XPS 15z Crackling Audio with Network Traffic

[iAMjason]

@Alias
Thanks for the tip but it didn't help.

@Shonky
Are you still unable to download the driver for your machine?

Also what's puzzling is that I was playing a game against my cousin over my home network and there was a ton of network traffic. But at that time, I never heard the crackling sound - it's only now that I hear it.

[Shonky]

Tried it just now and the multiple download method is working now. Will compare with the previous download to see if it's any different. I haven't tried the new one yet though. My "normal" machine has the Dell old card in it. I need to unpack and try it on the replacement machine.

As for gaming, I would say gaming doesn't produce massive amounts of traffic. Best I've found is either iperf or doing a simple file copy from machine to machine (assuming you have two machines including the 15z). And definitely more traffic equals more glitching.

[iAMjason]

Alright, let me know if the new driver fixes the problem on your replacement machine. Unfortunately, it didn't do anything for me.

And I also talked to a Dell Support rep and he agreed to replace the Centrino card with an identical one.

[Shonky]

I'm going to be busy with work for a couple of days but maybe by Wednesday I'll get it out and give it a go.

The 1st December version *is* different based on just a binary compare. It reports itself as A04 in both though.

I think if they are just replacing the network card like for like you are probably wasting your time.

[iAMjason]

Yeah, that's what I told them but I guess I'll have to convince them not to...

[Shonky]

I currently use channel 1 in the 2.4GHz space. Now they are telling me to try channel 11 on the replacement machine (still with the Intel 6230). I was mainly using 5GHz though since I get better speed there and can set it for 802.11n only

I have already done this for them long before the replacement machine arrived and also the problem was occuring at 5GHz too. So this will not help and we're going around in circles now.

[iAMjason]

Yeah I know we're wasting time with this.

I'm not sure if this will help, but I've been talking to a Dell liaison who has been in contact with their engineering department. He claims that engineering is "aware" of the problem, though I'm not sure what they plan to do about it. I plan on following up on this and I'll keep you posted. If anything, he can help get the wifi card replaced. This is his page on Dell Forum:

Sign In to Your Dell My Account

[iAMjason]

I just tested a different 15z to see if it also had latency problems. To generate network traffic, I streamed same YouTube video I've been using to test and the computer, in fact, had pretty bad latency problems. On average, the computer had about 4000µs of latency while the video loaded. However, the person said that she never hears that crackling sound.

At this point, I'm convinced that you're correct - this is a design flaw of the 15z...

[Shonky]

Did you hear the crackling/glitching during your test?

I definitely think a lot of people wouldn't notice it. I certainly wasn't looking for it. It took me a while to figure out what was happening. It was just I was copying a lot of files to the new machine whilst playing some MP3s...

[DanielNTX]

I have the same problem here. I think it's probably a driver problem. Had the same issue on my Lenovo ThinkPad W510 when it first came out. Updated the drivers back then and it was resolved.