XPS 15 9560 owners thread.

Just curious, do the XPS laptops have a proper power cord/battery logic, that if you have power cord connected 24/7, the battery is totally bypassed, or is it charged/discharged constantly in its upper 1-2% all the time?

 

You can enable a function that bypasses the battery, yes.

 

I'm facing an issue with my 2 years old ( XPS 15 9560 4K - i7), it started happening 3 days ago .
Whenever i start playing a game using my (GTX 1050) it produces a buzzing noise "not a coil whine"
here's a preview

Any thoughts on the culprit or how to stop it ?

 

No idea. Does it buzz when only on battery power or mains power or both? Does it buzz when using the nvidia card only? Do you have a failing HDD installed (only for units with the small 2.5" additional HDD)?

- Look carefully at the board around sound area for any physical damage, dislodged parts, oxidation (green, white, etc.) You need a loop and bright light as the parts are so small.

- Maybe the coil whine comes from the coils which are the big square silver boxes. You could try gently (!) touching that with a non-conductive rubber to see if that dampens the sound. Be extremely careful not to short out parts or dislodge delicate soldier. Also battery is very dangerous.

- Check battery health via software. Does the battery look in good condition with no swelling etc?

- Is the buzzing from that area? If so, that silver colored block with a black screw covers a cable jack for the screen. It could be loose and has odd installation. The black screw is JIS so you can't use a regular phillips tip or you will strip the screw. Be very careful with the cable underneath as the pins are extremely small and delicate; do not touch any of the contacts for bending or contamination! I would not remove the cable unless necessary.

- You might carefully check the surrounding cables are properly seated in that area. Be really careful with the battery cable as that can be dangerous.

- Check the surrounding screws are firmly installed.

EDIT - I also am thinking about one of the fans being dirty, dislodged, failing. You can lubricate the fans but generally when these cheapos start to fail there is no easy recovery. I did lubricate the fans of a macbook pro a few years ago with some silicone and that worked ok.

 

@pressing

-The buzzing stays on in both plugged and battery state.

-Battery wise i removed it yesterday cause the track-pad is really hard to click as its a bit swollen underneath . Although Dell's CPM indicates that ( battery health=◙ ◙ ◙ ○ |good| )
https://i.ibb.co/0ySgF1W/image.png.

-I only have an SSD installed .

-Fans where a bit dusty i did my best cleaning them both without removing them .

-The attached preview of the noise was recorded with the fan unplugged .

-I double checked the screws .

-The noise starts when i use the GTX GPU only and it gets insane in Path of exile more than anything else ! .

 

Ok, swollen battery is a common problem. That means it is failing and needs to be replaced ASAP. Dell had a battery warranty on some XPS models but I don't know if yours would be covered for free. These batteries store a lot of energy and are dangerous when unstable.

I can't say much about the buzzing. There are not many GPUs failing on XPS models. I would guess the buzzing is from power conversion and filtering. If you don't see any damage to components/board and can't identify sound source with ears/by lightly pressing the coils with non-conductive rubber..that makes search tougher. Not convinced there is a DIY fix unfortunately.

Search the forum for location of the coils related to the dGPU.

These laptops are not good for gaming unfortunately. The thermal design is light and the power conversion is under-engineered. Part of this is due to very thin profile.

You could try reducing the GPU (and maybe CPU) power demands by reducing framerates etc. Maybe try running Windows Power options on balanced. Install Dell Command-Power Manager and run on cool. Also CPU & GPU undervolting, underclocking . . Doug Black has some good guides. There are some repasting guides here that might improve cooling a bit.

You might check BIOS and all drivers are upto date. Maybe use DDU and reinstall latest nVidia drivers. I don't see why these steps would help but who knows.

If you are still on warranty that is the best path.

 

thanks for the input !

 

@pressing

Sorry to bother , I double checked and the buzzing sound is coming from HERE

is this the GPU ?

 

The CPU and GPU are under the black pipes (between the fans).

You have indicated the PCH. You can do some research on temperatures as that seems to have some overheating issues (using external screen, using dock, charging, etc.). Not sure if you have a heating issue from gaming but maybe you will find some tips searching for "9550 PCH". This get you started.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/9550-bios-1-5-1.810889/page-3

 

Mind some of the power circuitry is slightly to the right of the PCH.

 

... what?

 

Well, I mean you can enable a function where the battery only charges up to whatever percentage you choose. After that, the laptop runs completely on AC and does not use the battery. You can also choose a different system where the laptop only charges during specific times, and otherwise just runs of AC. If you meant whether the laptop also does this by default when fully charged, I do not know. I believe the laptop just continuously trickle charges to 100%, but I have never tested it.

