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I'm currently on my first and last XPS, a 9570. I really wanted to love it, but there's just too much about it that is a complete disaster, particularly around

I'm currently on my first and last XPS, a 9570. I really wanted to love it, but there's just too much about it that is a complete disaster, particularly around power management, wake behaviour, and thermals. I know I haven't exactly babied it, what with it having been plugged in in my home office for basically two straight years during the pandemic, but the battery is shot at this point— getting barely an hour of life. Often it'll be supposedly sleeping in lid-shut mode but be cooking itself for no reason. Then it'll wake up and immediately go into a power-panic shutdown, only to assert that the battery is full after all when it reboots connected to juice. And now the HDMI port is also toast (verified under multiple OSes to be a hardware issue). Maybe I just got a bad year, but this is supposed to be Dell's premium machine and I don't think I can justify giving them another chance after this. It's just nowhere near reliable enough to be used on the road, and not performant enough to be a true desktop replacement. So I don't know who is using this machine and for what.

wrycoder 4y ago
I’m thinking, that since your battery has passed its cycle limit, maybe the increased internal resistance of what odd causing all the heat issues. Maybe, change the battery?
jcranberry 4y ago
I had a 9520 for about 5 years. I had two issues, which was a broken left hinge (4k touch screen was two heavy for that part, I believe in the XPS 15 actually didn't suffer from the same issue), and swelling batteries, which caused various knock on issues. I also experienced the same issue with batteries from the dell latitude I got from work. Seemed to be a dell thing for laptops left plugged in constantly. I never had to deal with overheating issues despite having a Xeon (although it did get quite hot). Its a shame because otherwise I really liked the laptop. Gorgeous screen, good trackpad and keyboard, and a perfect size imo.
duped 4y ago
I think the real garbage part of buying an XPS from Dell for professional developer work on Linux is that they will not provide any support for the device. Particularly when you report driver, sleep, or other software level issues that they ostensibly provide with OEM installed Linux.
mathstuf 4y ago
> with it having been plugged in in my home office for basically two straight years during the pandemic Yeah, my second seems to have succumbed to that as well. There's a setting in the BIOS that says "I plan on keeping this plugged in all the time" and it'll do better battery management that way.
- sliken 4y ago
  My mbp automatically enables that after being plugged in for awhile, by setting the max threshold to 80% or something. The mbp warned me in the battery monitor I think. Nice, because I wasn't even thinking of such things.
  - mathstuf 4y ago
    That's the kind of thing that Linux tends to miss out on. But I don't feel that selling my computing experience to Cupertino is worth such things either.
tikkabhuna 4y ago
I've had the same experience with my XPS 9560. Past few years I've had "TPM device is not detected"[1] issues. Tried all the different solutions and nothings fixed it. Dell have never addressed it with a BIOS update. I don't want to go back to OS X, but its hard to find good build quality and a high res screen. Also, my battery was terrible after a couple of years. I had it plugged in as well. I bought a replacement this year and it was easy enough to switch out. Hopefully I can just keep this going and use it as an RDP machine. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/onvh42/xps_9560_tpm_device_is_not_detected_alert_before/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/onvh42/xps_9560_tpm_d...
- peteri 4y ago
  I had the same issue, for me updating the TPM firmware solved the issue (but it is convoluted) https://superuser.com/questions/1668861/alert-tpm-device-is-not-detected-on-dell-laptop-boot https://superuser.com/questions/1668861/alert-tpm-device-is-... My guess is that Dell didn't update the TPM firware, my guess is this breaks some keys so can't be done automatically and a BIOS update at some point then screws up the handshake with the older TPM firmware unless the laptop is fully powered off. But I'm not a huge fan of dell hardware.
rashkov 4y ago
Yeah my 15” xps was pretty bad too. Coworker and I both had this issue where one key press would result in the same letter being typed twice. Coworker sent his machine back several times but never got that fixed. I just used an external keyboard most of the time. Besides that, my machine’s battery ultimately puffed up and made the trackpad impossible to click.
debug-desperado 4y ago
Same issue with power here on my 9570! In fact I just checked after one month of plugged-in non-use, turning it on resulted in dead battery in < 3 minutes. What's crazy is that if I let it charge now, I will get 3 solid hours of battery life. The battery health indicates 2/4, it's definitely not a fully spent battery. The other thing that has driven me crazy is the wide-gamut 4K screen. The text is nice and crisp, but good luck with sRGB content. Basically all content for non Adobe professionals is fubar'd. I eventually made the situation tolerable by finding an old version of Dell PremierColor and using its sRGB profile (newer versions of the software on Microsoft Store quit working on the 9570 and the color profiles do nothing - imagine that). Still get terrible color banding and crushed blacks, and I'm not even sure investing in a colorimeter would fix it. Overall I've come to the same conclusion as you. In 2018 this was a $2000 machine (Costco price below retail), and I also can't justify giving Dell another chance.
- indymike 4y ago
  My XPS 15 was horrible under Windows, but it was fantastic running Linux. It would somehow get 2x the battery, and ran a lot faster... and once Proton hit, it wasn't half bad on gaming.
duxup 4y ago
> supposedly sleeping in lid-shut mode but be cooking itself for no reason Same. It fires up full fans and all in the middle of the night. It’s a nice form factor, but much like me growing tired of stuff like “android slowdown syndrome” and me getting an iPhone last fall … I feel like I’m being pushed to try a Mac laptop for a cycle…. I just don’t want to deal with this stuff anymore.
atraac 4y ago
> around power management, wake behaviour, and thermals. Can't speak for wake behaviour cause I have never encountered issues on my 15" 9570 but you can actually make it much, much better with a bit of work. You need to work around plundervolt flags and enable undervolting(there's a tutorial in some reddit threat on how to do this), then undervolt CPU a bit, this way it almost never throttles. As for thermals, just changing paste to Kryonaut and adding few stacked thermal pads so they connect to the chassis in few places according to some tutorials I found made insane improvements. I play Valorant on mine and I went from almost constant throttling, to no issues at all, even during longer sessions. It's also almost never running fans on higher speeds during normal work. But I agree, my next machine will be a MBP with Mx chip, I don't want to put in so much work into something that costs a small fortune just so it works properly.
Shalomboy 4y ago
That's so funny, because I'm in the same boat with my XPS 9570. I bought it for personal use because I had an amazing experience with a 9370 developer edition at my last job. I figured it would be the same, but that was extremely naive. I got the i5-8300H SKU with an empty 2.5" SSD bay, 53Wh battery, and a 1TB drive for $800 and change with the intention of plugging it into my GTX 1070 eGPU at home. I figured that this would be like, a power-sipping config. NOPE! It wakes itself from lid-shut sleep and cooks itself whenever I put it in a bag, it will crash and reboot if the Thunderbolt cable gets jostled, and I get maybe 90 minutes on battery life after weeks of optimization script fiddling. I wanted to like it so badly because at the time, the processor was a steal. Matching the old 7820-HQ's performance with a bottom-tier i5 8300H felt like magic, but nothing else lived up to the hype.

