XPS 15 9570 Owners Thread

On another note, does anyone have a good tip for how to upgrade win 10 home to pro for free or cheap?

 

Because Microsoft is changing the way that hardware drivers work on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and it is pushing all manufacturers/developers to use DCH drivers instead of the old Legacy drivers so the last one will be abandoned in the next future (When? ... Who knows).

 

@annabel_shanderin
1. Intel Dell driver because I noticed it triggers less dGPU polls
2. Nvidia original non DCH, because there is no meaning in using the DCH one, and people say its unstable and buggy especially the UWP app, it wont be replaced in the upcome future, mostly not for the next 5 years
3. Nvidia application on the Dell site is Geforce Experience, at least it was in the past, might now be the UWP app if they changed to DCH
4. buy a Windows 10 pro OEM licence for $5-10 and upgrade, then you can use easily the group policy editor and disable driver updates, for example

22% OFF Discount Code: "WEL22" Windows 10 Professional Retail Digital Key $12.29 https://bit.ly/2PsN43z

To upgrade the license you may have to use a trick:
- disable internet
- change key to default pro key VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T
- reboot
- go online
- change to bought key
- should be activated now, use MS account and its connected with your MS account

 

Hey guys, I’ve been reading many threads of all the problems with this laptop (having to replace WiFi card, undervolting, and changing the thermal paste). But I’ve also read it isn’t worth it to buy this laptop at all and to look else where.

Is this laptop really not worth it for this price? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/dell-xps-15-9570-laptop/8nnchkgrmm8w

I have experience dealing with dell laptop problems (my current laptop is a 6 year old XPS 15) so sort of used to it now.

I can’t find any laptops that are comparable at least to that price, any recommendations?

 

I think the Core i5 version has a lot fewer heat problems. Heat really shouldn't be a problem with that laptop. I am not sure if that version includes the gigantic 97Whr battery, though.

The Wifi card is pretty crumby - but to replace it is as easy as replacing memory and it costs $20 from Amazon. Undervolting is free and easy, I figured out how to do it in twenty minutes.

Really, for someone who knows nothing about computers, something like a Mac is great. But the Dell XPS is great for the money, and with a little bit of effort can make a great laptop.

 

Thanks for all this, maffle – much appreciated!

1. I'm running with this now. So far, no issues. I even think that the screen-flashes after waking up from sleep are gone, but it might be related to updating from Win 1803 to 1809. Don't know.
2. I have using the dell nvidia driver for a weeks time now, and it seems to run smoothly, but I don't like the idea that it's using a driver that is a year old... Also, the nvidia control panel won't open, so I might just uninstall with DDU and get up to date with Nvidia's version anyway.
3. I don't need the Geforce Experience at all; have always been avoiding it.
4. Will look into this – thanks again!

I have a fifth question. I recently had to do a reset of my machine due to some stupid/lazy tinkering with an older Intel RST driver that messed everything up. Now, when I try to have ThrottleStop start at boot (via Task Scheduler), it's not showing up in the tray. Task Manager tells me that it IS running, and that it IS enabled as a startup item. I have to end the task and start it again from it's folder in order to make it show up in tray. Ever experienced something like this? Any suggestions? (I have 'start minimized' selected in the TS options)

 

When it comes to value/specs for money, I think the XPS 9570 is a little bit like Churchill's idea of democracy. It is a terrible, terrible system, every bit as fallible and corrupt as its components, but its the best among all the alternatives. It's the worst laptop I've ever had, except from all the other laptops I have owned.

That being said, I would take a closer look at the Lenovo X1 extreme if I were shopping today. Might still end up with the XPS, though.

 

I just want something that can sleep properly, and where the fans aren't on a ridiculous curve that you can't really adjust except sledgehammering it to quiet mode (and doesn't really work anyway). I upgraded BIOS to 1.8 and I regret it, its far too twitchy/aggressive with spinning it up for no apparent reason. How its always on when connected to TB/USB-C is also irritating.
If I was an audio guy I might be mad at the DPC issue but fortunately not my use-case.

