*** XPS 17 Owner's Lounge ***

You can get away with cheaper 3rd party PSU with a barrel connector for Dell products if the orginal stop work after warranty have expired. But with only USB-C charger as power source you are locked into buy Dell's own official branded products to make it work as expected (If they is able to fix the power charging problem). Cheaper 3rd party USB-C replacement chargers will not be able to run at specs due the added limitation/restrictions into the firmware.

 

Such is life in benchmarkers R Us forum. That's all that's here now. If it has one thing that's not maxed out its garbage. You know better obviously owning one...

 

Just because one person is not affected by the very serious flaws in a laptop doesn't mean said flaws don't exist or are unimportant. Willfully ignoring them is just as bad as engaging in hyperbole to point them out. The 2020 refresh and introduction of the 17-inch model was Dell's chance to redeem itself for a half-decade plus of design problems that have plagued the XPS line, and once again, they have failed. Personally, I would loved to have picked up one of these. The specs and form factor are great, but the fact that I can't use the laptop to its full potential when I want/need is an absolute deal-breaker.

 

One owner here. There are many owners who are quite happy with them in other places too. Just benchmarkers R US have issues. Other places regularly rate the xps line as fast, top quality products. Because they USE them. Not run silly benchmarking crap all day long.

OMG say it ain't so....someone who actually USED the laptop instead of fiddlefarting around with it and gave it an awesome review for USEAGE PERFORMANCE! how silly of them.....

https://www.digitaltrends.com/laptop-reviews/dell-xps-17-2020-review/

OMG another one!!!!!!

https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/dell-xps-17

Wait a minute, what's going on here? 3 reviews stating that the xps 17 is a very powerful great 17" laptop that can handle anything you can toss at it? yet, here it's a POS? REALLY. all those people doing actual reviews can't be right and the armchair quarterbacks here are wrong can they?

https://www.theverge.com/21327454/dell-xps-17-2020-laptop-review-display-test-specs-price-features

Shall I continue? Yes....Why not. Here is one of a typical real world users that would not reside in Benchmarkers "R" Us land. An actual content creator....Let's see how it fairs doing what it was designed to do. Let me guess......AWESOME..

https://www.colbybrownphotography.com/dell-xps-17-hands-on-review/

 

@kojack, please edit your posts, you don't need to post 5 times in a row.

 

Great Scott....5 for 5.....how can this be? They are ALL WRONG. Right. Forgot. They never took the charger voltages, or some silly nonsensical values that mean nothing and base their decisions on that.

https://hothardware.com/reviews/dell-xps-17-9700-review?page=4

Proving a point. The same couple of people in here post the same nonsense over and over. SO refuting them with ACTUAL tests of real world usage of the 17 that actually matters.

 

And you can do so by editing your post, multiple posts are not needed. If you have issues with that, please PM me.

 

I don't. I have issues with the nonsense that is posted that is all. and I am providing proof that it is nonsense. Not one reviewer had issue with their devices draining while doing ANYTHING while plugged in. Not one user had MASSIVE slow downs like claimed by the so called "informed" here, Not one reviewer had a bad gaming experience actually. It wasn't as good as the "real" gaming systems. But that's not what it was designed for. Wrong fork for the gunfight.

So. I just call out the baloney when I see it.

And, while we are at it Crapping on the xps 15 for the same issues. Lets just have a looksee at that one too......SHALL WE? We Shall.

https://www.techradar.com/reviews/dell-xps-15-2020

https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/dell-xps-15-2020

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/dell-xps-15-2020

https://www.zdnet.com/product/dell-xps-15-9500/

4 reviews, 4 the same results. extremely powerful laptop for creators and other users like that.

No mention of power drain by using it while plugged in etc. Again. Spreading baloney here is silly. Use the damn computers.

 

I don't think anyone ever said the XPS 15 had the issue, I could be wrong but I think we're talking about the XPS 17.

