XPS 15 (L521X) Owner's Lounge

Having opened mine up, I would say that the memory slot on the other side of the motherboard is evilly hard to get to. There are a lot of components in the way and the machine is absolutely packed to the gills with stuff inside.

This is a non-trivial thing to do.

Of course the one on the closer side is a lot easier to get too (case and battery only), so that one is not as much an issue.

 

Thank you for all the tests. Some "real" game tests already have shown that throttling happens while normal gaming even before the 15 minute mark. I would not complain AT ALL if problems would only come up in such special tests.
Personally I do render Videos on GPU and CPU (simultanously) by Sony Vegas. GPU handles video effects (movielooks plugin and CPU does encoding)....at least my "older" version of Vegas (8).

 

I personally kept MSI Afterburner open, which apparently kept the GPU from throttling (beyond the normal Furmark throttle of course). To reproduce the idle CPU heat: 1. Start MSI Afterburner. DO NOT ADJUST ANY SETTINGS. Avoid the temptation to overclock to compensate for Furmark's auto-throttle. 2. Start the CPU temp monitor of your choice. 3. Start Furmark. 4. Set xtreme mode to ON and dynamic background to OFF, and set resolution to 1600x900. Keep antialiasing off. 5. Run it, keeping the window in front. Meanwhile the MSI GPU load monitor should stay at 100%. 6. Watch as the idle CPU's temperature rises above that of the beyond-full-load GPU.

By the way, if you download the CUDA files and run the nbody sim from the command line (do not use the benchmark switch, and around 50000-75000 bodies works well), you will notice it doesn't generate nearly as much heat (even though it doesn't auto throttle like Furmark does), yet it was still enough to crash the computer when a "real-world" (not thermally antioptimized) load was placed on a non-throttled CPU as well. If it can't handle an nbody sim on the GPU and a loop of 128-bit by 64-bit divisions on the CPU (both of which are very unoptimized and "real-world-ish") then why are you so sure it can handle an intensive game?

Here's a challenge to any owners: 1. Turn on ThrottleStop set to a multiplier of 21, with BD PROCHOT turned OFF. 2. Open MSI Afterburner. DO NOT CHANGE ANY SETTINGS. 3. Open the temp logging software of your choice. 4. Play the intensive game (anything that won't run 40 FPS) of your choice for two hours at ultra settings. 5. Post the highest temperature that any of the four CPU cores achieved in the entire session on this thread.

 

Why would you run nbody sim on a multimedia laptop? Isn't that something that should be run on a Tesla or Quadro graphics card? Not saying this machine shouldn't throttle less, I'm just curious why you'd buy this machine for scientific research when its not nVidia's top binned parts.

 

As soon as some games download I'll test more using FRAPS and HWinfo to monitor. I have Mass Effect 3 downloaded, SWTOR on the way, any other requests? I do not have Diablo III, Starcraft II, etc.

 

What can happen if you use some software to prevent throttling while gaming? It would keep working at turbo boost frequency until it shuts down?

 

most likely

 

Try my challenge in the bottom paragraph. If it crashes then post "100+".

 

Photo Album - Imgur
I'm completely ignorant to mobile hardware but I suppose the bottom chip with two copper heat pipes is the GPU and the top is where the CPU is situated. from the look of things both pipes makes contact with the GPU heatsink and in turn dissipates heat to the CPU socket, so could this be the reason as to why CPU reaches critical temp even in idle?
Have someone run any stress tests without the GPU?

 

I have zero interest in trying your challenge. The system did what it was supposed to and shut down.

I'm asking people what games they want me to test if I have them, so they know if the machine meets their needs as it stands now. The machine obviously doesn't meet your needs, you've posted your "review", it doesn't perform as you expect, you've expressed your opinion, so return it and move on.

I believe its the opposite based on that picture. It says GS near the first chip. Plus that would explain why the CPU gets so hot when the GPU only is running

 

An Intel Burn Test alone kept the CPU around 90C with Turbo Boost staying on the whole time. The GPU temp was only 50-60C... compared to an idle state of 45-50C.

 

Could I just clarify with people the problem, so I understand it.

When the CPU / GPU are put under load (For example, gaming), for a period of 5-10 minutes. The CPU and GPU are throttled due to the heat generated, in essence reducing the performance which can be achieved?

So essentially, you’ve all purchased a laptop with a 640m which while having pretty nice benchmarks can’t really ever reach those due to throttling. Also that this is a hardware / construction issue rather than a software one, so can’t be resolved.

I’ve been reading the Acer M5 has a similar problem..

