Surface Book Performance Base vs Kaby Lake XPS 15

HammerTime · 24 Apr 2017 at 19:37

Having some major noise issues now. Contacted Dell and awaiting a response, just appeared late yesterday evening. Seems to be a dull, consistent noise coming from the bottom of the laptop. Grrr.

skaif · 24 Apr 2017 at 21:00

Damn that's annoying.

I'm having some issues with the killer ac connection. Can't seem to get a solid connection speed of above 173mbps on 5ghz band.

Meanwhile 300mbps on 2.4ghz :|

LEK-89 · 27 Apr 2017 at 22:33

Evening all,

Just looking for some advice, in particular FAO @skaif

I've not long took delivery of my brand new XPS 15 9560, so far absolutely over the moon with it and no problems to report so far (touchwood). Originally a couple of weeks ago I did go down the route of purchasing a Manufacturer Refurbished version which cosmetically was as new but sadly sent it back a few days ago due to a reoccurring BSOD error which eventually was hardware linked.

Anyway to the matter in hand - I will be carrying out a repaste job on this brand new one shortly with some Thermal Grizzly Kyronaut but I was wandering if if it's really worth applying new & more durable thermal pads on the CPU / GPU VRM chips, as well as the factory supplied pads underneath the heatsink chips too? Some people have reported success with being able to lower overall temps even more but others report that there isn't really a great beneficial gain to it - and at the end of the day the only thing intensive I will be doing is a couple of hours of BF1 for a few hours a week. This is partly the reason I ask as it's been known for the 9560, as well as the older 9550 to throttle on some demanding games due to the VRM chips heating up & throttling the CPU in the process.

Many thanks - Liam.

skaif · 28 Apr 2017 at 06:35

LEK-89 said:
Evening all,

Just looking for some advice, in particular FAO @skaif

I've not long took delivery of my brand new XPS 15 9560, so far absolutely over the moon with it and no problems to report so far (touchwood). Originally a couple of weeks ago I did go down the route of purchasing a Manufacturer Refurbished version which cosmetically was as new but sadly sent it back a few days ago due to a reoccurring BSOD error which eventually was hardware linked.

Anyway to the matter in hand - I will be carrying out a repaste job on this brand new one shortly with some Thermal Grizzly Kyronaut but I was wandering if if it's really worth applying new & more durable thermal pads on the CPU / GPU VRM chips, as well as the factory supplied pads underneath the heatsink chips too? Some people have reported success with being able to lower overall temps even more but others report that there isn't really a great beneficial gain to it - and at the end of the day the only thing intensive I will be doing is a couple of hours of BF1 for a few hours a week. This is partly the reason I ask as it's been known for the 9560, as well as the older 9550 to throttle on some demanding games due to the VRM chips heating up & throttling the CPU in the process.

Many thanks - Liam.

I didn't bother with the thermal pads when repasting. My CPU and GPU temps dropped and I have not noticed any throttling whatsoever. I even took the laptop on holiday for some GTA fun whilst away and I left it on for hours with no issues. To this day I am yet to experience CPU or GPU throttling (whilst plugged in, there is always some performance loss when on battery) I would ultimately say its up to you but IMO probs not worth it.

The only thing slightly annoying about longer gaming sessions on the laptop is the fan noise which can be quite loud. Other than that it should be good to go with a repaste (and undervolt

)

LEK-89 · 28 Apr 2017 at 10:03

skaif said:
I didn't bother with the thermal pads when repasting. My CPU and GPU temps dropped and I have not noticed any throttling whatsoever. I even took the laptop on holiday for some GTA fun whilst away and I left it on for hours with no issues. To this day I am yet to experience CPU or GPU throttling (whilst plugged in, there is always some performance loss when on battery) I would ultimately say its up to you but IMO probs not worth it.

The only thing slightly annoying about longer gaming sessions on the laptop is the fan noise which can be quite loud. Other than that it should be good to go with a repaste (and undervolt )

Thanks mate - that's good to know

In your opinion, where would be a good starting point with undervolting? Also do you undervolt both the CPU & GPU via Intel XTU or use another program?

Many thanks - Liam.

skaif · 28 Apr 2017 at 11:38

LEK-89 said:
Thanks mate - that's good to know

In your opinion, where would be a good starting point with undervolting? Also do you undervolt both the CPU & GPU via Intel XTU or use another program?

Many thanks - Liam.

No worries.

I started at -.130 as thats what the general consensus was when I had a read through some forums/videos etc. Mine can handle -140 quite happily and at one point I pushed it to -.180 when I was stress testing but since then it sits at around -.150 (couldnt get it stable at anything more!).

