XPS 15 9560 owners thread.

Kinda normal as power management is at play. unless you want the fans at 5k to keep a baseline 34 degrees

It is more about how long you can last before the fans kick in again rather than idle temps.

 

Perhaps PremierColor turning it down?

 

Makes sense, at idle the fans don't engage which is pretty awesome!

Might also just be me but noticed the left hand side of the palm rest gets quite warm when charging. I usually run off power but guessing this is normal as battery was mostly drained, so assuming heat from charging?

You'll also love this - the headpad on the ssd in the original was torn to pieces and looked old. Replacement was brand spanking new so they got changed over also

Shocking to find this in a new system, even if it is dell...

 

Nope, not even installed.

 

The max you can add is 9.5mm without rubber grip

 

Do you have adaptive brightness disabled in the advanced power management? Even though this laptop has no sensor basically making that setting do bugger I did see an unrelated laptop have an issue like that.

 

Well it turns out my crashing issue was a bad memory stick after running memtest on them. Doh & bugger!

 

Good news! How are you going to handle this then?

 

I have been in contact with the seller, told him my steps taken, ie I have 2 identical laptops and only one sticks throwing the errors when I do them one at a time so I am shipping him the single stick back as they are not matched pairs for OEM laptops like this, he will send another by return as he has plenty for other jobs he has lined up. I assume he bought a tray of 30 and sold off the ones he didn't need, he will do the Crucial RMA to save me being without. Can't fault him tbh, even reimbursing postage without me asking.

 

Yes, but that seem to be default off these days unlike before when it was default on. Always go in to change that as soon as I get a new laptop but these days it does not seem to be necassary.

 

Hello guys, should I send back my unit with that backlight bleeding http://imgur.com/a/CjOFl ?
Do you guys have unit without ANY backlight bleeding ?

I don't know what to do, it bothers me a little bit but if all unit have some backlight bleeding, I will keep it.
Maybe I can ask Dell to give me some money back (around 100 euros) for this issue and the Toshiba SSD ?

 

That is bad, I know the camera is over compensating but it all looks pinched at the bottom. the top will be you taking a picture below and not straight on??

 

Actually, it's only visible when looking straight one (I can see it when watching movies).
But I don't really see it when looking from the top or from below http://imgur.com/a/oEUGU

It's my second Dell XPS 9560. I send back the first one, because of horrible backlight bleeding.
This one has way less backlight bleeding but still...
I don't know what to do, I'm tired of sending back unit. I wouldn't mind if the laptop didn't cost me that much money....

Just to show you how much this laptop is a lottery game, the fan on my first unit was constantly running (even when doing light tasks) and was making a rattling sound (like he was hitting something during each rotation). It was annoying but I thought it was normal in the XPS.
I was so wrong, my second unit makes no noise, dead silent, the fans rarely run and when running they do not make that rattling sound.

 

I am 100% with you, on such an expensive laptop you and I expect quality and get very disappointed when it isn't, these should have proper QC after the build not just plugged into a test bed to check it works. I don't mind playing the long game getting it sorted so see what they will do regarding the screen.

I had one with an identical fan issue and opening it up to check how things were seated fn wise fixed the rotational tick. They added a leg to stop the fan casing being crushed at its weakest point, being the exit area probably to stop what you had as well with the tick.

As for the constant running that is normally due to a lot of thermal paste preventing contact and is an easy fix unless you have a chip that runs hot then nothing can prevent that, my current one runs quite hot as the fans kick in and out a lot when doing light tasks but this ones due to go back for a refund as I purchased again as Dell shipped 2 replacements that both had issues so that triggers a refund unless you argue with the resolutions team. I didn't as a code stack came up so I saved £100 returning for refund and reordering.

Back to the screen, if you can see any of that on a black background straight on then it is defective, simple as in my opinion.

Good luck and welcome to NBR, we have plenty of hints and tips to make it a good unit

 

Was this picture taken on a black screen?! Because i fail to see any black in this picture? Lemme know!

 

Is that the 1080p screen? Mine was also pinched causing a similar issue and I've sent it back.

Ordered a 4k model to replace and hoping it doesn't have the same problem. If it does then I'll be getting a refund and not buying another dell.

 

Finally after two weeks of usage I've made completely full view of XPS 15 9560/UHD/16GB/Toshiba 512GB and wana share mine thoughts to those who still deciding to buy or not (and which configuration) as well to those who bought it already and wish to do some optimizations.

Build quality: would say - probably the best after MBP.
4K display - really VERY good piece of hardware (tested it for dead pixel with mine utility - it uses solid color + interleave method for better dead pixel detection, properly working even display is scaled due to high DPI, developed by me, you can find it in attachment)
Every keypress on this keyboard feel as good as MBP keyboard, but if you press hard in the middle of keyboard - you'll notice little flexure which actually have zero impact on your experience.

