XPS 15 (L521X) Owner's Lounge

Yerp. The XPS makes a pretty useless laptop for mobile applications.

I don't know what you mean about bluetooth, mine has it, and I use it often... ?



The WiFi issues are some-what lessened with the KillerN Wireless card, but the basic issue is that Dell put the antenna behind a metal lid, which any basic radio engineer will tell you is a no no. Same reason why car aerials dont work as well as they could either, they are always too close to a massive lump of metal.

And yes, the MBPs have wireless issues too, not even Apple can escape wave radiation physics XD

 

It's so sad to hear about all this issues, wifi, antennas beneath metal lid, no wwan,.... I wanted to spend +1.2 K Ł hoping that extraordinary quality will justify such price. Thanks for your time and answers ! I hope asus has something i need. Cheers !

 

I don't know whether I should be posting here or in the hardware section but...

I recently got BSODs so after some tinkering didn't fix it I tried resetting to factory image- before that process could finish however (got to 99% and stuck there) another blue screen hit. I restarted but it ran as if I had reset the laptop, and I made a new account and got to a new desktop screen. However, I'm now getting a new error message on bootup:

Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is OS.
One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended that you continue.

Then it automatically cancels and goes as normal- I can use the computer normally. I ran this by a friend and he told me that it could be a check disk error and that I should look to replace the harddrive maybe. So I'm taking it apart now- just a few questions.

1. Are the HDD and mSATA SSD seperate? I hooked up a new HDD and the screen told me I have that HDD and a Samsung PM83 SSD- I thought that the WD Black that I just took out had the mSATA built in or something?
2. If I eventually want to switch the HDD to a seperate SSD drive are there certain steps I have to take to configure it?
3. Should I be trying anything else?

 

Bakto, the msata and the HDD are separate components.

Did you disable the Intel rapid storage caching support while swapping over to the new drive?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4

 

Is the mSATA the small thing in the middle of the laptop? Physically.

I disabled the rapid storage when swapping (had to reset to Non-Raid) but a few curious things are happening; when I hooked up a different HDD in place of the WD Black, it blue screens before booting up and restarts into a loop. And again, when I leave the WD Black HDD in I get that consistency error but it boots up and seems to run normally. I was thinking of getting a SSD to replace the WD Black HDD to get rid of the blue screens and the consistency error but I don't know if that's the problem.

 

i would try un-installing all intel storage related drivers, having booted off the old drive, re-image the new one, and go from that. In theory, if there's something still tied to the old drive with how the intel drivers are using the msata that should clear it up. Then you can go back and reinstall and reconfigure the intel drivers to take advantage of the msata.

also, FWIW, I recently replaced the Killer-N 1202 WiFi in mine with an Intel 7260 and the performance has been overall reliably improved. That's just one case though.

 

I'll reiterate for you, I never asked for any of this. You forget that I was the first one in this thread to remove the Bluray (DVD) drive and talk about the benefits of having a wider and easier intake for the single cooling fan.

 

Well it seems that the problem has been fixed after I switched out the HDD with a new SSD drive; no blue screens or consistency error messages so far. I've installed a number of drivers and everything looks great except now when I change the brightness or volume, the bar that indicates that doesn't appear- is this related to a driver? It's not critical but kind of annoying.

Also is switching from Intel Smart Response to AHCI a noticeable difference? And can I do that without reinstalling Windows?

 

good for stability. ;^)

pop-ups for change of brightness/volume are done by the QuickSet application, it has to be running. The installation of that should set it as automatically run on startup. You may want to uninstall/reinstall QuickSet to clear that up.

Switching between Intel Smart Response and AHCI will require a full windows reinstall, or some serious hackery with the Windows configuration. The reason is that the Smart Response settings is basically a RAID setting so switching between the two requires a different fundamental Windows component (disk interface driver, possibly HAL too but I am not sure about that).

I don't think that fundamental disk i/o performance is very different between the two, but there is little point in using any of the intel HDD acceleration software and drivers when you are running the system on an SSD.

 

Did re-applying thermal paste fix the GPU throttling issue for you guys?

I used to get solid frame rates until a month ago (6 month old laptop), now I get great frame rates (60+fps, then it drops down to 10). On A14 BIOS.

