Feature Requestion Insipiron G5 5505 4800H (AMD) + Quality Check Drivers

We tried reaching you on a private message asking for the Service Tag but did not receive a response. Please feel free to reply to the private message whenever you are available.

Thank you! We have received the required details. We will work towards a resolution. In the meantime, you may also receive assistance or suggestions from the community members.

 want to follow up that the following behaviors are present:
I have updated to bios 1.5.
I have had the laptop roughly 2 months, and spend more time troubleshooting it, than using it.

Running any program that uses the RX5600 boosts the CPU power consumption to 100+ watts. Even though the CPU may only be used 4-10%, its consuming 100 WATTS and hitting 100+C on the die. EVEN WITH TURBO turned off, and new thermal paste, and removing the mesh filters on the bottom intakes.

Dells "high performance mode" toggling FN+F7 actually reduces power usage to 35watts on the CPU, But barely runs cooler. (about 91C tdie)

Something is horribly wrong with AMD smartShift, and Horribly wrong with this laptops design. I am filled with so much regret for spending 1500 dollars or so on the laptop, only for it to be un-usable.

Current Audio Driver STILL has no sound, and I have to roll back to the audio driver it shipped with near the end of October.

Dell is offering me troubleshooting and other advice, but there is no real fixing this laptop. Short of return and refund theres basically no resolution. Spending hours (or days) of my time trying to fix this laptop has been unproductive, And I should have just returned it the day it arrived and blue screened out the box constantly needing a Vbios update, a regular Bios update, and GPU driver updates to fix. The state of this laptop being sold this way is...shameful.

The forum also will not let me edit posts for whatever reason, So I have to reply to update them

Running at 100-110 Watts on the CPU package is NOT what AMD specifies (cTDP is 35-54watts)

Running at 100+ C is also NOT normal for any laptop, just because TJmax for this chip is 105C does not mean it should run at 100C all the time.

I have also reached out to Dell technical support regarding a BIOS update requisition. The thermal issue you are facing is common with the G5 SE 5505 series due to the use of SmartShift to control the power delivery to CPU & GPU. I have a 4600H + 5600M model and the thermals reach 100 C with medium CPU usage just because SmartShift has a faulty implementation of pushing 105 W power to iGPU/CPU where it should have been able to cap the CPU/iGPU power at 45 - 54 W and push more power to the dGPU (5600M) whereas it starves it at 70 W - 90 W as soon as CPU temps hit 100 C + consistently.

Dell is trying to tune the SmartShift with their BIOS iterations but really they should let the users decide if they want to keep using SmartShift or not and provide an option to turn it off completely in the BIOS and let the CPU & dGPU run at their rated power draw.

There's another problem with this laptop. It doesn't sleep. You can only hibernate or shut it down. The S3 sleep mode is disabled on this laptop and hence you cannot use the OS sleep feature as you would on other laptops.

I do not know what makes Dell push SmartShift so hard when it is clear that it doesn't work in the real world. Pushing 100 W + to the CPU most of the time during gaming not only is a waste of electricity but also diminishes the longevity of the device and circuitry.

This is my last Dell device, no doubt about that but still, I would like to see Dell realize what really works for this machine and provide these two things with their next BIOS iteration.

1. Ability to enable/disable SmartShift completely through BIOS

2. Enable S3 sleep mode with this laptop

Some folks have been able to look into the BIOS code and identified that these options are hidden away and can be altered with the right tools. No one should need to go that route only if Dell engineering would listen to the customers.

Regards,

Karl

Dells online support staff seems to be totally ignorant of this computers specifics. Dell has entirely lost a customer. They dont care, I'm a Small business account and only buy one laptop every 2 years or so and while they have had their issues, I kept being loyal...but I just cannot do this any more. I only have one tied directly to this account though due to email breaches over the years (yahoo, hotmail, etc)

I too am with you 100% in this being the last Dell I will ever purchase, But they DO need to fix it for all the other people. Can you imagine all the kids and teenagers that purchased this notebook or received it as a gift thinking this is just how a laptop is? Because lets face it, at the price point and it being a "GAMING" notebook it was pretty much entirely marketed at young adult males. I imagine this would be infuriating as a parent to give to your child, or as a young adult who just spent months of labor to pay for this machine only to have it be rendered essentially unusable for its advertised purpose.

Such gold examples are reiterating multiple times that the "machine heats up under use and is normal" in response to images with averages at 101C or higher, and peaks of 106. Or claims that it can run at tjunction safely with 0 caveats.

They dont know how to even navigate the ePSA for this laptop and give incorrect information and trouble shooting.

Claims that you can test the machine in safe mode (drivers are not loaded for the Dgpu, So I have no idea how you can stress a hardware element it cannot interface with)

Claims that Alien Ware Control Center and AW OC do not work on this laptop (despite sending screenshots of their own website) and it being the only way i can find to toggle High Performance or rapid cool fan modes.

Ignoring that I have just purchased the machine, and still am covered by the standard 1 year service + the 2 extra years of premium service extension. They Will grant me a "one time exception" and send a heatsink and fans

When it BSOD'ed right out the box just setting up windows updates... I should have just contacted dell and sent it back.

