Dell i5 5402 Mods Part 2

I decided that I will just go through the mods, instead of doing stepped comparison tests for each mod.

First thing, the new systems have been configured wrong during OS setup.
The default was SATA RAID on the host controller. Which I found does not work well with Samsung drivers, and their high end devices. To fix this issue, I copied a section out of a Microsoft KB article. If your BIOS is set to anything but AHCI, you need to boot into Windows before changing the BIOS setting to AHCI.

Here are the steps.

1. Open a command prompt with elevated privileges and run the following command to enable safe boot: bcdedit/set 'Current' SafeBoot minimal
   
   
2. Restart the computer and start the system BIOS.
   
   
3. Change the ATA / RAID drive setting from ATA / RAID to AHCI mode and press Enter to apply the change.
   
   
4. Click Yes to view the detected mode change warning on the embedded ATA controller.
   
   
5. The system usually starts in safe mode with the modern app start menu.
   
   
6. open a command prompt with elevated privileges and run the following command to remove the safe start option Console
   bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot

1. Restart the computer and start it normally, the system will successfully start in

Now you can use Samsung drivers with existing OEM boot SSD.

I tested and found the oem drive is slow and hinders a lot of things, even though it seems snappy.

Creating an image copy of my modded base OS, to be restored to my 970 Evo Plus.

So far only getting 1.6gbps on my media router. May have to tweak things a bit to get 2.4gbps. Haven't used it until now, so that's another config I will have to do to maximize my laptops performance.

Oh by the way it's pretty sturdy and feels solid for its size. One thing 5 hat bugs me is why the white bezel around the LCD screen? I was able to adjust a lot of video options, could probably calibrate the screen to be above its colour rating of 74% of RGB. The defualts really need tweaking. I may do a DVD HD Basics calibration to make it near a cinema calibration. I love the screen so far. No noticable bleed and very bright. I tend to stick with 50% or lower on most all my settings. As it makes everything last longer. One thing gamers can't do with their systems, is cinema audio and video. Way too colorized for my tastes.

This Windows 10 thing, and a lack of proper setup by Dell techs, has given my steep learning curve a wee bit of perplexity as to how tech is so overstated. I would be fired back in the day for doing production work so shoddy. Here I had my fill of picking on Android, for being inferior and this is what inferior get. I hear a nasty Droid mechanically laughing in the distance.

Should have the run down by next week some time. I am spending most of my time configuring windows and playing with the BIOS. The rest of the hardware should be delivered by the weekend. Blame it on corona.

 

If I am reading correctly, there are two drive slots and raid in the Bios? I would run the system that way for sure.

 

The nomenclature is ruff on true abilities. Dell needs to address why things are the way they are.

They set it up to be backwards compatible to SATA and Optane memory. Enabling AHCI and removing Secure Boot for my needs is against Dell's methods, so support on booting proper is not going to be from Dell.

Contrary to using the SSD sticks outside of factory defaults actually makes the system faster. Without AHCI, Samsung drivers and utilities are unable to function.

Put side of the problem Dell has created, another problem from Dell popped up last night. I updated the recovery support tool. After upgrading my support tool no longer boots. I kept my bios on SATA/RAID, which is factory default, and bam hit by Dell once more.

So as expected, I will do a clean install of the os and intel video and wifi/blutooth drivers. At least I will get some where, as the option to revert the Dell installation to function on AHCI has failed.

At least I got enough feel for the system, being hindered by Dell's bad choices, as to determine what improvements have been made.

Waiting on ram and USB3 external bluray enclosure. Will get this puppy on the road soon. It's the only way to fly, anyway. There has not been a factory fresh install kept as a base since the early 90s. So this is not all new to me, just a bit surprising to how limited this model is just by a factory setup. Now that Dell hosed their own support tool, no reason to keep Dell hidden. Partitions and factory windows install.

Moving on to AHCI and putting all this into the bin, as I am not going back to the SATA/RAID option in the BIOS.

Not reason to use RAID0, these two NVME drives are too fast to bother. If I had another dell 512GB ssd, 9r optane then raid0 would be an option.

My next update will be added, once I have installed all the updated hardware. As for custom mods, a grey keyboard and vostro ports module (on board NIC) will make it uniquely a custom Vostro with out the high price.

 

Good news! I found why I could not boot into AHCI mode with OEM SSD. It took a bit of rereading through the service manual to figure out why, after stumbling on xcopying the system over to the 980 Pro. The OEM SSD prefers to function in the M.2 slot 2. Dell factory builds will place all SSD cards in slot 1.