I use XTU - bit annoying on first startup as it pops up and I manually disable the monitoring etc but once done its fine. I've not touched GPU undervolting on the intel side. I did try overclocking the 1050 with afterburner but decided against running an overclock as its fine standard for me.

LEK-89 · 3 May 2017 at 10:53

skaif said:
No worries.

I started at -.130 as thats what the general consensus was when I had a read through some forums/videos etc. Mine can handle -140 quite happily and at one point I pushed it to -.180 when I was stress testing but since then it sits at around -.150 (couldnt get it stable at anything more!).

I use XTU - bit annoying on first startup as it pops up and I manually disable the monitoring etc but once done its fine. I've not touched GPU undervolting on the intel side. I did try overclocking the 1050 with afterburner but decided against running an overclock as its fine standard for me.

Thanks again for your feedback mate,

I got around to repasting my new 9560 last night, to be fair the stock paste out of the factory was not too bad upon initial inspection - just the box standard square thermal paste pad on both the CPU & GPU die's and was not a complete mess in comparison to other owners findings, rather easy to clean off. I think the only niggle I had with the entire job itself was delicately removing the Torx screws around the outer chassis... they don't half cause a bit of concern at times, it's stated that they are meant to be T5 - however my T5 fixing still had a bit of play in these screws and to tighten up at the end I had to use T6's but luckily I never experienced any sheering with the screws.

I also had to resort using Thermal Grizzly Hydronaut and not Kyronaut as I intended, I received the paste yesterday and the eBay seller mis-advertised it as Kyronaut - however upon ripping the packet open last night to get to the packet it revealed Hydronaut :mad:

Though from what I've read online I don't think there are hardly any differences in terms of temps between the two at all.

Idle temps since repasting appear to be near enough the same (40c, and 39c for the GPU) but having a quick test in XTU for 15 minutes reveals load temperatures on 70c on average so not bad so far. I'm going to have another go in Prime95 for a longer period of time tonight as it's more intensive.

Liam.

skaif · 3 May 2017 at 11:21

Sounds good, I noticed a drop in my idle temps down to the same as yours as mine was idling around high 50's before hand.

I have an iFix it kit and the screws came out just fine with that, I was more worried about taking the back panel off as it required a bit of force on the ol fingernails (ended up using the pry tool instead)

I am still having issues with the WiFi and Dell are sending me the intel card (should be delivered today) and still having issues with the spiking of cpu/gpu when on battery. I am really hoping that it has something to do with the Killer card but not sure. kind of annoying as it eats into battery life. I don't think its software related either as I have re-installed windows on the new mobo and it seems to be the same...Have a look at the screenies below to see what I mean - random spikes affecting both cpu and gpu every second.
This all disappears when plugged in on power.

Might just do a fresh install again though depending on how it goes.

LEK-89 · 3 May 2017 at 12:15

skaif said:
Sounds good, I noticed a drop in my idle temps down to the same as yours as mine was idling around high 50's before hand.

I have an iFix it kit and the screws came out just fine with that, I was more worried about taking the back panel off as it required a bit of force on the ol fingernails (ended up using the pry tool instead)

I am still having issues with the WiFi and Dell are sending me the intel card (should be delivered today) and still having issues with the spiking of cpu/gpu when on battery. I am really hoping that it has something to do with the Killer card but not sure. kind of annoying as it eats into battery life. I don't think its software related either as I have re-installed windows on the new mobo and it seems to be the same...Have a look at the screenies below to see what I mean - random spikes affecting both cpu and gpu every second.
This all disappears when plugged in on power.

Might just do a fresh install again though depending on how it goes.

What kind of peak temps have you been seeing from yours out of interest since the repaste? Also do you think the likes of Unigine Heaven / Valley is sufficient for benching?

That's unfortunate that you're still having issues with the Killer wifi card, I like to think that the new Intel one will eradicate the problem taking into account all the other reports I've read about the Killer cards. Funny you should mention about doing a clean install, as I did one last weekend using the latest Creators Update ISO on my pen drive and it works flawlessly for me - and I'm also running a Killer wifi card but without all the software, just the driver. The system overall seems to be so much more responsive on a clean install and less things running in the background when compared to Dell's factory install.

Liam.

skaif · 3 May 2017 at 15:01

Yeah I am running a fresh install of win 10 pro after completely wiping it when I first got it.

Come to think of it, I do not think I reinstalled windows last time the engineer swapped out the mobo, (starting to doubt my own memory here) I think it may just be something I will end up doing.

Peak temps do not go above around 88c on the cpu and around 80 on the gpu with an ambient temp of around 24c thats with everything maxed out. I personally don't gpu bench on the laptop as I am not overclocking it so use games as my bench. It has handled everything I have thrown at it so far!

