Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

The Dell support person whom I spoke to claimed that the CMOS batter was soldered but you may well be correct that it's removable. I had checked for for the battery on the accessible side of the board. Dell should have provided a socketed BIOS chip on this machine - I'm starting to wonder if/when the BIOS will be properly debugged. The rest of the machine is fine.

It's good that I have an M.2 to SATA adapter plus a SATA to USB 3 adapter so I could take out the SSD and copy my work in progress onto my backup machine (the E7450). It's also a reminder that I should only touch the BIOS when I am at home and Dell support / service is not too far away.

John

 

You don't have to remove the heatsinks for the CPU/GPU, but you do have to remove some of the motherboard screws. The battery is removable and has the typical plastic molex-type connector. I was able to reset the BIOS on mine after doing something similar by removing and replacing the CMOS battery.

 

Thanks. I'll remember this for the next bricking event. Whoever laid out the mainboard didn't anticipate the BIOS problems!

John

 

Update: The mainboard has been replaced and the computer is running again. I ran a few tests and the CPU on this board runs several watts hotter at full load than the previous one. I then look through the BIOS and note there is a log entry for August showing a thermal trip! Not very comforting. There were also a lot of bits of old thermal paste which I would have expected to have been cleaned before the board would be sent out for re-use.

The BIOS on the replacement board was A13 - the one which was pulled because of the battery charge problem. Not very impressive quality control by Dell's sub-contractor (Getronics).

John

 

Hi Bokeh - thanks for the nice thermal photos!

We have a huge thermal thread on the "twin" Dell 9550 which you may have seen:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...rature-observations-undervolt-repaste.785963/

Better thermal paste for the CPU/GPU and fixing the VRAM thermal pads on the nVidia card make a big thermal difference, bumping up performance a lot (preventing throttling). I know you have a different GPU so YMMV but I would still expect these changes to yield good results.

Undervolting also helps thermals quite a bit (especially for the i5). For undervolting, Intel XTU has some problems with the Dell and seems to invoke premature power throttling. So most of us that undervolt the 9550 use ThrottleStop.

The "remaining" thermal issue for us seems to be the "uncooled" voltage regulator module (VRM) which is located about where the cross hatch is pointed in your picture above. We are thinking about how to best cool the area. In a "normal" computer, a little air circulation around the VRM is sufficient. For these tiny Dells. there is just no air circulation around the VRM, causing heat problems and rapid throttling...

As you can see in the thread, one guy used some low-quality thermal pads connecting the VRM chokes to the bottom cover, turning the cover into more of a heatsink. I tried that with good-quality thermal pads and the bottom-case/keyboard got super hot, so that failed. The bottom case has very little ability to provide additional cooling; plus, a hot bottom case will heat the incoming air being sucked into the heatsinks so, as our resident professional laptop engineer GonZ0 noted, heating the bottom case quickly causes a thermal sprial of death.

I am thinking the best solution might be to punch some holes in the center of the bottom grill for air intake. Then punch some holes in the back center grille for air exhaust. Then figure a way rig up an external USB fan under the laptop. It's not so easy as these laptops are very small and have very little spare space. Any ideas are welcomed...

Someday, when you have some time on your hands, would you consider running the laptop with the screen up at 90 degrees for a while, then taking a thermal picture with the bottom case removed? Maybe you remove the screws, run the laptop for a while with some stress test with the cover on, then quickly remove the bottom cover for a quick photo.

IMPORTANT - GonZ0 noted as the cooling is limited on these very small, high-performance laptops, you might NOT want to use Furmark as it just stresses the system too much and could lead to heat damage. He recommended programs like Prime95, RealBench, etc...

Thanks!

 

any leaks on the kaby / pascal quadro's yet ?

 

I'm also having issues with characters occasionally being repeated when typing on the precision 5510's keyboard. Been looking everywhere for a solution (I'm on Ubuntu) - but haven't found anything yet. The XPS 13 seems to have received a fix through an updated BIOS, any word on whether we can look forward to something like that for our machines as well? Any other suggestions as to how to fix the nagging issue? Thanks!

 

These will be available in the next refresh, not likely to be seen before first quarter 2017.

 

Zero problems here, except for the no-good keyboard (myyyyy is it awful). had it replaced but no improvement

 

Just noticed that Dell posted the DCP control software on the 5510 drivers page. This allows for the dynamic contrast on the screen to enabled or disabled. It is disabled by default on the 5510 - right?