My brand new XPS 630i freezes randomly!

I did not change CPU speed or Memory so you may have some hope!

Chris,

I am also fighting the random hard locks and dealing with the XPS support line.  There is very little knowledge of these problems on the support line, unfortunately, and I've had to work with three engineers.  There is a dispatch open to replace my processor - is this going to work at all?  I've seen this type of problem manifest itself as a power supply problem.  Can I push suport to get this replaced?

Chris and community,

I have made the memory, chipset and cpu voltage changes and will watch it and report back.  I need to know if I am chasing my tail and should just push for a replacement/refund. 

Tonight alone I have had 5 locks ups... 1 logging in, 3 watching youtube.com videos and one reading this forum.  However, I can play 5 hours of WoW and never see a lock.  I am keeping track to corelate but I feel I should not have to trouble shoot a machine I paid a bump to have integrated and stable.

voltage changes made it worse, much worse.  I have set everything back to defaults.

Is there an effective way to escalate this with Dell?  I am questioning the product at this point.

What did you change the voltages to davidsnewton ?

I think the official recommendation was to just raise the chipset voltage and leave the others be.

Raising the memory voltage especially appears to have made it worse for some people too. (Your Mileage may vary depending on what RAM you have).

As far as the changes go that we did to our system (Chipset voltage 1.35, Memory Clock down to 667, Memory Timings 6 6 6 18), it didn't freeze as we tested it by gaming a 4-5 hours yesterday. But we had it run fine like that before and then freeze 3 times in a row within an hour on the next day, so can't really tell anything yet, except that we don't seem to have made it worse lol ;)

About "questioning the product" ... i fully agree. These things - or at least a whole lot of these things - arrive factory-unstable and no one on the Dell-Support-Line seems to have a clue how to approach the problem. Simply unacceptable.

Earlier in the thread I saw the following:

1.50 for chipset

1.30 for CPU core

1.2 for FSB

2.10 mem / unlinked

I've also started looking on my6301.com for hints but it seems to be more of the same.  I've seen weird locks like this be the power supply, but try telling that to the guy on the XPS support line who has no perspective and is following a script.

I will post if I come up with anything solid.

David,

Don't hesitate a moment longer: SEND IT BACK if you still can! You are completely correct that you shouldn't have to troubleshoot or spend any time whatsoever dealing with problems on a brand new machine.  And I can guarantee you that you will regret it if you don't.

I've been experiencing the same problems people are talking about in this thread on my brand new Studio XPS 435, and I made the mistake of assuming I could just get it fixed.  It arrived on 25th July and it is now off to be "serviced" for the THIRD time.  I've had no real usage out of it during my computer's first month and a half, and technical support just keeps replacing parts and sending it back with a note to say they've fixed the problem.  I didn't realise that the returns policy here in Japan is only 10 days, so by the time I finally realised that I should just send it back, it was already too late.  In fact just sending it off for servicing once is more than enough to take you out of the return window, leaving you at the mercy of Dell technical support, with a problem they clearly do not understand and will likely repeatedly fail to fix - if my own experience is anything to go by.

Even if you still want to get a Dell computer, you'll have far less hassle by simply sending the broken one back, getting a refund and buying a new one.

If only I had realised that from the start, I could have been sitting with a nice working new computer at this very moment.  As it is technical support has seen my new computer far more than I have, and I quite resent the fact that although it's brand new it has scratches and marks from where it was wiped before being sent back to me.

Thorf

@mikes-123

the changes make sense to the memory clock, the default is 800 MHz but the RAM shipped is only 667 MHz.  This helped stablize the system for me after I reset everything back to defaults.  I agree with you on the randomness of the event so it's hard to ever feel comfortable.  The system has been running well today so we shall see if the tuning you posted helps at all. 

I play Warcraft mainly as the game on the system but would also like stable performance when I'm doing standard office automation.  I have 2 of these systems, but they are not identical.  The wife's system has the dual ATI cards and I have a single nvidia card in mine.  Otherwise, they are pretty close to identical.  She has not had any lock up problems to speak of but doesn't use her machine for anything other then email, facebook and office automation.  Rarely does she game on hers.

Is there a good tuning guide that anyone has uncovered for overclocking?  My thought is this can't be a bad run of hardware, unless its a nasty power supply lot, and maybe all the bad XPS machines are just jacked up BIOS settings for the processor/clock/memory, etc.

Our system shipped with 8gb DDR2 800MHZ RAM, as ordered.

It has SPD timings for 800MHZ and gets recognized by the BIOS, by Everest and CPU-Z as 800MHZ RAM too.

It's not a matter of putting it back to "default" settings... the default settings for the RAM we have are 800mhz with 6 6 6 18 timings and it certainly does not run stable with that (lol).

Let's calculate together for the real cost of this XPS 630i.

I spent original JPY130,000 (US$1300) for XPS 630i.

Plus:

1. Data I lost due to random hangup = $priceless
2. Time to call Dell customer support and, they forced us to run dell diagnostic test =  4 hours of my salary wage$$
3. Time to post a comment to Dell forum and other forum = 5 hours of my salary wage$$$
4. Time to segregate the problem by clean install = 2 hours of my salary wage $$$$
5. Money to purchase spare power supply and HDD and memory = $400
6. Time to replace parts one by one to segregate the problem = 4 hours of my salary wage$$$$
7. Finally, stress from spending past 3 months begging Dell to figure out this issue. = Wasted$$$$$$$

I came to conclusion, not worth to waste my further energy to chase Chris regards this issue any more. (Sorry Chris but already 90 days)
Keep send it back until they give us working PC from out of the box.

Now I am 100% confident that there will be no more DELL in my house or company.

@Mikes-123 - I look up my service tag and it shows I have 800 MHz RAM as well.  I definately agree there is a problem with setting the speed to 800.  The system does go into an unstable mode.

I will post more when I learn it.  Thanks for being available to discuss this with.

@billybigfoot - thanks!  This is a great guide.  I've been stable for a while and only had one lock and it was coming out of suspend mode which is another problem all together.  I don't have much time to fool around with it this week but I will read through the guide and try things as I have time.  I am thinking about holding off on any kind of field repair, currently there is a dispatch open to replace my processor.

The more I think about the problems I've read about, the more I believe it's not a rampant hardware error but more of a configuration QA problem.  Several different RAM configs, processor configs, and gpu type but who is maintaining the standard configs and enforcing these upon assembly? 

I'm not ready to give up on my XPS yet.  My wife's is working fine although it's a slightly different config (I always buy from the Outlet store).  She has had zero locking problems and the big difference I can remember is she has ATI cards and I have an nvidia card.  I'll check the invoices later to compare for differences... maybe she got 800 MHz RAM and I didn't.

@davidsnewton, definitely good to have someone to discuss this with, agreed.

So you just changed the RAM back to 667 and didn't touch any voltages ? As said above, we also changed the chipset to 1.35,

but if you are stable after downclocking the RAM, without any voltage changes, we will propably go back to Auto on the chipset and see if our system behaves as well.

(Still didn't do enough testing on our own to know for sure if we are even stable yet LOL)

FYI - I bought a 630i 3 weeks ago - the first 3 days it was unstable but the last 2 weeks it has been rock solid.  I think my problem was a mixture of incorrect settings in the bios and with the nvidia performance software.  This might not be of any use but I did discuss what I was doing in this forum at the time:  http://my630i.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2850 and if not I have to recommend the forum there are lots of helpful and knowledgeable guys hanging out there.