XPS 15 9570 Owners Thread

Me too, couldn't live with it and all its issues. Dell need to redesign this whole XPS range in my opinion to be more stable, better build quality and bring back a 17" screen option. And to be able to cool itself properly straight out the box - not needing repasting and thermal pads, and Throttlestop etc etc...!

 

So after pushing the computer a bit at stock:

I get an ambient sensor telling me 121 C and cpu maxing out at 93 C. This results in CPU throttling all the way down to 800 mhz.

8750h, 16 ram, 1050 ti, 500 ssd, 93 whr.

 

There isn't any difference, in fact the i9 seems to throttle faster than the i7.

 

@ zeverus, your cpu didn't throttle because the ambient sensor reached 120c. It throttled because the DIMM sensor reached 62.

 

Wtf?

Mind explaining?

Weird thing is, no noticable fps drop while gaming cpu intensive game.

 

@zeverus you would know if you read this thread or @custom90gt's thread.

 

Have you replaced the NIC with an Intel NIC then, because that was one of the problems I had BEFORE replaing the NIC. I also noticed it sometimes with one of my TB16 docks, but not the other one.

 

Finally ordered. Got the i9/32gb/4k/1TB SSD.
Also got the sleeve and slim backpack.
Does anyone use the power companion? Is it worth it? Any other accesories I should consider?

 

Hello everyone,

I'm thinking of getting a 9570 i9 like many out there for video production work. I'm competent with my hands. My question is rather simple:

If I go through the repaste, under volt, vrm padding (still trying to figure out which method is best there) will I have a machine that doesn't throttle when working/exporting (using Resolve which uses a good amount of GPU and CPU) long (1hr+) projects?


Another way of looking at it would be: would I get the best performance out of an "end-user improved" XPS 9570 than I would going with other similar machines?

I am discarding the RB15 2018
because I already own a 1060 2016 version and it's been to support 4 times and it takes too long to get it back.

Also, what is the end-word on using liquid metal on a laptop? I keep on reading contradictory reports on the stuff eating the cpu surface along with the heat-sink area and others saying that liquid-metal would not be an issue as a long term "install and forget" solution to improved cooling.

 

It is my belief that on heavy long workload, the i9 will throttle to the same level of the i7 (even if you undervolt etc etc). Save the money and get an i7.

Liquid metal does stain, however, that does not affect the performance/longevity of cpu.
For applying liquid metal you need a very even heatsink and a good contact, not sure that's gonna be the case. Liquid metal needs to be reapplied, say yearly, e but that is also true for most high-performance pastes. You are also taking a risk by using liquid metal.

 

No I replaced the Killer with the Intel one, and now I have this issue. I didnt test before with the Killer card though, wonder if one of the antennas have issues maybe.

I find it really annoying and somehow disgusting btw, how many people there are who fall for Intels i9 scam, and also part Dells scam. Guys... DONT BUY THE i9. First the price is totally not worth the little extra "power", second, the XPS 15 isnt properly designed to handle the i9, and even the hexa cores in my opinion.

It doesnt need much brain to think why this is. They ar estill 14nm CPUs, nothing has changed, so where should the magically more power come from? The cooling also is the same...

10/7nm i9 might work, but not this one.

I am really devasted though right now, because of the coil whine. It is just permanently clicking, buzzing, doing short mice like noises when I open web pages and copy or open files. And two models had it, so I am totally sure every model has it, but people just aren't really listening to it in silent rooms. Youtube is also full of coil whine videos for the 9570.

 

Thank you for the swift reply.

When you say i9 eventually throttles to i7 level, would that be both processors throttling to the same speed on all cores? As in, i7 running at, say, 2.9ghz and eventually so will the i9 at 2.9ghz.

Assuming both achieve turbo speeds for the same amount of time (say 40-45mins before throttling) then there is a small edge to the i9 during the time it is not throttling. Is my thinking in the ballpark?

I understand the conductivity issue with liquid metal. If I understand well, there may be a bit of a heatpipe lottery as well to assure an even spread and contact with liquid metal. That's a bit annoying.

 

yes, that is what I mean.

The clocks are adjusted dynamically based on a variety of factors, not just core temps.
Anyway, I believe that they will equalize in 2-3 minutes of the sustained load (not 40-45).

 

So far there haven’t been many notebooks which could handle a 6-core cpu and even 4-core ones throttle under sustained cpu and gpu load, it’s just the way laptops work. The basic principle is to read reviews and threads before you but and use some common sense. If you want a machine which does not throttle get a desktop.