As configured I spent nearly 1500 USD on this machine after taxes. I've used it maybe 10 hours total that was not just troubleshooting it.I'd Love nothing more than to just return it, or exchange it for the intel g3 model that has the same chassis and keyboard and display but lower end GPU and CPU (provided the difference in cost was also made up for)

All I can say is its quite a shame really. I cant even be all that mad about it, just disappointed.

We have replied to you via private message.

Kavyashree

Additional update. Dell has sworn many times that this laptop is running "okay" and not hot. So I have updated every last bit of software on a fresh install of windows.

BIOS 1.5 - Current versions of all drivers installed. Fresh, brand new installed windows from installation medium yesterday.

This is the temps after running doom 2016 for 2 Minutes (kadingir Sanctum Arcade mode, ultra settings)

PC is On a Targus Chillmat (dual fans laptop cooler) Room Temperature is 22.1C
PC Turbo Boost is set to Disabled in Windows Power Settings (ie we are limited to 2.9ghz baseclock)
 (CPU core peak power during this run was 17 watts, GPU peak power was 80 watts)

Laptop intake fan mesh is removed. The laptop has been re pasted with Arctic MX-4

It runs at 130ish FPS for about 1.5 minutes. Then it drops to 80FPS with alot of stutter... the reason?

its Hitting 110C on the CPU core. 110C In less than 2 minutes of gaming.

As a follow up, if you play for a few more minutes (say to complete an arcade level in doom 2014, which takes about 4 minutes) after the FPS drops to around 60-80FPS, and you go look at your thermals you will find some very alarming things.

Namely 130C+ Core Temps. CPU Never throttles on bios 1.5. It did Not shut down.
GPU Throttles however and hits well into the 90C range.

Note this is ON a laptop cooling Pad, in a 22-24C room. It has been re-pasted with arctic MX-4 (does not help) fully updated (does not help) running the fans in AWCC at "rapid Cool" (does not help) With Turbo Boost disabled in windows power manager (does not really help either) with the mesh on the intakes cut out (apparently is not helping either)

Keyboard temps hit 59C, Though I did not take a picture of this. I have many pictures sitting at 54C though.

Peak CPU Power Draw According to Logging? 115watts. Peak GPU Power Draw at 161Watts.

AWCC stops reporting temperatures at 100C and does not go Higher, despite every other software (including windows) reading higher.

Laptop Can no longer boost, and only gets about 80FPS in doom2016. Its essentially living-dead. It passes Dells ePSA magically, but hangs for a very long time (like 8 minutes) on a test that runs a white line across in a scan line fashion. it has random white dots spaced along each "scan line". This photo was taken after removing the laptop from the cooling pad, and not how it was tested in a game.

Dell Has offered a Heatsink (as of 3 am this morning) replacement. I will go through that hassle, And I suspect I have defective hardware so it will not provide satisfactory Results. I tried my testing before reading that email.

Also Note:
dell FIX your site, and your customer help.

You allow us to insert images into our posts, and messages.

Your Employees claim to be unable to view images, and we must make 3rd party hosting accounts to send them links, to get them to see our images and screenshots they are asking for.

This has hands down got to be one of the most Kafkaesque, Vogonistic like system I Have ever seen...and I worked for a hospital and for the federal government. 

Laptop Has arrived from the service center:

New Motherboard, New Fans.
Thermals are much better so far.

However Screws on the front of the bottom cover area now different lengths. (one is now many threads shorter than the other)

Screws at the rear of the case are starting to strip at the heads (and were not like this when shipped in)

Sound did not work on drivers that did work before. Found Speakers to not be fully plugged in.

Missing Blue O-Ring Damper on one speaker. (causes rattle and buzzing sound on bass notes)

they Also stripped the battery hold down screws, and the M.2 Screw, daughter board screws. This M.2 Screw head is so mangled I cannot get it out if I wanted to. It was NOT like this before I sent it in.stripped m.2 screw headMultiple stripped battery screw heads

I am probably going to send mine back, this is just shockingly disturbing.
CPU should not be getting that much power or be getting that hot and having no thermal shutoff.

That damage back from Dell service center is also criminal.

Bad enough you CAN change iGPU VRAM allocation (for older games and some newer but badly coded games) on HP, Lenovo, and some others, but on DELL you cannot... Now you cannot even disable SmartShift should you want to, Dell should learn from others, make a hidden key combo press required area for ADVANCED users.

I also had 5~ dead/stuck pixels upon arrival (among other things), and it the screen flashes every once in a while like its having a seizure, im thinking this is due to the runaway power to the CPU/iGPU.

I went through all your updates. This is just pure garbage of customer service. I believe most probably they sent you back a refurbished one. Anyways you can have WUR until you have a NEW machine with proper hardware and within your limited warranty.

We have figured Dell WILL not provide options to disable SmartShift on this laptop and with BIOS v1.5.0 the laptop as a whole performs way worse than on BIOS v1.4.4. Dell has purposefully clocked down the dGPU to balance out the thermals since CPU & GPU share heat pipes. I can go on with the list of issues with this laptop but it will be time better spent pointing you towards some fixes that you can perform yourself to make this machine workable again. We did not get any help on the REAL issues from Dell on this one and only from the effort of the community we were able to fix some of the issues as we discovered.

You may want to search Reddit with DellG5SE, if you have not already done that, that is

Karl