Dell XPS 15 9550 Throttling FIX, potentially 9560 (Overwatch Scenario)

Hi guys, I've had this laptop since Summer 2016 and finally fixed the thermal throttling after taking a long hard look at the problem again (just always gamed on my desktop). I thought I'd help the community out with a short tutorial (was active back in the days of the Alienware m11x and helped troubleshoot that device)

Issue:

I believe the main issue is not due to heat. I've read countless threads on here and Reddit pointing to the VRM getting too hot, and thus causing throttling, which I don't think is the main cause.
EDIT:

Instead, with demanding use of both cpu and gpu (issue is 100% reproducible in Overwatch, which are many of the complaints online), Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework will limit the TDP usage of the laptop to around 6-7W, which keeps the cpu clocks to a locked 800mhz. This is apparent as Throttlestop reported PL1 and PL2 causing the throttle under Limit Reasons, which will look something like this (I found this image online, not for my laptop fyi):

Spoiler: Screenshots:

While playing Overwatch in exclusive fullscreen mode, framerates remain well. However, while playing in borderless fullscreen mode, I believe with the increased stress in having to process the Windows desktop, thermal throttling occurs, and the clock speed/TDP will steadily drop until 6-7W/800mhz and remain there until Overwatch is closed.

I believe that before a GPU repaste, my 960m was getting throttled as well, but not sure if it was the repaste that fixed that issue or driver updates etc.

FIX:

1. Did cpu/gpu repaste many months ago (not sure if necessary, but helpful in keeping temps down), used Arctic Silver 5 and some thermal pads I bought from Amazon, use whatever you'd like.
Useful thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...rature-observations-undervolt-repaste.785963/

2. Enable Intel Speed Shift (not sure if necessary, but highly recommended now my laptop FINALLY feels as fast as my desktop)
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/dell-xps-speed-shift.796891/
Right now applying it through Throttlestop, but I like Speed Shift improvements so much that I may use the more permanent option.

3. The final piece of the puzzle! -- disable Intel Dynamic and Thermal Framework:
Note: @Eason makes a good point, proceed at your own risk.

This worked for me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/4yvycx/psa_how_to_stop_premature_cpu_throttling_xps_15/
(I would make sure you disabled wifi/are disconnected from the internet so Windows doesn't try to reinstall after you uninstall.) I also uninstalled Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework from my Programs (Uninstall Programs under Control Panel).

Another maybe useful link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/621tog/xps_9550_disabling_intel_dynamic_platform_thermal/
Write-protecting folder the folder may work as well, I did not need to try though

Very important:
Disabling Turbo while gaming will keep temperatures down and keep the GPU from thermal throttling as well

You don't need your cpu turboed at 3.2ghz, 2.6ghz is fine. I now have a Throttlestop profile dedicated to disabling Turbo during gaming. Keeping Turbo on will cause the cpu to be 90C+, and my gpu will reach 90C as well and keep throttling, steadily lowering the gpu core clock to compensate. Disabling Turbo keeps my cpu at ~80C, and my gpu at ~87C.

With Turbo disabled, limited throttling and low temps (I also disabled BD PROCHOT, not sure if necessary):

Spoiler: Screenshots:

With Turbo enabled, more GPU throttling and much higher temps:

Spoiler: Screenshots:

I also applied this, not sure if necessary as well, but I'm going to keep the settings (through Intel XTU, and never opening it again as it can interfere with Throttlestop):
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-limit-throttling.793136/page-9#post-10449799
"==> Bumped "turbo boost power max" to 65 watts (from 55 watts). That 65 watts shows up in HWiNFO64 also.
==> Also increased the "turbo boost power time window" to 96 seconds.
==> These settings seem persistent as they stick in registers even after several weeks of shutdowns."

I did install Dell Command Power Manager and set it to Ultra Performance, but I think that's also unnecessary. Thanks @pressing

I also did this (not sure if necessary):
Under Device Manager, under Firmware, right click System Firmware > Update > Search Automatically. Apparently this is supposed to pull the updates from the new BIOS? I've never done this before, but read it somewhere so that's what I did lol.