 

Even if there is no gain from the i9, for those that want 32GB of ram and more storage to 2TB or 1 TB, the i9 is the only way to go.

 

Not really though, buying 32GB of RAM yourself is much cheaper than going for an i9 option.

 

The fact that the 9570 has problems with thermals with a i9 8950HK really didn't come as much of a surprise considering previous experiences with the XS15 line. But most talk here seem to be with people running real CPU benches like Prime95 etc which isn't perhaps a normal usage scenario. What have been the experienes so far with more normal usage, where you would only want the extra CPU speed for "bursts"? Like perhaps if you start a debugger in Visual Studio 50 times a day and would want to shave of a few seconds on that and similar stuff?

And yes, I have a XPS15 9570 (2 actually at the moment as the first one was broken) but haven't really had to do much more with then than unpack them so far, and now that "real" workstation like Zbook G5 and Thinkpad 52 etc is finally out, I am thinking if I should return the XPS15 and get one of those instead. But really does not need Quadro GPU, ability to use it on the moon etc

Or course I would do repaste etc but even though they might change things, they still can't transforme the cooling solution of the XPS15 into something it isn't. Would of course also replace the Killer crap with a real NIC. But I just cant seem to shake the constant feeling about the XPS15 being a lot of compromises and that some parts really isn't good enough (although others are). What are your thoughs?

 

Has anyone been able to see any real difference between the 4K this year and the 4K for the 9560? Happening to have 1 9560 and 2 9570 as the moment in front of me, I am note able to see ANY difference when it comes to brightness. I do get the feeling that the black levels might be a bit better this year though, although that really isn't important to me for a work machine.

 

Erm ... no? ... you can just call Dell on the phone, and order a XPS with 32GB of RAM with any CPU or SSD configuration you want. Just because greedy Dell is so greedy and put a few pre defined machines on their sites, doesnt mean you can still configure them as ou want (per phone or chat)... It works though it seems for people who dont know better. Oh I want 32GB of RAM? Damn, I have to buy the i9 for that? Meh, whatever, I have enough money to throw away.

Theyre still the same (bad) panel (identical panel, identical specs). Same input lag and terrible blur. The only difference is a "newer" LED backlight, which may use a little bit less power.

 

I have found a really bad bug, and I would like to ask people here, to confirm it on their 9570. If you disable modern standby and use normal S3 (suspend to ram), the CPU is stuck in C2 state and won't go lower anymore in idle. This is really bad for battery consumption but also can lead to performance issues. To reproduce it:

1. go into bios of 9570, and select FORCE S3 under power settings (modern standby is now disabled, the laptop will use normal suspend to RAM for sleep)
2. boot windows and monitor C states, for example with ThrottleStop (c states should look like this and are normal):



3. enter S3 sleep, wake laptop back up, now CPU is stuck in C2 for idle as lowest C state and wont go lower anymore:



4. rebooting windows, and c states are back to normal

This is mostly a bios bug, and Dell has to fix this via a bios update. Would be really kind, of other people can reproduce it too, and I can tell the Dell support that.

 

I don't think I've ever heard anyone really call the 4k panel bad. Anything that is rated at or above the MBP display has to be decent...

 

The ghosting of the 4k panel is just disgusting and terrible. If you move the mouse cursor over a gray background, the ghosting is so bad, that you see a ghost mouse cursor for about 200-400ms after the mouse has moved. Scrolling web pages is literally the worst I ever seen on any display I ever looked at.

Another issue I found. It seems the horrible modern standby is also bugged on the 9570, it shows a drain caused by CPU stuck in C7 during modern standby:

 

@maffle isn't the CPU supposed to stay in C7 during modern standby?

EDIT:
that section in red is for the SoC not CPU. I need to dig deeper into this modern standby.

 

@abujafar every modern Intel CPU is basically a SoC, it is the entire package. This is totally not normal. A usage of 1.5%-2% of total battery per hour is not normal. It is flagged as a drain by Windows as you see it. The HW 51% seems to show, that at least 49% of the total sleep time, there wasn a problem of putting the hardware to its lowest sleep state. I actually never have seen a Dell product with a working modern standby. I had two tablets before by Dell, and none had a good and normal working modern standby. Modern standby is even totally illogical to use on a laptop. So I wanted to deactivate it obviously in bios and use normal suspend to ram (S3). But as you see on the page before, I detected an even worse bug with that.

 

When I forced S3 a few weeks ago, I had some really weird bugs. One, which went away once I defaulted back, was that any type of playback on youtube would cause green line artificating (for lack of a better description); it was very odd. I wonder if it had to do with the bug you've flagged.

