Dell Precision 5510 Owner's Lounge

hoping the kabylake 5510s will be much more sorted compared the current skylake one.

 

Provided that Intel can get Thunderbolt 3 debugged. If Thunderbolt is in the CPU package then they may also address the power management. However, I also hope that a few more firmware and driver updates will get the 5510's Thunderbolt working better.

BTW, I see that Dell has now removed the troublesome BIOS from the download site - it's now showing A10 as the latest.

John

 

I had the mother board replaced today and it is now charging the battery. Interestingly, I check the the BIOS that accompanied the replacement motherboard and it has the 1.1.19 version. Not the most current version but also the version that do not cause the famous flickering issue. I will now hold off on any new BIOS update until I deem it necessary.

http://screencast.com/t/JO6LQzRprl13

 

I'm personally not having any issues with my 5510.

The one very minor defect it shipped with was one of the arrow keys on the keyboard wasn't snapped into place correctly, and one of the little tabs on the bottom of the key was bent as a result. I still need to contact them to get a replacement for that key, but I bent it back and it fits almost completely normally. I just want a replacement because I'm anal.

Outside of that I had the flickering which was resolved with a a BIOS downgrade, and I had to use the Samsung NVMe driver to resolve the random BSODs. Then again while those things are extremely simple for a tech savvy user to diagnose and fix, they could be big problems for people who know nothing and expect everything to work out of the box.

@John Ratsey are you still running with the dGPU and hyperthreading disabled? Do you use any other non-default settings in the BIOS? (I know the dGPU thing was not BIOS.) Did you do a clean install of Windows or are you running a dell modified image? I think it's possible that you're having more issues because of the somewhat unusual settings you're running. That's not to say that you shouldn't be able to run those settings without issue, or even that those settings are directly related to the issues you've experienced, but when it comes to BIOS updates, those contingencies are unlikely to have been thoroughly tested.

Those of you who have been plagued with issues, I'm curious what version of Windows you're running and whether you used Dell's image of did a clean install of the MS image.

Maybe I've just gotten lucky. I also don't own any TB3 accessories, so while I do have the TB firmware installed, I haven't been trying to get those accessories to work correctly.

 

I had hyperthreading disabled (haven't yet changed that on the new board). The dGPU isn't disabled but isn't normally used (for some reason ACDSee Pro wakes it up). The Windows is that supplied by Dell, but any bug which disables battery charging must be at the BIOS level. If changing some other unrelated setting in the BIOS can kill battery charging then that's careless.
John

 

Thanks for your advise, I've downloaded and downgraded the firmware. Let's hope it solved my problem and it's not the screen or connector issue I'm having.

I'm running SSD and not NVMe at the moment. Will wait for it to be more stable and purchase 950, but do you think it's advisable to get 951? on the 5510 manual it's stated to have the thermal tape, but I'm not sure if it comes with the 950 and 951....

 

If you guys are using Windows10, do you did an upgrade or clean installation?

I tried using the recovery DVD for Windows10 but it always fail to boot up after completion... hope to get advice from you all.

 

Make sure that you have the BIOS set to UEFI boot, and also make sure that you are using UEFI to boot the recovery DVD. (You may have both a UEFI and legacy boot option if you press F12 at boot for the boot menu.)

 

My 5510 was supplied with a 256GB Toshiba NVEe SSD and a thermal pad which, I assume, is intended to pass heat to the metal base of the computer. However, the pad doesn't seem to be sticky enough and tends to move. It seems to be 1.5mm thick and I've got a 2mm thick pad on order to see if it fits better. However, it's not a significant problem at the moment as the M.2 slot is occupied by a 1TB Sandisk X400 (SATA and cooler) as I need a lot more capacity than 256GB.

I'm waiting for the 1TB Samsung SM961 to show up in my part of the globe. It has a new controller which should run cooler and be less vulnerable to thermal throttling. You should only consider the 950 / 951 if the price is good compared to the 961 (officially an OEM part but some computer assemblers will sell it to end users).

John

PS: I spotted this post in the XPS forum - same battery charging problem.

 

Well, you just listed 2, 3 issues there.

For me, mine was shipped with the BIOS version before A7, and that killed the NVMe SSD, on multiple 5510's. The latest BIOS causes flickering. I didn't encounter the batter charging issue with .13 BIOS, and I haven't encountered BSOD. So I would consider having less problems than you and some of the others here, but I would definitely call those issues.

One biggest issue for me is the touchpad, as other have posted. This is probably a problem, or a bigger problem for me, on Windows 10, since it's using the Microsoft Precision driver. Windows 7 still has Synaptics dirver available. Another problem is that I am in an enterprise environment, so we don't get the latest fixes (and problems I guess). Also, TB3 tech is definitely not mature enough.