Software: laptop came with polish windows 10 pro - so I have to reinstall everything using en/us iso. Product key was automatically used from BIOS. Just after reinstall I experienced poor battery life (even I install all drivers - it still drain battery too fast, I checked processor Cstates percentage via ThrottleStop utility - value was relatively low <50% but normally it could be >70% when idle). Then I installed latest updates and everything become OK.

BIOS: it came initially with 1.0.3 (afaik) but then I updated it to 1.1.3 (unfortunately... I didn't knew it have FAN issues... so if your laptop feel good - don't update to 1.1.3). BIOS setting very user-friendly, but lack of SST feature really disappointing. Bless to other people on this forum - they made complete guide how to enable this feature via UEFI shell.

Battery: 97Wh - very good battery, people usually blaming DELL for batteries with wear level around 10% ...
I would say - if you battery report full charged capacity lot less than designed capacity - just calibrate it. To do so - gently discharge your laptop from fully charged (100%) down to 5% (until it hibernates)... make sure your laptop wont sleep/hibernate before completely drain battery. As soon as it hibernates - it update battery FCC with new value.
So finally after all settings and manipulations I was able to achieve 9:30 minutes on battery (25% brightness/music/visual studio/browsing) which is very good result I think ... Of course running FHD instead of UHD - you'll get much more battery life, but UHD worth sacrifice of few hours on battery especially if the rest is still so significant.
I was able to undervolt CPU by 150mV but sometimes (when load drops from high to low, PC just hang) then I went to -130mV, ThrottleStop 8.4 doing its job like charm...

SSD: of course it could be better if it was Samsung .. but I would assure you that you wont see the difference except in synthetic tests. I tried to compile large projects in Visual studio - its fast like lighting... Disk utilization 25-40% during solution load and 1-10% during compilation, that means overall impact on the speed is relatively low.

 

@GoNz0 thanks for the welcome and the quality of your posts dude.
It's a shame, this laptop would be simply perfect without these issues. I'm going to call Dell Monday to send it back (I'm still in the return period). Not sure If I will order another one...

@stripealipe Yes this picture was taken on a black screen. With the IPS glow and the bad quality of my camera, it's doesn't look that black but in real life it is and the backlight bleeding is even more noticeable.

@cRuNcHiE no 4k screen

One more thing, I'm currently watching a movie now and maybe I'm becoming paranoid but I have the impression that the dark scenes in movies are not as sharp as in my previous unit.
It looks a little blurry like when you are watching a movie from a bad angle in a cheap screen.

 

Yes, it's pretty frustrating to see issues like this on an expensive laptop. In many ways it is a really good machine, but there are places where they cut corners and it's painfully obvious where these are (the QC being the most obvious since the majority of these issues are immediately apparent). Mine has screen flickering (but only around once per day so I haven't bothered messing with the drivers), noise crackle and takes 20 seconds to fully shut down. That is, the display turns off in less than 5 seconds, but the power button is lit and connected devices receive power for another 15. None of these really bother me so I'm keeping the machine, but it would have been nice if something this expensive came without such issues.

 

Just created an account to share with you guys another issue as ive been reading this thread for a long time. I had a replacement unit sent with an ultra loose hinge. The video shows the old and the new laptop , old one being on the right, having a tighter hinge while the replacement set has a loose hinge and "closes by itself".

FYI

 

To someone relatively new to this issue, how do you judge when light bleed is bad enough to return? Do you go to a site like this: http://lightbleedtest.com/ ? What exactly do you use to measure it? Sorry for the novice question but it's not a problem I am familiar with and I will need to assess my new laptop very quickly when it arrives before I travel. It sounds like you just throw up a black screen image and if there is significant light showing rather than black, that's the issue. But what defines significant? Any light bleed at all or needs to be more substantial?

 

I currently have a 9530 with the UHD 4k screen and considering upgrading to the 9560. One of the things I like about my 9530 is that i have the smaller battery and so have fitted a secondary storage drive. Looking at the new 9560, there doesnt seem to be an option to configure the UHD screen options with the smaller battery and hence cant fit another hd. Am i correct?

 

Depends on the sales region, it may follow our you can phone to see if you can spec one. You would be as well fitting a large fast nvme drive anyway.

Sent from my SM-G920F

 

@iunlock

Might have asked this before but since you have both, do you feel that the 4K running in FHD is as sharp as the real FHD panel? Have tried to set my 4K to 1080p but it just feel blurry, more so than I think a true FHD resolution should look on 15".

(Of course, the question is open to anyone else and not just iUnlock but please no speculation but rather actual observations)

 

About the 4K screen flickering, do we know for a fact that this isn't a hardware problem? Seems very much like it with mine which sometimes flickers like crazy for about 5-10 seconds. That said, changing was is displayed on the screen seem to affect this, mostly seen this in a browser but haven't really done more than web browsing still in it.

 

I have the FHD with 256SSD as well, do you have the part number for the SATA cable ?

