15" NoteBook (XPS 15, AERO 15x, X1E, ZENBOOK PRO, BLADE 15, ETC) Discussion

[TSE]

I have the 9570. Keyboard is similar to older MBP with the spread out chicklet style. Short learning curve. At least the keys work well.

The 9570 has been great for me, only thing is since updating the bios sleep / booting is so messed up. I have to shut down my laptop, because I have the widespread issue of randomly waking up, and when I boot it, for some reason sometimes the screen doesn’t turn on, so I need to do a hard shut off and power back on and it will work.

Overall I give the laptop a 4 / 5. Great battery life, performance, screen ( I love the 1080p Matte), build quality, trackpad, and price. Poor BIOS updates, at times fans pumping all the way on over nothing, and the famous Windows overtime slowdowns put it a step below perfect. Overall I’m happy and excited for what Dell is going to do with the XPS 15 in the next redesign.

 

[lcseds]

My XPS has no issues with sleep/wake up. Very reliable. Fans have been well behaved. Occasional wifi hesitation but otherwise a solid piece for me. I use a mouse so I don't use the trackpad much. When I do, it's fine. I preferred my MBP trackpad from 2015, but the trackpad I used for a few months with a 2017 MPB I did not like much. Had lots of trouble with click and drag.

There is nothing I can say is worse than a MBP other than SSD speed. And I'm not sure if I would really notice the difference in my usage. Other than that, it's better hardware. It's up to the OS preference. But honestly when my XPS boots to a desktop with a few icons on the side and app tray at the bottom, it's the same experience with MacOS. In fact with the right click feature in Windows, there are a lot more choices that really simplify tasks. One just has to invest a little time customizing and familiarizing that's all.

 

[LindsayD]

Well, the Aero arrived yesterday. To recap it is the Aero 15-X9, RTX 2070, 32Gig RAM, 1TB SSD, 4k.

I have to say I am loving it so far. However I think the ‘out-of-the-box’ experience may well generate a few returns if the user isn’t accustomed to putting in some time in order to optimise and tweak. Initially I was greeted with permanently (and rather loudly) running fans and the loudest coil wine I have ever heard - in fact I could hear it 10 feet away. Hmmm!

So I started working my way through the setup list which I normally do with any new laptop. I did a clean install of the operating system and drivers, followed by updates. I downloaded the Gigabyte control centre utility which has some useful features. On this I set the fans to ‘quiet’ mode. I then went into the various power management settings and made sure this was set to Balanced, from which I went into advanced power management where I took a look at the processor states. As I said, I’m not a gamer, so I like to setup my laptops for fairly quiet stable operation. I set the maximum processor state on battery to 95% and to 80% when charging. I set cooling on both modes to passive. This doesn’t result in any noticeable performance degradation for the tasks I carry out, and I find it can help to minimise fan noise. I then set the battery management to the middle of the slider when on charge and to the left (a quarter of the way in) when on battery.

I disabled any background tasks that I didn’t need such as Cortana, Win 10 communicating with other computers, Windows tips etc.

At this point the fans were marginally less loud but the coil wine was still absolutely horrible and because of that I was struggling to work on the laptop and my husband indicated he did not want to sit next to me. When assessing all this I should state that CPU usage was very low, around 3%, so that was not the cause of the constant noise.

The next thing to do was to set an undervolt at -0.140v and 0.020v on the GPU. There was a slight improvement to noise but not in any way meaningful. The fans were still constant and fairly loud and the coil wine was still manifesting as a loud squeal which fluctuated when I changed task or scrolled. Not good. I went and checked on the Gigabyte site and I saw that a BIOS update was available. I decided to go ahead and install this (FB08 23.04.19). I was then greeted with a completely black screen and the machine showed no signs of turning itself on again, as it normally would. After half an hour a hard reset got things going and I saw that the firmware update had been installed. I was delighted to be greeted by silent laptop - no fan noise and absolutely no coil wine.

I started to do some general things like opening chrome browsers and watching 4K videos on YouTube. The fans only came on once, briefly, about 30 minutes into a movie. I then did some processing in Adobe Lightroom and I noticed that the fans were kicking in every time I opened an image made some changes. I went back to look at my power management settings and I noticed that the firmware update (and the update of the Gigabyte control centre) had introduced a new power plan, geared towards performance. I set this back to balanced and set the fans back to ‘quiet’. From that point onwards the machine has been silent unless I’m pushing it a bit in light room running exports and slideshows. Fan behaviour is completely normal, it kicks in only when needed and at a pleasingly low level. I will also say that the update took out my battery management slider (on the bottom toolbar) so I can't adjust the battery state.

Idling temperature is around 40° C. General productivity such as having three or four web browsers open, doing emails, and documents in Word can take the temperature up to 52° C. I consider that perfectly satisfactory. Plugged in idle temp fluctuates a bit but is mostly 48-53 degrees.

