XPS 15 9560 owners thread.

I have a chance to buy a used TB16 Thunderbolt dock relatively cheaply, however it's the 180W model. Does this work with the 9560 since Dell doesn't list it as compatible?

I would assume it would just charge the laptop more slowly but is it enough to maintain the charge? i.e. under heavy use the laptop won't start losing battery level would it?

 

That's what I have and I only use it as a charger. Not bad.

I even use a 40 watt charger from time to time, that's really slow.

 

Hey guys,

Is anyone else here having CPU throttling issues (7700HQ) when maxing out the GPU? I am not talking about thermal issues, I am talking about potential power issues.

Yesterday I was rendering a video in Premiere Pro and my GPU was pretty much maxed out at 99%, yet my CPU was running at 800-1000mhz (at 60 degrees C). Even when switching to high performance, the CPU frequency wouldn't go any higher. Which to me seems like it couldn't go any higher due to power delivery issues.

From what I understand, the 1050 should use about 75 watts of power when maxed out. Shouldn't this leave more than enough power to at least get the CPU up to a non-turbo 2.4ghz? (when using the standard 130 watt charger)

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...rature-observations-undervolt-repaste.785963/

 

Is it really a VRM issue / CPU-GPU temp issue? The VRM was at 83~84 degrees. And the CPU was at 60 degrees, GPU at 71 degrees. So it really doesn't seem like a temperature issue. More like the CPU was running out of power to use.

I plan on repasting/padding sometime next week anyway, but if that fixes this issue, then I would be really happy.

 

Yes.

 

As it has been discussed in depth on the other thread you're best asking there instead.

 

VRM - see the link referenced by GoNz0. Dell seems to have that programed to throttle when VRM temps hit about 77-78*c both in the 9550 and 9560. Some issues are that cooling in that area are poor and fact that the mosfets get quite inefficient as power rises (and when it gets hot).

Some people here have put together workarounds to reduce or prevent the throttling, including user @iunlock

No way the 1050 is running near 75 watts in the 9560. See a very quick, back-of the envelope estimate of a more reasonable range:

After searching all over for actual 1050 wattage for the 9560 a few months ago, I found nothing. So I tried to ballpark the 1050 using the CPU rough TDP of ~45 watts, some data on the 960m & 1050, other powered items in the laptop...vs... typical power output of the GPU mosfets, the 130 watt power brick size, etc., reduced for inefficiencies (15%) & cushion (10%) of say 25% total.

That gets us to 1050 in the 40-55 watt range. The lower part of the range is supported by the physical cooling challenges Dell faces with the very thin 9550-9560 chassis. And Dell's low temp vrm throttling scheme indicates the engineers are using alternative options to keep temps in check.

Maybe TDP of the GPU around about 45 is a reasonable first guess.

 

I think, it is an issue with Simplo batteries. Alienware owners also reported a similar behaviour on Simplo batteries, but not on other OEMs. I also depleted mine (took ~6-7 hours with Unity on iGPU with the UHD) and after waiting ~2.5 booted up -it wasn't fully charged. The wear is at 3.2% now. Some wear is "normal" as batteries are designed not to charge at their full capacity to expand their lives.

 

Any thoughts on replacing the stock 256gb Toshiba XG4 with a 512gb WD Black or 850 EVO? (can't seem to find many benchmarks other than synthetic for the XG4)

 

Both SSD's are a serious downgrade performance wise on the XG4. Only if you really need the space and don't care much about performance I would replace it for a WD black or 850 evo. If you really want to replace it I strongly advice you to pay a bit more money and buy a 950 evo. That one is a serious upgrade on (mostly) the seq. read/write speeds.

 

950 evo 1tb in mine, blisteringly fast drive.

 

Meant 950 evo and the NVMe WD black drive, sorry!