Look, I really like the package they put together with it, but I have to agree that if the power drain while under elevated utilization or DPC latency issues are something that would give you pause to buy an XPS 17 people should step into that with eyes open. If you don' fall into those usage patterns then by all means it sounds like a great device. But when people see i7/i9 + capable GPU on the spec sheet they should know that they can't operate it under elevated load without it potentially slowly losing charge. They should know that if they perform audio production or some other latency sensitive issue they might want to think twice. If not, sure it sounds like a great machine.

 

agreed.

 

It's basically another really expensive Netflix machine, a lot like Razer Blade models with the 4K/60 OLED display.

 

But it has not been mentioned in any review. Leading me to believe that it's baloney. And since only one person here actually owns one and reports no such issue. It's probably a made up issue here like many others in the past.

 

I expect this will be a hot topic on Dell's own Tech support forum XPS 17 9700 Significant Battery Drain Issue

And Dell tech support team who frequently visit the different threads to answer on questions seems to avoid this touchy topic. This show again how this being handled.

I see you call it nonsense and baloney. Please tell me how you have tested the XPX 17 since you don’t see this problem. But be you sure... When more people owners discover this defects/flaws they won't be happy.

Edit.
2020 Dell XPS 15 9500 and XPS 17 9700 – what to expect, vs XPS 15 9570 ultrabookreview.com

I’m curious about how Dell are going to charge these. Looks like there’s no barrel plug and they’re relying on USB-C charging, which needs they’ll have to design some sort of custom high-power USB-C charger able to drive an 8C Intel processor and an RTX 2060 chip.

I’d reckon those would require around 180W of power, which is a lot more than the MacBook Pro 16, pretty much the only current option that offers USB-C charging above 100W.

As well as figure out if Dell were able to address their unresolved issues of the past XPS 15 generation, such as the screwed up sleep and DPC latency, or the fans’ coil whining, among others.

We have now got some of the questions answered. 107W Peak maximum being recorded by XPS 17. And still DPC Latency problems.

 

I'd really like to see a thorough review of the spec without a dGPU. I suspect that one probably doesn't suffer from the charging issue, but might suffer from DPC latency still as it's unrelated and seems to be perhaps situationally dependent as notebookcheck.net didn't see it but Jarrod did.

 

On two previous XPS models, I found removing nVidia drivers helped with DPC latency a bit. So audio pros might find good results on the non-dGPU models.

I also found DPC latency improved quite a bit by removing Intel DPTF. That is risky on a thermally constrained laptop, however.

Power management is a general bucket for poor laptop performance vs. desktop performance.

 

@kojack I looked at the 2060 config. What a ridiculous laptop. 16G8 RAM, £2899, and comes with a 130W charger. Surely you can do the math to determine this is insufficient to power all the components.
The 2060 could run at 90W or more, although they probably dumbed this down to 80W in the XPS. The CPU TDP is 45W, turbo boosting to 90W I guess. Screen, RAM, SSD, and motherboard, can eat up another 15-20W under load. Summing up, we get up to 190W power draw, and we have mercifully forgotten about any USB and TB3 devices...
There was a similar issue with Appleware m15/m17 and earlier laptops. Dell tried to sneak in the cheaper 180W charger with the 2060 config, only to backpedal and upgrade this to 240W to prevent any battery drain (which they attempted to tout as a "feature" called Hybrid Power).

 

The Asus laptop I had that used a Ryzen 7 3750H (4c/8t, 35W TDP) and GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q (60W) came with a 180W power adapter. There is absolutely no way a 130W unit would be sufficient for a much more power-hungry CPU and GPU. Even the base model Razer Blade 15 ships with a 230W one as standard.

 

My only issue with the aforementioned reviews is how generic they are. "Oh it has a i7 cpu so it's fast." No actual numbers, logs, facts. I prefer a more comprehensive review such as notebookcheck.net or @B0B. Sure you won't have charging issues if you just youtube all day. Run some FEA on it for a couple of hours and have your battery die on it because the charger can't keep up, I'll call that a problem. Properly testing a laptop involves more than running an 8 minute rendering session on (and yes the MBP beat the XPS in that review on that). And the fact that there has only been one or two owners on this forum shows that Dell priced themselves out of the market. There was never a shortage of XPS 15 owners in the past, but being 2x the price really limited that. If I could pick one up for a reasonable price, I'll do so and review it. And yes these are things that potential owners should care about, we all like to know what issues our potential purchases may have.