I now have all the memory upgrades in place and from the utilities built into the BIOS and from the OEM SSD, I have found both Samsung drives well worth their price. If you have the money you should go with the 980 Pro, there is a noticable speed improvement on some functions. Mostly sequential reads and writes up to the point of filling it's internal cache.

Still waiting on my external USB3 enclosure, for my RW Bluray. Once it is here I will do a custom install using a fresh iso build from Microsoft.

Doing chkdsk /f /r and diskpart commands showed how well the 980 Pro functions without being in a windows cached environment. The 980 Pro was running circles around the 970 Evo Plus, even though the channel speeds were limited by the maximum of the PCI-E 3.0 interface. There is a wee bit of room that the Evo Plus leaves by cache and it's own NVME limits being older gen and 3.0 limited tech. Though I chose 500GB versions, 1TB will have more cache, that will give a deeper range of sustained data rates.

Once the drives reach around 20% of their capacity the speeds level off. Mostly by temp regulation, being that they are without heat sinks attached. I may look into making some sort of custom heat transfer panel to fit between the drives and bottom cover. I have plenty of sheet metal to work with. Just will have to see on how I will tackle it, being so limited by space.

If you have the money two 1TB 980 Pro drives would be the icing on the cake, being that they are future ready for your next laptop, if your constantly into the latest and greatest. I see no big upgrade necessity in the next two years or even more. This is the first mid priced laptop that actually can run as a desktop replacement in every way, but being on a LAN, at least at the time of writing. I do plan on obtaining a Vostro ports option to swap on the left side. Which has the LAN capability. Just have to cut out a square access hole or obtain a keyboard with palm rest and swap out as well. Since I plan on the keyboard swap, the palm rest section would be part of my purchase, most likely.

Oh by the way, the BIOS will automatically change the Intel video shared memory from 8MB to 16MB with the addition of another 8GB to the system.

 

I am completely blown away! Fresh non factory install with Intel and samsung drivers and utilities. Swapped the primary ssd to be the 980 pro. Reason being, my own secret and I am not telling... unless someone is doing what I am doing can see for them selves.

Off to buy another 980 pro 500. Mwhahahahahahahaha!

Either my chipset is clocked to pcie 4.0 standards or I must have a newer chipset capable of such speeds. I once had a few early builds of devices that spec higher than advertised. This just may be the case once more. Until I can truly verify with an inspector benchmark app. Something sort of reminds me of describing a pen mark but in 3D. Ha!

I will say this... booting up is less than 20 seconds.

Not going to install Dell stuff. Just keep up with directly related drivers by the manufacturers, and any bios updates for the system.

Now to do a boooku amount of custom system configuring, before installing my programs.

I have totaled up all my purchases to make my build complete. For less than $700.00 you won't find a better performing laptop, without doing exactly what I have done. Sure you can find a decent build for that, but it will still be limited without adding to the overall cost.

 

You don't have PCIe 4.0, but having said that, you won't really notice a difference between the two. It's the random 4k small reads that helps with booting time anyway, not long sustained transfer speeds.

 

I did the tests after noticing the boot speed increase. Also I did a few installs, and played around on the EVO plus, before doing the data migration to the 980 pro. So I have two identical base installs, to switch from.

I know the cache on the 980 Pro out performs the Evo plus, as doing the chkdsk /f /r on a boot from CD command shell, proved 2x the speed with the Pro.

I finally did the Samsung Bench mark on both to compare. I get PCI-E 4.0 speeds when it should not. That is why I am going to check further with hardware and other tests. There should be a cut off, which I am not seeing no matter how do it. I could speed test transferring one os over to the other drive in a temp folder. On both SSD cards. Even if the pro is a wee faster, it should not cut in half the time to transfer 40GB of OS and programs over to the other drive. Being both are set identically with system settings.

 

I'd love to see proof of these pcie 4.0 speeds...

 

Ok, I will see if I can post bbs codes or something like a link to post what my Samsung Magic Manager has posted for bench marks.

I have yet to dig deeper than that on Windows 10. As I progress with other more labor intensive bench marks, I will post my findings as well. I know this should not be but until I find more, I am sort of skeptical as well.

Will post my bench mark soon... once I get the links made from the hosting site I use.

 

Samsung manager is not a good bench, it will just show you hyper inflated numbers from testing the cache... Crystaldiskmark with larger tests is more accurate.

 

Here is the Samsung Magic Manager results

 

The C: drive is the Pro
The F: drive is the Evo Plus
Default settings with testing set with SSD NVME

 

After reading up on Thunderbolt, it is to have direct connection with PCI-E, so I have Thunderbolt 4.0? Won't know until I have some device that has such capability to test with. That is also a possibility for dual 4K monitors or one 8K monitor, on the Thunderbolt connection.

