DELL Studio XPS 16 1645 i7 power problem

Update 4 (2/13/2010):

Bios A07 shows a significant improvement with the 130w charger.

There is still throttling that need to be analyzed, most likely this throttling is a machine limitation.

For now, the system is able to run near the advertised specs.

Please post your experience with the updated BIOS.

Update 3:

Dell is finally listening, they are replacing the 90 watt charger with a 130 watt slim charger with a promise of a BIOS fix version A07 that is promised to fix the problem.

Will update upon the testing of the BIOS.

here is how to place a replacement request in USA and Canada

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/19320784.aspx

Update 2

DELL thinks a BIOS release will fix the problem and is working on it now.

ALL the people who performed all kind of testing in NBR assures the engineers at DELL that a BIOS fix will not fix the problem completely without the use of a charger of higher power. Using Throttlestop the system was able to consume 110-120 watts under load.

Some people will accept a BIOS that throttle up to the maximum power of the charger used so for a 90 watts charger the system throttles at 90 watts, for a 130 watts, it throttles at 130 watts.

Some people are planning a class action browse the thread for more information.

Update

Here is our group findings so far

1. The power conservative BIOS forces the system to throttle to 7x when the power consumption is around 90 watts due to one or more of the following reasons:

           a. Limitation of the power supply capability

           b. Limitation of the motherboard to accept more than 90 watts (This reason is from DELL, but we suspect it)

           c. To increase the battery life

           d. To limit heat generation

obviously DELL should be blamed for poor design if it is a, b, or d.

2. Thanks to unclewebb there is a software now to unlock the throttle, this one will almost certainly put the 90 watt charger to rest or fire.

3. Due to the power limitation, it looks like the people with the RGBLED are most affected by the problem due to the added power consumption.

4. DELL is aware of the problem, but according to them it only affects a small percentage of people that put the system on full performance.

5. DELL keeps saying that the 130 watts adapter is not the solution of the problem, which is quite true as it needs both an adapter and BIOS update.

6. After a long wait, DELL acknowledged that there is a problem and that they will address it soon without announcing a time frame.

7. We as a group lack the trust in DELL fixing the problem to our satisfaction.

I think most of our group will agree on the above.

With all the above said, i am quite happy that mine was returned back to DELL after a frustrating experience with DELL level 1, 2, and 3 technical support. This doesn't represent the other members as most of them are happy with their notebook but expect action from DELL.

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We are among the first to receive our DELL studio XPS 16 1645 with i7. We have some benchmark results that strongly suggest that the equipped 90W charger is not providing enough power to the system. To summarize, the performance of the system is correlated to the brightness of the monitor which suggests that the power provided is not enough so when the monitor is dimmed it allows more power to be consumed by the system. Here is some findings:

Here is the findings, if you stress the laptop using 3Dmark06 the performance is correlated to the brightness of the screen, here is the findings
Full brightness: 5003 3DMark '06
SM2.0: 1664
SM3.0: 2189
CPU: 2568

Lowest brightness: 5405 3DMark '06
SM2.0:1834
SM3.0: 2326
CPU: 2785

To further see the effect of the power consumption, i ran Crysis benchmark for two cases with one difference, the power source battery and minimum brightness vs charger and maximum brightness. I used the exact same settings for power plan (High performance and optimize performance for powerplay)

On Charger, Battery full, maximum brightness

Run #1- DX10 1024x768 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Low ~~ Last Average FPS: 68.75

Run #2- DX10 1024x768 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Medium ~~ Last Average FPS: 30.24

Run #3- DX10 1024x768 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 20.38

On Battery, minimum brightness

Run #1- DX10 1024x768 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Low ~~ Last Average FPS: 80.31

Run #2- DX10 1024x768 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Medium ~~ Last Average FPS: 50.93

Run #3- DX10 1024x768 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Last Average FPS: 29.50

To further test the claim that the power is not enough, an external monitor is connected and to our surprise the system showed its muscles with best performance.

The correlation to the between the brightness and performance, and the heat generated from the charger strongly suggested that the charger is not providing enough power under full load.

It will be a shame if the power adapter is not adequate specially after the whole mess of delaying orders.

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