 

Goes back to my original point. Using laptops for doing things it was designed for is alot different than running dumb syntehtic benchmarks. These reviews are real world useage not some idiotic test that stresses the crap out of device for no good reason other than to come on websites and complain about said device.

 

Has Gordon from Dell World been contracted to review this bad boy yet? That guy is a rock. Safe bet it would be 10/10, maybe 9/10 because there is no dramatically superior Nvidia Super graphics on offer.

Are you for real? What do you think playing modern games does to the hardware? Relaxes it? Surely there is no suggestion from Dell that the XPS is inappropriate and should not be used for gaming, given the presence of a relatively powerful GPU such as the RTX 2060?
3D Mark benchmarks, for instance, are representative of gaming worloads, Cinebench is representative of 3D rendering etc. Without benchmarks it would be much more difficult to compare various hardware models, clearly a bad state affairs for us consumers.

Why are you so passionately defending this laptop? The price is hardly attractive, and with the 130W power supply, this clearly is a misengineered dud. Is the trivial power arithmetics not obvious and convincing?

Us consumers should behave like the mythical rational agents, actively scouring the market for the best deal, lest we become exploited by becoming attached to brands. The integrity of capitalism depends on it

 

You mean real world gaming test as with Witcher 3 is idiotic as well?
View attachment 186964

 

Safe bet Witcher 3 FPS correlates well with either FireStrike or TimeSpy scores depending on whether it's a DX11 or 12 game.

 

We can disagree on that. For me, real world usage would be transcoding/encoding video files for hours at a time, gaming, running simulations (which take hours), etc. Your real world may be significantly different. The reviews you linked have one paragraph on performance and that consists of mentioning the CPUs available and maybe a Geekbench score. That's not exactly an all inclusive performance review in my opinion. Again, different strokes for different folks.

For me not being able to fully utilize a 3rd party USB-C adapter is a big deal, I don't want to carry around a 130w adapter (which mind you only works at 100w and would ruin the battery with the above scenarios) when I have significantly smaller GaN 65w and 100w chargers. Yes 45W from a 65W or 65W from a 100W is enough to do office applications, but what if I wanted to do something that actually utilized the CPU/GPU? No sense in arbitrarily limiting the power levels (outside of trying to line their own pockets).

 

Not only that. With the dGPU options, they can charge more for more features. It's not only about the spec sheet.

You are forced into the weaker Intel® Core™ i5-10300H if you try to avoid the battery drain due the not sufficient power adapter. The cheaper and better options Intel® UHD Graphics, can only be selected with the i5. This is intended. You get the worst from bot worlds... Have to pay more for the graphics that almost can't be used.

All know by now that XPS 17 can't utilize max power from the provided USB-C adapter. But from the review unit it will run haywire while you put it in Sleep mode. Yet another flaw people don't talk so much about.

"Also of note is that the system will pull 6.8 W from the outlet when in Sleep mode whereas most other laptops typically pull just 1 W to 2 W when under similar conditions"
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-...ew-Pretty-Much-A-MacBook-Pro-17.480975.0.html

The battery will drain fast no matter how you use this new 17 inch XPS model.

 

I had to clean up a number of posts in here.

Charles

 

Yo! Looking for confirmation from other XPS 17 owners regarding fan profiles in Dell Power Manager, please share with me your findings.
From my testing... -Quiet mode is stupid, the fans stay off for light use, but kick on 4x louder than Optimized when spinning. This would be my preferred mode, but wow its pointless, fans become disgustingly audible during normal use and streaming.
-Optimized has been a winner, if I'm streaming 4K video or using some power, the fans only spin up to low RPM and remain super quiet. It acts as you'd expect: cool the machine as needed, but not excessively. Fans stay off quite often as well.
-Cool mode just runs the fans, a lot. I treat this mode like a fan toggle switch. Overly excessive.
-Performance mode I haven't used much, performance wasn't my reason for purchasing this machine. I'll test this more in the future, may even be better than optimized for all I know.

