XPS 15 9560 owners thread.

same here, you can also do it thru bios

 

Where do you get the motherboard so cheaply?

You can see some good thermal mods here to reduce temperatures.

For example, The 7th generation CPUs can undervolt decently so that reduces temps a bit. You have to use an older BIOS that permits undervolting (undervolting was probably disabled late 2019).

There are other mods on the forum. . .

 

On the 'bay! There's one more in the UK right now, sealed new, same price!

Looking at the issue from a thermals POV, I've had all my previous high end dell laptops die from ****ty solder fracturing, so this is probably not any different. It would make sense too, a gradual decay to utter death. Maybe the extended warranty isn't such a bad deal!
M1710, m6600, 5520, all the fastest on the planet at the time, bar none. I seriously do beat the living **** out of them. it's quite surprising how long they last.

Will search thethread for thermal solutions. I have a quantity of fujipoly hanging around as it is!

GB

 

Some ideas beyond undervolting.

Just lifting the back of the laptop with an eraser say 1cm improves air intake and thermals a lot.

Install Dell Command | Power Manager (select cool and fans will run faster).

You may want to run the CPU at a lower speed (lower temps) if you are doing GPU intensive tasks. Enable SpeedShift in BIOS as that is the best CPU control (you can set the CPU power consumption via EPP and I have a thread dedicated to SpeedShift here). EPP=0 max performance, EPP=255 max energy savings, EPP~79 allows max clocks but that EPP will vary a bit by system. Some people see better performance with SpeedShift enabled and Speed STEP disabled.

On some XPS models, (high temperature) electrical tape to seal the out-take side of the fan to the radiator improves thermals. Clean the radiators with canned air. Clean the fans with a q-tip (canned air can overspeed the fans and ruin them).

The grille on the casebottom might restrict air intake so cutting away a few of the metal bars might help thermals. That could expose the internals to physical damage etc. but offer health and safety "issues".

VRM cooling is poor on these. If you can use an external fan "chill mat", you might be able to heatsink the mosfets to the casebottom. If you don't have a good chill mat, the mosfet heat will saturate the casebottom quickly and thermal advantage disappears (also the keyboard gets uncomfortably hot).

 

for those who use throttlestop, do you set igpu unslice in fivr? if so what values do they usually copy (ie, igpu, system agent, cpu core, etc undervolt value).

 

It's generally not recommended to do anything to the iGPU as it's really sensitive to changes. Once time I tried to undervolt it, just -50mV and my system entered an endless BSOD boot loop. Had to reinstall Windows from scratch as a result.

 

I got the dell xps 15 9550. I also downloaded the power manager. Where can you change it to charge up to 85%? I read people said doing it to 80% or 90% is the best to make your battery last longer?


Also is there proof... that doing this makes battery last longer than having it plugged it fully charged 100%? I use my laptop charged and connected to external monitors almost always.

 

my usb c/thundebolt connector is acting up lately. i connect a 512gb ssd to it and it will sometimes lose connectivity to the drive, i tried it with a different drive (hdd) and the problem persists. i have ran the standard hardware tests thru bios and thru the dell website and there are no errors detected. my questions are:
1. do the hardware tests detect errors in the usb ports? i persume they do but would want some confirmation.
2. if this is indeed a software issue (seems like it) what drivers should i try to reinstall or what other things can i try to fix it?

 

Lappy now back up and running!
(motherboard for Precision 5520 with Xeon E3-1505m v5/M1200 had died. Direct equivalent to XPS 15 9560. Replacement part DP/N: 3YC22 )

Happy bunny, except fot the kosher replacement power jack it *didn't* like, and stopped recognising the 130W PSU (which I also replaced).
Troubleshooting and isolation down to the actual original DC power jack being required, weirdly, for the BIOS to recognise the PSU.
BIOS updates, and roll-backs, same thing, not recognised. Original jack back in, no problemo!
Checked on the TB15 I've been running trouble-free since day 1 back in late 2016, and confirmed it wasn't the DC power converters.

A couple of MS update bugs with W10-64 for Workstations, so they've been ignored until next patch Tuesday.

All Nvidia drivers updated, couple of quick stress tests and cooling is good.
Idle temp for i7-7700HQ around 43Celsius, stress with Furmark CPU burn 86Celsius stable and no throttling, nice smooth response graphs.

A friend got the XPS15 9550 as a recommendation, and with it the GTX960m GPU version. I noticed the FPS on Furmark GPU burn is way better from something basically identical as hardware goes. The Quadro M1200 on 1920x1080 (2k) dynamic background gets 23-25 FPS, 4k dynamic background gets 8FPS, and the GTX960m upwards of 40FPS on 2k from memory. If someone wants to chip in with their results?

I came to the conclusion it was most likely the lead-free solder(sodder if you're from the usa) that had fatigued from heat/mechanical stress. This happened with every XPS or Precision model I've had since 2007, necessitating either temporary reflow in a calibrated domestic oven, or motherboard replacement.
Having faffed around in the past with the M1710, M6600 and reflowing temporarily, I wasn't going to explore that rabbit hole, and instead the mobo was going to get dropped in.
Sourced the refurb on e*ay, go see recent sales at 250GBP. It's labelled as new but there were tape marks on some metal, so it was a refurb for sure.

It makes sense now. All of the symptoms are clearly indicative of heat-related microfractures attributable to poor solder quality.

Where possible I'm now offloading my content creation and image editing to a desktop Optiplex 3020 that's been pimped with a Xeon 1241 v3 and GTX 1650 Super, 2 SSD's 3 HDD's and 16GB ram.

You cannot drive them hard for a long time, Dell just doesn't seem to get the solder quality or cooling nailed. Even the Precision M6600 I had before this, just couldn't take the heat.

Anyway...

If anyone in the UK reading this has use for a dead Precision 5520/XPS15 9560 mobo with a Xeon 1505v5/M1200 then DM me. You may have some luck if you want to attempt a reflow. You can pay postage if you want it. It's that or off to the local e-waste skip.

GB