 

I used the laptop for actual work over the last four days. My comments so far:

• It is amazing that I can leave the house in the morning and come back at the afternoon without a need to charge it. Switching back and forth between Dell (a modify Balance) and High Performance power modes, the laptop lasts at least 6 to 7 hours at 40% brightness, with Unity and VS 2017 open. Amazing!
• The keyboard is a bit above medium. There is a good amount of space between the keys, making blind typing easy. Keys aren't silent, instead they have a tactile feedback. My left Ctrl key, while registering, doesn't sound right and is a bit wobbly -I can hear the key bumping into the membrane bellow. I pushed the key down a bit and that kinda fixed it. My only real complain is that the height of the keys is on the short side.
• The trackpad is absolutely fantastic. I felt in love with Windows 10 again thanks to it. Switching between virtual desktops and apps was never easier. It is as good as a Mac's.
• If set to "quite" on Dell's Power Manager Lite, the laptop is extremely quite.
• I played some DOTA2, it can run the game at 4K/ultra at ~35fps. However, some drops on larger battles are expected, thus, it might worth dropping to FHD on ranked matches.

I also bought myself a sleeve for the laptop. I was planning getting the Dell one. However, after seeing it in person, I was disappointed and changed my mind. The inside isn't that soft, thus, it may scratch the XPS. Also, the magnets are really weak. Instead, I got a Thule Sunterra 15" one. It is designed for the MacBook Pro 15", making it a bit more compact than other 15". It fits the XPS really well. It is well padded all around, feels really premium, has a large front pocket, and the inside is velvet-like soft. I am really happy with it. It is quite thick due to all the padding, but it will definitely keep the machine safe. I am using it as a laptop mat as well and so far it doesn't appear to block the fans, as its exterior is nylon-like instead of cloth.

 

Thanks for the review!

What do you guys generally think about Premiere Color? Do you recommend adding it after a fresh install? What, if any, other Dell specific apps or drivers do you load after a fresh install?

 

The Premiere Color isn't that bad, as it allows an easy switch between different display profiles. I think, now that Windows got a built-in "night reading mode", it's less needed. Still, I would install it.

The Dell's Power Manager Lite is worth adding. My XPS was missing it out of the box. It is good for switching between power modes, cooling profiles, and even tweaking your battery charging settings.

As for the rest, let Windows install what it needs. Definitely don't install Killer's Performance Suite, as it is anything other than "performance enhancing". Oh! And don't forget to download nVidia's GeForce Experience --it will install and update your dGPU drivers.

 

GeForce experience can **** right off

 

Premier Color is a must have for me. Without it it's impossible to choose what colorgamut windows uses. You could create an icc profile but most applications don't give sh*t about icc profiles and you end up with an oversaturated screen.

Only other option is to use a program that can use LUT to map the colors differently and apply it system wide. DisplayCal is such program. Because my colorimeter is broken (doesn't read the luminance of red correctly) everything is of. Once I get another one I will try it again and see if DisplayCal can replace Premier Color.

Bad thing about Premier Color is that it's very picky what display driver you use. With some versions of the Intel drivers it work, while other drivers aren't workly correctly and only change the gamma but not the whole gamut.

My current working setup is Intel 46.29 from station drivers and the premier color version from the 9550 download page. With this combo everything is working correctly and I don't get flickering, lag or BSOD's. Took a while to figure it out but now I'm a happy person!

Using sRGB btw because almost anything online is based on sRGB and although I edit a lot of photos, sRGB is my standard because of that reason. Plus I almost never print...

 

Some observations on my new xps 15 9560, and hoping someone can save me from having to return it.

I got primarily because the touchpad is the most amazing I've ever tried. My fingers do not glide easily over most touchpads and I always feel like I'm fighting them. Sure I could use a mouse, but I like working at coffee shops and on the couch and not interested in dragging a mouse around with me everywhere. If I return this xps, I'd probably get a macbook pro except for the fact that the dell xps touchpad works way better for me than the latest model macbook I tried in the store.

So the touchpad lived up to it's promise, it's perfect. The screen is great, battery life seems good, the screen is beautiful, it's relatively thin and light. And I got it for a great price from Microcenter, $1899 for 1tb ssd, 4k display, i7, 16gb. So I really don't want to return it.

