After A09

I updated to A09, and all I have to say is <3 Dell!

Seriously, just idleing and sitting on a glass table, my laptop would reach upwards of 80c before the fan would kick on low. Right now my laptops fan seems to always be on a nice speed. I think some wont like the noise, but I think its really pretty quiet. All I hear is the rush of the air, no fan whurring noise. To me its a noise of relief, right now my temps are 34/48, playing FFXI I see 55/60.


Is this update the anwser to Nvidia saying their GPUs fail and they dont care?

 

Damn, I hover around 55-60C gpu temps at idle...

 

Yeah.. 80 degrees at idle.. wow...

 

wow ... 80C u deffinately need that update.
For now i will stick with the old one (A08). It works for me , 65/69 idle.

 

The way I think of it is that A09 just gives existing non-defective card owners a bonus of keeping their laptop cooler than it already is, which is always a plus. Sure it might consume more battery life with a 6-cell, but I haven't had any noticable decreases yet, and besides, the M1530 has great battery life to begin with anyways.

 

What kind of life do you see? On a 99% charge it says I have a little over 3 hours.

 

I'll have to take a look at that when I get home. It was somewhere close to 3 hours, but not quite.

 

Wow, IDLE CPU at 65? Thats way too high! My CPU has never seen 60+

 

My CPU idles in the low 40s (and that was with the A08). GPU usually around high 50s to low 60s idle. Really have not watched temps enough yet on A09 to say what they usually are on idle.

I got almost exactly 4 hours out of my XPS M1530 with the 9-cell with Wi-Fi on the whole time and screen at various brightness settings (I change it quite often). During those 4 hours I was mostly surfing the internet and chatting on xfire. Yesterday I had Wi-Fi off and I did not use it continuously but it seemed to last from the mourning till about 5 PM (it was in sleep for a few hours here and there).

 

What do you consider "idle"? How many minutes of non-use?

 

Just putting around on the laptop checking myself and IMing, on power saver w/ Wifi on and my LED knocked down one bump I get about 3 hours on my 6cell.

Gaming, not really worth it without being plugged in honestly. Maybe hour and a half on WoW. I refuse to play games without my LED on max.

 

Sounds like a nice improvement ... maybe it wasn't totally the gpu's fault if the fan didn't kick in until 80 C

 

Yeah, I think that happened because of the laptop holder I use, I open the screen up all the way, which completely blocks the air being blown out the end of the laptop.

Like shoving a pillow over a baby.

 

what a comparison!!!!

 

I have to understand something, when you say idle what do you mean? no use at all or for example a normal surf on the Internet.

from what i have noticed the new bios update kicks in the fan in 60% of its speed when my cpu rich to 51C and lowers it to 44.

and my idle temps are about 42-40 C , anyways from some reason when i stress my gpu and cpu to max the cpu riches to 80C is that normal?

 

If you get anywhere near 3 hours with the 6 cell battery I'm insanely jealous! I get about 2 hours, 2.5 absolute max with aggressive power saving measures.

 

I get close to three hours, I'm on balanced mode with brightness knocked down one notch. Same as a few other posters:

Gaming is definitely not worth it without being plugged it. I agree LED on max makes a world of a difference. The whole game just comes to life!

 

Yeah, I paid $250 extra for my beautiful screen, I refuse to not use it at its full potential! This little screen is brighter and richer than my HDTV, side by side comp of the two and you'll always pick my laptop over the HDTV.

Does everyones laptop screen cover the exhaust port if you open it farther than 90 degrees (from they keyboard)

I definitely set off my 45c CPU alarm if I open my laptop screen to where I like it.

If I cold boot then idle, my temps are 34-36/48-51 but the GPU will peak at 65c but come down and stay down. I've made a few modifications to the cooling, using my own thermal paste and doing it RIGHT. I've also developed the perfect posistion for using the laptop AS a laptop. I was thinking about taking pictures sometime

 

It's nice to hear that you've experienced such positive results. I was unaware of a new BIOS revision being available. I'm running A08 right now. I'll definitely have to update. I'm doing tech support right now for my battery that won't charge and my grainy screen; then I've got Vista SP1 to install. After that I should be able to update the BIOS.

I also just reformatted, so I'll have a clean install of Vista. This ought to be nice.

I didn't even think to test my temperatures before and after the A08 update, but now that I've been reading about temp drops, I've started to feel like my computer is running a lot cooler. That is awesome news, since it used to get very hot.