Do wonder what real world wise the GPU performance is like over a 1-2 hour stint of gaming, 20% below what i should be?

It would appear these ‘thin and light’ laptops with discrete graphics card are having real issues. While they’re impressive examples of (almost ultrabooks), they don’t actually work unless equipped with adequate cooling, which is difficult when an optical drive takes up so much room...

I almost purchased one, so glad I didn’t.. But a friend of mine has just put in his order, think I’ll get him to cancel.

 

Yes... That's perfectly normal. 3DMark measures the CPU speed before it starts running so it quite often gets the wrong numbers. Here's one from my gaming computer showing the wrong frequency too (clocks to 4.4Ghz load)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 video card benchmark result - Intel Core i5-2500K Processor,Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z68X-UD3H-B3 score: P7234 3DMarks

 

I just got this laptop yesterday and I just spent about 15 minutes playing Call of Duty 3 with high settings at 1920x1080.. fan whirled up, but the experience was pretty good.. if you guys want a video of me playing it I can post that too.. I got the i7 and took out the 750GB HDD and put in a Crucial 256GB SSD into it.

 

The game was completely fluid all the time during these 15 minutes at those settings?

What I'd like to know, is your experience after you played for at least an hour... If you ever do, please post back!

 

Yup. I actually started to record it 15 minutes into the session. I'll try a much longer one later today and play for say 60 mins and then start to film again for another 5-10.. We'll see how that goes.. provided I can keep my son away from me for that long he's not allowed to watch me play COD3

 

Thank you for your test. Could you please run FRAPS in the meantime to see if you FPS drop critically? Other people experienced FPS drops after few minutes, so it would be very helpful to know if you have the same issue or not

 

Probably a good idea... My friend's son is watching him play Battlefield, and he began telling his fathet to "kill that guy" and stuff like that... And now sometimes he ask him if he's gonna kill people today!

He's about 2-3 years old.

 

Yeah, which comes with the 630, too!

 

Yes.. since I am a game reviewer, I have a registered version of FRAPs so I can run that.. I'll keep VSYNC off so we can see some fluctuations.

To be fair, I really only bought this laptop to do development work on my gaming website and my other job. I wanted the i7 to do some vid rendering while I was at conventions such as E3 and I didn't really plan on playing games on it as that's what my main machine is for..

But, I guess having an install of Diablo 3 or Left 4 Dead 2 won't hurt if I wanted to hop into a quick game

Haha no doubt.. he's been saying that on his android games.. and he's 6..

I'll try out Modern Warfare 3 again and install Left 4 Dead 2 and Skyrim.. I we'll see how it goes.

 

I found that playing at 1920x1080 is a much better experience than 1280x720. The latter is very laggy.

Can someone confirm my feeling? I think Intel scaling is involved.

Also I dare to say that turning on v-sync is beneficial (not for raw FPS, but for the gaming experience)

You started Hwinfo before turning on the GPU, so you didn't log GPU values

I'll try to do some 3dmarking with and without hwinfo.

Do you used the Mercury engine and CS6 with the OpenCL blur factory?
I have no doubts that the CPU is working as intended if the GPU is turned off.

 

Well, the XPS 15 isn't light at all, but yeah...I think there's a reason the original ultrabook spec didn't include discrete graphics cards.

 

I played Skyrim yesterday for about 20 minutes on high setting on 1080p and had no problems. You can see screen caps and the setting on my first impressions thread. I'm gonna try some Crysis 2 and some other games later today.

 

Ok I've tested

SWTOR
1920x1080
Graphic Quality High (Everything on high but whats below)
AA off Character Texture Low
Average on FRAPS was 30.73 in battle and higher when not.
Slightly choppy but very playable. I played on Dromund Kaas in a heroic area.

--However these FPS #s are no where near as good as they should be. From just after launch til I quit, I averaged ~1300 Mhz across all the cores and 352 Mhz on the GPU. The CPU cores averaged around 50% load, and the temperatures averaged around 75 C. It has to be some kind of driver or bios issue. Why wouldn't it try to load up more for better frame rates?

Mass Effect 3
1920x1080
AA on, motion blur on, dynamic shadows on, 3 cinematic lights, harmonic lighting on, arisotropic filtering 8x
Ok, This was very playable and smooth. I played the Earth mission for about 10 minutes as well. Sorry I'm not playing longer, but I'm trying to download and test games. FRAPS listed the frame rate at 51.22 FPS average, all while involved in a battle on Earth.