I intended to use it for some light programming, which it seems great for, and for audio production and games both of which have problems.

First thing I noticed was that something was buzzing when the speakers were playing over about 40%. Seems like it is a loose caps lock key; when I hold that key down the problem goes away. Not great, but not a dealbreaker by itself.

Right out of the box the dpc latency was terrible. Removing bloatware and shutting off many services that seemed unnecessary, I was able to get it pretty close to acceptable. The "killer" wifi, of course was still causing problems. I can understand why 14-year-old boys who buy laptops with adorned with giant red cooling fins and silver alien likenesses would be into a wifi card which maybe shaves a few microseconds off of a 50 millisecond ping time, but why would a prospective customer of a dell xps want this thing which causes so many problems and solves none? Why not just a plain vanilla intel card? Anyway, shutting off wifi makes the dpc latency, according to latencymon, just fine, so I could live with having to shut off wifi when doing some audio work.

Then I went to play Rocksmith, the guitar game, and the lag between plucking a string and hearing the note through the speakers was unacceptable at maybe 1/2 a second. I have no lag at all on my 3 year old asus (with a bad touchpad). I read through everything I could find on the problem and got the lag down to maybe 1/3 of a second, still unacceptable. I played with the number of buffers and buffers sizes in the Rocksmith settings, tried disabling Waves, tried installing the Realtek driver from the Realtek site, tried using the Microsoft driver, updated the bios and drivers to the latest (as of today) and probably a few other things I'm forgetting, nothing worked.

Then as I'm preparing to box it up for a return I plugged in my USB 3.0 external drive to backup the 60gb of audio stuff I'd downloaded over the last few days, when the drive immediately started hanging up. Moved it over the Asus, worked fine. Tried a different USB port on the XPS and it sort of worked for a while and then died. Tried it again on the Asus, just fine.

It's a shame that this thing has been so buggy for me because that touchpad will be sorely missed. Can anyone save me from returning this, any ideas to fix the audio and USB external HD problems?

 

I have a 9550 which is very similar to the 9560.

- The USB3 ports are wonky. One tends to work better than the other. They seem to work better if I have Windows set to do nothing when plugging stuff in.

- XPS latency out of the box is terrible. Follow this thread for tips to get latency to very good levels. It takes time and effort. Page 3 of the thread has LatencyMon picture with results that you should be able to meet or exceed.

http://forum.pianoworld.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/2625443/Re:_Laptop_recommendations_for.html

 

Is the USB external drive powered? I've had much better luck when I use a powered usb hub.

 

You can always replace the Killer crap with an Intel NIC instead like I did.

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

 

This DPC has me worried again about Dells lack of QC and repeating hardware problems...

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

 

You should not be panicing over my latency comments. I have a very special usage scenario (massive audio files being played real-time that require ultra-low latency). You probably don't need this level of latency performance.

Probably every windows computer requires significant tweaking to get near these latency levels. You will see in one of the XPS latency threads a picture of LatencyMon results after tweaking the XPS 6300HQ; no issues.

 

I am not, i worry about my own latency problems

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

 

New Intel graphics driver from Intel - ver 15.45.18.4664!
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/do...phics-Driver-for-Windows-15-45-?product=98909

 

Is there any way to test if the Premier Color app is working correctly? When I change profiles, it only changes brightness and whatever settings I customised on a profile. The colors don't change at all, every profile is equally saturated for me.

 

Try moving a slider in the Intel control panel and after that change profiles in premier color.

 

Have been trying for a few hours to get rid of the DPC latency problems with the XPS 15 on a fresh windows installation but it just won't happen. No matter what I've tried they are still there. Everything seems to point to ACPI.sys problems (ie Network related).

Really not impressed and have started considering if I should get an Thinkpad P51 instead.

 

I just installed it..

so far so good?

 

I had a similar problem. Latency problems was reflecting as mouse microstutters. It was happening randomly with out some specific time interval and even while laptop was on ilde. After analysis with latencymon i have found that main cause of the problem pointing to wifi card and ndis.sys. Now I have replaced Killer with Intel 8265 and so far so good. Will keep you updated.