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/modern-standby

Here it says that you need to reinstall windows to change that settings... seems a bit too extreme...

 

Sometimes, I don't understand Microsoft.

 

I know that """suggestion""" to reinstall on flip of S3/modern standby by MS docs. It is actually a lie / false propaganda. There is no reason to reinstall Windows for this flip. I did it before on several devices and it worked everytime. There are a few people on here who did a clean install and also did a force S3, right? Would be interesting to hear, if they could monitor c states if theirs is bugged too after sleep or not.

Could be. The stuck in c2 state after S3 sleep could lead to CPU is confused and "got out of it's normal work range", it mostly would cause a battery drain of course, but could also lead to performance issues.

 

Seriously Dell, seriously.

Ordered at 9th July, they said delivery to be done at 27th July,

Now I log in to check if my order is shipped. And it is set back to be shipped 13th of August.


Like Wtf. 5-6 weeks delivery time ????

 

Call them and let them know you are upset. They will try to expedite it and probably give you some cash back.

 

Is it really annoying? I am seriously considering the xps 15, but this issue seems to be the worst. I currently own a macbook pro 2015, which is really quiet (which i really like), but I need to upgrade. Not happy with the new macbooks, so dell is my first choice. But the coil whine issue seems really annoying. Will dell replace the device if I get a machine with coil whine?

 

I don't seem to have any of the major issues reported except for the cooling issue. with a repaste + some thermal pads (didn't order enough, so I needed to order more) + undervolt, my max throttlestop stress test turbo frequency is only 3.6GHz.

Overall, if we consider the price, I find myself a bit unsatisfied, but left with no other viable laptop option in my price range. (my config is i7+32GB+1TB ssd+4k screen).

I'm acceptably satisfied though, the 4k screen is really nice.

 

3.6 is excellent. Is what you can get at the normal (long term) power limit PL1 56W.
What are your maximum temps during the stress test?

 

Goes to 95-98C. Thus, I'm still thermally throttling.
In a desktop, with the thermal buffer space, you generally expect to have full turbo on all cores available. I think full turbo is 3,8 or 3,9?

 

Full turbo 6core is 3.9mhz BUT there are also other constraints. For example, you can run at 75W for around 30 secs after that you run at 56W, and achieve whatever frequency within 56w envelope, if everything else is normal.

 

Hey fellas, about 3 weeks ago my XPS 15 (which was only bought 1 month ago) slowed down and cannot run games well anymore. I booted my laptop to play one day and the frames were dropping far too low than ever before. A game such as fortnite was running at a steady 80 fps and now goes up and down and usually only runs at 40 fps. Since the issue started I did a factory reset and reinstalled the graphics drivers and nothing had worked. If anyone has experienced the same problems or has any idea how to fix the problem please let me know!

 

As I was about to replace the Killer NIC with the Intel 9260 in my 9570, I noticed that the black antenna cable (misc) was completely smashed to hell, or rather, the connector was. To my surprise, both Wifi and Bluetooth seemed to work even with just the white cable attahed to the "communications card" (I believe its called main or something like that). I would have guessed that one antenna was for Wifi and the other one for Bluetooth but apparently not. Whats is the misc antenna for? Or are they just complementing each other so that it will work but with shorter range etc with only one of them? I recall that at least the 9260 has something with "Dual band" in its name, but I didn' notice any of the Wifi networks missing, as both 5Ghz and 2,4Ghz where still to be found.

 

@improwise I thought main and aux is the MIMO 2x2 (so it needs two antennas simultaneous) configuration for the card (it doesnt matter in which order you put them on though I think), it uses two antennas, main and aux, to achieve 866Mbit (2x80Mhz) or even 1700Mbit (2x 160Mhz). So if you just connect one, you mostly would just can get 433Mbit or even less. What speed is your Wlan info showing? Make a copy test to and from a PC SSDs and look what you get and if it's stable.

I tried to flip main and aux btw and this didnt change the issue I have sending files from the 9260 card into the lan. The moment I send a file, Wifi breaks down and the Wifi driver seems to crash, at least with a high chance.

 

@maffle, I can 100% reproduce the behavior you show. With modern standby disabled in the BIOS, after resuming from sleep the package C states are all 0 except C2.

Hard to say if you successfully manage to explain this to some Dell technician and if you do, if they are going to act on it.