Spoiler: Screenshots:

I also crudely undervolted by 140mv (recommend you read this very useful thread (same thread I linked way above):
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...rature-observations-undervolt-repaste.785963/

Spoiler: Screenshots:

Please discuss, leave feedback etc. I hope this helps someone out! Also thanks again for your workall these years, I've known of Throttlestop since it first came out! @unclewebb

 

FYI It's huge difference between F and C degrees. Intel, Amd and Nvidia operate with C degrees. So should you

 

Oops I dun derped, thanks fixed haha

 

Yeah, no, it's the VRM temperature that causes DPTF to throttle.

 

Yes you're right, I should rephrase -- high VRM temps do cause DPTF to throttle because it's super aggressive, however it's almost impossible to keep cool temps with concurrent heavy cpu/gpu usage (i.e. Overwatch) so that's why I disable it.

What I'm saying is:
Main cause of CPU throttling is DPTF because of high VRM temps, which are hard to cool so we disable DPTF
Main cause of GPU throttling are GPU temps (influenced by overall ambient temps, including CPU temps)

I've edited my original post

 

I tried to remove DPTF before, but it kept reinstalling itself. Are you sure turning off wifi fixes it permanently? It won't just reinstall immediately?

 

Mmhm, DPTF still uninstalled after I've rebooted my computer:

Spoiler: Screenshots:

When I was still connected to internet, Windows immediately reinstalled DPTF right after I uninstalled it. Turning off internet prevented this -- Windows Update shouldn't reinstall it either since they're disabled.

 

Right, so you're saying you have to stay offline for it not to reinstall?

 

Yes, and then right click and disable PCI Data Acquisition.. and all the other Unknown devices afterwards so Windows doesn't reinstall after rebooting, and then you can enable internet again

 

My only concern is that if you didn't do a good repaste and VRM padding you have a chance to actually damage some components. I am reasonably confident in my paste job and temps (plus I use TS to keep temps under control) but if you did this on a totally stock XPS 15 I reckon you'd fry something.

 

Good point, I'm confident in my repaste and my temps remain well. For a $2000 machine at these specs, I'd expect to be able to play Overwatch at 1080p on all low settings, borderless fullscreen. It was unplayable when it throttled, so I'll take these risks anyhow. I doubt any frying would happen as there should be built-in safeties at the physical level (i.e. I actually accidentally left my XPS charger under a blanket and it got extremely hot and shut off :x -- I let it cool off and it worked)

Side note, my friend's Dell Inspiron 15 with 960M has zero throttling issues (either due to better cooling or different DPTF or drivers/bios who knows) but has the same specs at $800.
This model:
https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Inspiron-i7559-2512BLK-Generation-GeForce/dp/B015PYZ0J6

I'll add a warning to the original post though!

 

Hey, Dell wouldn't be able to prove you did anything to damage it...

 

Some of the NBR experts here have disassembled several 9550 and 9560 units noting in virtually all cases terrible factory thermal paste jobs. I think custom90GT, GoNz0 and Eason alone have taken apart dozens of these XPS units. So based on those stats alone, I think it is reasonable to assume the factory thermal paste on these units is flawed, creating a major thermal performance bottleneck.

I find SpeedShift to be a great feature also.

"Ultra Performance" at least gives you a more aggressive fan profile that you can not access in BIOS. Not sure if it does anything else when using SpeedShift with EPP=0 and Windows Power Options at "high performance".

I think the undervolt requires you to have matching figures on "CPU core" and "CPU cache". NBR user Eason has a ThrottleStop guide linked in his signature using a 9550 as an example so take a look at that. You can also undervolt the Intel GPU in the above screen...

 

Ah, that's good to know!

I never finished my undervolting/stress testing, but I plan to. That guide seems very in-depth. Thanks!

 

Undervolting can give up to 10*C+ thermals improvement on the i5 so that is an incredible bump in performance. i7 improvement is not quite as good but still excellent.

Of course, the defective thermal paste needs to be fixed, but you are good there. That gave me about 5*C thermal improvement, but removes artificial bottlenecks and allows the (flawed) fans-radiators to work as the engineers intended.

