Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

It's not as simple as that. I tried, and never managed to get the system to boot in AHCI mode, no matter what I tried. I'm not saying it's not possible, just that I was unable to find a way to make this work.

 

Hi,

I have been reading posts regarding NVMe SSDs and if should use RAID or AHCI in Bios. Some have been saying that NVMe SSDs should use AHCI while other say that NVMe may not work as well in AHCI. Perhaps try changing to RAID in the BIOS.

See this post in the link below and also check a few of the posts that follow it. I've not ordered my system yet, but I think this info will be helpful when I do.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/7710-performance-problems.787109/page-2#post-10192323

 

Thank you for your reply.
I discovered that five days ago a new bios update has been released. After having installed the new bios update and after having updated the intel chipset drivers (not from dell site, but downloading them outside), it seems that I have resolved my issues.
Now I'm able to reboot under windows, and during this day no one bsod has happened.

Fingers crossed!!!

 

For others knowledge, on win 7, 950 pro experience is as follows:
In AHCI mode, its fast, but unfortunately before booting it is super slow, until windows loads the samsung drivers then it speeds away. Unfortunately in this mode i couldn't get hibernate working, it'll just go in super slow mo in win 7.

In Raid mode, you have to use intel rst drivers, and can't use samsungs drivers. But it does run from the get go, allowing me much faster boot speeds. and hibernate working. To be honest i measured the speed with crystal disk mark and it seemed really similar, unsure about whether AHCI is really that much faster. (its marginal anyway)

I'm sure win 8/10 have sorted this as windows is providing the drivers.

 

Works well on Linux? Wow. Did you have to do anything to get this running properly? Or was it OOB after 1.1.19? How's battery life? Is the trackpad working? Did you use Ubuntu live installer from Windows, or booted to it from USB? What version of nvidia drivers are you running?

After my motherboard replacement, I've been wary of rocking the boat too much until drivers / firmware stabilise. I'm on 1.1.05 BIOS w graphics drivers from November for both intel and nvidia, using Microsoft NVMe controller drivers (i.e. NOT Samsung). Crystal Disk Mark gives pretty good numbers, and apart from very rare BSOD (NVMe related I imagine as there's no crash dump on disk), it's pretty solid. Close-open lid works for me as well.

 

Regarding ubuntu, how's the behaviour of your fans under linux?
Mine go always at 3200rpm.

 

In Arch Linux I was having an issue where the fans would be on - when I checked a system monitor, one of the 8 virtual cores was pegged at 100%. For me the problem was the xhci_pci module (related to USB3) - and it may or may not have had something to do with me using powertop to try to optimize power usage. If I unload and reload the xhci_pci module, it would stop taking over a core. I haven't been having that issue lately though, so perhaps a recent kernel change or otherupdate helped?

Linux has been working pretty well for me except for a couple random freezes that seem to only happen if I've been using suspend/resume a lot. Hopefully that will settle down as the Skylake drivers get more mature (I have a sneaking suspicion it's the intel graphics drivers that are doing it - but I have no proof).

I just updated to BIOS 1.19 now so I'll be eager to see if any of my issues have improved - glad to hear it might help with warm reboots.

 

Any fix to the sloooooooooooooooooow wake-up time from sleep? It still takes forever to show the Dell logo, before it finally shows WIndows 10 logon prompt.

 

I was wondering: what should I use to clean the keyboard and touchpad? I think I read on a thread about the XPS 15 9550 that someone suggested alcohol wipes. I can aleady see smudges on the touchpad, blech. What do you think?

 

I've been using this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00C6LS64I
Protip: Flip the laptop upside down and gently tap the back. A LOT of yucky stuff will likely come out that would otherwise be festering in the keyboard.