The new Dell XPS 15 9510 OLED has problems with the GPU Performance

[Redaktion]

Dell equips its brand-new XPS 15 9510 with the 45W version of the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti, but our tests show that the performance quickly drops and it is even slower than the old XPS 15 9500 with the RTX 1650 Ti.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-new-Dell-XPS-15-9510-OLED-has-problems-with-the-GPU-Performance.553007.0.html

[MBV]

Feels like Dell doesn't learn.

How many years now we had issues with the performance of XPS15?

I had a 9560 myself and it was usable. It took two more generations for Dell to finally cool the VRMs.

But still the two Heatpipe cooler is outdated and it is time for a VaporChamper considering the price...

It can be another issue but I wouldn't wonder if it is just the cooling combined with Intels 10nm SF and Samsung's LPP.

[splus]

Same old Dell... Every year the same performance problem with the XPS...

[Sid]

This. I got an Precision 5510, which is basically a rebadged XPS-15 9550. Thermal issues all over. Latest BIOS which introduces crucial security fixes also breaks downclocking. The laptop would downclock to 0.59ghz when both CPU and GPU are stressed for more than a minute. This laptop is basically unusable without user side tweaks.
So they sold me a laptop with planned obsolescence from start. Never again I'm going to buy an Dell. I might as well go the Mac route after this Windows 11 update debacle. At least with macs you know that support is going to end after 4 to 5 years.

[Eric]

Thank you for this sort of honest, objective reporting of usability issues on products that persons are likely to consider. This is why I read NotebookCheck.com!

[Dorby]

Disappointing to hear but not at all surprising.
Returned my first XPS 17 9710 after multiple issues that I didn't bother fighting Dell over, immediately got the MSI Creator 16 instead and it has no power throttling or performance hitches whatsoever so far.

Now I'm more curious to see how the upcoming Thinkpad X1 Extreme and ZBook Studio will perform in the same form-factor to cool an i9 H55 and RTX 3080.

[Julian Schneider]

I have the i5 Version and even that is throttling massively. Curious to see what results you get once you get an i5 Version!

[Erikur]

Dell is really a bad brand, all the people I know who had Dell laptops all had serious glitches. It's like if you buy a Dell, you should expect 30% discount in its performance in reality. All the work I have tried to fix Dell laptops, I would say it is the least brand I would choose.

[Jay9922]

Please let us in the review what's the i7 11800h cpu speed during the benchmark. There's multiple videos online showing it's throttling pretty badly

[Lin Baden]

Hoping that this time your review won't be as mediocre as before.

How about you mention in your full review that this laptop's fan configuration is not classic? The reason the laptop doesn't keep its PL2 for long enough compared to others and it doesn't even sustain its PL1 of 55W ( for the 11800H ) in Ultra performance profile ( perhaps i'm wrong, it might be 50W or 60W, not sure but you can confirm this in your full review ) is because of the fact that the fans "wait" after the cpu/gpu hit a certain temp, then, think of it as a countdown starts running and as soon as it hits 0, and assuming that the cpu is still over that certain temp, the fans will then start spinning faster and after a while they'll reach a particular speed. During this time where the fans start to slowly spin faster, the cpu will already be lowering its power draw to PL1 levels, which is as expected. Throttling will happen only if the cpu doesn't sustain PL1, and that's it. Ultrabookreviews has confirmed that the i7 11800H needs to pull ~90W to achieve its advertised 4.2Ghz on all 8 cores under 100% utilization, but the performance growth with power draw raise is not exactly linear for this 11th gen 45W Intel cpus ( even worse with ryzen 5000 mobile ), that's why you see diminishing returns. I'm not saying that this XPS should have higher power limits, but sure, if it would be able to at least sustain those 55W indefinitely with fans not making you deaf and its body temps not burning your skin, that would be nice.
Btw, it looks like with a -80mv or -100mv undervolt, 11800H pulls only ~80W to reach & sustain 4.2Ghz on all those 8 cores, just like ryzen 7 5800H does ( it needs to pull ~80W to reach 4.0Ghz on all of its 8 cores just as advertised ). Of course, this doesn't imply that both of them generate the same amount of heat just because they draw the same amount of power, but perhaps it is a worthy comparison?

