XPS 13 Plus 9320, overheat, low battery life, blue screen

Although I haven't run into the blue screens, my battery drains 1% per minute with or without HDR while browsing the net with occasional YouTube clips. Once, when Windows Update kicked in, after the install (5 minutes) and the subsequent reboot I was shocked to find the battery had drained by 20% and was extremely hot. I think the OLED 4K display is the culprit. My 7 year-old Dell Inspiron 13 with an HD display (and in pretty bad shape) beats the brand new XPS in battery life. I'll be returning this soon and settle for a SurfaceBook which has a beautiful display like XPS but has more battery life. Too bad because I love everything else about the XPS.

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Hi there Cayano.

I totally feel you with the frustation and the mindset of not wanting to give up your thoughout chosen model and brand. There is alot of ranting these days - like Dell designing poor Notebook Archicetures with way too HOT technics inside (this is a general thing with various brands in my opinion).

I did look into your XPS's service-book as well as the specs. What i am worried about right now is the fact, that on the bottom side - there are no ventilation slots to have the fans  in ambient air - right? This would be definately a real flaw in design. 

I see, that you did replace the factory NVME SDD with a WD Black. Did those bluescreens already happen before you exchanged the drive? Maybe there is some issue with the golden contact points or its not fitting 100%? Another thing - what HW Setup does your Bios show in terms of interface setup regarding the harddrive - is it set to RAID  or is it already running in AHCI mode and depening on your bios - there should be also some kind of NVME mode being available. 

In terms of your battery life - i really can agree with the other post. Nowadays notebooks are packed with super fancy screens (higher resolutions and brightness - like compare oldschool 1366x768 vs 1080p or even 2k or 3k) paired with more power CPUS, faster ram and superb NVME SSDs . The only way to maximise your battery life would be to tweak down the settings ALOT to squeeze out 1-2  more hours in battery usage (brightness, energysaving settings, less cpu usage, and so on).

If this error is not relating with any hardware issues, there could be only a problem with a driver issue, or some other software not being to your OS taste. Do you have Win 11 or Win 10?

I doubt that you will have any chance in optimizing thermal issues without the use of any third party software like throttlestop - but be careful, i dont know if your CPU is supported by it and you really have to dig into quite some online resources before you start sliding some stuff and changing values. This might result in a better and cooler notebook - thus reducing unnecessary power draw from a cpu going totally mad with the max available frequencies - which will be around 4,8 GHZ in your unit. 

If you use it with having intel turboboost turned on, there is a real downside with the 12th gen CPUS these days - they just go totally nuts with their max available clocking and put super high temperatures into your chassis - which is designed super-slim and please dont be offended  , having only a very feeble heatpipe (only one!?!) inside. 

I dont know and see how the connection between the bottom case and those heatpipe is happening, but one single, and maybe little helping mod i would "suggest" would be ->  get yourself some good thermal pads and think about how thick and where to place them to maybe get a few more contact points to the aluminium case (the bottom) - that would transfer some heat on the case and might reduce the temperatures a few degrees - but there is no garuantee for this!

There might also be the final optional fix in removing the heatpipe - repasting your CPU with a "better" thermal paste and also see where and how many thermal pads are on the bottom side of that heatsink - maybe you could also improve something there.

Sorry for the long text. Hope it helps a bit!

Cheers and good luck.

Fullyard

I ending returning it, because of the poor battery performance and the heating. I really wanted to keep it but this was dealbreaker. Dell has the right idea, but it still has some work to be done. thank you for your feedbacks. I would not recommend this laptop yet, especially, if you are looking for something "portable" which means a good battery life and heat management. 

If you could give Dell our feedback - the XPS 13 is an awesome laptop but for the battery problems. The battery drains quickly (2 hrs max for me) and becomes uncomfortably hot. For a $2000+ ultra-portable laptop, this is unacceptable.

I am facing exactly same problem. Its beautiful design, however it really get hot. Also facing this blue screens very frequently.

We purchased 3 units for our IT department to test. All 3 have this issue:

The battery drains overnight while the laptops are shutdown.
Something keeps running while these laptops are powered off. 
They are fully charged, then you shutdown/power-off. In the morning battery is 100% dead. 

To eliminate the possibility windows 11 is not shutting down and instead puts the machine to hibernation, or sleep somehow, we formatted the SSD and powered off the machine manually pressing the button. Same issue. Something keeps running all the time draining the battery. Latest bios as of 09/23/2022 with all factory defaults.

And this is exactly why we test before purchasing 68 more units to deploy to our fleet. We will wait  until end of Oct 2022 for a BIOS fix otherwise going with another brand. Dell offshore support was not helpful just like all other brands. The usual canned script "reboot, adjust windows power settings, reset BIOS to defaults and run diagnostics." 

Other than this 'fatal' bug, the laptop design, form and function are excellent. 

I have the same issue with my xps 13 plus. The battery drains overnight despite the laptop is in sleep mode. On average 8-10% each night.  I returned the first laptop and currently trying out a replacement.  Looks like the same issue on the replacement. I will likely return this one as well and just get a refund.  This is unacceptable from such a high end laptop.

Good for you!
I'm waiting for the return for 3 months now.
Problems are the same. The laptop is barely usable.

I'm facing the same issue. Today I got the new XPS 9320 Laptop. it took 8 hours to get it fully charged and battery got drained in 1.5 itself..  another major issue is, this laptop is heating up link anything .... Really disappointed... 

Please suggest if we can fix this issue ?

Hi Fullyard, thank you for your reply. I ended returning it and i bought the Microsoft Surface Pro 8, very solid one.

Best.

Yes.   XPS 13 plus 9320 received Sept 2022 ran very hot the day I received it.  60 degrees Celsius.  I returned it, and Dell sent a replacement.  The replacement unit did not run hot.  If it had, I would have returned that one also.

I received my laptop a couple days ago but just set it up. It not only runs very hot, but i also see the battery issue you'll are talking about. I like the build but this is too big an issue for a premium laptop.

Is getting a replacement an option to rule out a one off faulty machine?

Same problem here... in a factory setup the battery runtime is 2.5h.  When moving some windows from left to right less than 2h.  I have XPS laptops for around 12 years or so.

About low charging speed... for unknown reason the adaptive charging is enable and you can set it to "express" charging which speeds up a lot.

This is very disapointing!

Regards,
Joerg