-- Same thing happened here. The system averaged in the 1300 Mhz range for CPU usage in the 50-60% range. The GPU averaged right in 350 Mhz. CPU averaged 83 C

I like that the games are plenty playable at the speeds the CPU is running, I'm just curious why its throttling down so much on the GPU and what FPS the GPU is really capable of. Oh well, I'm keeping this thing. It seems to be fully capable of playing the types of games I play.

 

Here my 3dmarks:

3dmark 2011
p1757
graphic 1640
phi 3437
combined 1472

3dmark vantage
p6976
g6643
cpu8208

3dmark 2006

8768 total
3519 sm2
3879 sm3
2711 cpu

On notebookcheck, the 3612QM score (only cpu tests)
3d mark 2006: 4087-5552 vs my 2771


Vantage: 8328-19552 vs my 8208. The 8328 is another XPS 15, the Inspiron 15R SE does 17565

I didn't log the frequencies, but it's evident the cpu runned at 1.2Ghz as usual when the GPU is on. Please try yourself to check if it's just me.

Maybe we can live with it, maybe it doesn't matter... but I wonder if the XPS 15 is inferior to the Inspiron 15R SE.

edit:
Inspiron 15R SE 3dmark2011
http://3dmark.com/3dm11/3658892
p1680
gpu 1482
cpu 6948
comb 1481

Oh well, let's wait for DELL. I think they should try to fix this.

 

Lol... I was wondering the same thing... I was on the Inspiron page a few minutes ago, considering it for a minute!

 

hmmmmn ill consider it but if XPS fails Lenovo Y580 with i5 CPU FTW

 

As this is an "Owner's [sic] Lounge," I will try to limit my replies to actual owners here. If you are a potential owner, I'll try to reply to you as well.

Sorry for the absence yesterday, but I got sick Sunday night and still am just a bit. I'm well enough to type, though.

Yes! Liquid silver is the non-scientific name for mercury.

I have sent your information to the quality engineers. I want to let everyone know we will look at customer feedback with the same approach we always use: 1. replicate the symptoms on our hardware, 2. capture units from customers reporting the symptoms and analyze the hardware, 3. determine whether the behavior is within design spec or not, 4. assuming it's not within spec, we will evaluate possible fixes and begin testing them, 5. the best possible fix will enter qualification (to make sure it doesn't break something else) and web post when available.
Normally, this takes a few weeks to a couple of months. However, with XPS launches, we have unusual amounts of engineering resources dedicated to the product in the days and weeks after launch. As you can see by the 5 steps listed, we are nowhere near a point where I can provide an ETA. So, if you are super concerned about the 21 day return window and are completely unhappy with the performance, I'll be honest with you and say you should just return the system and check back to see if there are any changes. However, I'll say if this can be made better, we'll do it as quickly as possible with a very large amount of resources on the case. You should expect to see the same pace for platform improvements that we saw with XPS 13.

Are you in the US? If so, would you be interested in an exchange instead of a return? You could always return the exchanged unit if you still want to.

Glad you guys found this. I had promised last week to find this and post it. I received the answer in email Saturday morning, but you guys beat me to it. Keyboard shortcut for WinMobCtr=Windows key+X

I was surprised by that as well. He's pretty fair and balanced, but I'll be watching to see how he approaches the same if he happens to see it on his Dell review units.

 

@ bill do you think there will be a fix by the time im ready to order late august early September ?

 

I hope the fix comes soon, because I will be heading back to Europe come early July, and I suppose I wouldn't be able to receive any potential hardware fixes after that.

My unit comes in tomorrow. Bill do you know whether opening the packaging will have any affect on returning the product, a la some sort of restocking fee that can be avoided.

 

Bill,

If you want to get a hold of a customer unit ASAP that exhibits the CPU throttling problem within 1-3 minutes of gaming I would be happy to bring my XPS 15 by personally for your engineers to test if your lab is in Austin (Round Rock) TX. ??? (my office is in Arboretum area)

Send me a PM if you want to take me up on my offer

 

Hi Bill,

I own the XPS 15 and overall, I'm pleased with the performance and build. However, like most others on the forum, I'm troubled by the throttling issue.

If the Dell engineers conclude after testing that the throttling issue can't simply be resolved through a BIOS or software update (as some posters have speculated) and XPS 15 owners are beyond their 21 day return window, would the fix (whether it be new thermal paste, hardware replacement, etc.) be covered under the Dell warranty?

Again, I like the laptop, but I don't want to find out somewhere down the road after my 21 day return period has expired that the only fix is to purchase a redesigned XPS 15 with better thermal management. Thank you.

 

Hi,

I have on order this new XPS 15 mainly for photo and video editing.