 

Whenever the the laptop reaches 80C, throttling occurs, but thankfully nvidiaInspector can disable throttling using various power states

1.Download nvidiaInspector and save it into your HDD
2.Right click to create a desktop shortcut
3.Right click to access properties of the shortcut
4.Paste the code into shortcut target
"P0 performance"
\nvidiaInspector.exe -setVoltageOffset:0,0,0 -setGpuClock:0,2,645 -setMemoryClock:0,2,2500 -setBaseClockOffset:0,0,0 -setMemoryClockOffset:0,0,0 -forcepstate:0,0

"P5 Performance"
\nvidiaInspector.exe -setBaseClockOffset:0,0,135 -setGpuClock:0,0,607 -setMemoryClockOffset:0,0,0 -setMemoryClock:0,0,2200 -forcepstate:0,5

"P8 Performance"
\nvidiaInspector.exe -setBaseClockOffset:0,0,135 -setGpuClock:0,0,645 -setMemoryClockOffset:0,0,0 -setMemoryClock:0,0,2200 -forcepstate:

"Default" (resets clocks to default +80c throttle enabled)
\nvidiaInspector.exe -forcepstate:0,16

5. (Optional) create multiple shortcuts for different power states
6. Set windows power management CPU utilization to 99% (diasble turbo)

You may notice a bit of lag using P5 and P8 states because they are using PCI express 2.0 and 1.1 but no lag on P0. Its good to use P5 P8 states because they use low voltages which may run the GPU under 80C easily

 

I now have the i7 640gt and I think the video card is throttling is there anyway to stop that? How do I tell whats the throttling the cpu or gpu? Thanks

 

Are you having any trouble with the CPU throttling instead? I'm using throttlestop but it still slowly but surely clocks down to 800mhz?

 

Bit of a problem here:

I purchased this notebook approximately a year ago, and the battery no longer lasts more than 2 hours (on the balanced setting). Any idea is going on here?

 

Ok I am pretty sure now it is the video card giving me trouble in a few games.....it gets to 80c and throttles down to unplayable. I think the CPU is fine but would love to know a way to text it. so how can I stop the gpu from throttling? Please help thanks

 

Brand new here, and just bought a new Dell XPS15 with a 32Gb msata and a 1Tb 5400rpm platter drive.

I researched an earlier thread in another forum discussing replacing the msata drive and the process required to do so, and I figured I would try this approach, to see if I could use a larger msata drive as the boot drive (using the original Dell image), and then replace the 1Tb platter drive with an SSD also.

Here's the process I used...

(1) Disable "Accelerated' from Intel Rapid Start Technology GUI.
(a) Launch Intel RST UI from the system tray.
(b) Select “Accelerate” Tab, click “Disable acceleration”.
(c) Click “Reset to available” to reset the msata volume to no longer be a cache drive.

(2) Change to AHCI in BIOS by following below steps:
(a) At the Dell logo keep tapping the F2 key
(b) BIOS screen appears, using left/right arrow keys move to advanced menu.
(c) Using up/down arrow keys move to SATA operation and change Intel smart Response Technology to AHCI.
(d) Then move to exit and select exit saving changes.
(e) Restart the Computer

What happened, was as I suspected, the Laptop now booted from the 1Tb drive, without the 32Gb msata drive being involved at all.

My assumption was that this would happen, so I set about to:

(3) Replace the 32Gb msata drive with a nice new Intel 120Gb one by doing this:
(a) Shutdown, remove the bottom cover and swap in the new 120Gb msata.,
(b) Reboot and then clone the 1Tb drive onto the 120Gb msata drive using my (previously created) bootable Acronis13 Recovery USB stick.,
(c) After cloning, reboot and enter the BIOS again.,
(d) Select the msata drive as the 1st boot device and ensure that it is set to UEFI.,
(e) Boot into Windows7 from the msata.,
(f) Uninstall the Intel Rapid Start Technology and its Manager.,
(g) Shut down and replace the 1Tb drive with a 512Gb ssd, onto which I will store all of my data folders.,
(h) Move the location of my data (My Doc’s Videos, Pictures, Music & Downloads) to the 512Gb SSD.