 

Thanks. So I guess every 9570 has this bug. Nice... I talked to a customer support guy named "Dell-Alan D". Could you maybe PM him, and tell him you have the same issue. That mostly will raise the chances, he will really report it to an intern tech team and they hopefully will fix it. The laptop is literally useless without a fix for this. S3 is important to use on a laptop. And I totally WONT use the disgusting modern standby for several reasons. You can open his profile here:

https://www.dell.com/community/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/2443283

 

@maffle will do.

Have you tried to use the disconnected variant of modern standby?

I will run an analysis on the power consumption during sleep tonight with powercfg

 

@abujafar You mean that I manually go flight mode before I close the lid? Totally not an option. First, disgusting modernstandby drain is at least 10 times worse compared to S3 (10-12% drain vs 1% drain over night), second, it is a permanent stress of every part of the laptop (in S3 just the RAM is kept alive with power, in modern standby the laptop is literally never really off and cpu/ect everything still has voltage), it is dangerous (can happen the laptop wakes up even with lid closed and burn to death in your bag). And then there is the thing that it just doesnt work properly. Every little burp wakes the laptop up again, like bluetooth mouse, or even hundreds of triggers Windows things are cool to wake up the laptop you cant disable. Just S3 (or hibernate, but thats bad for the SSD) is safe to use if you want a laptop sleep.

 

There are 2 variants of modern standby: connected (keeps wifi on and receiving data) and disconnected

I think some timers and movements can still wake-up the system from the old standby.
Anyway I agree with some of your remarks. I have set modern standby, now let's see tomorrow morning what the powercfg sleep analysis says.

 

A few guys here had meltdowns in backpacks with the 9550 and 9560.

 

Erm... no. First, there is just "modern standby" aka connected standby (old therm from Windows 8, MS renamed it), there is no connected/disconnected modus to chose from. Second, nope again. You can deactivate all wake timers or events for S3 (usb, bluetooth, keyboard, event timer ect), you cant for modern standby (leads to annoying permanent wake ups, or even worse, meltdowns in backpacks).

 

When the coming 10nm (i9) 6/8 core chips finally come expect the same overheating problems.... Smaller processor die and next step in shrinking the notebook chassis design will make it exactly as Today. Nothing will really change.

 

So it seems like a lot of people are returning their XPS because of heat issues and cpu throttle. When i play games on the machine, my cpu throttles all the way down to 800 mhz at certain points.

The main reason i got this laptop was because i needed a 13-15" light weight and slim portable laptop with a decent battery life to browse web and use MS office.

My minimum requirements were 8 gb ram, 128 gb ssd and an intel U cpu would have been fine. I never needed a dedicated gpu. I was considering a zenbook 15", ideapad/thinkpad 14"/15", MS surface 13", macbook 13".

But i got a 33% discount on the XPS, and therefor all the other computers in the same price range come with 4-8 gb ram and 128-256 gb ssd and slower cpu's. The XPS i got was with FHD, 16 gb ram and 500 gb ssd, 8750h. The faster cpu and gtx 1050ti is just a bonus that wasn't a requirement for my needs.

When power plan is put to silent mode, it lives up to all my needs, and in this regard only weight and thickness are downers.

No matter what "best ultrabooks guide" i read, the laptops on the lists are either far more expensive, or far lower specs. most are thinner and lighter, but aside from that, they mostly seem to suck compared to the xps.

If anyone can knows a laptop that is at least 8 gb ram, 128 gb ssd, slimmer and lighter and long battery life (compared to dell power mode: silent), at same price range (compared to a 33% discounted xps), i would appreciate any recommendation.

But i think the xps 9570 is a winner when it comes to my demands when running in silent power mode.

 

I did complain and asked to have my xps delivered at first promised date.

But they excused themselves with having trouble in the Chinese factory and didn't wanna do anything about it.


Said I wanted money back for the 5-6 delivery time, or they could add 2 years extra support .



If I knew I had to wait this long I would definitely go for the Huawei matebook instead.

 

I carried my 9570 in my backpack almost every day, rode by bicycle, only 30 min. one way. The device got fu..... hot.

 

In my case, Dell has been pretty good with offering partial refunds for issues like getting a slower SSD. Their service has been decent overall, with my issues being with the device itself. Have gone through FHD 4 XPS 15 9560s and 1 FHD 9570, and all of them had quality control problems, ranging from bezels not being glued properly to various touchpad alignment issues. Issues with headphone output and screen bleed are also prominent. The lack of good competing Windows laptops puts me in a difficult situation, but the 2 week waiting period after order and the Dell lottery is tiring.