Live data from Hacker News

Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

anandtech.com

101–110 of 215 posts

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#101

> They’ve opted to go with the same Killer Wireless-AC 1535 as they use in the smaller XPS 13. FWIW this NIC is a huge liability, wifi instability is common and it will bring some machines down hard (bluescreens/kernel panics, just check /r/dell). Dell US apparently has instructions to replace this POS by a compatible Intel NIC (7200 or 8000 series) if you have issues and complaint, that seems not to be the case for…

This is what I don't get. Don't they do basic testing before releasing these?

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#102

> They’ve opted to go with the same Killer Wireless-AC 1535 as they use in the smaller XPS 13. FWIW this NIC is a huge liability, wifi instability is common and it will bring some machines down hard (bluescreens/kernel panics, just check /r/dell). Dell US apparently has instructions to replace this POS by a compatible Intel NIC (7200 or 8000 series) if you have issues and complaint, that seems not to be the case for…

I have a Killer NIC in my MSI gaming laptop. Opening the Killer wifi desktop configuration app would bluescreen my desktop every time :(

The only thing that worked was uninstalling all Killer software and just letting Windows install the wifi driver.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#103
post #52
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the XPS 15 in an office with only mac users and this machine is just more powerful since Apple wont update the Macbook Pro line with developers in mind. I hated working on an under performing laptop when I was using the macs.

The specs would agree with you, but my real life side-by-side experience only demonstrates that the XPS is better for gaming. For everything else, my old rMBP is as fast or faster. And my Mac runs for weeks, sometimes > 2 months, without a reboot. I've had to reboot the XPS on average twice a week (due to crashes, or updates, or really weird performance drops).

My real life side by side test show that turning off my machine at the end of the day isn't a big deal. The fact that I can run 2-3 VMs when the rest of my team can barely run one is a big deal. More ram is a huge benefit, everything I run in the linux subsystem runs faster than the macs I work next to.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#104
post #49

My experience with my 1-month-old maxed out 9560: - less precise trackpad than my 3 year old rMBP - palm-sensitive trackpad - failure that politely states that I need to reboot (if I try to use fingerprint reader to login too quickly after opening the laptop) - unplanned reboots due to updates - laggy and choppy video on a single external 4k monitor (compared to no apparent lag when the old rMBP drives 2x 4k monitors…

I've always found that Dell ships rock solid H/W, but does a piss poor job of systems integration. The best way to get "OSX Level" reliability that I've found is to clean-install Windows, or remove all their shitty Dell applications and tools. Their track-pad 'helper' tool is particularly quite terrible. Windows 10 too is its own beast. I disable all that update shit because like you I don't want any unplanned reboots. Its ridiculous that you have to do all this shit, but you will be rewarded in the end. I regularly get 40-50 days of up-time before manually rebooting for updates. YMMV !

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

high DPI is an even more troublesome issue with Linux. As of right now, for me, high DPI is not worth it outside of the Apple walled garden.

> high DPI is an even more troublesome issue with Linux. As of right now, for me, high DPI is not worth it outside of the Apple walled garden. Actual 4K resolution works way better on Linux than it does on OS X. By default, OS X will use 2560x1440, even on a display that's capable of 3840x2160. If you try to set it to the latter on OS X in your display settings, it looks really terrible. The experience is less consis…

OSX will happily use 3840x2160. Are you sure your limitation is not somewhere else? Maybe you ran out of available crts on the graphics card, or the display cable has it's limits, or whatever.

That said, the 4K support in Fedora is nice. The only problem is with Qt4, Gtk2 and other apps using legacy toolkits.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#106
post #5

If you want to buy one you should extend your analysis beyond the hardware specs because the software and operating systems are not ready yet. I can give the example of the latest XPS 13 2-1 where Office applications like Outlook cannot recognize a monitor with a different resolution and the fonts are blurred. Look for example at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Office-apps-appear-... high DPI is a whole issu…

Very true, the previous XPS 15 had huge problems with the Killer NIC card because the drivers for it took months to stabilise and its only recently been that a driver update has made the Wifi somewhat stable and the machine has stopped crashing every few days. What other people seem to have done is get Dell to swap the Killer NIC with an Intel one which has much better driver support.

My experience with a similar (fully maxed out 9560, but no touch display). Since updating the drivers, the killer card has been working without fail, though it was a little frustrating to deal with a brand new laptop that constantly blue screened and failed to connect to wireless when my 10year old macbook sitting at the same desk was fine. Reddit has a good guide for setting it up, though some of these are now out-of-date. https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/5unlmb/got_my_brand_n...

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high DPI is an even more troublesome issue with Linux. As of right now, for me, high DPI is not worth it outside of the Apple walled garden. Actual 4K resolution works way better on Linux than it does on OS X. By default, OS X will use 2560x1440, even on a display that's capable of 3840x2160. If you try to set it to the latter on OS X in your display settings, it looks really terrible. The experience is less consis…

OSX will happily use 3840x2160. Are you sure your limitation is not somewhere else? Maybe you ran out of available crts on the graphics card, or the display cable has it's limits, or whatever. That said, the 4K support in Fedora is nice. The only problem is with Qt4, Gtk2 and other apps using legacy toolkits.

> OSX will happily use 3840x2160. Are you sure your limitation is not somewhere else?

Yes, it will use it, but it looks terrible. Even the native system UI isn't designed for it, let alone Cocoa-based third-party applications or third-party applications that don't use Cocoa.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

high DPI is an even more troublesome issue with Linux. As of right now, for me, high DPI is not worth it outside of the Apple walled garden.

Ubuntu 16.04 handles it really nicely, but it requires a few hacks to get things like Chrome + Thunderbird to scale properly.

Chrome is still using an old version of GTK isn't it?

I have a load of problems with the virtual keyboard on my Tablet, I've had to work around it with a chrome extension that manually lets me pop the keyboard up.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true, the previous XPS 15 had huge problems with the Killer NIC card because the drivers for it took months to stabilise and its only recently been that a driver update has made the Wifi somewhat stable and the machine has stopped crashing every few days. What other people seem to have done is get Dell to swap the Killer NIC with an Intel one which has much better driver support.

Colleague recently bought one of these, has a Killer NIC, still not stable, machine hard crashes every time they boot a VM.

FYI: Don't use the killer drivers, let windows install it's own driver.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#110
post #49

My experience with my 1-month-old maxed out 9560: - less precise trackpad than my 3 year old rMBP - palm-sensitive trackpad - failure that politely states that I need to reboot (if I try to use fingerprint reader to login too quickly after opening the laptop) - unplanned reboots due to updates - laggy and choppy video on a single external 4k monitor (compared to no apparent lag when the old rMBP drives 2x 4k monitors…

You just about summed up my experience with my 9560.

I bought the laptop because I didn't want a new Macbook. I ended up regretting it a little bit since I don't love the trackpad.

Post reply on HN