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January 30th, 2020 15:00
XPS 15 7590 Thermal concerns
So to start off, with this being a very nice overall laptop in terms quality and how solid it feels. I however have some pretty serious concerns regarding its cooling capabilities. I purchased the laptop I believe it was September of 2019 with 4K OLED, 9980HK, GTX1650, 2TB PCIe SSD, and 32GB RAM. So it was a little bit of money and I was under the expectation that the performance would reflect that.
When I received the product and made sure everything was updated and installed the first thing I did was run some simple benchmarks and keep an eye on thermals and I was worried that they forgot to put thermal paste on the CPU or something. It was almost instantly and constantly at 100c and underclocking itself even with basic background tasks, the perfomance was significantly under the average 9980HK in other laptops. So I checked and there was certainly thermal paste there so I decided to go the liquid metal route after trying some other pastes like Artic Silver 5 and Kryonaut.
After protecting against shorts and applying Conductonaut, the thermals on it were still at 100c under loads, but the clock speeds were significantly higher and yet it still performed under average, Cinebench R20 for example scored a 3000, better than the previous 2700. I then thought that maybe undervolting would help so I ended up with a -120mV undervolt. With all of that my final benchmarking after letting it cool off was a 3198. Still almost 100 points below what Notebookcheck listed as their benchmark running the same XPS 15 7590 setup bone stock. So I imagine their setup would run around a 3500+ with better paste and an undervolt. Is there a Quality Control issue and different laptops of the same model have that much difference in performance?
One thing I have noticed is the fans kick in very strangely. It's almost as if there is a delay like it doesn't want to turn them on until the CPU has already reached 100c. There should be a profile allowed for people like me who would rather there be some fan noise with better performance, or more preferably allow us to set our own fan curve. I may have to buy some fans earlier, but at least my BGA CPU wont die in 2 or 3 years.
Longtimetroubleshooter
2 Posts
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January 31st, 2020 04:00
Hi,
How good are you at looking through subfolders? I believe that if you right click on the battery icon, you can then select properties? From there you can customise power profiles depending on whether you are plugged in or running on battery.
I remember there being an option in there for cooling/fan speed. It is probably set to low. Try changing it and applying the setting.
samos1111
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January 31st, 2020 05:00
> ... 9980HK, GTX1650, 2TB PCIe SSD, and 32GB RAM. So it was a little bit of money and I was under the expectation that the performance would reflect that.
Paying a large sum for an XPS 15 often leads to false conclusions that one should expect stellar performance. While in fact one is paying for sleek thin and light design with a rather heavy compromise on the cooling capacity. Though, performance worse than other similar laptops is an issue of course.
> so I decided to go the liquid metal route after trying some other pastes like Artic Silver 5 and Kryonaut.
I guess reaching to Dell support earlier might have been a better idea. But you should find a way of demonstrating that your performance is worse than normal (mind Dell don't seem to have or want to publish specific standards for acceptable performance, and laptops sometimes get shipped with wildly inadequate paste).
> ...fans kick in very strangely. It's almost as if there is a delay like it doesn't want to turn them on until the CPU has already reached 100c.
The CPU heats up very quickly upon the onset of a heavy workload, in just a couple of seconds. The fan action tends to have a little bit of delay, so that they don't spin up fully for trivial tasks. But if they are delayed by just a couple of seconds and soon reach 100%, you shouldn't be losing much performance. The steady-state temperature depends a lot on the particular load test. For instance, Prime95 "Small FFT" is quite heavy and likely results in 100oC, at least without undervolt.
However, there is a chance that your cooling is malfunctioning. Inconveniently, the cooling and throttling schemes are undisclosed, also subject to change with BIOS revisions sometimes. You could try changing power profiles, and try reinstalling Intel DPTF, which is known to be involved. Other than this, you could try plotting and posting all the relevant signals using HWinfo64/Signals at load test start, like: clock frequencies, temperatures, package power, fan speeds, throttling flags, temperatures under Dell EC. And compare them to what others get. Folks at the XPS forum at Notebookreview tend to have some experience with this, you may also try Dell reddit. You may want to study relevant threads for 9550/9560/9570 if you don't find data directly for the i9 7590.
MathiasB
5 Posts
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March 26th, 2020 06:00
Exact same thing for me: I really like the laptop, but I have also noticed this kind of delay before the fans kick off full blast, leading to very frequent throttling (even when just doing office work: a web browser open, a few instances of my favorite text editor and connected through a VPN to my office). As I run Linux, I have installed undervolt and now apply undervolting to the cpu, cache, gpu and analogio (all -100mV except the gpu that gets -75mV). Now, very few throttling if at all. It would be very welcomed for Dell to allow undervolting in the BIOS so we could keep secure boot enabled (because to do it outside of the bios, secure boot has to be turned off)!