 

Same as the 9550 so it will be on here somewhere if you have a search

 

Just tried this again and there is no way that the 4K in FHD can be the same as the actual FHD or that screen is really bad. Even with ClearType and font smoothing disabled it looks like crap in FHD resolution.

 

I run 4k display and would say - its not blurry when you set 1920x1080 resolution as long as you also set scale level to 100%.

 

Not sure (waiting for my DELL reseller to confirm), but should be this PN: XDYGX

 

There are two configurations in the UK that comes with the UHD screen which I'm debating over. The first is the 16gb/512gb ssd and the other being the 32gb/1tb ssd which costs £300 more. Having heard people getting the slower toshiba/lite on ssds, does anyone know if i go for the 1tb I'm more likely to get the Samsung?

 

Just tried this again and there is no way that the 4K in FHD can be the same as the actual FHD or that screen is really bad. Even with ClearType and font smoothing disabled it looks like crap in FHD resolution.

Well, mine it at least when I compare it to a 17" FHD laptop which seems strange. Cant really understand this as it should be perfect pixelmapping. I just cant seem to get the text to be sharp at FHD resolutionn, even though custom scaling is off, standard windows scaling is set too 100%, cleartype and font smoothing is off. No reason text shouldn't be sharp on a low resolution screen even though it has less pixels.

 

The part is XDYGX
Here's one on ebay:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/301999673647?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT

 

It's possible, but it doesn't strike me as likely. I've seen it more than 10 times so far when browsing, but not once when gaming. Also, people claim that messing with the Intel graphics driver seems to solve it.

Have you tried setting the resolution to the maximum value and setting the Windows scaling to 200%? That should also effectively give you FHD.

 

Yes, but if you do that, there really is not that much point in getting the 4K over the FHD and loose several hours of battery life unless you really need full color space etc.

 

Just tried to compare the XPS15 4K vs XPS13 FHD that I have and no, they are miles apart when the XPS15 4K is set to FHD. Sure, the 13" is marginally smaller than the 15" but that alone cant explain the difference. The FHD in the XPS13 is sharp in a way the XPS15 4K in FHD is not even close to.

 

I have a fhd xps13 and had both the 9560 fhd and 9560 uhd and in my opinion nothing compares to the uhd screen on the 9560. I have not been able to look at my xps13 the same again and I used to think the screen was amazing. Setting the uhd to 200% is perfect because you get all the screen space of a fhd, but it looks so much more crisp and clear. I have ordered another 9560 uhd which should arrive this week and I cannot wait.

 

And you are sure you are not liking it because you see yourself in the UHD one?

No, serioulsy, not trying to talk down the UHD, only trying to figure out if it running in FHD is actually as good as the real FHD panel.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Why are you trying to use a UHD screen at FHD resolution? What am I missing?

 

Battery life and windows 10 scaling problems. But mostly trying to see if the UHD can be used in FHD resolution without fuzziness/blur


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

1) Its not windows 10 scaling problem... but some applications (even modern ones) still developed using old way ... using old API.. while MS already developed new API for this... and added legacy scaling (ofc it add some blur to scaled image if scale factor not 200 or 300%) for old-fashion apps for backward compatibility.
2) Set scale level to 200% - your "scaled" apps wont be blurry at all (almost like 1080p using 100% scale)

 

I'm curious how it would improve battery life. You are still running the same number of pixels, is it just less strain on the gpu?

 

Display panel display same number of pixels and draw same amount of power over time...
While GPU/CPU/Memory stressed less (you need 4 times less memory and calculations when running FHD vs UHD)
But I am not sure which % of total power consumption does it take, could be relatively low. Most power taken by backlight and display matrix itself (BTW these matrices support "self refresh", dunno what is it exactly - think its kind of bandwidth saver ... just less data to transfer from PC to display)

 

How long have people waited for order tracking to update?

My first order despatched manu facility on 8th march then tracked at waalwick on the 10th and delivered on the 14th.

My new order despatched manu facility on the 22nd and there's been nothing since.

I rang up and they just repeated what the tracker says. ( Not very useful!)

 

1 or 2 flights a week so until it takes off nothing will happen. The ETA will update 1st then when it lands you will see plan committed.

 

My new order also dispatched on the 22nd. If you are from the UK, our laptops must be in the same container

 

Same boat for me and my colleague too, the tracking solution is crap, they quoted 3/4 for delivery when I ordered (20th), and the tracking says est 31/3 so :/

 

So what loads when Nvidia Inspector is loaded? Seems something runs in the background and BSOD's every time I unplug my laptop from power... I'll go in on AC power, overclock...close the program... then when I'm done gaming and need to do actual work work...I'll unplug the laptop and BSOD... it only happens after I open Nvidia Inspector... I'll need to research it a little.

 

Yes, exactly, it has been reported that the power draw is lower in FHD but not sure to what extent.

 

I think this is a driver problem.