Until I get the hardware specs sorted out, the only possibility of having PCI-E 4.0 speeds, is if the chipset is one of the versions that allows overclocking. It's more possible than an undocumented PCI-E 4.0 update, unless this model is destined to be a 2021 model, early.

 

Humm, those are significantly faster than expected results. What does hwinfo64 show?

 

Yep, made my jaw drop, as I had given up on thinking I had PCI-E 4.0, from my original thread, by people telling me it ain't happening without Thunderbolt 4.0 or Intel's new chipset.

I know $1k + laptops have Thunderbolt and LDDR4X ram. This laptop seems to have more than advertised, just the higher speed ram is not happening.

I will get further along, I just had time to do the few tests. Never planned on needing to do more than just simple tests.

Think I will do a 3DMark and Sis bench mark program as well.

The big bummer is that I should have gone with two pro sticks, and never listened to anyone. Well next year 980 pros will drop when 990 Evo knocks on the door.

I will post what I can later on in the wee hours. That's when I have time to mess further along. I have been mostly learning as I go deeper into the laptop, and Dell's way of managing recovery. I am glad I am ditching the factory image and recovery. Windows does very well for me and easier to control for recovery needs, though I rarely ever need to.

I am thinking cache has nothing to do with the speeds I see. It looks like I was right to begin with, that Dell was lazy with making claims with what version of Thunderbolt and PCI-E capabilities. As the AMD variant won't match with Intel, so basic claims and port iidentification on the laptop meets with both specs, being generallized.

Again this is not the first early release item that got a refresh just before the following year release. It's been going on with just about every thing since the 60s. I bet they give this model a new number for a March release or even early Feburary. Since there is no live reviews made on the model. Just too early or way too late in the marketing game.

 

AIDA64 will show link speed under devices and then PCI devices and then clicking on your NVMe drive. One thought that I have is maybe Dell is devoting additional lanes to it since there isn't a GPU or anything else to run. PCIe 3.0 8x will do those speeds easily. Standard specs are not defined by Intel, AMD, or any company, they have committees for that. PCIe 4.0 is the same everywhere.

 

Pci-e 8x I doubt will exist on mid priced laptops. Plus I haven't seen any 8x cards, though we are talking M.2 card.

Way back, Intel when made the 386, they did not publish an interupt for the internal math co-processor. There was many after market turbo mother boards that did not use the line. Only one that I know of that actually followed intel at an engineering level. Basically it comes down to engineering, how much do you want to spend on making a custom board, and the design requirements for mass production. If it's low cost, I doubt any effort will be done to make it function any better than what was required by design. On the other hand top of the line, may and has been cheapened out by AMD design requirements. For the same design under two differing CPU makers, Intel has always leveraged manufacturers to follow their guidelines after all Intel has to support their products for high standards. Two differing structures, AMD is a nice product but I see too many cost cutting ways with designs to make them any better and reliable than intel. None of three types of servers I worked with had any AMD CPUs. Though my point is simple when you design for the masses, you don't have to state specifics when two different designs fit into one groupe. Just be general in terms and it fits.

This issue never was, when one design and model was made around one manufacturer of CPU. Once cost cutting in making layouts fit in a common footprint the specs may fall in and out of equal terms. Like memory addressing. You may find one make may have more addressable memory.

Back to you your reasoning. AMD likes and pushes pci-e 4.0. It's possible the AMD boards in the same model, are in the same boat with hiding specs. AMD does not push Thunderbolt so they just emplement it because they follow the trend. Two competing platforms, but both provide speed increases through data streams.

Maybe with mid priced systems they all support pci-e 4.0 if cpu supports it. Just marketing it as 3.0 to sell 4.0 on higher priced systems. Until more try using higher rated pci-e 4.0 cards on the 3.0 channel, we won't know how much has been under our noses for the last year. Obviously the last half of this year with 11th gen Intel on mid priced systems.

 

Ok, here is proof I should have Thunderbolt 4.0 capability from having PCI-E 4.0 from CPU channels. I looked into the device manager and noticed Windows update has not loaded any chipset drivers for 11th gen CPU. Just basic drivers for each PCI device. As for proof in identification of channel speed or version compatibility here is the screen copy of the results.

 

Sweet, glad Intel actually implemented PCIe 4.0 in their tiger lake products. Not that it actually makes a difference in something 99% of users will see, it's good to see them actually do this.

How is the battery life and screen in this thing? Those are the two biggest things for me.