This worked exactly as planned.

(4) There are only two areas that I need to tidy up, and I'm hoping the obviously vast experience here may be able to assist...

(a) During the boot process, I now get the Windows 'line going across the screen' rather than the holographic colours in the centre of the screen., and

(b) Straight after that 'line going across the screen' disappears, there is about a 10-second period during which the screen is completely blank, and then after that... I arrive at the desktop as normal.

This makes me wonder whether there might be another setting needing adjusting in BIOS or something like that. I have disabled secure boot, and other than that, only made the changes listed in the process above.

I have just taken a complete image of the machine as it now is, and may run Startup Repair, and see if that resolves the issues (did this from bootable Win7 USB, and the msata drive is not listed - ran the startup repair anyway, and holographic start did not reappear).

Definitely value any thoughts as to what the 10-odd second delay may be caused by.

Thanks

 

fritzman, there are a bunch of anecdotal reports that disabling/uninstalling the micro-sd driver can clear the 10 second delay. I've no experience with it myself though so I can't say whether it's really related or not.

 

anyone please help?

 

Thanks.. I saw those as well... With the device and driver uninstalled, boot time has been reduced significantly, and is now a paltry 13 seconds from button to desktop (no password).

Is there a driver for the SD slot that IS recommended? (I let it look for one on the first reboot after uninstalling, and it didn't find anything suitable).

 

If you read back / search there is a lot of detailed discussion about repeating the CPU/GPU, removal of the DVD, etc.,

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4

 

Step 1. Elevate the laptop so it has better air circulation. You can even make one yourself ( Top 10 DIY Laptop Stands)
Step 2. Replace thermal compound on CPU and GPU with superior one (just search internet for reviews on CPU thermal compounds). Be sure to clean off the old residue and compound using rubbing alcohol or ArctiClean
Step 3. Remove DVD/Blu-ray drive

If you did these 3 things properly, the laptop will not overheat during gaming.

 

Why remove the cd/dvd drive? more air flow?

 

thanks I called dell and they are sending someone out to do the thermal compounds. Its only a few games and im pretty sure its just the gpu only giving me trouble right now. will the guy that dell send have better thermal compound or should I get my own? thanks for your help

 

First post here... I've been REALLY disappointed with the gaming performance. I'm all updated on Nvidia drivers and the BIOS, and I have to play BF3 at 800x600 with the lowest settings to make it playable. I may try doing those above things mentioned...

So you can call dell to just come and replace the thermal paste? Do you have some special warranty plan or something? Mine is a refurb. Frankly, I never know how much thermal paste to put... and I've never done that in a laptop before... Is it hard to do with this Dell?

 

Yes, it gives more room around the fan inside for it to draw in air.

The Dell thermal compound is not as good as one you can get but it can come close assuming the tech properly cleans off the old compound on the CPU and GPU before putting on the new heat sink.

 

skippyfire, re-pasting the CPU/GPU isn't that big a deal as long as you take your time and have the right tools. The only weird one you need for the L521X is the T5 screwdriver, needed to get the case bottom off. There are many guides online for re-pasting available, and the dell manual for the machine has instructions on how to replace the heat-sink fan (which you basically follow to expose the CPU/GPU). If you're handy enough with stuff and can be patient about it you'd probably be just as well doing it yourself.

But YMMV. I offer no guarantees.

But I wouldn't let a Dell tech do my machine on my behalf (and I have re-pasted my machine).

Other people have gone to the length of removing the DVD drive also to allow for more air inlet, but not everyone wants to do that.

The real upshot is that the machine just doesn't handle heat buildup well at all, it's just not suitable for a dedicated gaming rig IMO.

 

Does this 10-second delay caused by the SD-cardreader still occur on a clean Win7 install to the msata?

 

Last night I removed the DVD drive and that stupid piece of plastic covering the vent, disabled speedstep, and.... NOW I CAN PLAY BATTLEFIELD 3! I can actually play it at a decent resolution! Thanks a ton guys for putting in all the hard work discovering this stuff. I also ordered some thermal paste, the deluxe arctic silver one with the cleaning stuff too. I'll let you know how that goes!

