XPS 15 9560 owners thread.

I seriously doubt it, a desktop isn't going to put out 60w.

 

Lmao, are you joking? The only thing worse than HP's huge bezels and ****ty engineering is their support. Sure the XPS line may have quality control issues but at least they are willing to replace it and you can get replacement parts / machines easily unlike HP. Their customer support is atrocious / non existent. Good luck waiting for the tech support team to take 274749 days to get back to you, if you can even get a hold of them .

 

I just want to add one other question to this one. Would you guys speculate that almost all lag issues (I am having some lag with some random software) are related to the 630 graphics driver?

 

I honestly doubt that there is any company that could give me a worse experience than what I got with my Dells.

 

I used to contract HP years ago, trust me it can be worst!
The only good warranty is the one where they ship user changeable parts.

I would show up with the wrong part, phone the engineers line (not a UK call centre) and spend about 20 minutes arguing with the guy on the phone that I had confirmed a faulty memory stick by using my own test parts and they would still send a motherboard

 

Dell support takes a lot of flack, but the next day at home warranty has been a big plus for me. The support staff may not always be that knowledgeable, but when push comes to shove and something needs fixing or replacing, it's usually a pretty fast process.

 

Had an Elitebook, and in short: HP was "competitive" in that ;-)

 

Yes and probably not. Type C supports up to 100w all you need is a docking station or charger. A lot of type C ports are only supporting the old USB 3.0 charging standard...or even USB 2.0. Worse, because of compatibility issues with some cables the laptop could potentially draw too much power from the port and fry it.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/4/10916264/usb-c-russian-roulette-power-cords

 

Did anyone try to play Dawn of War III on his/her XPS 15? If so, how does it run?

 

How the hell do you get rid of this Killer Software crap? Even the uninstaller is crap and keep crashing. Should I just get a quality product from Intel instead and throw the Killer NIC where it belong (in the trash can)? What Intel replacement card do you recommend?

Is http://www.killernetworking.com really their main website or is it a scam? Doesn't even have their office address listed.

Should I get an Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265 to replace this crap?

 

My battery no longer charges past 87wh matching it's 9% wear level after a few days using the battery whilst on holiday. ffs.
It used to charge to the full 97wh and go past the wear level rating...

 

Hi!

Can someone please run a latency test (using latencymon) and post the results?

 

Realtek drivers in "Audio Input/Outputs" and "Sound,video, and game controllers" should suffice. I came from a clean install (which rendered audio mute), but then let Windows update grab the necessary audio drivers (and didn't bother with Dell's). All has been well since.

 

I guess you have made sure no battery charge mode is activated that would cause this?

 

Thanks for the reply and... my collegue have a macbook (2016) and he use an Aukey charger with a typeC cable for his mac.
Do you think that i can use the same solution?.

really thanks for the link.

 

Thanks. When I uninstalled the Realtek driver and rebooted, it magically was back and reinstalled again. Perhaps I'm doing things in the wrong order..

 

This was aida64 saying it was at it's wear level capacity, windows said 100% charged. I have since done a discharge and now it thinks it has 4% wear level wtf :|

Will be a couple of hours until it is charged.

 

Probably the firmware in the battery read the max charge wrong and then by discharging you did a battery calibration. The 4% should be your actual wear level. It happened to me quite often with my MacBook Pro 17 and in December with the MSI GS43VR (which had wear out of the box).

Windows will show 100% charged irrelevant to the wear level; the battery reports to the OS if it reached its current reported capacity. In fact, in most notebooks it will report 100% even if the charge is bellow 100%.

 

I installed the beta to try it and the game runs terrible.....It did not matter how low I set the resolution it still could barely break 17 fps. I made sure to double check that it was running on the GTX 1050 and it was. Must be something very wrong with that game because the graphics did not seem all that great.

 

I encounter a bug on my desktop (specs on the sign) at home, where the game runs poorly and looses my settings. I reset my preferences and restart the game. I get 60fps @ 3440x1440 all maxed out (v-sync on). I would expect the 1050 to at least run the game on medium/high at 1080p... :-/

 

Annoyingly it came with 9% out the box, I ran 2 complete discharges and it made bugger all difference despite it charging beyond the 84wh capacity reported in aida64 to the full 97wh capacity, now it has stopped at the new 4% wear level 92.4wh

I wonder if the new BIOS has something to do with it?

 

Ouch! A 9% wear it is a bit much out of the box. I am still waiting for mine, as it is on the slow ship from China, but this makes me worry -nearly as much as cancelling my order.

A quick search online, it shows multiple posts on Reddit about the 9560 reporting high wear levels. I wonder who is the manufacturer of the battery. In the AW13 R3 (my other option), they source batteries from LGC and Simplo. The later proved to be the culprit of reporting various, inconsistent wear levels.

 

What's the best way to test your battery wear and overall health?