 

Oh, I haven't really gotten down to the nitty gritty of how things settled down. Been multi tasking and getting confused by Dell's methods of making systems so limited. Seeing their BIOS a bit robust and all. Plus the lack of any real deep reviews with late in the year products. Like we are in Corona, and reviewers should be taking advantage of such an opportunity. I knew reviews have been paid adverts. Just i am not a reviewer, as my methods are around what can be done, not what you have on the spec sheet. What seems too obvious to me seems like some sort of mystery, in that every manufacturer has a like product of everyone else's, just rebranded to sell as their very own. I doubt this laptop, that is built around the 11th gen is the only one of the 12 different laptops available that are mid priced and lack the moniker of Thunderbolt 4.0. This sort of stuff is not new, and has not surprised me, after all I believed it was just a lack of effort due to being to cheap to pay royalties and have two different enclosures made to reflect the true specs of what what built around each CPU manufacturer.

Enough rants... here is what I gathered after a few days, probably will level out after I am done with the tweaks, reboots, and what nots gone into redoing everything from scratch.

Boot time 13 seconds and less. It's an odd thing, even if you shut down and wait hours, sometimes boot ups are as fast as waking from hibernation. Then you get the real boot times, to show you some cache is being done on shutdowns. Real boot times are around 13 seconds for now.

I adjusted the default of 10% to 25% on the Samsung over provisioning. It's to keep some extra memory for wear, and allow extend cache further, with using less memory to map to.

Can't wait for Samsung to release 980 Pro drivers, the basic NVME driver is limiting the SSD.

Battery has calmed down... I originally broke it in by allowing the default slow charge with deep cycling. Now I have optimized it with Dell's quick charge feature. Note, HP and a few others have actually sold similar designed laptops with 45w power supply. 65w is minimum for Thunderbolt. Try 100w and higher, when set at desktop mode and raid5 plugged in to Thunderbolt port.

The battery can last 10 hours and even more with average use. Once you get into performance switching fans are noticable but not too aggressive. You can make it run in performance only, so I doubt you wI'll get more than 3.5 hours of game play on battery, with settings set to maximum for graphics and cpu.

Having two drives has sped up cache and loading of apps with their temp files located on the second SSD, my swap file, and work drive.

On default the the battery and system runs just fine, cool and quiet.

I prefer the 14" because the mouse pad is near center, as the display size increases, the mouse pad shifts more left. I some times right click, because my right hand is centered while the mouse pad's slight shift to the left, makes the presses within the just right of center area, be right clicks. I may have to place a request by Dell or the manufacturer of the touch pad to allow offset adjustment of center or near center. Thus way such issues with hand placement, will be a mute issue.

The touch pad is awsome, large and responsive, one mouse button, being the pad. Just where you touch makes the button below left or right on your clicks.

Display is bright, but I only go no higher than 50%.
So with any display the brighter the more battery consumption.

Believe me or not, the oem SSD sucks! I cannot stress this any more, without making a asshat out of me. I think by doing so with mid priced laptops, it makes their higher priced laptops look good in the reviews bench marks.

Everything about the laptop has livened up since adding the ram for dual channel use, and using a fast SSD. If I had only 4GB, which nobody offered on builds... I would have just popped in another 4GB, even though my video memory would be 8MB. The performance would out do my original build given on the order. Just because both video and system memory were set by single channel with just one 8GB chip.

So with any mid priced laptop expect to dump at least another $150.00 after paying for your laptop, to make it near the top of the food chain. In some respects, mid range is base to build upon. Once you get near 1k, on any comparison, the cost of buying just below flag ship is a waste. You getting better performance but still limited.

Of all the laptops, this is a true sleeper. I would say a flagship for 2020 on the all around performer league. I just love having two full sized M.2 slots, and a large capacity battery. Few offer those two options, even in the higher price ranges.

One thing Dell has that I like, 30 day return, on them. So if you find it not what you wanted, return it.

I would have paid a wee more for a 15.6" but the 14" grew on me as it got further into using it. Bigger keys and a simple keyboard layout. I recommend doing a clean install, and turning off secure boot. You can also disable Dell OS Recovery in the BIOS. No sense in keeping it enabled, if replacing with a fast SSD. Windows recovery works just as well, and does not give the run around with popping in and out of bios routines to find what your looking for.

That's it in a nut shell. A wee bit of work and $150 spent wisely, will give you one mean portable machine, that will impress you. The big thing I still have issues is Windows 10 start menu. It's not laptop friendly and the time spent adjusting it to my needs, won't fix it, and could be used in final adjustments elsewhere.

I will add more or possibly just make a 3rd thread on direct facts that are clean enough to rely on, than my two threads that move in and out of speculation, and facts, and a bit of trouble shooting Dell's convoluted setup.