 

My problem is that I already dig The same but am still seeing the same problems although much better than with Killer installed.

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

 

Has downgrading worked for you ? Isnt HDD/SSD password equivalent to SED password in BIOS or is it different ?


What is recommended intel drivers for 9560 now ? 4664 from intel ; 4627 from dell or still 4590?

 

Yes, but then I had some other problems so I am running on latest BIOS now. That said, the a complete reinstallation and some tuning of BIOS and system setting has decreased the fan noise from the XPS quite a lot. And it is also drowned by the HORRIBLE fan in the TB16 dock which seem to have been purposely built to cut through any ambient noise there is. Ironic that when Dell finally was able to build a dock that worked they managed to make we want to throw it into a wall for other reasons

The XPS15 BIOS does not have a HDD/SSD password unfortunately AFAIK. Yet another reason I am considering the P51 as I have now to run my 960 Pro with BitLocker anyway which isnt so fun. Might be different on the Precision line though.

All of the above said, I must say that after having thrown out the Killer NIC crap and replaced with an Intel NIC, made a complete Windows reinstallation, tuned some settings in BIOS and Windows, I am now having a setup that seems quite nice. Sure, there are still DPC problems but they seem to have decreased also now.

 

Delete post, I made a thread.

 

Curious, I have a strange feeling that the max brightness on my 4K varies from time to time. Sometimes it seems OK bright and sometimes it feels a bit dim even in a quite dark room. And I have checked to see the adaptive brightness in power settings isn't on (seem to be off these days by default). Anyone else noticed something similar?

And yes, I know the most likely answer is probably imagination

 

Maybe try disabling Dynamic ICC color management in Premier Color? Unsure if that would help

 

Dont even have it installed but thanks for the tip

 

Still noone that has managed to get SED (Self Encryption Device) to work on a SSD connected to an XPS15 (that does not have support for BitLocker that is)? Like Samsung 960 Pro.

 

Just buy SED drive and enable BitLocker ... that's all you need..
XPS 15 have builtin TMP (trusted platform module) which handle your task easily... but of course requires SED compatible drive

 

Ideally this would be the case but it would seem the mainstream drives are missing an important component that works with bitlocker even though they are SED.

 

AFAIK there are only 2 options needed, but BOTH are required to work....
1) SED drive
2) supported TPM (if you don't want to specify password every time you boot-up)

And yes .. most systems doesn't have TPM (at least all my previous laptop didn't have TPM .. but 9560 does)

 

To be fair you have a bit more to learn then.

960 evo is a SED and I have TPM yet without the eDrive component bitlocker doesn't work on a hardware encrpted level that you would expect only software being decrypted on the fly taking up CPU cycles.

IEEE 1667 is missing whereas hardware based (SED) requires IEEE 1667 and TCP OPAL, the drives only have OPAL.

It is more annoying when you spend £400 to find this out!

 

My battery wear consistently read 3.8% after I followed the advice on here to calibrate it. A few weeks later, and all of a sudden my battery wear is reading 6.9%. Do I re-calibrate again? Surely this can't be normal wear that dramatically in just two weeks? Any other steps to take?

 

Yeah leave it alone and check in a couple of months.

 

Frequent calibrations will do more harm than good, as you will wear your battery.

There is definitely an issue with Simplo batteries, used by Dell, which report a variable battery wear. So far, there aren't any data, here or in the AW lounges (where this was observed), to support that the issue is hardware and not just FW.

 

BitLocker could support OPAL 2... but I am afraid it doesn't support old OPAL, at least it looks so according to your expirience

 

Opal isn't the issue it's the lack of IEEE1667.. gits.

 

Leave it here: https://vxlabs.com/2015/02/11/use-t...-disk-encryption-your-tcg-opal-ssd-with-msed/

For those who not have OPAL 2/IEEE1667 drive but does have TCG OPAL