 

Simplo and all 3 9560's had 9 or 10% out the box, if was one of the reasons for returning the 1st 2. As they still charged to rated capacity I made do with the 3rd as it was the only issue but when I noticed today it had stopped charging past the wear level I threw my toys out the pram and ended up calling the managed a rather nasty word and letting him know I will be doing a chargeback as he refused to action a new battery.

 

I personally use HWInfo ( https://www.hwinfo.com/download.php) as it has a portable version (no installation needed).

 

I use Aida64 to check a lot of things and forgot to return my engineers licence with my last employer so I happily use it at home to test things, under power management it shows battery health and a lot more.

You can get battery apps from lots of places http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-tools-analyze-laptop-battery-life/

 

Albeit the lack of a significant sample, I think Simplo screw up. It can't be a coinsistence if AW and XPS machines have the same battery issues when Simplo-made batteries are used. The question is if are there other OEMs supplying batteries to Dell for the XPS15 or is it just Simplo? If it is just them, I get even more doubts at getting my XPS now. :-/

 

Thanks. So if it shows the capacity as 87.438 mwh, that's pretty bad for a one month old laptop, right? That's 9.9% wear.

You get 1 year warranty on the battery regardless of your other warrant? If so, how low does that % wear have to be to get a replacement nearing the one year mark?

 

Have you done a battery calibration before? If not, do one. Also, in theory, you will have <=5% out of the box, but it should stay stable around that. A ~10% is indeed high.

Batteries are classified are consumables, thus, they are limited to one year. Based on the AW13 thread, Dell should consider 10%+ high out of the box/within a small amount of time. Obviously, the more time you use the laptop, the expected wear level rises.[/QUOTE][/QUOTE]

 

It seems like you've made capacity qualification cycle...
Once you discharge your battery - windows rewrite FCC.
So before you going to update FCC - make sure you fully charged your battery.
if you set to charge your battery no more than 90% and then suddenly do FCC update - it will count 10% wear level instantly...
But that's reversible.
Just recharge your battery and then let it make qualification discharge to update FCC again.

 

Thanks a lot for the reply. What is the best way to do a battery calibration? I've never done this before on a laptop so pardon my ignorance.

Also, if 10% is high out of the box, what is the % they would do a replacement after around 11 months? I figure if it's a weak battery, I still could be better off just replacing it later this year. I have a new laptop and would rather not deal with tech support right now over this.

 

Actual wear level is much less than you think...
It just FCC value...
Charge your battery to the full capacity then gently discharge. make sure you discharged it gently don't allow it to sleep/hibernate e,t,c, until it goes flat - then windows updated FCC again...
By default windows turn off your PC at 5% battery - that means FCC will be updated with value 5% less than actual capacity.
So those of you who says they lost 5% instantly - just faced this misbehavior when windows updated FCC at 5% of capacity with 95% of actual capacity.

If you set charge behavior to stop at 95% and then do qualification cycle - FCC will be updated with 95-5=90% of actual capacity.

 

I have no clue. The issue with Dell is that it really depends on who your support rep is. My best advice -which I plan to do myself- is to drop them an email now. Pick your language carefully, don't ask for a replacement now, but "let them know" that you will need a future replacement. This way you have a record yourself about it, in case you need to ask for a replacement at the future.

 

Thanks! What do you mean by 'gently'? I just disable the sleep/hibernate settings to 'never'. Can I use the computer while it's draining the battery?

And sorry for my ignorance again, but what is FCC (full capacity charge?)? Is there anything else I'm supposed to do besides draining it and letting it turn itself off at 0 or 5% of whenever it automatically turns off if I disable sleep/hibernation and then fully charging it after? Can I use the laptop while it's recharging back to 100% or is this process supposed to be done with the computer idle?

 

As I said before, when new despite the 9% it charged to the designed capacity not the fully charged capacity (the one accounting for the wear level) Without doing the math about 110% of the wear level. Even though this didn't change with 2 full discharges it has now gone to 4% wear level and charged to that level now. Maybe the new BIOS sorted it out now I have calibrated again.

For those trying to fully discharge when it shuts down at 5% boot into the BIOs and let it sit until it shuts down then let it charge to full and see where you stand.

I had set my battery to custom charge and set that to 100% to get this result.

 

You can use it, I set a stress test to run it down quick then went into BIOS until it shut down.

 

You can use it of course .. but 'gently' - means don't run heavy apps (3d games e.t.c.) during calibration. Use of heavy apps might cause innacurate result or even non-qualification cycle (FCC wont be updated)

 

Letting it shutdown in the BIOS did absolutely nothing for me ... FCC was set at 5% of remaining capacity
HWInfo says I have 96991 mWh but FCC 91713 mWh - which is actual capacity were drain until 5% reached and windows shutdown.

 

What does your fully charged capacity report?