So no show-stoppers, and return period in my country is 2 weeks not a month and I didn't catch all the issues (would probably have returned it had I found everything out). As it is I can live with it and its certainly plenty fast + nice build + awesome road warrior battery, but man the sleep issue + overly aggressive fans are irritating.

I regret getting a gaming dGPU, the chassis cooling just can't handle it, and I suspect anything similarly thin/light will have the same issue. I mean games seem to run OK after undervolt but the jet engine fans make you not want to bother, even with headphones. I don't ever game on it anyway as I have a desktop at home and a switch for the road lol. It was really the hex-core I wanted, but I suspect I would have been OK with a well configured Kaby-Lake R (quad), was really getting irritated at Chrome lags etc. on the old dual core sky-lake Us.

The sad thing is that the sleep / audio / fan curve issues are all very very fixable, there are thousands of laptops out there (all my old thinkpads/latitudes... why didn't I just buy a thinkpad/latitude) without any of those issues.

 

Yes, I find myself for maybe the 7th time the last year looking for a new laptop as the 9570 and the PoS TB16 is driving my crazy on a daily basis. While it kind of works most of the time, there is a constant uphill battle that has me loosing inspiration and will to work. But as we have discussed before, the alternatives are quite few. Personally, I am again considering a Razer Blade 15 which at least has proper cooling but lack of fingerprint reader and TB3 charging is holding me back. The Thinkpad X1E is of course the most simlar device, but I am not convinced it is actually much better. The Thinkpad P52 is a real proper laptop but of course its quite a brick to carry around and I dont really care for touchpads with dedicated button and a numpad (at least on a laptop keyboard).

One thing though that I am considering, how much of all the problems we have complainedabout in this thread for the last years are actually Dells fault and how much is Windows fault? Of course, noone but Dell should be blamed for crappy BIOSes etc but many of the problems are the combination of Dell Hardware/software and Windows 10, and if the laters is to blame for much, just switching brands wont really achieve anything...

Yes, I am kind of fed up with this

 

The P1/X1E is a better laptop in terms of "just working". The broken standby with the XPS was really the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

Throttlestop icon won't show up if you don't set at least a 5 second delay in the task scheduler. When explorer loads too quickly, it misses icons for the taskbar/tray.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. The problem, though, was multiple places in the task I had created. I didn't RTFM, which I should have done in the first place: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/the-throttlestop-guide.531329/#post-6865107

– I apologise for wasting your time with this.

 

On another note of something that have been bothering me for quite some time.

The speeds (especially the write speeds) of my SSD (Toshiba kxg50znv512g) took a dive at some point last year. I thought it might have been due to me fiddling back and forth with RAID/AHCI settings in the bios and different drivers, but now after having reinstalled everything, including windows (1809), the speeds are still too low compared to what they should be. It got a little bit better after installing the latest toshiba firmware, but it's still not good enough. Any Ideas? Have a look (before/now):

Before (when I first got the laptop):



And now:

 

It looks like your drive is too full -- 90% is going to reduce performance on an SSD a lot. They say usually 75% full and beyond will cause significant performance degradation (around 1/3).

 

Oh, I was suspecting this, but I thought that 10% would be plenty of empty space for the drive to shuffle around the data... I guess I have to start cleaning up a little. In extension of that, have you guys deleted the dell partitions of your drives?

 

@annabel_shanderin Thats mostly, next of it being full, because of Spectre and Meltdown protections, I have them turned off. https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm open as admin click a few times disable enable back and forth until its off, reboot, test again.

 

Interesting. Thanks, will give this a shot. You reckon it is safe enough to have spectre protection turned off permanently?

 

If you know what you do, what programs you use, ect, yes, adblock, noscript, tab auto close after 5 mins, I dont see any reason in havigng the "protection" on on your PC, other from performance loss. It is false protetion anyway.

