XPS 15 9560, Shuts down randomly

Thanks. I hope you sent them the link to this thread. It is about the most viewed and replied to thread in this whole XPS forum, so it is obviously a very common problem. It is surprising to me that Dell doesn't seem to monitor these forums.

Yes, I included the link. Funny enough Twitter support mentioned there was no internal report of this issue yet. I hope there is now ;)

Not funny. It's more sad to me.

First of all thanks to everyone who posted on this thread - I am experiencing this issue on my new xps 9560 trying to run x-plane.

What was strange for me was when I ran the prime5 test in extreme mode with a gpu stress tester, the machine didn't reach its Tj max - but with x-plane, it does everytime I launch the program and it is about to start rendering.

I will downgrade the thermal drivers to A04 to verify that this 'fixes' the thermal shutdown issue.

But, what I didn't see anywhere in this thread, is a mention of the fans not coming on fast enough.

I would think that once the temperature gets above 70C or 80C that the fans would come on full throttle, but they don't.

There doesn't seem to be anyway to force the fans on either - utilities like speedfan, etc. don't work on the 9560.

Does anyone know now to force the fans on? With the A04 driver, do the fans come on enough to cool the processor, so that the cpu doesn't throttle itself too badly?

It seems dumb that a brand new laptop can't be run at 100% cpu at full frequency - I mean what's the point of having a modern cpu if you can't actually use to its full potential?

I am happy to report that downgrading to the A04 versions of thermal management package resulted in the machine being able to run x-plane! I can set the graphics settings to HDR and set the number of world objects to max.

I hope this helps anyone else who has a Dell XPS 9560 and were having trouble getting x-plane to run.

I also had problems with shutting down due to overheating and overload of the CPU during gaming. Yet, I solved my problem with just a few tweaks and using the most recent drivers (no need to downgrade).

Open Dell Command Power Manager: In the Battery Information tab, set battery settings to "Primarily AC Use". In the Thermal Management tab, set to "Cool Mode".

Also, set the power mode to "Better battery life".

This reduces the performance (avoiding the overload of the CPU) and increases fan usage (keeping the temperatures down).

I tested this by playing Mafia 3 (video settings set to low and resolution 1600x900). With the default power and thermal management settings, my XPS was shutting down after 10 min of gaming with CPU reaching ~90 Celsius and GPU ~75 (even using a cooler). With these changes, temperatures reach max ~65 at CPU and ~55 GPU.

Happened to mine a few months ago. Opening Device Manager and right clicking on all the drivers, then choosing "update driver" eventually resolved the problem. Same with my son''s Dell, which had a loud fan. The auto update and online diagnostics don't always detect or update every driver. About every 6 months I do it manually.

As I understood the algo is something like that:

- when CPU/GPU are not loaded, fans are off and laptop is colled passively - this should be enough without extra load

- when CPU/GPU are loaded significantly, temperature rises about 10 C per second, which is really fast

- when temperature reaches some point cooling fans should turn on. The main problem here is that fans speeds up not fast enough to stop temperature from rising

- when temperature reaches 100 C then throttling should force CPU to reduce frequency. Here is the difference come between driver version A04 and more recent. With A04 I see CPU throttling until cooling fans speeds up enough to cool CPU working on full power. With the latest drivers there is no throttling and PC shuts down to prevent hardware damage.

What you did is reduced your laptop performance and made cooling fans to work all the time. Whats the point to buy hi-end ultra performance laptop and keep it as slow as possible to prevent from shutting down?

Have the same problem with XPS 9560. It shutdowns randomly when CPU and GPU are heavyly used :-/

Tried all driver revisions, BIOS revisions... didn´t help.

Sometimes the machine runs flawless .. but I don´t know why. I think it might be the case when the battery is FULLY charged. Perhaps charging generates additional temperature?!

Yesterday I tried the tipp in the post above installing DELL Command Power Management and setting "thermal mode" to "cool". This seems to have worked. But.... after using the machine for  ~~30min it got so slow - almost unusable. But all better than shutting down without warning and loss of unsaved changes.

BUT I don´t like to accept this as a "solution" for a notebook that is worth >2000€ (!)

I downgraded to A04, and everything is working fine for me again. I find it terrible that the new bios update are causing these terrible shut down issues. Dell should really be on top of fixing this as it's definitely affected my workflow.

Hello, 

I would like to give you guys an update regarding my issue. So, after got my motherboard replaced, so far - since 2 weeks ago, I have not got any shutting-down problem anymore. And I hope, the issue completely resolved by this new motherboard.

I'm getting these random shutdowns regularly, often during something important. Very disruptive and it destroys productivity.

If I wiped Windows 10 and installed a Linux distro, would I still have the same issue? I am wondering if the problem is inherent to the Dell hardware itself, or is it some combination of hardware, bios and operating system?

Installing Linux should be possible, but it might be difficult to find drivers for everything. If you are willing to spend many hours troubleshooting you could probably get it to work, but I wouldn't recommend it.

I had the same issue when I would play a game or exert my laptop too much.  This was until I opened up my laptop and cleaned out all the dust and fluff that was affecting my fans movement.  I don't know if it relates to everyone's issues, but it certainly worked for me.