7 ms·

If it makes you feel any better I branched off to a XPS 13 2in1 4 months ago in between jobs (where I use the latest mbp) and used the thing for 2-3 months with

by mjayhn 7y ago

If it makes you feel any better I branched off to a XPS 13 2in1 4 months ago in between jobs (where I use the latest mbp) and used the thing for 2-3 months with no MBP as backup. I absolutely hate it. It throttles constantly even after undervolting it. I had to do a bunch of black magic to get it to sleep properly (which is evidently happening to every Dell) and eventually gave up on that and just set it to hibernate any time the lids closed (it's 32gb so that adds about 30 seconds to the start up time). I've spent more time tweaking this thing, reading forums and reddit about how to make it perform DECENTLY than I did building my last hackintosh and I don't enjoy that experience ever. When you get past all these issues it's still Windows 10 which I just find to be the most annoying OS I've ever used. Just got my new MBP yesterday and couldn't be more excited to be back on osx. I do really, really wish my MBP was smaller and a 2 in 1, though.

rubber_duck 7y ago
I know what you mean - had my share of random issues with Lenovo, HP, Dell - but at the end of the day Windows/Linux/Android are more customisable and I'm missing that a lot when I switched ecosystems.
ben-schaaf 7y ago
I've heard that most of the Xps lineup has cooling issues. On the other hand I've got an Aero 15 (2018 I think), fan noise is decent and after a small undervolt it can indefinitely sustain max single core turbo speeds (4.1GHz) with respectable all core turbo (3.7GHz), while sitting at 70C. There are laptops out there with adequate cooling solutions out there.
- p1necone 7y ago
  A lot of high end laptops have cooling issues because it's the kind of thing you have to buy the device and actually use it for a while to find out, but everyone sees "i9, ultra slim, 'pro'" straight away.
- cb22 7y ago
  To give some numbers to the comment I made previously in this thread, with an XPS 7390 2-in-1: Single core turbo 3.9GHz, maintains indefinitely, temperature hovers around ~75 degrees, fans around 5000RPM All core turbo: Keeps 3.4GHz and ~45W TDP for around 10 seconds, before dropping to 2.7GHz and ~25W TDP indefinitely. Temps still around ~75, with the fans around 8000 RPM. That's without any undervolting, but with the processor set for 25W TDP (like the Windows "Ultra Performance" mode). Adding in some undervolting gets the all core turbo up to 2.9GHz.
  - mjayhn 7y ago
    This is Ice Lake?
    - cb22 7y ago
      Ice Lake, yeah. It's the i7 1065G7 [1] [1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196597/intel-core-i7-1065g7-processor-8m-cache-up-to-3-90-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196597/...
      - mjayhn 7y ago
        Can you tell me what you did to set it to 25watt? I swear I've tried this a few times going through Throttlestop tutorials with different usb-c chargers (from the stock 67w up to 97w) and either that option was greyed out or I never got it to actually do 25w.
freeqaz 7y ago
Might be worth trying Linux on that. At least you'd have more control over the sleep issues. I have a Dell Precision 7540 that I was having issues getting sleep to work. It would panic on resuming I think because of WiFi but I couldn't fix it. So I enabled "hybrid-sleep" which is like hibernate and sleep together. Before it sleeps, it flushes the RAM to disk. When it wakes up, it tries to boot from RAM and, if successful, it deletes the hibernation data. But if it crashes before it deletes the files, you just reboot and it resumes from disk. So I never "lose" my status but 95% of the time my computer resumes normally. There are certainly other frustrating bits with Linux, but at least the flexibility to fix the issues is within your grasp. That was my biggest gripe with OSX and Windows. You just aren't always able the fix the issue and it's very mentally painful (for me). :P
- fluffything 7y ago
  I have arch linux on that same machine and there are indeed a million knobs to tune these things. I haven't yet managed to make it work as good as a macbook, after putting in around ~100h by now into the problem. I went back to macbooks ~1 month ago. The Dell is still brand new (4 months old, ~4000$ fully spec'ed), but my employer does not want it back, so it is now sitting in a drawer in my office. I ended up billing my employer for the ~120h I spent on "configuring" the laptop over the 4 months. With that included, the laptop costed my employer about 14.000$. Now I'm using my personal 2013 macbook air instead, and am finally able to get something done, yet I'm not happy with having to use my own laptop for work. Had they buy me a macbook for 1.500$ instead, like I requested, that would have saved them ~13.000$ + my lost respect + my continued lost respect for requiring me to use my own 7 year old personal laptop for work.
  - neurostimulant 7y ago
    Why did you use arch instead of other distro that known to work on many laptops, such as Ubuntu?
    - ahmedalsudani 7y ago
      This is pure FUD in my opinion. Arch has always run better on every computer I’ve owned, especially newer ones. The people for whom Ubuntu works usually have fewer requirements or are not as particular about things working _just right_. That’s not to say I haven’t had issues with Arch, but there were fewer and they were easier to figure out. Now if you want a distro where you can update packages without manual intervention several times a year, then it’s probably best to look past Arch.
cb22 7y ago
> I absolutely hate it. It throttles constantly even after undervolting it. I had to do a bunch of black magic to get it to sleep properly (which is evidently happening to every Dell) and eventually gave up on that and just set it to hibernate any time the lids closed (it's 32gb so that adds about 30 seconds to the start up time). I've spent more time tweaking this thing, reading forums and reddit about how to make it perform DECENTLY than I did building my last hackintosh and I don't enjoy that experience ever. When you get past all these issues it's still Windows 10 which I just find to be the most annoying OS I've ever used. Really? I love my XPS 7390 2-in-1, it's the best laptop I've used and owned by far and that includes Macbooks. Combined with a WD19TB dock (and a useful trick of flipping it around so it's an inverted L) it makes a great work from home setup. Its thermal profile is relatively aggressive by default but it should stay at 15W (and ~65 degree temps) indefinitely. Upping the power limit to 25W (like the Windows / Dell "Ultra Performance" mode does) and it appears it can maintain that too. I mean, Crysis can even run on the thing [1]. That said, I'd probably lose my mind if I had to run Windows on it. A suggestion for getting good old S3 sleep to work: enable the hack for reenabling S3 sleep in the Windows registry, then disable "Early Signs of Life / Dell Logo" in the BIOS [2]. I'm not sure if this will work on Windows, but it works flawlessly on Arch. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MXS_KJf_M0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MXS_KJf_M0 [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_2-in-1_(7390)#S3_Sleep https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_2-in-1_(739...
- mjayhn 7y ago
  It seems like we're just waiting on bios updates for Ice Lake to have a proper thermal profile. I'm not sure. What happens is the laptops thermal profile is way under the Intel recommended profile. I believe it starts to throttle around 80* instead of the 100* or so Intel says Ice Lake should be able to run at. It's been awhile since I played with this but I don't believe I was able to bump my voltage to 25w on Ice Lake. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'll do a fresh install and give it a try again. I've heard a few comments where peoples 7390 2in1s were running great but on /r/dell I've seen a lot more with complaints like mine. I did get some improvement by dropping the thermal/power plan from High Performance down to Quiet. That seems to keep the thermals down so it triggers throttling less. My problem is it throttles constantly and has other issues where if you move it (lift it up) while it's under load it will immediately throttle and I trigger it sitting on my lap a lot. I bought it hoping I could run a bunch of VMs (thus the 32gb) and do light development work on it but I can barely even draw in Figma without having a rough experience so I completely gave up on developing on it. This is a really good article https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.playerzdominiance.com%2Fdell-xps-13-2-in-1-7390-can-an-ultrabook-run-the-crysis-trilogy-at-60fps%2F https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.playerz...