 

Hi all,

I am having a weird issue where the laptop won't reboot. only shut down. So I am unable to update anything that requires a restart. I have factory reset BIOS settings, and no luck.

Anyone experienced this or know a fix?

Thanks

 

Dell Command Deploy WinPE Driver Pack
This package contains the Dell Command Deploy WinPE driver pack. To see the list of drivers that are updated as part of the driver pack, go to https://Dell.com/command. Click Dell Command | Deploy, scroll through the list, and click the respective cab file for your system.
Fixes & Enhancements
- Updated release with new drivers.
Version
Version 1.0, A16
Category
Systems Management
Release date
23 Jan 2020
Last Updated
23 Jan 2020
Importance
Optional
https://www.dell.com/support/Home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=JC0KJ

 

Hi
In my 9560 I see rare events (~2 per hour) where the whole laptop STOPs for whole seconds

On latest 0.18.0 BIOS I've matched this issue with hundreds of SMI triggered by the BIOS.
I also see a 4 SMIs every time I change the brightness.
Bios 0.16.0 is also affected


downgrading to BIOS 0.12.1 avoids the problem
BIOS in-between I've not tested.

Do anybody seen this rare but show-stopping event for audio recording / DAW?

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/...auses-SECONDS-of-SMI-latency-not/td-p/7477967

 

Thanks for demonstrating that IDLT @pedro estrela

I will run the IDLT on my 9550 for a while and post back if I see issues. I haven't for 15 minutes.

Using the F11 & F12 keys to adjust brightness also causes me big bumps in latency on IDLT charts. However, using the windows software slider to adjust brightness causes no excessive latency hits. I am on penultimate BIOS I think.

Dell revised BIOS several times relating to brightness on some XPS 15 models. If I remember correctly BIOS revisions:

- Reduced popping noise when using F11 & F12 to adjust brightness. Never fully resolved
- Maybe reduced max brightness available
- There was some color reproduction issues also (for photographers etc.)

FYI - I use the 9550 for live audio (piano VIs). It is not bad from a DPC latency perspective (it was bad during the first year or so). It does have a few pops and crackles per hour so is not perfect. The newest XPS has some real DPC issues.

Some ideas that might help slightly:

- nVidia drivers. You might get slightly better DPC latency results with a clean install of windows. The nVidia drivers are notorious. Maybe you don't bother to install them and just use the igpu or use O&O for barebones nVidia install (then prevent MS from auto installing/updating nVidia software.

- Undervolting GPU. Also, it seems undervolting the iGPU & iGPU unslice can adversely impact DPC Latency. Don't.

- Dell Command I Power manager. "Ultra Performance" might permit more aggressive fans and a bit more power consumption.

- Kill variable CPU speeds. This might make your laptop very hot so you need to use caution.
--Disable SpeedStep in BIOS
--Disable c-states in BIOS
--That might lock out all turbo speeds. A work around is via ThrottleStop software, which can help lock mid-turbo clocks. I enable SST there and set EPP=0. And usually locks down clocks. You might not want speedshift running at all but a lot of laptop makers lock out turbos when c-states are disabled so this was the only trick I found to lock clocks near peak frequencies.

--You might need to shut down some cores in BIOS to reduce temps.

- A good repaste helps thermals a lot on these laptops. You can try undervolting the CPU but Kaby Lake units don't undervolt too much.

 

thanks for these tips, great information for sure.

I've now split the pictures to clarify to others that the brightness topic is NOT the latency issue here;
this is just to validate that I'm measuring the SMIs correctly.
https://github.com/pestrela/smi_counter#a-bios-0180-smi-problems

 

True.

The brightness topic is just one identified issue that seemingly can be bypassed by avoiding f11 and f12 buttons.

The nVidia driver issue is a bit more painful. The unidentified issues are most painful.

 

My 2.5 years old XPS 9560 just started having coil whine, few weeks ago. Coincidentally it started occuring when I tried to do some gaming on the laptop few weeks ago - never gamed on it before and don't think I ever will, thermal throttling galore. I gamed for a total of 5h at max during a 10 day period but it was not enjoyable at all - the fans were ramped up to overtime and after 30-45 mins the throttling kicked in. I was undervoleted as well with ThrottleStop and limited my turbo frequencies to 3.2 GHz. But here I am now, the whine which WAS NOT there before is constant now. I cleaned the fans and replaced the thermal paste 2 days ago. No go. All drivers are up to date from DELL, and Intel/nVidia respectively.


Update; coil whine kicks in when the fans kick in as soon as I connect my external monitor via USB-C cable - but I always used it with external monitor.

 

UPDATE: the SMIs latency problem returned even on BIOS 0.12.1. It happens every 30minutes,

It is perfectly correlated with DellSupportAssistRemedationService that does a full PCI inventory every 30m. Disabling this service avoids the problem (again!).


