Inspiron G15 BIOS updates lessens system performance

Question

Dell's latest bios updates might be great for security but for my G15, I will never ever update from the original bios version unless I have no choice. What is the point of rushing out updates to stop a vulnerability that may never be an actual issue over the performance of their gaming experiences? Now having this G15 for 8 weeks 4 bios updates have cut at least 20% off the performance level of the RTX 3060 cards is shocking. And before everyone starts jumping up and down on the first bios from out of the box you can see on PassMark that this card was scoring an amazing 21400 now it is only 16500.

To me it is clear we think they have lessened their own products. It also does not help these bios updates also hurts the power plan firmware. Dell has decided NOT to include this driver in the product support that could be another reason why Alienware does not want to fully run and this might be the cause of the firmware/driver conflicts? I am forced to use other versions of earlier dell laptop power-plan software, this is just plain crazy. So can I at least get the original dell power plan software listed on the support page for the gaming laptops? To help out others and dell technical this is what most of us get when we update our bios to the latest version and when we open the fusion part of Alienware software. If its a known windows 10/11 conflict and tried both, by the way, can you tell us how to fix it, is there a bios version based on the original release that will get us all to get back to where we were, or have dell basically bricked their own product. I really don't want to do that as this is an excellent gaming laptop out of the box but now it's a sub-standard product and too slow. I have tried every windows version as I have lots of home and pro keys as I am an MS beta tester so it definitely is the bios version I also replaced the 512 GB slow drive with the fastest NMVE gen 4 Kingston KC3000 1TB that scores 410 on nova bench and 57,000 on PassMark 10.2

What causes this particular windows 10/11 conflict?

SEOGURU · Accepted Answer

Thanks for that great advice it turned out to be more about the command center software than I first realized Ron.

RoHe · Answer

Exactly which G15 do you have?

SEOGURU · Answer

Hi Ron the 5521 SE, I found a kind of solution on the dell thread last night where you have to switch off the virtual memory in windows this actually works but the memory bandwidth takes a hit of about 10% less than normal here is the user bench PassMark 10.2 score with this standard rig it also causes the Kingston KC3000 to take a 10% hit as well - ok it's still fast but from the out of the box scores it's still 10% slower for both the SSD and memory nevermind the security aspect. One other thing that's really weird is the fact the timings for screen cut-off times cant be saved on the AWCC or the PC now but when you revert to the windows change, it does. Wish Dell can just release the original power plan on the units support page that might solve it. I kind of now accept this is the best solution for gaming and especially as this is running on the 22h2 windows 11 version. So all in all if I kept the first bios version this laptop might be unbeatable even with an RTX 3060 version - ok I know how to make windows really fast and how to un-bloat it safely.

Screenshot 2022-10-13 passmark 10.2 score for dell g15 5521 image..png

Giving this is a $1200 gaming laptop with excellent thermals and crazy gaming performance that can outshine a $4000 gaming desktop rig with these benchmarks that extra 10% I want back, it also proves its a fantastic product that easily beats the lonovo legion by a huge margin same specs, I had one lol

SEOGURU · Answer

Just to prove how good this laptop can be here's a well-known American nova bench score from this G15 5521 SE this graphics score beats a desktop RTX 3090 and a desktop RTX 3080 TI average scores now readers might ask how this is possible well what Dell does not tell anyone is this is a very rare 3060 version in the card's properties it's rated at 140W max NOT 115-130W! I would love to know what the 5521 3070 TI is scoring on nova bench please guys.

RoHe · Answer

Are all your other drivers and apps up-to-date? I see there are recent updates for AWCC, etc.

There's nothing stopping you from downgrading BIOS from the latest v1.12.0 as far back as v1.0.1 or any version after v1.0.1, but not to any version before v1.0.1. There's a BIOS option listed at bottom of Table 13 to allow BIOS downgrading. It's set to On by default, but you should check for yourself.

Keep in mind that you'll lose any fixes, improvements, security updates, etc offered by the latest version. So you shouldn't t go back too far...

I presume you do the downgrade by following the instructions for Updating the BIOS from BIOS Boot Menu (independent of operating system) here, putting the BIOS downgrade .exe file you want to install on a (non-bootable, FAT32) USB stick. You do a BIOS downgrade entirely at your own risk.

I'll also ping my Dell contacts to see if anyone knows about AWCC issues with the latest BIOS on this PC model...

Vanadiel · Answer

I own both the laptop and a medium end gaming desktop. The gaming laptop does not even come close to the performance of my desktop. There's no way it will outperform a desktop RTX 3090 system or a 3080Ti.

Novabench Score 5877

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core at 4.6 GHz
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
32GB DDR4SSD
Microsoft Windows 10 Education

CPU Score
3459

Show Details

RAM Score
375

RAM Speed: 44739 MB/s

GPU Score
1633

Direct3D 11: 310 FPS
OpenCL: 31378 GFLOPS

Disk Score
410

Write Speed: 5581 MB/s
Read Speed: 2927 MB/s

As for the performance hits you were talking about, I am on the latest BIOS and never noticed any difference between when I received the laptop, and now.

Vanadiel · Answer

PerformanceTest score of my desktop:

SEOGURU · Answer

Thanks, guys for your input's when I was talking about performance it was in relevant to other manufacturers who limit the power of various video cards, sorry for not spelling that out!

I was always happy to update bios versions but I am not brave enough to go back although it seems Dell has implemented this very well over the last few years and I can't find any examples of bricked motherboards is that correct?

Kind regards,

SEO Guru

RoHe · Answer

Probably very few/any users ever downgrade to an older BIOS, but you can search these forums for possible threads about that.

Before you attempt any BIOS upgrade or downgrade, make sure BIOS Auto-Recovery and BIOS Recovery from Hard Drive are both enabled in BIOS setup. Save the changes, if any when you exit setup.

There's also BIOS Recovery in the event of a failure, so you might still be able to rescue things, should a BIOS upgrade or downgrade go badly. Any Dell computer shipped after August 2016 or with the Intel Kaby Lake chipset, supports BIOS Recovery 3.

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Inspiron G15 BIOS updates lessens system performance

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