Out of interest, if you have afterburner installed, are you getting any random spikes?

LEK-89 · 4 May 2017 at 08:03

skaif said:
Yeah I am running a fresh install of win 10 pro after completely wiping it when I first got it.

Come to think of it, I do not think I reinstalled windows last time the engineer swapped out the mobo, (starting to doubt my own memory here) I think it may just be something I will end up doing.

Peak temps do not go above around 88c on the cpu and around 80 on the gpu with an ambient temp of around 24c thats with everything maxed out. I personally don't gpu bench on the laptop as I am not overclocking it so use games as my bench. It has handled everything I have thrown at it so far!

Out of interest, if you have afterburner installed, are you getting any random spikes?

I would very much do a fresh install in that case as it's not been carried out since the motherboard swap, Windows in general can act very funny after a motherboard install.

That's interesting to know that yours is running smoothly when gaming, and I had some progress last night when doing a few tests here and there. Doing a standard Unigine Heaven benchmark before any undervolting saw the CPU temps average around the 86c mark and GPU maxes out at 78c, no throttling reported. Going ahead as you mentioned about starting off XTU with an undervolt of -130 proved to be successful as well in Prime for over 20 minutes & also another Unigine Heaven benchmark afterwards - this time the temps dropped down to 77c on the CPU and the same temp of 78c on the GPU, again no throttling reported.

I then decided to up it a bit more to -150 but sadly the laptop locked up within 10 seconds when carrying out another Heaven benchmark but strangely Prime was stable during the 5 minutes that I gave it a quick test on? -140 lasted a bit longer when doing Heaven but again locks up.

Perhaps for me -130 is pretty much bang on for what my undervolting capacity is, though weirdly enough as well when setting everything to default again before retiring for the night I noticed that XTU seemed to of changed the Intel GPU offset voltage by itself to -60 too, maybe this could have affected my -140/-150 undervolts if that was the case.

I've never used afterburner so I wouldn't know where to start with it unfortunately.

Liam.

skaif · 4 May 2017 at 12:38

I think I will do a fresh install this weekend as its just bugging me now(my memory more than anything else)
Your temps are similar to mine so no issues there and I havent suffered from throttling either so all good.

-130 seems to be the sweet spot on most then, I don't think the gains are huge when going more than that anyway so stick with stability.

Afterbuner is available to download here with more information available here
Its a good tool for overclocking but I am using it to predominantly keep an eye on my system load and temps.

HPTL7 · 5 May 2017 at 23:05

I am looking to buy the Dell XPS 15 9560
Is the 4k worth the decreased battery life? Would I be able to see a big difference?
Also, is Dell the best place to buy it from? Should I wait for offers?
Thanks

skaif · 6 May 2017 at 08:23

Yes
Yes
Yes
Probably not
The 4k screen is amazing. Every single person who has seen it has commented on the quality of it and that includes a colleague who did a side by side comparison with the new £2.3k macbook pro. The battery life isn't so bad and will last you a day (around 6-7 hours) normal work load.
Not sure who else does offers on them but get on the love chat and special your machine and calculate around 13% off. That's your target price. Tell the sales rep that that's all you're willing to pay and they will sort it out. My configuration was around £2k and I paid under £1750 so pretty worth it overall. Especially only a few weeks after release.

skaif · 6 May 2017 at 17:42

Ok so update on my XPS issues

Its sorted!

Don't ask me how, I don't know for sure but heres a breakdown of what I did.

I reinstalled windows this morning, did not install anything other than intel drivers and nvidia drivers along with gpuz to monitor the gpu spikes.
For some reason on a fresh install it was exactly the bloody same!!

So I thought screw this, went back, fresh install but this time wipe all my partitions and completely start again. (had previously just wiped the 128gb windows partition I made)
This time I only installed the nvidia and intel graphics through the device manager have disk option and for some reason everything is fine. I did install the nvidia drivers first and the intel drivers second. Not sure if this has anything to do with it.

I have now installed all my usual apps, undervolted and running the usual monitoring it looks like a different machine. There are no spikes, the 1050 is completely dormant until a gpu intensive app kicks in (up till now only games)

So all in I finally feel like I have cured the spiking issue and the laptop is running as I want!

LEK-89 · 6 May 2017 at 19:31

skaif said:
Ok so update on my XPS issues

Its sorted!

Don't ask me how, I don't know for sure but heres a breakdown of what I did.

I reinstalled windows this morning, did not install anything other than intel drivers and nvidia drivers along with gpuz to monitor the gpu spikes.
For some reason on a fresh install it was exactly the bloody same!!