My machine is the i7/1650 model, 4K display. I'd love to hear what profiles ya'll use, and any tweaks you've made. Overall I love this machine, and only took 10 days to receive. Thanks guys!

 

Dell finally addresses XPS 17 9700 and Precision 5750 charging woes, but the solution isn't as simple as you may think notebookcheck.net | Today

If you own a GeForce-powered XPS 17 or Precision 5750, Dell wants you to contact customer support to work something out. The manufacturer has successfully reproduced the charging issue on a "limited quantity" of laptops and will be reaching out to existing owners as well.

“Dell has identified an issue on a limited quantity of XPS 17 9700 laptops and Precision 5750 mobile workstations where users may notice their battery depleting at a higher than expected rate under sustained heavy workloads and while connected to AC power. Dell has rectified the behavior, and current orders for the products are unaffected. Dell will contact customers with potentially affected systems for resolution. Customers may also contact Dell Technical Support for assistance.”

The Bad News
Early adopters who were crossing their fingers for a simple software fix may be out of luck as Dell has yet to confirm what the fix will be. It's looking likely that there will be no magical driver or file that Dell will provide for existing owners to download or else they would have done so already. A quick update would have been much easier than telling owners to call customer support. The resolution between Dell and affected customers may be on a case-by-case basis as a result and we will update this page should that change.

Yeah, defend flaws and say it's a "no thing or call it baloney" can go into himself/themself and rethink why others react the way they did!
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/xps-17-owners-lounge.833204/page-32#post-11035778

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/xps-17-owners-lounge.833204/page-27#post-11035196

 

Unbelievable company... it's right there, on their website! "130W" via USB-C to power a 190W worth of hardware! They are just betting most people are mugs and won't notice until it's too late.

 

Yeah, the 30days return time frame go damn fast. And if you aren't familiar with Dell's return policy you are stuck with what you got.

And for the records... When XPS 17 being reviewed a second time with the proper 130w load it will run a lot hotter than what it did with the capped 103W load from the power brick. The +25% higher load will be transformed into higher heat.

And the fix for those outside the 30 days window will most likely be a refurbished machine (MB swap). Not nice with a brand new machine that has to be opened due bad QC.
Dell XPS 17 Power Drain Issue Requires Motherboard Replacement per my interaction with Dell Supp

 

Yeah, but what do does that motherboard replacement even achieve? The laptpp needs a 200W power supply.

 

2060 Max-Q have a TGP of around 65 Watt. Add in 40w for Cpu load in gaming and you have 25w for the rest. This if the USB-C charger is able to output 130w 24/7 without failing. But both the 130w charger and the machine in itself will run hotter due the relinquished 25% power from the wall. But expect the charging of half full battery will either be zero or the power handling in firmware will help the battery over better normal performance. This is reality and the drawback vs adding a proper and adequat speced power adapter. It's what it is.

 

So is this supposed fix going to force the 130W adapter to run at full tilt all the time? If so, at some point down the line I can just about guarantee you that we will see a rash of burned out power supplies.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Hope they have engineered the power inlet power delivery to handle 130w load 24/7/365. The start we have seen so far doesn't look promising (failed QC and testing). The concern you provide here should apply to more than just this USB-C adapter. If they haven't done proper testing with 130W load on the machine you yourself can see how this will become a couple of years down the road. Engineering is much more than make a quality chassis.

 

Wow, so Nvidia eventually produced a Max-Q variant of 2060 which is used in this... In that case, it's 45 (why 40W?) +65W and 20W for the rest - any short turbo boosting, if it's even enabled, will drain battery, forget about getting the CPU to run at higher power (the cooling system wouldn't handle it anyway). Perfect, £2899+ well spent lol

 

Dell use Hybrid Battery boost tech adopted from MSI. And yeah, Nvidia pull out many different versions from the Turing silicon https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-2060-Max-Q-Graphics-Card.386286.0.html

 

Yeah, I saw the page, but there wasn't a 2060 Max-Q, nm a 65W one, at initial RTX Max-Q launch. Well, if people will buy heavily castrated hardware at full price, Nvidia and select OEMs are evidently happy to deliver.

