New Latitude 5470

It's time I checked in here since I now have one of these and it's been up and running for a few days so I think I'll keep it.

It's a pretty nice machine, although I consider the keyboard a bit mushier than the E5450 and its backlight doesn't go low enough for late night use. They should have kept the 3 level keyboard backlight from a few generations ago.

The power brick this thing came with is really ridiculous.

My system on its stock fan profile wouldn't go past 0 RPM until ~85°C. I installed i8kutils and set my own profile.

I have a stock X400 SSD and it seems to like to randomly BBQ my right palm.

The camera is the noisiest thing I've seen in the past decade but luckily the uvc driver under Linux isn't half bad.

I'm intrigued by 32GB in this system especially considering the platform isn't supposed to be capable of it. Has anyone memtested it with 32GB for more than a few hours?

 

I've used mine with 32GB heavily for work, and I've run the long diagnostics memtest. Zero problems until the original battery got too weak, and zero problems since replacing that battery.

I wonder if yours came with a 130W brick? The iGPU versions are capable of woking with 65W, which are mostly pretty small, and the dGPU require 90W (most of which models are pretty reasonable in size, unless you go back to the old D-series round ones.

 

Dell tend to oversize the PSUs. I've received several with 90W PSUs although 65W is plenty. Get yourself a mains outlet power meter so you can check the actual power drain - the worst case is full CPU (and GPU if existing) load + battery recharge. 70W at the mains outlet means less than 65W delivered from the PSU. Since the computer knows the PSU rating (via the centre pin in the DC plug) it will draw no more than that amount and will cut back, if need be, on the maximum battery charge. I've even used the 45W Dell Latitude XT PSUs (they are plug compatible) which are a good example of how small PSUs can be when it's a design objective although they can get a bit warm under full load. The current 45W PSUs are not compatible as they either are USB-C or have a small plug (but a dongle like this might work).

It's also possible that whoever sold you the notebook chucked in an older generation power brick. Visit ebay and find a current generation 65W PSU - one with the rounded sides. They cost a bit more than the old ones but are smaller. It's always useful to have a spare PSU.

Check Intel's specs for the CPU (which includes the memory controller). Dell might not have certified the notebook for the higher capacity RAM modules as they weren't easily available when the notebook was designed. This was a big issue some years back when 2GB RAM sticks appeared but there were loads of notebooks which claimed max 2GB RAM. The Intel chipset was, however, designed to address up to 4GB so, in most cases 2 x 2Gb would work in spite of what the notebook specs claimed. We then encountered the 3.4GB limit of 32-bit Windows but that's another story!

John

 

I did get the 130W brick. Not exactly sure why because I do have the iGPU version. I've got a few other dell adapters around but I thought it was pretty funny how overpowered the one that came with it is.

I'll give 32GB a shot if I can find a reasonable deal, but I may end up paying more for RAM than I did the entire system if I go by market prices.

 

I've just re-read the relevant part of my E5570 review (last paragraph before conclusion) and see that, unusually, the BIOS didn't throttle the charge rate to stay within the PSU power limit so it could overload a 65W PSU (not a catastrophe since the PSU has a cut-out which resets). Whether your E5470 shares this problem can only be determined by testing. Dell might have shipped the E5470 with a 90W PSU but it's extremely unlikely they'd include a 130W PSU.

John

 

I just looked at the dell system configuration for my service tag and it originally shipped with a 65W. The reseller who sold me mine must've been feeling saucy.

 

I upgraded from 8GB to 16GB today. I was lucky to find a module exactly matching the stock one in the first slot. Now I can open all the tabs I want and run VMs without having to worry about swap.

32GB was too damn expensive at the time I looked. I've got a search saved in my RSS reader if any deals pop up, but I'm not holding my breath.

The weird thing is that this system seems to choke on EFI boots sometimes. I ran the dell diagnostic to quickly test the RAM and when I came out of it the BIOS had completely lost my EFI settings. I had to boot with a debian installer image and run rescue mode to reinstall grub-efi. Pain in the ass, and not a good sign for when I go very far away from my desk. I'll be keeping a small debian installer USB stick with me at all times I guess.

edit: I should also add that it wouldn't boot even after manually setting the EFI entry from the BIOS setup. Hence the rescue mode reinstall of grub.

 

On my machine it seems like whenever the EC resets from taking the battery out it loses its memory regarding EFI. Has anyone else had a similar issue?

 

I did a search here and didn't find any info, but for those of you who installed a Transcend MTS400 M.2 in the WWAN slot, have you had instability problems coming out of low power states or on the battery?

I was thinking about putting one in my e5470, but then I saw all the reports of the MTS400 having issues with low power ALPM settings. It is unclear whether Transcend has updated firmware to fix this issue or not. Most of the complaints come from Chromebook users from a few years ago. I am not sure if the issue is related to how the Chromebooks handle the ALPM settings or if it is a universal issue with the MTS400 drives.

 

I never had problems waking from sleep, but as part of making sure the shutdowns under load ended I took mine out when I swapped for the 3-cell battery.