Inspiron 7577, insufficient power adapter, WTF Dell

Hey all,

I had recently bought an Inspiron 7577 configured with the i7 7700hq, gtx 1050-ti, and 16gb RAM, but to my surprize this configuration came with only a 130 watt power adapter.

And my concern was confirmed to be correct, as when i game for a couple of hours on it while plugged into AC (and battery 100%), i find that the battery level had dropped by 20%, so i dig in a little more and find out that dell has a "feature" implemented into the laptop called "Hybrid Power" which makes the laptop draw any power requirements in excess of the 130 watts provided by the psu directly from the battery.

In other words, i cannot have an extensive gaming session on this laptop or render any heavy graphics without having my battery being drained, which basically limits the operation time (at maximum performance) to at best 8~9 hours while plugged in, which for my use case where the laptop will be running at max performance more often than not...is absolute bollocks, not to mention that too many power cycles will shorten the battery life and degrade performance, which in turn will make the former problem worse.

So i contacted dell to try have them replace the 130 watt psu with a 180 watt one like the model with the 1060 max-q has, and i tell them the situation exactly as i had described above, but of course i get the expected response of "the laptop is performing within spec", and here's the one that really pissed me off "if you don't like the product you can return it"....

All my rant aside, has anyone been facing this problem with the laptop as well?, how did you solve it?, did you manage to get dell to replace the psu with a higher wattage one?

note: I'm in Egypt btw, and i had sent dell an email explaining all this and requesting a replacement, currently waiting on the response.

 

This is actually something I haven't heard before - the 7577 wasn't really plagued with issues such as this one. You can try undervolting the CPU and GPU - it won't affect performance but power draw is usually reduced and it also leads to lower thermals. Use MSI Afterburner for the GPU and Intel XTU for the CPU. hitting -100mV on the 7700HQ is usually easy as those came very highly overvolted.

 

actually this is with the cpu undervolted by 125mv

Nvidia power management also on adaptive so it's not high performance all the time, and the Throttlestop EPP set to 32 to allow the processor to drop its clock as needed (not full turbo all the time)

 

Hmmm, what's your ambient temperature? It's also possible that the adapter is overheating and thus supplying less current so as to not set itself on fire.

 

ambient is fine (22~25c)

 

There's definitely something odd - I've seen laptops pack 120W power adapters for similar components and not have issues.

 

I heard about this when I was looking to buy a gaming laptop. Basically, if you got one of these laptops, Dell’s attitude is “deal with it”. Ultimately I got my HP Omen 15.

 

Never had that issue on my $700 refurb 7567 (which is similar) and it’s unfortunate that your issue isn’t solved, I wonder if it’s contracted support you are dealing with in your region. In fact I complained about uneven core temps twice and guess what, they gave me a $1,200-1,400 7577 with a 1060, 4K display a 512GB nVME driver and a 1TB HDD. At least in the US they generally have the best service in the PC buisness granted they aren’t perfect and some do face CS issues.

I would avoid HP with a 10 foot pole though, not one person I know has gone without issues within 1-2 years. Even the medical corporation where my father works goes exclusively Dell, the one year they went with HP due to reverse auction they regretted it as HP support was terrible and they reverted to Dell within a few months. HP/Acer I never recommend.

Dell and Lenovo is what I’d stick to.

 

I haven’t had any issues with HPs myself except for the bloatware they feel the need to shovel onto their PCs. I just kill a half hour with PC Decrapifier and clean the garbage off. I have a 10-year-old low-end Presario that still runs fine with a fresh install of Win7 on it. I do ordinarily agree that I generally prefer Dells though.

 

I have not had this issue on my brand new G3 17 with GTX 1060.

Of course it came with a 180W power adapter but then again the GTX 1060 uses that much more power compared to a GTX 1060.

I've customized the battery charge to have it only charge up to 90% and I've ran RealBench as least 15 times already on this laptop and there's no indication of any power issues, the battery has drained from 90% to 85% over a weeks time which seems to be normal.

I also have a G3 17 with GTX 1050 coming next week which comes with a 130W power adapter and I expect no issues with that either, as someone has mentioned above there are other brands that include even lower power adapters at 120W and I've yet to see any online reviewers point out any power ralated problems even when running extreme stress tests like Prime95+Furmark.