 

That's great news Skippyfire!
I'm glad removing the drive worked (to some degree) for you.

Use HWMonitor or any other app that can tell you GPU temps, what kind of temps are you seeing after playing BF3 for 30 mins or 60 mins?

 

I'm going to try this out, I've been using the wifi on the laptop more recently and even the Killer 1202 doesn't cut it. How much of an improvement are you seeing and how far from the AP?

 

"a lot"

I'm going to be VERY conservative in making any performance claims as the whole mess with this machine has been crazy and I don't want to give anyone false hopes. The 7260 is in fact inexpensive though. In my environment at home I have yet to figure out how to configure things to get 'ac' data rate connections, not that I have spent any time doing so, really, so all my connections to date have been 'n' data rate.

None of this is record setting, just a bunch better than before.

Home usage has easily doubled, or more, and easily handled multiple walls and such. I happened to have some large files to transfer from my server at home over the weekend, over SCP (e.g. over ssh running on top of the wpa2-psk crypto'd wifi) and downstream data rate was around 18 MBps.

Out of home usage in places where before I needed to use my Netgear WNDA3100v2 usb dongle (starbucks, wegman's, etc.) I can now just use the internal. At Wegmans I was getting on the order of 10 Mbps downstream which is on-part with my dongle, and beating it some times. In all locations I have tried so far the connection has been good enough, and stable.

I haven't taken the time to setup jperf or iperf to figure out real detail though, that could be a long time happening.

Unless I get the flu or something.

 

Cool, thanks!

 

Hello everyone,

I just recently got a Dell XPS 15 L521X, and after doing some heavy research trying to find out a perfomance problem, im hoping after reading alot of the posts here that someone could fill me in on some possibilities.

I just received the laptop last night and booted it up this morning. I installed BF3, and immediately noticed the framerate dropping from 40+ to 10 and making it completely unplayable even on the lowest settings. It seems the processor may be throttling down due to heat? Im not too sure. Specs are as follows:
Intel i7-3632QM @ 2.2 up to 3.2
8gigs DDR3 1600mhz
Nvidia Geforce GT 640M w 2g DDR5 vram
32gb mSATA and 750GB 7200rpm HDD
Win 7 Home Prem
Killer Wireless-N 1202
8x Slot Load DvD Burner

The drop in frame rates happens almost every 20 seconds when running the game. It doesnt matter what i do, whether im looking at the menu, or moving. I keep a small fan pointed at the computer as well to keep it cool, but I dont think that is helping. Are there any thoughts on the subject? Im pretty sure it has already been brought up plenty of times, but there is no point in keeping the computer if its 15 hours old and theres no fix.

thanks
David.T

 

David,

The reason for what you are seeing is that the CPU/GPU gets too hot (80C or higher) and throttled down which kills performance. The stock cooling system isn't adequate for gaming.

In another post, I have steps you can take to fix this yourself at the cost of voiding warranty:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...s-15-l521x-owners-lounge-593.html#post9355333

 

I really appreciate the quite response!

I will call Dell and have someone send a tech, i cannot afford to void the warranty especially after spending the $200 for the 3 years. They said that they could send me a replacement with specifications adequate to my needs. I wonder if I can tell them to remove the DVD drive all together with a replacement. One can only Hope. With a total cost of $1,750 ish, do you think its worth keeping considering i would have to remove the DVD drive? i probably used my BRay drive on my Inspiron 17R SE about 3 times in a year. xD

David.T

 

If you spent $1750, I would just return the laptop immediately. Theres no point in keeping this laptop with this problem if you dished out that much.
The ONLY reason I kept this laptop and bought it in the first place knowing these problems (from this thread) is because I got it for $900 total.

Seriously, return it and go buy a laptop thats more appropriate for gaming. The Dell XPS laptops will not suit your needs.

 

Im going to go ahead and get a full refund, they were not helpful in the least about this problem..

 

I want to upgrade my msata to a larger one so I can place my os on it, would the XPG SX300 by adata work nicely? the 256gig model.