by mjayhn 7y ago

rubber_duck 7y ago

I know what you mean - had my share of random issues with Lenovo, HP, Dell - but at the end of the day Windows/Linux/Android are more customisable and I'm missing that a lot when I switched ecosystems.

ben-schaaf 7y ago

I've heard that most of the Xps lineup has cooling issues. On the other hand I've got an Aero 15 (2018 I think), fan noise is decent and after a small undervolt it can indefinitely sustain max single core turbo speeds (4.1GHz) with respectable all core turbo (3.7GHz), while sitting at 70C. There are laptops out there with adequate cooling solutions out there.

p1necone 7y ago
A lot of high end laptops have cooling issues because it's the kind of thing you have to buy the device and actually use it for a while to find out, but everyone sees "i9, ultra slim, 'pro'" straight away.
cb22 7y ago
To give some numbers to the comment I made previously in this thread, with an XPS 7390 2-in-1: Single core turbo 3.9GHz, maintains indefinitely, temperature hovers around ~75 degrees, fans around 5000RPM All core turbo: Keeps 3.4GHz and ~45W TDP for around 10 seconds, before dropping to 2.7GHz and ~25W TDP indefinitely. Temps still around ~75, with the fans around 8000 RPM. That's without any undervolting, but with the processor set for 25W TDP (like the Windows "Ultra Performance" mode). Adding in some undervolting gets the all core turbo up to 2.9GHz.
- mjayhn 7y ago
  This is Ice Lake?
  - cb22 7y ago
    Ice Lake, yeah. It's the i7 1065G7 [1] [1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196597/intel-core-i7-1065g7-processor-8m-cache-up-to-3-90-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/196597/...
    - mjayhn 7y ago
      Can you tell me what you did to set it to 25watt? I swear I've tried this a few times going through Throttlestop tutorials with different usb-c chargers (from the stock 67w up to 97w) and either that option was greyed out or I never got it to actually do 25w.

