XPS 17 9700 Significant Battery Drain Issue

I placed an order on June 26 for a maxed out XPS 17” (which I still don’t have) and after these findings, I am already planning on returning my order. It wasn’t listed anywhere on the product page that this would happen and it shows just how terrible Dell is at quality control and customer service. They failed to inform consumers about this issue and failed to properly test the AC adaptor. If you are going to release a product that requires that much power, either design it with a proper power adaptor or allow charging with two USBC plugs. In my opinion, Dell really turned a beautiful product into a terrible failure. It should be recalled and replaced with a redesign with a suitable power supply and provided to anyone that purchased these computers.

I was quite surprised that after years of shipping XPS 15 models with 130W power supplies, Dell rolled out an XPS 17 with a higher-end GPU and kept the same 130W power supply.  I figured they did it just to allow using a USB-C power source rather than a "traditional" power supply connector -- and in fact even Dell's 130W USB-C charger is already doing something proprietary to stretch beyond the official 100W max of USB PD spec.  So I figured they were maybe using the same playbook that Apple used for the 15" MacBook Pro, i.e. developed a system and power supply pairing where the system would have to drain the battery under load to make up for an undersized power supply.  It sounds like the drain may be more significant than intended.  If so, hopefully this can at least be mitigated somewhat with something as simple as a firmware update rather than having to replace hardware, but this is disappointing to say the least.

I have to imagine that people buying 17" laptops in general aren't overly concerned with avoiding bulk and minimizing weight, and people buying the XPS 17 in particular probably care about performance.  So I would have guessed that XPS 17 customers overall would prefer that their system came with a power supply that didn't require the system to drain the battery AT ALL when under load, even if it was slightly larger and heavier and even required a proprietary connector rather than USB-C.

I wonder what happens if an XPS 17 owner kicks off a long encoding/rendering job overnight or something -- or even just plays games for a few hours straight.  Is the system going to die partway through the job/game?  Or will it actually throttle performance when the battery is low rather than continuing to drain it down to 0%?

Then there's the reality that this design means a lot of additional wear and tear on a battery that isn't considered user-replaceable (even though I realize it's possible).  I have my laptops set with a maximum charge level of 80% and a minimum charge level of 50% so that my batteries spend most of their time completely idle, i.e. neither charging, nor being kept topped up, nor being actively discharged.  It's great for longevity.

Exactly, I share the same thoughts and will be cancelling my order unless this issue is properly addressed by Dell. Many users have already cancelled their orders or returned their computers as the battery drain is unacceptable for a flagship premium device.

Long duration renders and encoding have shown to reduce battery to 20% where it begins to throttle performance to near non-functional levels, where the battery will charge back to 100% before draining again. This is less than ideal and you are absolutely correct that the battery wear becomes another concern. If this battery drain mechanism was advertised, I doubt anyone would have purchased this device.

I just put in a request to cancel my order. It’s been in “shipped” status for nearly two weeks. Hopefully, it’s not to late. Good luck with this equipment if you decide to keep it. 

@tuneyain Ouch.  So the throttling continues until the load stops in order to allow the battery to charge AND the battery actually charges back to 100%, which is probably another 2.5 hours or so?  I guess throttling on long jobs that are running overnight aren't so much of a problem (as long as they actually complete by morning), but obviously not all jobs will be run that way, and if you're a gamer where you actually expect to USE the system under load and have it perform properly, that's even worse.  And if you don't start from a 100% battery, then you might not even get much time before you drop to the 20% mark.  Although even that assumes that the system doesn't throttle even sooner than that due to temperature, which has been an issue on XPS 15 systems going back at least as far as the 9530.

Well like I said, hopefully this can be mitigated quite a lot by a firmware update, but the fact that this behavior is at least to some extent by design is disappointing.  One option might have been to offer a higher wattage AC adapter for people who wanted to chose between more portability and more performance, but that still probably would have required building the system with a "traditional" AC adapter connector.  I'm not sure how much farther Dell could safely stretch the USB PD spec past its official 100W max.

I don’t recall where I read it but allegedly, Dell is working on an i9 variant of the XPS 17” due out later this year. If that’s the case, the current issues will be expediently more severe on that build.  I can’t see Dell changing the PD system on that model without changing the whole product line, or at least the larger variants.  That would cause Dell to admit (not publicly) there is an issue with the existing design(s). Dell of course wouldn’t replace existing machines purchased by customers as that would be too expensive. It might fall to a suit and affected consumers would get the bare minimum back, a few bucks max. 

I can confirm this seems to be a real issue. Unfortunately discovered after the return period. Running CAD software most of the day the machine seems to drop to a low % towards the end of the day even whilst being on charge all day.

This has led to a number of issues. 

Hoping dell come through with a fix.

I hope they fix it, this isn't a good issue.

Does anyone know if the dock with the 180W charger fixes this, or if we could possibly plug in 2 power adapters?

@MedicD  The WD19 180W and WD19TB (which comes standard with a 180W adapter) only pass through up to 130W to the attached system, which Dell allowed specifically to support systems designed for 130W power sources.  The 130W they're pushing via USB-C/TB3 is already above the 100W max of the official USB PD spec, so it might not be feasible to go higher than that, at least without running a non-standard voltage rather than increasing amperage.  As for connecting multiple power sources, the only case I'm aware of that being possible is with the WD19DC dock and Precision 7000 Series systems.  That dock plugs into two USB-C ports in order to be able to deliver up to 210W to the attached system, but "power source aggregation" seems to require firmware-level support from the system.  Otherwise I believe the system will just draw exclusively from the highest-wattage source.

Good thing I found this. I was waiting for this to be available in the Philippines and I was almost going to pre-order. Now I’m looking for other options...

I have had my XPS 17 8 core i7/RTX 2060/16GB/1TB since June and have had multiple problems. Under any gaming load for about an hour or more (1080p low-normal settings) it gets very hot (100dc CPU, 72dc GPU) and throttles so heavily the frame rate drops to 7fps. 

I have been trying to fix this with dell for months and yet to find a solution despite it having to be a specific unit issue as no one seems to experience such poor thermals. They won’t replace as i contacted them after 4 weeks post shipment cut off (even though I only had it for half of that time).

When I do manage to get some decent game time out of it, I experience battery drain so sever that it drains a fully charged battery within 5 hours despite being plugged into the mains.

It is a great product when not under load, but a laptop that costs over £2,700 should be able to do a lot more than browse the internet and stream videos...

I have the WD19TB - 180w power adapter and the battery drain is also present with this USB-C Docking station.
Also plug two adapters the WD19TB and the 130w default adapter don't change anything because only the first plugged adapter is recognized.

XPS 17 Flashed with latest bios 1.0.6

12% per hour under Ultra is manageable. My 2020-July unit draws 20% per our under Optimized, mainly just because of GPU heavy load. What did I suppose to do? I have asked for repair first time this July, and the manufacturer just replaced the AC adapter. Of course, this didn't help.