 

Alright thanks. I think I know what I am doing. Most of the time, anyway. Disabling the protection helped a little, though not as much as I had hoped. Guess it's time to clean up after all.

 

Hey guys, i am looking to buy an i7 or i9 XPS15 9570. I see the 512GB version is m.2 where the 1TB version is ePCI. Is there a significant performance difference?

 

They are both M.2 (the connector) and should both be NVMe (the interface). The performance difference shouldn't be much (typically larger drives are faster) and wouldn't be worth considering unless you want/need the space. Sadly Dell uses whatever they have for SSDs so no one knows what you would get brand wise.

 

Dell is replacing my faulty XPS with a new build XPS 9570. When the laptop arrives, what would you say is the right 'checklist' to go through to make sure the laptop that arrives is in good working condition and doesn't warrant an immediate complaint?

I can think of making sure the screen looks fine, coil whine, and audio issues, but I'm curious if there are other common issues that may not be totally obvious when first checking out the computer?

Also, with a clean install, which drivers do you download? Wifi, BIOS, and Dell Update? Or do you strongly recommend against using Dell Update?

 

Same for me, third one being shipped any day now. You can't fault the customer service at least

Sent from my SM-N960F using Tapatalk

 

Not that this is a surprise, but Dell finally put their foot down with me on the GPU throttling...



That's such a sham response and I wrote them back explaining how their "Testing" is flawed. @Eason, feel free to post this on your review site, lol.

 

This means the customers of this notebook model is Scammed by Dell I hope the buyers don't forget. There is something called Payback time.

 

They mostly will say the same for the disgusting fan behavior they introduced with bios 1.7.0, activating the fans for 9 seconds for every dGPU activity poll, even the temps are 30°C and it was just active for a millisecond. Someone has to do something about this. This disgusting incompetent ignorant behavior cant be tolerated.

=> https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/akngpy/incompetent_dell_devs_answer_to_bios_170_fan/

 

@custom90gt Thanks for letting us know their response...
They are really incompetent.

 

Will forward it to the editors

 

I am done with this lying incompetent company. Here is another status update about the fan change with bios >= 1.7.0 for the dGPU polls:

https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/...n-Idle-dGPU/m-p/7277659/highlight/true#M26974

"We had escalated this to the product team & we were not able to replicate the issue anywhere. Since the issue you have is that there is a fan blast every few seconds (which is not loud) & is not affecting the performance.

If you still observe the issue, we can have the system picked up for service & ensure that this is resolved at the earliest."

You can forward this too, @Eason

 

Anyone have any advice here?

Also, is the Dell secure erase feature in the BIOS full proof such that the data can never be recovered when sending back the old laptop?

 

So, is the latest BIOS the worst ever release by Dell? I find that "suspend" now means dead computer having to force a cold boot about 90% of the times.

 

The Dell XPS 15 9570 is the worst pc I have ever owned. It is basically a $2800 worthless brick. The touchpad is unusable and continually doing crazy unwanted things with the screen and the apps/programs opened on said screen. The keyboard is to flat and has little to no key movement making it exceedingly hard to use as a touch typing keyboard. I made a huge mistake trying a Dell PC after many years of happy use of the IBM/Lenovo family of workstations.

 

This must be a new record, my XPS15 now crashes EVERYTIME after having goon to sleep, so that I need to force shutdown it. If I had not already had yet another replacement 9570 on the way I would have just bought something else by now. Might just do that anyway, but as we have discussed before, there really are not that many options that are much better right now

Have tried both the Razer Blade 15 and THinkpad P52 before but am desperate enough to trye them both again soon, just want something that actually work for work, and right now, the XPS15 just feels like crap. Would be interesting to know what laptop Mr Azor actually uses when noone can see him...

 

@improwise you know the causes of the crashes? did you look into it more in detail? might be the Intel RST driver which had some bugs causing BSOD while sleep in the past versions, same as the Intel Wifi driver if you use one.