wrycoder 4y ago

I’m thinking, that since your battery has passed its cycle limit, maybe the increased internal resistance of what odd causing all the heat issues. Maybe, change the battery?

jcranberry 4y ago

I had a 9520 for about 5 years. I had two issues, which was a broken left hinge (4k touch screen was two heavy for that part, I believe in the XPS 15 actually didn't suffer from the same issue), and swelling batteries, which caused various knock on issues. I also experienced the same issue with batteries from the dell latitude I got from work. Seemed to be a dell thing for laptops left plugged in constantly. I never had to deal with overheating issues despite having a Xeon (although it did get quite hot). Its a shame because otherwise I really liked the laptop. Gorgeous screen, good trackpad and keyboard, and a perfect size imo.

duped 4y ago

I think the real garbage part of buying an XPS from Dell for professional developer work on Linux is that they will not provide any support for the device. Particularly when you report driver, sleep, or other software level issues that they ostensibly provide with OEM installed Linux.

mathstuf 4y ago

> with it having been plugged in in my home office for basically two straight years during the pandemic Yeah, my second seems to have succumbed to that as well. There's a setting in the BIOS that says "I plan on keeping this plugged in all the time" and it'll do better battery management that way.

sliken 4y ago
My mbp automatically enables that after being plugged in for awhile, by setting the max threshold to 80% or something. The mbp warned me in the battery monitor I think. Nice, because I wasn't even thinking of such things.
- mathstuf 4y ago
  That's the kind of thing that Linux tends to miss out on. But I don't feel that selling my computing experience to Cupertino is worth such things either.

