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Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

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Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#111

Post by luxcem »

wslh wrote: 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…

XPS 13 on linux (ubuntu) here, the support is very good. The HiDPI screen need some configuration but most apps will run out of the box, some need to set a parameter for pixel density. Most issues can be solve by looking in the ArchWiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI). USB-C (even a dock with power, usb, sound, hdmi, display port, ethernet will run fine), WiFi, Graphic Card, touchpad, sound, event the touchscreen, all work without troubles. Really happy to finely find a nice linux-friendly laptop.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#112

Post by pbhjpbhj »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #84
oulu2006 wrote: post #15

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.

There are a lot of reports of killer drivers causing issues. My friend needed help with his Alienware 15 because it started instantly blue screening as the login screen came up at every boot. Dell's only solution was a factory reset. I dug into it and a release of the official killer wifi drivers was bugged. They had to be disabled to actually boot. They couldn't be uninstalled or upgraded in safe mode because they u…

>They couldn't be uninstalled or upgraded in safe mode //

Isn't this entirely broken, surely no one designed it so you couldn't fix applications in safe-mode?

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#113

Post by amiga-workbench »

stuff4ben wrote: post #60
blunte wrote: 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…

> Too bad Apple no longer caters to my crowd What is "your crowd"? Only thing I wish my rMBP had was more than 16GB of RAM for some of the dev I do. Other than that, I can't see switching anytime soon.

People who want to keep their computer longer than the warranty period?

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#114

Post by luxcem »

jgalt212 wrote: post #36
wslh wrote: 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…

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.

The https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HiDPI is a wonderful resource to solve practically every troubles.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#115

Post by manaskarekar »

sp0ck wrote: post #72
cm2187 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest the lattitude E7470 or E7480 (if you don't see a laptop as a fashion statement). Light, practical, enough ports (the E7470 has a full Ethernet port) and a boring keyboard (which is what I expect from a keyboard).

My friend have one of lattitude models (12.5") and those Dell business screens are not the best ones IMO. Maybe I'm wrong but it is hard to find reseller that have those on the shelf to touch and feel :/

Actually the matte FHD (1920x1080) displays on the E7450/7470/7480 are some of the best displays with no pwm etc. They're not the widest color gamut but they're solid.

Can't speak for the touchscreens.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#116

Post by vetinari »

chimeracoder wrote: post #107
vetinari wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right now I'm sitting behind 4K (Dell P2715Q) monitor connected to rMBP (13", 2015). What I'm supposed to miss? What exactly is not displaying correctly and I didn't notice?

Also, exactly what applications do not use Cocoa? Apple had made extremely difficult to talk directly do display server, the two non-private-frameworks-without-stable-abi ways were Carbon and Cocoa. Carbon is already dead.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#117

Post by dugmartin »

trzeci wrote: post #22

Hi, I've had lots of problems with the previous version of XPS15 - 9550 (More info @ https://trzeci.eu/dell-xps-15-9550-was-the-most-problematic-... ) It was included: problem with CPU and random freezes, Coil Whine, Swollen Battery, SSD problem and problem with misaligned Jack port with a hole in case. In total, my device was repaired 3 times (within 10 months) and from the original device I have a case, touch-pad a…

I also had the swollen battery problem but my 9550 - my trackpad eventually got pushed up 1/4 of an inch or so. The bummer was that my laptop was out of warranty and the battery is not a "user serviceable option" on the 9550 so I couldn't just order a replacement battery from Dell -- they wanted me to send it in and wait two weeks which was a non-starter as it is my main development machine. I ended up buying a used battery off of some guy on Amazon along with a screwdriver kit with a T5 bit. It took me all of 10 minutes to replace the battery.

I haven't had any other problems but the fact that they won't allow end-users to replace such a simple part as the battery will make me think hard when I replace this laptop.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#118

Post by cryo »

BlackjackCF wrote: post #110
blunte wrote: 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.

Same here with a new XPS 13, the trackpad is awful for 2017. My 2012 MacBook Pro trackpad is working perfectly, responsive and precise as hell.

I don't get why it is so hard to make a decent trackpad today when Apple did it more than 5 years ago :(

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#119

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

blunte wrote: 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…

> - less precise trackpad than my 3 year old rMBP > > - palm-sensitive trackpad

Sadly this seems to be par for the course for non-Apple laptops. I will say that the Asus ZenBook seems to get pretty close though.

> Thankfully this old rMBP I use is still running well (despite the screen covering deterioration in weird spotty ways).

I'm using a mid-2010 MBP (upgraded the RAM and replaced the drive with an SSD) and it's awesome. Still very usable, runs the latest MacOS, and still gets really good battery life. The Apples of that era seem shockingly well built.

Re: Dell XPS 15 9560 Review

#120

Post by jorgemf »

This is a great laptop if you are not using the gpu and the cpu at the same time and you don't care about the screen response. So basically you put a game in this PC and after some minutes you see the great faults of the computer. The 4k screen has low response and it is a bit more blurry with movement than usual displays, although you will only notice this if you have another display to compare.

The biggest issue is the power throttling. When the CPU and the GPU get a bit hot, the VRMs area get hot too and they drop the CPU to 0.7GHz. You play for few minutes and you are amazed, you can play last gen games quite good. But suddenly everything is crap. The VRMs area is hot and is dropping the voltage of the CPU to cold down. Really bad air flow design. Where I said games you can say another application that uses GPU and CPU like deep learning, or maybe watch a video and compile the kernel.(Message for Dell: why do you put a great CPU and GPU in a laptop if we cannot use both for more than few minutes?)

The other minor issue with this laptop is the thunderbolt with 2 PCI lanes. If it had 4 PCI lanes it could be you all day computer as you could connect external GPUs without losing too much. But 2 PCI lanes is not enough.

As a side note some people also have problems with the Wi-Fi. I had to buy another Wi-Fi card for my router as it couldn't connect, but with others routers that it connects it works quite good.

P.S. I run Windows 10 Pro and Archlinux in this computer. The fingerprint does not work on linux yet, everything else is fine.

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