 

Frank Azor claims that Dell has fixed many DPC latency related issues
The saga of the XPS 15 9570's latency issues rumbles on. Frank Azor, the Vice President & General Manager of Alienware, Gaming and XPS at Dell, has tweeted that recently updated Realtek audio drivers should fix DPC-related issues....

 

"Azor also claimed that Dell will be issuing a new BIOS revision within two weeks, which will "solve most of the other root causes" of these DPC-related issues. "

Cool (who believes that)... too bad we are stuck with bios 1.6.0 mostly forever, because of the fan changes made with 1.7.0 and Dell refuses to revert them or even admit they did so and there is an issue.

 

Have anyone actually seen Mr Azor IRL or is he just some kind of AI trials running wild at Dell?

 

Actually now youre saying, that seems very plausible. He is mostly just some AI tweet robot by Dell, reminds me of that terrible "AI" bot by MS, which was shut down just after a few days https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist

 

Dell's update page shows Bios 1.8 not 1.7? Which is the best to use right now on a new machine?

 

No, with a replacement on its way I just decided to wait, have spent enough time error searching this machine...

Sent from my SM-N960F using Tapatalk

 

I dont recommend anything newer than 1.6.0 because of the fan issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/akngpy/incompetent_dell_devs_answer_to_bios_170_fan/
Be aware, that the dGPU throttle bug isnt fixed in 1.6.0 though, and you have to heat up the dGPU beyond 48°C to make it clock up properly. That is not a big issue as I see it though. Manual fan mode also just works properly with <= 1.6.0, for example with HwInfo.

 

Just had a complete mental breakdown after yet another complete crash of my XPS15 and decided to order both an Elitebook 1050 and a new Razer Blade 15 2019. And this is with a new 9570 (third replacement) being shipped from China. Next on the list is a Thinkpad X1E or even a MacBook Pro 15. I just want to find a 15" laptop that can be trusted to not hinder my work and cost me a massive amount in non billable hours because of one problem after another. How can this be the state of the laptop industry in 2019 even if willing to pay top dollars?

 

Anyone knows where can I download Dell PremierColor 4.1.4.0? That's the version that came on my factory image but the one I found online from Dell's site is an older version 3.06.007

 

I think 4.1.4.0 is only on the Microsoft store, I'll look around though.

 

but it's an actual app sitting in my taskbar.

If you can't find it, I can at least copy the folder that is installed and upload it for you guys so you can overwrite what you have.

 

I just checked on my laptop, and I also have the Store app version 4.1.4.0.
The MS Store app IS an actual app that sits in the taskbar. Just uninstall the old one from Dell's website and install the Store app.

 

Thanks a lot.

 

@custom90gt I just got this Dell XPS 15 that you see in my signature, I wanted a little powerful beast of a machine with great battery life and this one ticked most of the boxes but man, what really sold me was when I saw its screen, as much as I hate 4K screens on a laptop, the clarity and crispness is out of this world since it's glossy. I hate the dull anti-glare screens. This reminds me of he awesome LED Backlit screen I had in 2007 on my SONY VAIO SZ Series. One of the best screens I've had.

Do you own an XPS 15 as well because I see you know alot about them?

 

Yeah when it comes to the screen and battery life, it's hard to beat the XPS for sure. I've owned several 9550s, 9560s, and 9570s but right now I do not have one. I thought about buying another XPS just for the battery life and screen but I haven't done that yet. I'm still kind of erked that Dell refuses to revert to the 78C GPU throttle setpoint vs the 75C they now have. It doesn't sound like much, but if you game the GPU will throttle down quite a bit.

Over all I really liked the XPS for what I did. It's not a gaming laptop for sure, but I sadly don't even have much time to game on my Desktop, let alone my laptop.

Here are my benchmarks from my first 9570:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/dell-xps-15-9570-benchmarks-temps.817970/

 

@custom90gt Would it be the third XPS15 9570 then?

Agree about screens, besides Apple, Dell seem to have the best ones and has had for a long time.

 

Actually the 4th, but who knows. I had one in hand but luckily a customer needed a laptop ASAP, lol...