----
windows_count_smi log:

2020-02-22 13:19:28,504033800+00:00 1582377568.504033800 SMI 192
2020-02-22 13:49:29,709938000+00:00 1582379369.709938000 SMI 192
2020-02-22 14:19:31,464194900+00:00 1582381171.464194900 SMI 192
2020-02-22 14:49:32,292745300+00:00 1582382972.292745300 SMI 192​

DellSupportAssistRemedationService.log

20-02-22 13:19:26,938 [4] [ERROR] Failed to detect audio playing. #StackInfo#
20-02-22 13:49:28,208 [4] [ERROR] Failed to detect audio playing. #StackInfo#
20-02-22 14:19:29,470 [4] [ERROR] Failed to detect audio playing. #StackInfo#
20-02-22 14:49:30,732 [4] [ERROR] Failed to detect audio playing. #StackInfo#​

 

Because the problem is now on the service and not on the BIOS, I expect this to affect multiple XPS versions

could anyone that is experienced on WSL to run my script? The full instalation instructions are on the file itself
https://github.com/pestrela/smi_counter

thank you

 

UPDATE #2:

• Previously I recommended to just disable the services.
  • This is not enough. Something reactivated the services some week(s) later.
• New recommendation: Un-Install all Dell sofware with has "support" in the title.

 

Hi guys,

I have recently 'upgraded' the screen on my 9560 7300HQ from 1080p to the 4K UHD version (previous was damaged in use outdoors).

However, I have had problems with the maximum brightness since making the switch. I am absolutely convinced that this is lower than it should be, and have tried all sorts of hardware and software fixes to no avail.

Then it hit me that it might possibly be limited by the system, as I have not upgraded the battery from the 53 Wh to the larger 97 Wh. However, it is not my understanding that battery capacity would affect screen brightness.

Interestingly Intel Graphics Command HQ reports the screen gamma as 3.55, but I believe this should actually be 2.31 https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-15-9560-i7-7700HQ-UHD-Laptop-Review.200648.0.html

Can anyone help me solve this mess?

 

Hi everyone,

I got a quick q regarding getting a eGPU. I like to use one and display via the laptop. I understand that 9560 has very little bandwidth to do so.

I like to use it to play Modern Warfare: Warzone in 1080P. What is the min video card I need to do so to run the game smoothly (60 fps).

Thanks

 

egpu.io is the site for this. Do a search. You need x4 pcie lanes; some thunderbolt controllers have only x2. That site has some data on the various laptop # of lanes

https://egpu.io/forums/builds/hp-om...s-9370-2017-15-dell-xps-9560-biiz/#post-53178

 

Hi Guys!
It's time for me to change the battery. I'm looking for the 97wh verson.
Do you know where can I buy a new original one?

 

If something is interested bought one directly from Dell for 55£

 

Hey, did you buy it off Dell's store or through contacting customer support? I don't see a 55£ version anyone on the UK store. Thanks.

 

Hey all, had battery swelling on my 9560 last fall so I replaced it with what I thought was a a Dell battery but I think it was a fake. Only get 45min-1hr on a charge. Hoping to get a REAL replacement so I can get back to the 3-4hrs I used to get when it was new (still not a great battery life). Is there a "go-to" place to buy the battery? I found this: https://www.newegg.com/p/16J-001J-01445

It has the Dell logo on it but since it's not shipped from NewEgg itself, I worry it could be an offbrand too

 

Where did you buy the fake?

 

This looks like a legitimate Dell parts supplier and repair shop. I haven't used them before but this looks more legit than eBay, Amazon, etc. No guarantees this is legit as I haven't seen a 100% certain supplier of these batteries.

https://www.parts-people.com/index.php?action=category&id=143&subid=1201&refine=battery

 

I just called the UK customer service and they sent me a new 97wh battery. It's refurbished with 90% of health. Pretty happy for 55£ tho.

 

Anyone else using an external monitor with the 9560? I'm getting a 4k 28" monitor and I'm hoping to run it 4k 60hz through my USB-c to DP. Wondering how the usbc does with 4k 60hz....hoping its not going to crush my laptop trying to run it...I'll probably game at 1080p still...scaling shouldn't be too bad...

 

I dont think that works. Mostly just 4k@30Hz.

 

I recall at a certain point in time 4k@60Hz became possible with a dedicated USB-C adapter (all wires used for nothing else than video). Not sure if 9560 and which adapters, look up.

 

Everything I've read says usbc to display port will work for 4k 60hz. I think it'll run through the dedicated gpu so it'll use more power and create more heat but I've got a cooling pad for it so I should be fine.