 

Thanks everyone. It appears the calibration did add almost 6% on the battery level. But that brings me to my next concern. Is the battery wear % a direct reading of how 'fresh' the battery is? Or can two different batteries read 5% wear but one has a lot more 'life' left in it than another?

It seems really disappointing that with only chrome running. No videos, no heavy software, and the screen brightness set to 26%, battery bar as well as the built in battery meter are projecting just 3:50 on a full charge. What gives? Shouldn't it be saying 6 or 7+ hours when on a full charge with a dim screen and little else running? Is that estimate usually accurate, and if so, what should I make of it/do about it?

 

Have you looked at what is consuming the battery? Click on "Battery usage by app" under the battery overview in the settings. I only have Firefox visibly running, but the settings application itself as well as Dell's Premier Color and the Logitech control app I use to customize my mouse also show up. It might be that you have something else in the background.

It might also be that the battery meter is confused in general. I just tried it and mine shows a little over 11 hours while browsing Firefox at 20% screen brightness. It would be nice if this were true, but I doubt the battery will last that long.

 

I ran it down to 38% and it was pretty much right on track for it's estimate of 3:50 (2:15 to get to 38% from full). I checked the usage stats and it showed basically nothing consuming significant power other than Chrome. 3:50 is extremely disappointing as I was reading people getting 6+ hours with the 4k display and <50% brightness when not using the computer in an intense way.

That's why I am wondering if all 5% wear's are created equal or if two batteries with the same wear level can actually be at different stages of performance. I haven't yet disabled the touch screen but nothing I've read indicates it will add much more than 30 minutes so something seems really wrong here.

 

Two identical-model batteries with the same wear level should have the same performance. If one is depreciated faster, then there is something faulty with it. However, it isn't that straight forward to blame it to the battery.

Chrome is a battery eater, I prefer Firefox or even Edge over it. Also, you need to check your other settings. I.e. which battery mode are you on and did you change anything? Do you have other services running? Or any other software -which might look insignificant to you, but it can be badly coded.

 

I'm using Dell Active power plan. I've extended the time a bit for when the screen turns off and when the computer goes to sleep but nothing crazy and that shouldn't be related to battery time while using the laptop. As I mentioned, it's mostly just Chrome showing significant power consumption in the usage statistics. Do you think Chrome alone can account for 2 hours less time on battery? Should I change it from Dell Active to something else? I do have four extensions running (Adblock Plus and a few other things like that) but it would seem strange that those would be the cause.

I can disable touch and can take key brightness down to the middle setting in the BIOS but I assume that won't do much.

 

The simple way to test this is to close chrome and see how the results change.
Due to everyone using laptops differently to the next person it is impossible to compare results unless everyone has the same programs running and does a set test bench to get a result and I doubt anyones going to go that far. Even ambient temps will change results due to fans kicking in.

 

How can I get Dell power plan after clean reinstall? Dell Power Manager does not add this profile.

 

As I mentioned FCC is 91,713 mWh
But that's just a number having nothing with real capacity which is actually 5% higher.
You might notice it when charging your battery to full.
It just stay on 99%..100% few times more than 98%..99%. Last time it took for me about half hour to charge last percent

 

It seems like your PC configured to eat a lot ...
You might use a lot of tweaks to make your laptop faster (e.g. disable C states e.t.c.) but that's make it power hungry
Mine last result is 9:30 minutes from full charge to 5% at 25% brightness - even more than working day.
I used laptop for surfing (edge), development (visual studio 2017), listen to music (groove all day).
I've made all necessary tweaks I usually do on new PC.
Remember - one little change you might have to PC settings might dramatically affect battery drain.
These processors very powerful to eat your battery in couple hours but also implement a lot of power saving tweaks - use them all to get decent battery life.

 

Hi all!
I'm considering buying XPS with 4K display, but also would like to have a possibility to install additional SSD. That means smaller, 56Whr battery. I would be using it mostly on my desk with AC adapter plugged in. I cannot see anywhere to buy XPS with 4K option with smaller battery. Is it because some 4K hardware restrictions or purely because of let's say just 2-3hrs work-on-battery time? Does that configuration actually make any sense? Did anyone tried that? Thanks for any help in here.

 

The UHD SKU gets less time on battery due to the display having to display (and needs to power) four times more pixels than the FHD one. I believe that Dell doesn't offer the smaller battery with the UHD as the main reasons to go with the XPS15 is its incredible performance in a small, portable chassis. Good portability -at least in my mind- doesn't mean just small dimensions and weight, but also having sufficient battery life. The UHD with the 56Whr would just run dry in no time, defeating one of the selling points of the XPS line.

You can go with the 1TB SSD SKU and then use an external drive with Thunderbolt, if you need much more space.

If you plan keeping your laptop on a desk, as a desktop replacement, why are you going after the XPS compare to i.e. a Clevo, Alienware, etc?