XPS 9550 + 4K panel screen flicker thread.

Have you phoned Dell about this as I an assure you they don't visit this thread

 

They must have pull out from their site the Bios v1.2.13 for a valid reason. Try the v1.2.0 or v1.2.10 with the new Intel video drivers from Dell site and see if you still have the flicker. I'm on v1.2.0 with the latest Intel video drivers and no flicker.

 

Bios 1.2.14 is up. Don' waste your time with it. Flicker is not mentioned so it will not be fixed, I bet. They just fixed the battery 60% problem.

 

yep flicker is back. Reverting to 1.2.0

*edit. On hold with Dell after explaining in grahic detail and being told to go to version 1.1.15 (that causes BSOD with nvme drives)

42 minutes later and things are going to the product team, I will link this thread in my reply.

 

By graphic you mean "explicit"? I would have a lot of explicit content to tell them

 

More me explaining I am a qualified laptop engineer and have tried the following 20+ things to try and work round the issue.
My main issue is the 1.1.15 BIOS has the problem where I randomly BSOD with store or machine check exceptions and this seems to be the NVME drive being dropped by the motherboard as no crash dump is written and no drive shows when it restarts. A forced power off and on gets the drive back. ( lots with this issue and it happened on my previous 9550))

 

But sir, have you tried restarting the laptop 5 times? Maybe you have a flicker virus...

 

Yeah I will submerge it in a vat of Dettol! That will stop the flickering

 

Yeah, conficker...

 

My reply to the email I just got from Dell.

Hello any BIOS version 01.02.10 and above that includes the fix for flickering screens on the full HD versions causes flickering below 50% brightness on the QHD panels.

I see what they did in the so called fix, they removed the lowest brightness options below 20% to work around this instead of fixing it. This is demonstrated when you try and go lower than 20% brightness as nothing happens. This is not a fix it should be classed as a temporary workaround and Dell should list it as such.

BIOS 1.2.0 works best for me, I no longer get windows hanging that eventually results in either a "machine check exception" or "store exception" resulting in no crash dump as basically the fault is the NVME drive dropping. When the BSOD reboots the system no hard drive is present until you power down and back up again.

The BSOD issue has been ongoing with a lot of members from the notebookreview forums and the flickering issue started when the BIOS revisions got to 1.2.**

It seems obvious the fix for the FHD panel itself created a problem for the QHD users.

Telling owners to roll back to BIOS 1.1.15 is unacceptable given the timeframe this problem has been going on for. all listed fixes are not in version 1.1.15

• 1.Fixed Dell Thunderbolt Dock (TB15) device will lost after S3 resume
• 2.CREATED LCD flickering when in lowest brightness
• 3.Fixed After McAfee encrypted, the PCIE NVMe SSD \ SATA SSD can't boot to OS issue
• 4.Fixed Wake on WLAN takes a long time with Intel 1830/1820A Wireless card
• 5.Fixed USB audio/mouse may be lag while connected to Dell Thunderbolt Dock (TB15) and Dell Dock (WD15)
• 6.Support for Windows 10 Enterprise features
• 7.Fixed incorrect Thunderbolt security level reading from Driver
• 8.Fixed Touchpad may be lost after Dell Thunderbolt Dock (TB15) device connected
• 9. Add passthrough MAC address shows on BIOS Setup feature.
• 10.Fixed System will become shut-down with connected to Dell Thunderbolt Dock (TB15) after S4 Resume.
• 1.2.13 included a NMVE stability fix

I am running the latest Dell intel video drivers and all other drivers are up to date.


I created a thread about the flickering here http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...en-flicker-thread.795285/page-5#post-10338117
Feel free to get a Dell rep to post and acknowldge the issue with every QHD 9550 owner that has gone in and reported the issue.
Needless to say the 1.2.13 and 1.2.14 still have this problem I reported back in July.

Del needs to at least remove the so called flicker fix for QHD owners as it fixed the issue for FHD owners and created the issue for QHD owners.

Any BIOS below 1.2.** still exhibits a very occasional flicker that is best described as a loss of backlight for a split second, not enough to totally blank the display just dim it considerably.

I feel Dells priorities should be with the flagship XPS laptops and have more people work on this issue to get it resolved be it with revised hardware or a true fix instead of removing the lowest brightness option.

Thanks.