Can someone confirm (or not) that CPU throttling is NOT present while using Adobe Lightroom (RAW conversion for example). I mean not to a level than force the CPUto be at 1.2Ghz !

Again what about CPU throttling with Nvidia CUDA software like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro during batch convert or encoding task.

Thank you in advance for your answer !

 

Would love to know that too!

 

Way to early to answer either question. We have to get to step 3 first, which should happen PDQ.

Boom. Definitely will get in touch. Happy to drive out to the Arboretum. mmmm Mighty Fine FTW.

 

Anybody got the i5 version yet?

 

This is my first post but I lurked in the L521X Speculation the entire time.

I just received my L521X yesterday and have found the fan to be very loud so far. I have a L502X sitting here that I am transferring files from which I never found overly quiet but in comparison it is much quieter.

I'm having a hard time telling if the fan is running all the time and ramps up to higher speed every once in a while or if there is another fan inside that kicks on in addition. When the computer is just sitting there sometimes there is virtually no noise at all but then the noise will kick in. It's almost sounds as if the fan may be rubbing against something.

Anyways it's driving me nuts. Just as annoying as the squeaky space bar on my L502.

 

Edit: Just re-read everything... Never-mind... [Self-Deleted]

 

Edit: double post deleted.

 

I've attempted to attach a sound clip of the fan spinning up. This is not on a power on but was just a random kick in of the fan. Maybe I'm just ultra sensitive because I've read about fan issues.

I also used my iphone to record decibel level increase (not sure how useful this is on an iphone). It seemed to go up about 5 decibels. To me it's more the pitch of the sound. It seems a much higher frequency then my old L502X.


View attachment Memo.zip

 

Dean - I think that might be a typo - 5 decibels is incredibly quiet - for example:

Whisper Quiet Library at 6' = 30dB and it's a logarithmic scale.

 

So, I've had a bit more of a play with the laptop, and the fan noise has calmed down quite considerably. With a game on, it's still too loud, but for general surfing etc, then it's okay, although it does come and go randomly (it seems).

Is there any software to change the thermal limits for when the fan kicks in?

 

I suspect that iphone app is not able to detect the frequency of the noise. I know 5db is not much which is way I'm partially wondering if I'm being too critical.

 

5 decibels higher seems consistent with what I observed during a "normal" fan spin-up (i.e., not near critical settings). The fan wasn't loud at all.

 

Update - just received a call from field services that there will be NO technician coming today to repair as they have no spare parts.
Actually this upsets me right now quiete a bit as I normally would have had to go to work today and after confirmation yesterday that there will be someone coming today and the call this morning is just to define exact time.

Sorry, love the laptop but will return it now.

 

Update #2 - Fan Problem SOLVED
Couldn't resist and opened the laptop. There is a yellow tape on the base cover with some 2 black tapes underneath on the base cover - they seem to hold the XPS plate. If base cover is attached these are directly above the fan. They were loose, air could flow under the black tapes and seems to actually have caused the noise. Added two stripes of tape to fix it to the base cover and........no odd sound anymore

@Bill - please check with quality control

@All - WLAN still slow, actually fast if near the router but 5 meters away drops significantly. Anybody experience the same?

 

I made a conversion raw to jpeg of 336 photos using lightroom. The CPU worked at 2.8ghz all the time.
The system was really fast, the CPU was around 80% load, I think because the hard disk (7200RPM in Italy) cannot feed it so fast. (so converting raw with lightroom was like copying them).

When the GPU is off, I'm not seeing any problem.

When the GPU is on, on my system and with my usual ambient temperature, I expect the CPU may throttle, depending on the load. I can bet a CUDA enabled converter and a high load for more than a minute will trigger the CPU throttling.

I'll check with Photoshop CS6 (that's light load) later today.

 

I wonder if your "taped" system has now better cooling that mine. Can you run 3dmark Vantage and post the result? (detailed, I'm concerned about cpu/physics score)

 

I don't think it actually changed cooling at all as I just fixed something on the base cover.
However, here the 3dmark vantage scores:

3DMark Score 7492 3DMarks
Graphics Score 7300
CPU Score 8135
Jane Nash 20.62 FPS
New Calico 22.18 FPS
AI Test 1091 operations/s
Physics Test 11 operations/s

No clue if this is good or bad

 

Its bad, a dell inpiron with a old i3 gets a cpu score of 7200
A old (sandy) i5 2430 scores 9000 and a inspiron with i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz scores 17000

So with your cpu score 8135 you could have bought a inspiron i5 for half the price and have a faster system compared to you i7

My xps will arive today, if it throttles I think i will return it and get the i5 version.