People complain about XPS line's thermals but little do they know that they're made like that, their point is not to make the fans immediately spin faster as soon as the cpu/gpu get hotter. This behavior is the same as the one in Macbooks, but fortunately not as aggressive. To a lot of people with approach to thermal design is ideal.

[S1]

All the reviews out there so far concerning the 15 inch OLED on this machine are full of praise, with some calling it 'display perfection' and crowning it as 'the most colour accurate display' all without much in-depth analysis and sound a lot like paid promotions. I hope your detailed review here will help to confirm or refute those claims.

Ability to maintain colour accuracy (many reviewers use this term too loosely to describe a wide colour gamut coverage instead of actually being able to map colour output consistently and accurately to a colour space) across different brightness settings is a key concern as it's not uncommon for OLED panels to exhibit significant colour shift, sometimes more pronounced in a particular hue, when luminosity is changed. Dell's Premier Colour was not implemented in its previous OLED models possibly due to this reason. Such panels are unsuitable for colour critical work despite having a wide gamut coverage as colours can vary greatly depending on brightness levels. Hopefully it comes with a colour manager pre-installed to toggle between the ICC profiles and have the ability to maintain and keep its colours tamed within sRGB this time around. NotebookCheck may need to introduce additional tests that are specific to OLED displays in your future reviews and comment on the experience with PWM from the user's perspective as numbers don't always tell the full story.

[nils_]

I've got the Precision 5560 which is quite similar, with an i9-11900HK, running Linux though only on integrated graphics.

CPU certainly gets uncomfortably high when running a compute intensive task for a longer time (observed up to 100° without the core even hitting 5GHz). I'm not sure why it has to be that thin, you're not only sacrificing thermals you also lose a lot of options regarding ports.

[Pez]

Assuming you got the configuration with 16gb ram, can you let us know if it comes with 1x16gb or 2x8gb sticks?

[Flaschenhans]

the fans "wait" after the cpu/gpu hit a certain temp
[...]
People complain about XPS line's thermals but little do they know that they're made like that, their point is not to make the fans immediately spin faster as soon as the cpu/gpu get hotter. This behavior is the same as the one in Macbooks, but fortunately not as aggressive. To a lot of people with approach to thermal design is ideal.

Thanks for pointing this out! The arstechnica review of the XPS 15 9510 (and the comment section) also emphasized that Dell actually made a nice balance: it's not designed to be a chunky power horse, but an elegant, well-built, and silent notebook.

Side note: with a control over the fans, which is not possible yet, the power throttling could be removed to a certain extent.

but the performance growth with power draw raise is not exactly linear for this 11th gen 45W Intel cpus ( even worse with ryzen 5000 mobile ), that's why you see diminishing returns.

Yessss. For a comparison of the power scaling between the 11800H and the Ryzen 7 5800H see also techspot.com/review/2262-intel-core-i7-11800h and youtube.com/...
The R7 is more energy-efficient (performance per Watt) than the i7 - at least for the Cinebench benchmark.
Btw: typically for any CPU, they both become more energy-efficient for lower Wattages. In other words: everything above 20W is just a waste of energy (but not of time) ;-).

Of course, this doesn't imply that both of them generate the same amount of heat just because they draw the same amount of power, but perhaps it is a worthy comparison?

Well, here you're wrong. According to the law of conservation of energy: If you put a certain Wattage in, you have to get the corresponding energy out again (here in terms of heat). Give it a read.
What you may mean is energy efficiency: that one CPU uses less energy per time unit than the other to perform the same calculation.

Assuming you got the configuration with 16gb ram, can you let us know if it comes with 1x16gb or 2x8gb sticks?

2x 8GB, see the picture of the interior in the Notebookcheck test. In this way, you get a slight performance increase by using dual channel mode.