So I thought screw this, went back, fresh install but this time wipe all my partitions and completely start again. (had previously just wiped the 128gb windows partition I made)
This time I only installed the nvidia and intel graphics through the device manager have disk option and for some reason everything is fine. I did install the nvidia drivers first and the intel drivers second. Not sure if this has anything to do with it.

I have now installed all my usual apps, undervolted and running the usual monitoring it looks like a different machine. There are no spikes, the 1050 is completely dormant until a gpu intensive app kicks in (up till now only games)

So all in I finally feel like I have cured the spiking issue and the laptop is running as I want!

Good result there mate

I should have mentioned in my previous post as well regarding wiping all the other partitions when doing a fresh install of Windows. By default I always make a complete image of the drive via Macrium which preserves the original install and all the partitions for when if I need to or in the event that I sell a laptop on - everything will be restored & intact as if it's came straight from the factory. Usually it is safe to just wipe the C: drive and install Windows but as you've discovered, you never know if the other partitions can conflict with the new install.

Sadly it looks like I maybe returning my XPS back to dell for a full refund (while I've still got a couple of days left of the 14 day return window), as just my luck & talk about timing - Gigabyte released the Aero 15 this week and I'm seriously swayed to bite the bullet and get it... :eek:

Liam.

HammerTime · 13 May 2017 at 23:43

I was forced to open up a Dell support case and an engineer came out a few days ago to fix noisy fans. Great support network and both fans replaced and laptop is running like a dream. After a lot of research, honestly don't think there is another laptop on the market which beats the 9560 4k.

skaif · 15 Jun 2017 at 15:17

So my long running Dell saga has officially come to an end

The system was still misbehaving after the content creators update and gpu was spiking about all over the place. Battery life was not great and I just couldn't let it be.

Being a complete nerd I wasted hours trying to diagnose what the problem was including more windows reinstalls than I care to admit. Drivers were changed and swapped out and I tried in vain to cure the problem. To cut a long story, short, Dell went as far as giving me a replacement system which suffered from the same thing, and I could not for the life of me figure out why.

I even tried a bare bones install of windows with no updates and just graphics and it has the same problem. Either all the systems suffer from the issue or I have been sent 2 lemons.

Ultimately, to protect my own sanity, I returned both systems for a refund and will sit on my hands for a bit when it comes to buying a replacement.

kiteloopy · 29 Jun 2017 at 12:17

So I've had my 15" Dell XPS (i7-7700HQ, 1920 x 1080 /Infinity Edge - Model 9560) since mid March now. Got it with the 3 year antivirus support and 2 year premium support for about £1,500 thanks to work discount and promotions. Its a top spec machine with 512 SSD storage and 16gb ram, im very happy with whats inside!

It worked flawlessly out the box...until I tired to go onto google chrome and it stuttered every 10 seconds or so. Really frustrating trying to browse especially as it did not do it with MS or firefox; but im a chrome person and wanted it fixed. Anyway, several hours looking online and remembering how MS Windows worked (I came from a Mac), I pin pointed it to the chipset driver. Dell auto software kept finding a old chipset driver from 2013 or so. I manually forced it to find a driver from January 2017 and the issue fixed it. Works like a dream now.

Im annoyed with the auto Dell driver software for not picking it up by itself...and for Dell shipping with loads of old drivers in the first place.

LEK-89 · 29 Jun 2017 at 12:37

kiteloopy said:
So I've had my 15" Dell XPS (i7-7700HQ, 1920 x 1080 /Infinity Edge - Model 9560) since mid March now. Got it with the 3 year antivirus support and 2 year premium support for about £1,500 thanks to work discount and promotions. Its a top spec machine with 512 SSD storage and 16gb ram, im very happy with whats inside!

It worked flawlessly out the box...until I tired to go onto google chrome and it stuttered every 10 seconds or so. Really frustrating trying to browse especially as it did not do it with MS or firefox; but im a chrome person and wanted it fixed. Anyway, several hours looking online and remembering how MS Windows worked (I came from a Mac), I pin pointed it to the chipset driver. Dell auto software kept finding a old chipset driver from 2013 or so. I manually forced it to find a driver from January 2017 and the issue fixed it. Works like a dream now.

Im annoyed with the auto Dell driver software for not picking it up by itself...and for Dell shipping with loads of old drivers in the first place.

I had a very similar issue on my old 9560 where YouTube would stutter and freeze in chrome, and it was reported that an old Intel graphics driver version was the blame - after I downgraded it to the version before that it was fine. However I think the newest Intel driver even runs fine on it now.

The biggest grumble I have with Windows 10 on laptops in particular is how Windows Updates automatically updates drivers to their own signed ones, which can create a major headache - especially if a laptop like the 9560 is very particular on which drivers are required to work properly. As a precaution I always disable the automatic update of drivers via Windows Update to alleviate this.

Liam.