New Kaby Lake XPS 13: coil whine

Thanks for a fast response Justin, I wanted to place an order today/tomorrow because of the 10% promotion that's available at the moment, however I will wait for an update to avoid any issues.

Thanks

I decided to purchase this regardless, hopefully I'll get a unit with no coil whine, otherwise I'll have to wait for a fix and get it sorted then!

@Ervytis,

Thank you for your order. Looking forward to your feedback once delivered.

Hello. I took delivery of my new i7 XPS 13 (not a developer version) about a week and a half ago. For the most part it's pretty quiet. But start playing Minecraft and the motherboard makes a screechy/scratchy sound that is not very pleasant. It made this noisy once during the Windows Updates configuring stage, after the reboot.

I have revision A00 motherboard. I am wondering how soon to contact Dell New Zealand support, as I don't want another (possibly louder) A00 motherboard installed. Thanks.

you may well be right, but I think the Project Sputnik team should not be lumped in with this as they appear to be working hard on getting the best linux experience for us.

Ask them to download the trial version of Minecraft from the Windows 10 Store.  Start playing. Does it for me.

Is there any chance to get 9360 i7 without coil whine?

How can I test xps in 10-15 minutes in the store before purchase, run dxdiag or something?

Got my XPS 13 today, i7/8G/256GB/FHD. Shipped 22nd. Just went and installed the latest updates. Diagnostics page shows A00 revision. Has anyone actually got an A02?

There is some intermittent whine audible from a normal sitting position with AC plugged in and when running certain operations (window update, youtube, minecraft). Not really bothersome IMO so far. Very quiet when running on battery, which would be the main use case for me. So far I think it's not too bad. Other than that it's a great little machine.

Kabylake i7-7700K - quad-core hyper-threaded CPU appears to be the best processor currently available for notebooks. Guess, XPS 13 Kaby Lake (9360) is offered with i7-7700K. haven't heard of the coil whine noise problem in particular.  

I received the A02 revision yesterday as part of a service request for this coil whine issue.  The whine is better, but it is not gone.  Under heavy graphics load it no longer screeches terribly.  I find the whine to be more bearable, but still uncomfortable.  It is disappointing that the issue still remains, but without another option to fix this, we can live with it or return the laptop.  I will try to bare with it as I do very much enjoy the features of this laptop.

One thing to keep in mind, upon replacing the motherboard with the A02 revision, my touchscreen and touch-pad no longer worked in Ubuntu.  I had to upgrade to the mainline kernel version 4.9 in order to restore usage of the touch-pad and mouse with the new motherboard revision.

I do have a question for the representatives from Dell.  How do you measure the boundary (decibel level and frequency range, etc.) between your 2 use cases of acceptable and unacceptable noise?  This coil whine isn't so much loud as it is high pitch.  High pitch noises have been found to put people on edge.  When you want to be productive, a laptop that puts you on edge doesn't create a good working environment.  Furthermore, perception of these high pitch noises diminishes with age.  Though not scientific, I have asked many friends if they can hear the whine, most over the age of 30 cannot and those under it almost unanimously do.  If you are having people perceive this difference, you may be missing the issue entirely.  I understand that for this model of laptop you may not be able to fix the issue completely, but I don't think it is wise to state seemingly arbitrary distinctions in these forums.  If you could provide objective measurable thresholds, I would appreciate it very much.  It would go a long way toward convincing me and others that this problem is being truly resolved, even if it is for a future model.

This laptop is a very good piece of hardware in many ways and the work done for supporting Linux is phenomenal.  But, in this very technologically competitive era, loyalty will only be retained if both fixes and new features are incorporated with each generation.  I hope you fix this issue completely (both of your scenarios) for the next generation of this computer.  If you do, I see myself upgrading and staying with this line.

In Linux I have these kernel options : pcie_aspm=force i915.enable_fbc=1 i915.enable_rc6=7 i915.enable_psr=0. I also have the touchscreen disabled in bios. I can hear a very fainth coil wine once in a while for a few seconds..., other than that, the laptop is dead silent at 30cm distance under any load. I can still hear the coil whine at 5 cm distance in a very quiet room. I have the A00 revision. Hope it helps.

Thanks everyone for reporting and sharing on this and especially Zyell with who points very relevant points:

Situation 1: could only be heard in a very quiet environment.
Situation 2: could be heard in busy office environments.

These are exceptionally vague descriptions of acoustic conditions, in ambient noise spectral characteristics, intensity, variation over time.

Then you can add:

• everyone has different hearing capabilities due to physiology, age and hearing damage: no universal "could be heard" exists.
• different computer tasks, stressing storage, CPU and GPU all produce vastly different acoustic output
• Some coil noise types can be masked by ambient noise, some far less

DELL-Justin C:

Any improvement with a new board revision must be accompanied with measurement results, otherwise what is happening is that any perceived difference with A02 vs A01 or A00 might be due to the placebo effect.

I received a XPS 13 9360 (Ubuntu dev edition with high specs) with motherboard Rev A00 on January 28 which has multiple issues: 1 dark spot due something like a dust particule behind the display glass, erratic touchpad behavior, and the coil noise.

However I really like it and would like to have the XPS 13 with these flaws fixed. It is brilliant in other regards and I'm very impressed by the overall package.
I work with software development for acoustics tuning; added to my sensitive hearing, a noisy laptop is an instant annoyance and a definite no-go.

I am not sure what to do now:
Return and get my money back, or ask for a replacement of the display + touchpad + motherboard to A02, hoping it'll be later under my hearing threshold?

Zyell:
Did you measure before/after?

Kindly.

@DELL-Justin C:

I ordered a XPS13 DE back at the end of November. Even though I heard of the coil whine issue before I decided to get one, I was hoping I wouldn't be affected. However, when I got the device it did have the coil whine.

I sent back the device since you wrote in the forum that the engineers were working on the issue and that a fix would be available soon after.

So when you wrote on January 20th that a new revision was available to all new orders that fixes the problem (situation 2), I was very excited and again ordered a XPS13 DE. I specifically made sure not to order a smart selection system so I'd get the revision A02.

So now imagine my disappointment when I got the device today and not only is it still on the old A00 revision, but it also has coil whine which is even worse than on the first XPS I got.

Could you please explain to me how it is possible that I still got the old version? After all, your post announcing revision A02 was the reason I ordered!

While I really appreciate the work done on project sputnik to ship linux out of the box, I can't help but wonder about the hardware issues. Is it really the engineers that are behind this, and deem situation 1 to be as designed, or is it management cutting corners?

Regards,
Herwig

@Community,

I've recently found out that the ePSA diagnostics may not be displaying the correct motherboard version on most systems. Dell is trying to find out why. With that said and unfortunately, we can't use the ePSA diagnostics as a way to find out which motherboard version is inside of a 9360 at this time. The only way to know for sure is to find the yellowish PPID number sticker on the motherboard itself. The PPID sticker is under the CPU heatsink. I won't be asking anyone to remove the heatsink unless absolutely needed. Owners are however, welcome to check if comfortable doing so.

@Supercurio,

Thank you for your kind feedback about the 9360.

Dell's scope of support on this matter is limited to providing the solution once available. Any internal noise level measurements taken by Dell engineering, won't be shared.

It will be up to you to decide which support option you'd like to go with.

@Herwigstuetz,

Go ahead and send me a friend request with your service tag. We should be able to work something out.