tikkabhuna 4y ago

I've had the same experience with my XPS 9560. Past few years I've had "TPM device is not detected"[1] issues. Tried all the different solutions and nothings fixed it. Dell have never addressed it with a BIOS update. I don't want to go back to OS X, but its hard to find good build quality and a high res screen. Also, my battery was terrible after a couple of years. I had it plugged in as well. I bought a replacement this year and it was easy enough to switch out. Hopefully I can just keep this going and use it as an RDP machine. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/onvh42/xps_9560_tpm_device_is_not_detected_alert_before/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/onvh42/xps_9560_tpm_d...

peteri 4y ago
I had the same issue, for me updating the TPM firmware solved the issue (but it is convoluted) https://superuser.com/questions/1668861/alert-tpm-device-is-not-detected-on-dell-laptop-boot https://superuser.com/questions/1668861/alert-tpm-device-is-... My guess is that Dell didn't update the TPM firware, my guess is this breaks some keys so can't be done automatically and a BIOS update at some point then screws up the handshake with the older TPM firmware unless the laptop is fully powered off. But I'm not a huge fan of dell hardware.

rashkov 4y ago

Yeah my 15” xps was pretty bad too. Coworker and I both had this issue where one key press would result in the same letter being typed twice. Coworker sent his machine back several times but never got that fixed. I just used an external keyboard most of the time. Besides that, my machine’s battery ultimately puffed up and made the trackpad impossible to click.

debug-desperado 4y ago

Same issue with power here on my 9570! In fact I just checked after one month of plugged-in non-use, turning it on resulted in dead battery in < 3 minutes. What's crazy is that if I let it charge now, I will get 3 solid hours of battery life. The battery health indicates 2/4, it's definitely not a fully spent battery. The other thing that has driven me crazy is the wide-gamut 4K screen. The text is nice and crisp, but good luck with sRGB content. Basically all content for non Adobe professionals is fubar'd. I eventually made the situation tolerable by finding an old version of Dell PremierColor and using its sRGB profile (newer versions of the software on Microsoft Store quit working on the 9570 and the color profiles do nothing - imagine that). Still get terrible color banding and crushed blacks, and I'm not even sure investing in a colorimeter would fix it. Overall I've come to the same conclusion as you. In 2018 this was a $2000 machine (Costco price below retail), and I also can't justify giving Dell another chance.

indymike 4y ago
My XPS 15 was horrible under Windows, but it was fantastic running Linux. It would somehow get 2x the battery, and ran a lot faster... and once Proton hit, it wasn't half bad on gaming.

duxup 4y ago

> supposedly sleeping in lid-shut mode but be cooking itself for no reason Same. It fires up full fans and all in the middle of the night. It’s a nice form factor, but much like me growing tired of stuff like “android slowdown syndrome” and me getting an iPhone last fall … I feel like I’m being pushed to try a Mac laptop for a cycle…. I just don’t want to deal with this stuff anymore.

atraac 4y ago

> around power management, wake behaviour, and thermals. Can't speak for wake behaviour cause I have never encountered issues on my 15" 9570 but you can actually make it much, much better with a bit of work. You need to work around plundervolt flags and enable undervolting(there's a tutorial in some reddit threat on how to do this), then undervolt CPU a bit, this way it almost never throttles. As for thermals, just changing paste to Kryonaut and adding few stacked thermal pads so they connect to the chassis in few places according to some tutorials I found made insane improvements. I play Valorant on mine and I went from almost constant throttling, to no issues at all, even during longer sessions. It's also almost never running fans on higher speeds during normal work. But I agree, my next machine will be a MBP with Mx chip, I don't want to put in so much work into something that costs a small fortune just so it works properly.

Shalomboy 4y ago

That's so funny, because I'm in the same boat with my XPS 9570. I bought it for personal use because I had an amazing experience with a 9370 developer edition at my last job. I figured it would be the same, but that was extremely naive. I got the i5-8300H SKU with an empty 2.5" SSD bay, 53Wh battery, and a 1TB drive for $800 and change with the intention of plugging it into my GTX 1070 eGPU at home. I figured that this would be like, a power-sipping config. NOPE! It wakes itself from lid-shut sleep and cooks itself whenever I put it in a bag, it will crash and reboot if the Thunderbolt cable gets jostled, and I get maybe 90 minutes on battery life after weeks of optimization script fiddling. I wanted to like it so badly because at the time, the processor was a steal. Matching the old 7820-HQ's performance with a bottom-tier i5 8300H felt like magic, but nothing else lived up to the hype.