 

Is this implying that the 130w charger (and internal power conversion) are about 75% efficient, with the 25% wasted as heat and 75% *130w peak power available to the CPU, GPU and other systems? Or am I misunderstanding this phrase?

It is possible Dell designed this for a bigger power brick but substituted a smaller one at some point due to the weight & bulk added to a thin-and-light laptop. Before the XPS17 was announced officially, I hoped Dell would offer an upgraded big power brick option for those looking for max performance (providing users the option of using the big brick at home and a small brick on the road).

From a cooling perspective, the XPS17 seems to have signifantly more cooling area and improved cooling engineering vs prior XPS models. Visually impressive and I am hopeful here, as always.

 

The output from the brick is with the efficiency calculated. Aka power from the brick to the notebook power inlet should be 130w. In same way as my 330w Delta draw 425w from the wall. Some have measured up to 450w with similar adapter.

 

Dell should just do the right thing here and send out brand new machines to these affected customers and pay for return shipping on the defective units. Level up the customer support Dell.

 

That's exactly what they are doing. Dell support yesterday placed the production order for my new replacement 9700. When it arrives I have ten days to return the defective unit, with UPS picking it up from my home. I don't even have to print a return label.

I've been buying Dell laptops since 1998 and they've never let me down.

 

Yeah, but will they do this if you a few months later find out that your machine is affected by this flaws? And will Dell now try to reach out to all owners who bought the models with this defect? Or is it up to the owners find proper info a and have to call Dell support? Many open questions that haven't been answered by Dell.

Have you seen a public announcement sent out by Dell that addresses the issue? Or maybe they hope this goes into silence?

https://hothardware.com/news/dell-xps-17-9700-charging-woes
While it’s admirable that Dell has rectified the issue, and systems shipping now are not affected, current customers aren’t so lucky. This doesn’t appear to be an issue that can be fixed with a simple firmware/software update, and likely requires hardware modifications; hence why customers will need to get in contact with Dell. This probably means that customers will have to ship their brand-new systems off for repair, which can be a bit of a hassle – especially if the system is needed for work.

 

@hfm @Papusan https://www.dell.com/support/articl...cted-rate-when-connected-to-a-c-power?lang=en

 

Thanks. +reps.

I expect at least Notebookcheck will re-do tests on proper working machine and see if they can utilize 130w from the USB-C Charger.

 

That would be nice if they could send notebookcheck a new review unit. Linus released a video today reviewing the XPS 15 & 17. He called out and referenced a screenshot from notebookcheck's review. He also validated that the XPS 17 they had in for review also exhibited the battery drain issue under load.

 

Well done Dell.
Apple would have probably ignored an issue like that indefinitely.

 

"It's working as designed"

 

They already do. All MBP 16 models have a 100W adapter.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

The 2007 MacBook Pro (core2duo) approached the "issue" slightly differently. Not sure about more recent MBPs.

For aggressive use, the included 85w charger is insufficient, so the battery is called upon. But IME, battery drain when plugged into mains is negligible. So Apple was using the battery rarely to cover occasional peaks. I didn't know this "feature" existed for a decade.

It only becomes a "problem" when the battery expires or is removed, the CPU speed is throttled 50% from 2.2 to 1.1GHz (and runs only runs on 1 core IIRC). These batteries take 10 seconds to replace,are still easy to find, and good ones cost well under $100.

 

A Macbook implementation is fairly uninteresting, given that the device throttles well before any serious power draw can be realised. It would make more sense to compare to other latops of comparable dimensions and weight. Alienware m15/m17 might be one example, and while the recent models suffer from terrible applesque flaws, a similarly specified laptop would ship with either a 180 or 240W power adapter.

 

I had a 2011 MacBook Pro, so Sandy Bridge CPU and AMD Radeon 6770M GPU. Under heavy load its 85W PSU would pull significantly from the battery under load and would still throttle.