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Three days of owning a Dell XPS 15 (9570) #1

Open utterances-bot opened 5 years ago

utterances-bot commented 5 years ago

Three days of owning a Dell XPS 15 (9570) - Philip Trauner

Detailed Dell XPS 15 (9570) review and postmortem from the perspective of a previous MacBook owner.

https://philip-trauner.me/blog/post/three-days-of-owning-a-dell-xps-15

istepaniuk commented 5 years ago

Thanks for the write up! I wish I had seen this before my purchase decision or at least before my own "day one". Also, I wish I had not misspelled "nouveau" in the kernel command line, that added several hours of fiddling. I am on the BIOS version 1.5 now, which claims to "solve power management issues in Ubuntu". BIOS > 1.3.1 also solved the coil whine and some touchpad issues.

PhilipTrauner commented 5 years ago

@istepaniuk Even though I returned my unit, I would be interested to know how much the Linux experience™ of the XPS15 series actually improved. More specifically: How's battery life and does graphics switching still require a reboot?

istepaniuk commented 5 years ago

@PhilipTrauner Battery life seems to be ok, I have not been able to test it fully on the road. I have no tried the nvidia stuff. I run wayland, gnome on the integrated Intel 630 with no issues whatsoever. Admittedly, I don't usually do anything with graphics. I have the model with the i9-8950HK CPU. No issues with the adapter shipped with my unit so far, QCA6174 (168c:003e).

istepaniuk commented 5 years ago

Battery drain stays around 5 to 6 watt when idle, which is more than acceptable battery life for me. powertop --auto-tune seems to make a huge improvement. The discrete GPU is not that interesting for me now. The intel one seems to be way more power efficient and more than enough for my current needs.

gsteve3 commented 5 years ago

Did you end up with the MacBook? I've been comparing the XPS 9570 and ThinkPad X1 Extreme. After a month, I ended up returning the XPS and kept the ThinkPad. Benchmarks were all very close, and surprisingly I typed faster on the Dell than with the X1E keyboard, which overall has a nicer feel. The ThinkPad speakers are horrible though. Headphones or stereo is required. Good enough for talking, but even action scenes on Netflix are missing a certain deep sound that the XPS was able to reproduce.

Didn't try Linux on either. Making the move later this year.

PhilipTrauner commented 5 years ago

@sqrl0 Went with the MacBook in the end. I really didn’t want to settle with Windows, and the Linux experience wasn’t up to snuff at the time I wrote this piece, but its apparently much better nowadays.

gsteve3 commented 5 years ago

@PhilipTrauner Makes sense. The MacBooks are still beautiful devices. Thanks for the reply and the write up!

le-dawg commented 5 years ago

Thanks for the write-up. Currently typin this on a XPS 15 9570 on Windows. Inhad been hopeful to build a dual boot system fornsome lioght on-the-go deep learning butnit seems this would be too much of a hassle.

I have non throttling problems on Windows due nto my extensive use of throttlestop. But going for Linux appears very daunting...

Have you also tested the X1 Extreme ?

le-dawg commented 5 years ago

@PhilipTrauner Makes sense. The MacBooks are still beautiful devices. Thanks for the reply and the write up!

Did you ultimately get Linux to run on your X1 Extreme ? Compatibility and better thermal management might convince me to form over 500 EUR more for the X1 Extreme if it is easier to detup Linux.