 

I think the 9550 doesn't support this yet even if the adapter does, probably something to do with DP version. Video output is always from the iGPU.

 

The USB-C has two DP 1.2 outputs, so you can run two 4k @ 60hz.

HDMI is 4k @ 30hz only.

 

No problem getting 60hz for 4k with the usbC port to Display port. Laptop is working awesome with the new monitor! Such an upgrade. I can only game at 1440p but that seems to be better than 1080p so I'm happy! The PCH temp seems to be crazy high using the external monitor... I haven't figured out a great cooling solution for it yet...I've got a thermal pad on the PCH but that doesn't seem to work great. PCH is maxing out at 64C

 

Hey what do you guys use as a backup solution? Do you do image files or a clone of the internal c:\?

On my 9560 macrium only works if I boot the system with winPE. As the backup of a 2tb internal nvme takes some 16 hours to a HDD, the result is an unacceptable amount of downtime. And if (god forbid) I have to restore from the backup, I’ll need another 16 hours.

If I clone to a bootable USB, is the clone going to be bootable off off the same USB? That would give me at least an interim working system in case something goes wrong…

 

I regularly make system images of the C drive on my XPS 9560, and I put them on an external drive. I just use the Windows 7 Back Up and Restore that is available via the Control Panel in Windows 10. While there are other programs available, I've found that Windows 7 Back Up and Restore works just fine.

If I haven't made a new system image in a few weeks, it will likely take 90 minutes to 2 hours to make a new system image. If I am making a new system image only a day or two after having made the previous system image, it will only take a few minutes to make the new system image.

If I use the system image to restore the computer, the process of restoring the computer will generally take less than 30 minutes.

Over the years, there have been several times when I've been able to use a system image to restore the computer after something went wrong with an update or when I've done something stupid. With always having a recently made system image on hand, I don't have to worry about spending hours to try to resolve an issue because I know that I can restore the computer with a system image made when everything was working fine.

 

well, i'll probably stick with macrium - and for some reason it now runs when the system is up, much faster. i did an image, and it completed in about 4 hrs. i guess i have to bite that duration.

now, is there any way of extracting that image for test, not overwriting the main drive?

 

I bought myself a Macrium Reflect Home license a couple of years ago. Think it was around 50€ at the time, but worth the investment.



This allows me to make incremental/differential backups which saves a lot of space, as it only makes a full backup the first time you run a backup. Next time it only adds the differences with the full backup. Every X-time it than makes a new fulll backup.
You can customise this as much as you want.

I make a backup of my partitions (no HDD clone) to my nas, +/- once a week. (scheduled)




All this is done out of a running Windows, so not in a WinPE environment. But that’s also possible.

 

yeah. looks good. specially the fact that you can see/manipulate the contents of your mrimg /w explorer. that will likely enable me to make a bootable USB of my win environment... haven't yet tried, but it likely will work.

anyway, i'm a believer in using the tools that everybody does, so i'll stick /w macrium.

 

Dell just posted a new BIOS version for the XPS 15 9560. It is version 1.19.2

 

Fixes:
- Firmware updates to address Intel security advisories INTEL-SA-00289 (CVE-2019-11157), INTEL-SA-00317 (CVE-2019-14607), INTEL-SA-00320 (CVE-2020-0543), and INTEL-SA-00329 (CVE-2020-0548 and CVE-2020-0549).
- Firmware updates to address the Intel Security Advisory INTEL-SA-00322 (CVE-2020-0528 and CVE-2020-0529).
- Firmware updates to address security advisory INTEL-SA-00295 (CVE-2020-0531, CVE-2020-0532, CVE-2020-0533, CVE-2020-0535, CVE-2020-0536, CVE-2020-0537, CVE-2020-0538, CVE-2020-0539, CVE-2020-0540, CVE-2020-0545, CVE-2020-0594, CVE-2020-0595, CVE-2020-0596, and CVE-2020-8674).
- Firmware updates to address CVE-2020-5362.
- Fixed the issue where the SMM Security Mitigation gets disabled while loading BIOS defaults.
- Fixed an issue with the hard drive master password reset not functioning.

Enhancement:
- Updated the Texas Instruments (TI) Power Delivery firmware.

Gesendet von meinem SM-T820 mit Tapatalk

 

> INTEL-SA-00289

Beware Plundervolt patch has tendency of killing undervolt

 

I confirm - after BIOS update to 1.19.2 mu undervolting in the ThrottleStop app stopped working :/

 

can i new version of throttlestop fix this?

 

my undervolt is still working with that latest BIOS revision, just needed to re-apply the settings and it seemed to have worked

ThrottleStop:
https://imgur.com/zjkbSpj

BIOS Version:
https://imgur.com/mMIcp46