XPG SX300 SATA 6Gb/s mSATA Solid State Drive_Solid State Drives_ADATA Technology

 

Hi guys,
I just got the xps 15 which came with Dell 1901 wireless, i want to replace it with the Intel 7260ac wireless, since i read some earlier post here that the Intel 7260ac is better than the killer-n 1202. Do you think it is a good idea?

Also, have an old Toshiba L505-ES5018 with one 4GB stick in it, i want to know if it will be compatible with the xps 15 to replace the 2GB inside to get 8GB of RAM.

Thanks in advance....

 

Yes, that should work.

Yes, replacing the wireless card is a good idea. Its very easy, but remember that you need torx screwdriver to open the bottom of the XPS. Its not a regular screw.

As for the RAM, you need to see if its DDR3 and what speed. If you put a lower speed stick of RAM in the computer, it will force both sticks of RAM to run at the lower speed.

 

Ok great. I'll go pick one up. I really wanted a GPS in that msata slot but no one seems to be of help so I'm just going to go the bootable is route.

 

FYI, I got a Mushkin 120Gb drive off NewEgg a while ago for <100$. I have all my "big data" areas pushed to the HDD, but everything else lives on the SSD. Machine runs great. Based on my readings on various places you should plan on keeping 15-20% of the SSD empty so that the wear-leveling can work best and performance stay even. For me that means I have about 80-90 Gb of usable space.

 

Ok so I dissociated the 32g msata. Turned off of irst in the bios but when I try changing the data operations from irst to Ata or ahci, windows 8 boots then says there was an error and restarts in the same loop. Until I put it back to irst.

 

You'll have to use magic-fu to change the low-level windows driver that interfaces with the SATA ... the IRST mode drive interface is basically a RAID mode, and AHCI is not, and they require separate low level drivers that are only changeable normally at windows-install time.

If you do some google searching you may find a way to alter that setting.

I'd try windows installation media in 'repair' mode myself, but I don't know if you have that.

 

so ill finish moving all my big files (pics, music vids, etc) to the new partition on my hdd, then ill switch the sata to ahci and put in the window 8 disc and try to repair?

 

sounds good to me.

when I moved to SSD hosted OS I did a clean install, but that's just my personal preference.

 

done, everything seems to now be in working order, although it took a few jumps into burning hoops, it now works, ive got my 256 gig msata as my main bootable, with my documents and desktop, and the 750 gig hdd as the other folder location ! my windows score is still 5.9 though, due to the graphics card :S

 

Hello,

I got one XPS 15 L521X with 512GB SSD.

I have read about CDROM making noisy sound. I have same problem. When I start NB or when I get up from sleep. That's horrible. Any advice here?

Same here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3TbpYas0nY

I think I have last version of BIOS A14 (22.5.2013).

 

f3l1x: you pretty much can't void the dvd seek at start-up situations, but as long as it's only that once is it really a big deal?

elvis7: good to hear.

unrelated: I am upgrading my evaluation of the Intel 7260 wifi from "probably good" to "definitely worth the 30$". Now with the driver update from link rate to my Asus RT-AC66U hovers been 500 and 700 Mbps on an 802.11ac connection. 802.11n connections around town have been good too. Signal strength is solid. Operation at a small variety of wifi spots around town has been solid. I've a couple road trips later this month which will give me a more broad roaming experience and if it continues to perfom I won't need the USB WiFi dongle any more. The specific revision I purchased is the HMWG, from the following Amazon retailer (Spicy Bomb) :

Amazon.com: Intel Network 7260.HMWG WiFi Wireless-AC 7260 H/T Dual Band 2x2 AC+Bluetooth HMC: Computers & Accessories

This car supports all the wifi features the original base card (63xx) provided (WiDi, etc.).

 

Hi all,

It's been a long time since I've had the time to read up on here but wanted to check in.

I've had mine for over a year now and everything is working excellent on it except I still have to occasional weak wifi signal. One other thing that is concerning me however is the battery life has seemed to dropped fairly drastically.

I was used to getting about 5 hours on a charge doing the usual light stuff but now I'll be lucky to get 3 with brightness all the way down doing web browsing. Was wondering if anyone has had a similar issue.

The throttling has been a non issue and just wanted to see what everyone thinks or if there have been some major updates that I've missed out on.

Cheers!