't scale well will have tiny text. I've noticed that lots of installers behave this way, including Windows itself ironically. Fortunately installers aren't everyday-use applications. Otherwise, some Adobe apps still don't support scaling well, which can cause problems. At the end of the day, HiDPI is still a relatively new feature on the Windows side, and both Windows and third-party applications have some work to do before it's a truly seamless experience. Until then, you're on the cutting edge, which in the tech world always involves accepting some growing pains in exchange for being the first to enjoy shiny new technology.

As for Costco, a few people here have ordered through there, so you might want to search "XPS 15 Haswell Costco site:notebookreview.com" in Google to bring up a few relevant posts.

 

On my old Windows 7 desktop, I have external stereo speakers (plugged in to the back) in addition to a headset with a pair of headphone + mic plugs (plugged into the front). In Windows' playback devices, I have "Speakers" and "Headphones" as separate devices, one of which I can set as default device. But, individual applications can choose which device to output to regardless of which is default.

On my XPS 15 running Windows 8.1, when I plug in a headset, a pop up appears asking me what type of device I plugged in. I choose "Headset," which works (i.e. all sound gets routed to the headset). But, under Windows' playback devices, nothing changes. It just shows "Speakers" like it did before plugging in, even though audio now plays through the headset. I guess the popup that appears somehow maps the device I plug in to the existing "Speakers" device.

Is there an easy way to get the system to recognize the plugged-in headset as a separate, selectable playback device, so that an application can choose which device to output to? In my case, I want to have Skype ring the laptop's built-in speakers, but have voice calls work through the headset. As it stands now, all audio goes through the one and only "Speakers" device, which is mapped to the headset when plugged in, or the built-in speakers otherwise. I want to use both at the same time.

 

The reason you're asked what type of device you've connected is so that it can electrically set up the jack appropriately and leave other built-in devices active as needed. For example, if you connect just a mic and select "Microphone", the built-in speakers will remain active, whereas if you select Headphones/Speakers, the built-in speakers will be disabled but the internal mic will stay active. And "headset" tells the jack to handle both a mic input and audio output.

In terms of simultaneous use, I'm surprised that your desktop classified devices connected to the front jack as a separate device. Most desktop motherboards will prioritize the front jacks and disable the corresponding rear jacks if anything is connected to them. But the short answer is that no, there's no way to have this system consider the built-in and external devices as independent, simultaneously usable devices. To get that, you'd either need to buy a USB headset or an adapter that accepts your current headset's jacks and converts them to a single USB connector. You might actually find that either one of those actually results in superior sound quality anyway because the headset's DAC would then live outside of the system, away from all the electrical noise and interference generated by the rest of the components on the motherboard.

 

As regards the coil whine, some people have reported on the Dell forum that the coil whine stopped after the A03 BIOS update. Has anybody else seen any improvement with this update?

 

A quick skim through the last 3 or so pages here indicates that nobody seems to be seeing any change in either direction, myself included.

 

Well, it's been at 100% since mid-November. Maybe that speaks well for the quality of the battery.

 

Sorry, I meant now that the A03 BIOS update has been applied, which apparently allows those settings to have an actual effect.

 

any word on an 8600 gtx version of this laptop?

 

My desktop does prioritize the front jack by automatically setting the headset as default device when connected, but I didn't realize that it was unusual to be treated as a separate device. That's too bad, I guess I'll look into getting a USB headset or adapter per your suggestion. Thanks.

Actually, it occurs to me that I could just plug and unplug my headset as needed. But would frequent (un)plugging cause excessive wear on the jack? Enough for me to worry about damaging it?

 

I came across Dell XPS 15 - 470112G at a local store in my town...

and it didnt have the whining fan noise.

i tried scrolling, removing, replugging the plug, changing the power saving mode to dell and to high performance.

and literally stuck my ear to the chassis.


is this 470112G a newer model which has this issue handled or maybe all that loud music affected my hearing?

FYI.. this was the 1TB mid-tier model with 6 cell battery.

 

FYI, if you only want to change the input/output mode of the audio jack, you can open the Dell Audio application, then click Advanced at the top, then Jack Information and click the jack icon. This will open the mode window.

Say you want to change from headset to headphones and instead of unplugging and plugging back, you can do the above steps and save the wear and tear of the audio jack.

 

this is the previous XPS 15.

 

No, but for reasons I've already given in this thread when this has come up, don't count on it ever happening, at least not until the entire next generation XPS 15 is released.

Which output gets set as default is configurable. Windows will automatically set your last default device as default if it reappears later; it maintains a priority list, basically, so if you set your rear output as default while both are connected, the front probably wouldn't become the default immediately anymore when you connect something to it.

No worries about wearing out the jack. That later post is correct that you could just reconfigure the output as a microphone or something, but that could cause weird noises in your headset. I'd just disconnect and reconnect if you don't truly need to use it simultaneously with the built-in devices.

 

Just received that gift card cash back for the XPS, anything worth buying on the dell accessory store for the XPS? The card is for around $70.

 

The dongle to allow you to use Dell power adapters with the standard (larger) tip on this system is nice if you're around other Dell adapters a lot. A second AC adapter is also handy if you'll take this thing with you so you can keep one parked at your desk and one in your bag/backpack. After tax and shipping that will probably put you around $60.

 

That might be ok (configuring output as microphone). I only wear the headset when I'm on a call, so I'm not worried about weird noises in the headset. But, I'm not sure how quickly I can switch to headset mode when a call comes in. I can imagine myself scrambling to bring up the window to switch modes when a call comes in, though I'd probably get used to it over time. Still, (un)plugging seems a lot easier.

I may give the software switch a shot and see how it goes. Thanks for the feedback.

(I did something really stupid, so I may have to do another clean OS install before I can test it out.)

 

so guys, i'm really frustrated right now...
I want to do a clean windows 8.1 install on my new ssd...
I have tried to do this with dell back-up and recovery, but then I get the error that I need at least 950 Gb free space...
The recovery option from windows that puts the recovery partition on the usb also doesn't work...
And I can't download a ISO from the windows site because my serial key is a OEM key and you can't download it with a OEM key....

So.... what to do? i've searched the web for about 3 hours, but can't find anything that provides me a iso to make a bootable USB...

 

are you serious man? it has the new haswell processor and 1 tb hdd + 32gb cache.

i thought this was the latest mid tier model and almost planning to buy it tomorrow.


whats wrong with singapore man...all outdated electronics over here

 

You can ask Dell to send you a USB flash drive with a Windows installer. Otherwise if you have access to MSDN, use that. Otherwise a torrent. It shouldn't be this tough, but sadly it is. Microsoft apparently only wants to provide bandwidth for people who bought Windows directly from them.

 

How is the screen glare on the XPS 15? I hate glossy screens and I thought I read somewhere that the screen was kind-of glossy.

 

Please see this tutorial: How to Download the Windows 8.1 ISO image using a Windows 8 key

Download Windows 8.1 image by starting the Windows 8 downloader using a generic Windows 8 key provided by Microsoft:

Appendix A: KMS Client Setup Keys

Then, after the download starts, cancel it and immediately start the Windows 8.1 installer tool. It will resume the installation so you would not need to type in any key again. When you install Windows 8.1 you may have to type in a Windows 8.1 generic key in order to install 8.1.

Personally I've just created a 8.1 USB installation dongle but could not try to install it yet as I will receive my XPS 15 next friday

 

It's come up quite a few times in here, but it's comparable to the Retina MacBook Pro, maybe slightly glossier.