freeqaz 7y ago

Might be worth trying Linux on that. At least you'd have more control over the sleep issues. I have a Dell Precision 7540 that I was having issues getting sleep to work. It would panic on resuming I think because of WiFi but I couldn't fix it. So I enabled "hybrid-sleep" which is like hibernate and sleep together. Before it sleeps, it flushes the RAM to disk. When it wakes up, it tries to boot from RAM and, if successful, it deletes the hibernation data. But if it crashes before it deletes the files, you just reboot and it resumes from disk. So I never "lose" my status but 95% of the time my computer resumes normally. There are certainly other frustrating bits with Linux, but at least the flexibility to fix the issues is within your grasp. That was my biggest gripe with OSX and Windows. You just aren't always able the fix the issue and it's very mentally painful (for me). :P

fluffything 7y ago
I have arch linux on that same machine and there are indeed a million knobs to tune these things. I haven't yet managed to make it work as good as a macbook, after putting in around ~100h by now into the problem. I went back to macbooks ~1 month ago. The Dell is still brand new (4 months old, ~4000$ fully spec'ed), but my employer does not want it back, so it is now sitting in a drawer in my office. I ended up billing my employer for the ~120h I spent on "configuring" the laptop over the 4 months. With that included, the laptop costed my employer about 14.000$. Now I'm using my personal 2013 macbook air instead, and am finally able to get something done, yet I'm not happy with having to use my own laptop for work. Had they buy me a macbook for 1.500$ instead, like I requested, that would have saved them ~13.000$ + my lost respect + my continued lost respect for requiring me to use my own 7 year old personal laptop for work.
- neurostimulant 7y ago
  Why did you use arch instead of other distro that known to work on many laptops, such as Ubuntu?
  - ahmedalsudani 7y ago
    This is pure FUD in my opinion. Arch has always run better on every computer I’ve owned, especially newer ones. The people for whom Ubuntu works usually have fewer requirements or are not as particular about things working _just right_. That’s not to say I haven’t had issues with Arch, but there were fewer and they were easier to figure out. Now if you want a distro where you can update packages without manual intervention several times a year, then it’s probably best to look past Arch.

cb22 7y ago

> I absolutely hate it. It throttles constantly even after undervolting it. I had to do a bunch of black magic to get it to sleep properly (which is evidently happening to every Dell) and eventually gave up on that and just set it to hibernate any time the lids closed (it's 32gb so that adds about 30 seconds to the start up time). I've spent more time tweaking this thing, reading forums and reddit about how to make it perform DECENTLY than I did building my last hackintosh and I don't enjoy that experience ever. When you get past all these issues it's still Windows 10 which I just find to be the most annoying OS I've ever used. Really? I love my XPS 7390 2-in-1, it's the best laptop I've used and owned by far and that includes Macbooks. Combined with a WD19TB dock (and a useful trick of flipping it around so it's an inverted L) it makes a great work from home setup. Its thermal profile is relatively aggressive by default but it should stay at 15W (and ~65 degree temps) indefinitely. Upping the power limit to 25W (like the Windows / Dell "Ultra Performance" mode does) and it appears it can maintain that too. I mean, Crysis can even run on the thing [1]. That said, I'd probably lose my mind if I had to run Windows on it. A suggestion for getting good old S3 sleep to work: enable the hack for reenabling S3 sleep in the Windows registry, then disable "Early Signs of Life / Dell Logo" in the BIOS [2]. I'm not sure if this will work on Windows, but it works flawlessly on Arch. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MXS_KJf_M0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MXS_KJf_M0 [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_2-in-1_(7390)#S3_Sleep https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_13_2-in-1_(739...

mjayhn 7y ago
It seems like we're just waiting on bios updates for Ice Lake to have a proper thermal profile. I'm not sure. What happens is the laptops thermal profile is way under the Intel recommended profile. I believe it starts to throttle around 80* instead of the 100* or so Intel says Ice Lake should be able to run at. It's been awhile since I played with this but I don't believe I was able to bump my voltage to 25w on Ice Lake. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'll do a fresh install and give it a try again. I've heard a few comments where peoples 7390 2in1s were running great but on /r/dell I've seen a lot more with complaints like mine. I did get some improvement by dropping the thermal/power plan from High Performance down to Quiet. That seems to keep the thermals down so it triggers throttling less. My problem is it throttles constantly and has other issues where if you move it (lift it up) while it's under load it will immediately throttle and I trigger it sitting on my lap a lot. I bought it hoping I could run a bunch of VMs (thus the 32gb) and do light development work on it but I can barely even draw in Figma without having a rough experience so I completely gave up on developing on it. This is a really good article https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.playerzdominiance.com%2Fdell-xps-13-2-in-1-7390-can-an-ultrabook-run-the-crysis-trilogy-at-60fps%2F https://getpocket.com/redirect?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.playerz...