The keyboard is also a nice surprise. Having been spoiled with my ThinkPad keyboards I thought I might not like the one on the Aero. But it’s great, no iffy keys, and a nice tactile feel. The 4K screen is also beautiful - and it’s matte. The Pantone calibration was garish out-of-the-box but is easy to tone down and tweak slightly, and it’s now very accurate. The speakers are absolutely lousy, even worse than the ones on the X1E. That doesn’t bother me because I tend to carry a good quality Bluetooth speaker with me.

Looks-wise I feel it’s better in person than in pictures, it’s really very sleek and handsome.

It is terrible for fingerprints, but this is easily dealt with by using ECO Natural Cleaner which is wonderful stuff, chemical and alcohol free. I use it to clean all my electricals (and it’s the only thing which gets all the smears of my glass shower screen).

So far, I am loving this Aero. As and when I have any additional findings I will give an update.

 

[kazmac]

This might be a silly question for a Windows noob, but @LindsayD how did you know to do all of that?

And thank you for sharing this!

 

[LindsayD]

This might be a silly question for a Windows noob, but @LindsayD how did you know to do all of that?

I suppose like most people, I've had to learn to fix things over the years as a result of having hot or noisy laptops. Hours spent on the internet, YouTube videos and trial and error. I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable as many of the contributors here though!

With respect to the Aero I'm using to type this, I have a few more observations to add:

Sometimes it throttles even at apparent idle (XTU's Current Limit Throttle goes yellow) and I can only presume that is due to my chosen power settings. This is irrespective of whether on battery or charger.

The fans rarely spin up but when they do the sound isn't loud but it is high pitched, slightly buzzy, and a bit metallic. The lowest fan setting is the most annoying. Research has shown that this appears to be normal for this particular machine.

For Adobe Lightroom users, I find the fans spin up pretty much every time I go to a new image and fiddle with something or when scrolling through images in the Develop module. It's irrespective of whether using the GPU is selected in Preferences or not (the RTX2070 is selected by default). However if I force LR to use the UHD 630 instead, the fans hardly come on. Likewise if I then deselect the UHD 630 in LR Preferences. In other words so long as I have the UHD 630 showing as the one I've assigned to LR, whether it's off or on (LR is much slower with the UHD 630 'on') then the fans are less active.

Each time I switch the computer on, or plug in or remove the charger, the system defaults to a Performance power plan and I have to manually re-set it to balanced.

As was the case with my X1E, performance is noticeably slower in 4K, particularly when rendering images in Lightroom, using the adjustment brush etc. I tend to switch to 1080p for editing and retouching for that reason, it significantly speeds things up. This is just a 4k phenomenon - it's nice to be able to switch between the two resolutions when the situation dictates it.

 

[kazmac]

Thanks @LindsayD

 

[Thysanoptera]

XPS 15 7590 is up for sale. $3050 for maxed out i9/32/2TB/1650/OLED. With Windows Home, because for some reason you can’t add Pro to the best configs. You can to the i5 one though. Dell, you’re drunk....

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-15-7590/spd/xps-15-7590-laptop

 

[TSE]

XPS 15 7590 is up for sale. $3050 for maxed out i9/32/2TB/1650/OLED. With Windows Home, because for some reason you can’t add Pro to the best configs. You can to the i5 one though. Dell, you’re drunk....

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-15-7590/spd/xps-15-7590-laptop

The prices aren't actually that bad. Unless you are buying for a company or something, and can't upgrade the memory or SSD yourself, the $1500 configuration comes with the 1650 ti and 97Whr battery, just get that one, buy 32 GBs for $200, a 1 TB Samsung SSD for $250, and you have a $2000 laptop with everything you need. That's beyond reasonable.

 

[Thysanoptera]

The prices aren't actually that bad. Unless you are buying for a company or something, and can't upgrade the memory or SSD yourself, the $1500 configuration comes with the 1650 ti and 97Whr battery, just get that one, buy 32 GBs for $200, a 1 TB Samsung SSD for $250, and you have a $2000 laptop with everything you need. That's beyond reasonable.

Prices are ok, similarly equipped MBP will be over $4500, and that’s before the perpetual ‘going out business’ fire sale that usually starts at Dell a month after release. But it is just weird you can’t have it with Pro. And still not all possible permutations are possible. Right now, thanks to MBP it is apparent that this CPU generation it is i9 or bust. So I’d like i9 with 8GB ram, 128 SSD, small battery and FHD, but can’t have it. I have 6TB of SSDs and 32GB waiting for something like that. They usually expand config options after a while, so it is probably best to wait, more so that X1E gen 2 gets out soon. Although Lenovo put an asterisk next to i9 (*coming soon) - same way it was with the 8th gen i9 that never got released.