 

-----------
Hey miXwui. Thanks for your post..
I did almost all of what you suggested.
Unfortunately I still got the fps drop. (This was while playing dota2 but i think it's similar to other games)
My temp also went up to about 96C.
I noticed that this usually causes the speed to drop to 0.8gHz, and thereby causing the lag.
I have this issue for about 1.5 years now since I bought this XPS.. Still no fix.
Dell has been frequently coming to change parts. the latest change was the motherboard and heat sync about 2 weeks ago.

Any suggestions?

 

Hey Jeremiah, sorry I didn't see this earlier -- are your CPU temps reaching 96C? That's quite high, are you sure you 1. did a repaste and 2. disabled turbo?

With these tweaks, during gaming your cpu should remain well under 90C (mine hovers around 80C). I haven't played Dota2 in a while or on this laptop, but I can try if you're still having issues.

Lastly, are you sure you uninstalled Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework software/drivers? This is the root cause of the throttling. You should have several unknown devices in device manager, which you then disable permanently.

Those steps above should cover CPU throttling!

 

Why should the owners have to disable Turbo boost? The machine is defective if you need to do this!!

 

You're right! The thermals of the XPS 15 were either designed poorly, or Dell wanted to keep things extra super safe. During "intensive" games (stressing both the cpu and gpu), the ambient temperature rises higher and higher when the cpu is turboed and pegged at 3.30ghz.

Disabling turbo during gaming sessions allows cpu temperatures to stay perfectly reasonable. Also, the cpu won't throttle without Intel DPTF, but the ambient heat leads to high gpu temperatures, thus resulting in gpu throttling. So to prevent gpu throttling, I have a Throttlestop profile to disable turbo while gaming. It's not really needed in the large majority of games anyways.

 

The machine is defective and should be returned. If people buy it and not return it... The ODM's will continue pushing out more machines who can't work as intended. All buyers will be screwed in the end. More money you throw after the ODM's, more utter trash will be sent out in return. This should be stopped!! All of us will suffer in the end, if this practice continue as now.

 

But I think the majority of users are probably using it for word processing/Excel/web browsing and won't run into or aren't even aware there's a throttling issue. If we could get Dell to pay attention (are there still Dell engineers here? I remember there were back in the Alienware m11x days around 2011) maybe something can be done. As far as I'm aware, the new model (9560) has throttling issues as well...

But when you stick power components into an ultrabook chassis, manufacturers throttle to hedge risk of component failure due to high heat etc. so it's...just..a little understandable, yet incredibly frustrating.

 

No excuses for sending out machines Who can't do all tasks the hardware is intended to do. Either put in weaker hardware or don't design it. At least not push it out on the market!!

 

I totally agree with you bro.
This is the second XPS i got since returning the first one.
The first one i had so much issues with it that dell had to come try and fix at least 11 times before changing it.
This second one is still buggy but unfortunately my warranty ran out. For this one the technician changed the almost all the parts twice...

 

Hey miXwui,
For repaste, a dell technician did it about a month and a half ago.
And these are the current settings in my XPS 15 9550.
....
I cant seem to upload pictures here. Do you mind telling me how you did it?
Soz first time using this.

 

Hey guys. Great article of yours. I found your approaches very useful. They did make better my CPU temp but no the gpu's one.

I was very frustrated for a long time that a machine for $2000+ worth is unplayable even on 1080p.
Repaste / thermal pads / speed shift / cpu undervolt didn't help to maintain my gpu's temp under 90

But I found a solution. The solution is simplest ever.
Your laptop is thin, very thin. It has even less height than MacBook pro 15. So the clearance is lower. Plus MacBook has different cooling system.

So I just simply put my laptop on 10 centimeters height. And I now I can't reach even 80 degrees Celsius.

Since I have ssd configuration and play through external display. I close the lid and put laptop face down. So my cooling system are faced to the celling.

Now I enjoy playing DotA 2 with stable vsync 60fps on ultra settings. And have 80 degrees at Max in fights.

Hope it helps )

 

Not very smart close the lid and run hardware on full load

 

Good point. But what can happen anyway?
We have smaller temps on the keyboard than on the back side. So display should be totally fine.
Anyway we can stick with 1st option )

The main problem I wanted to raise here is that There is not enough space to have cool air for cooling system. Because back side warms your table etc. So air is preheated and comes to cooling system already warm.

If you look at laptops with same gpu. They all are thicker.

 

How do you raise it 10cm and not block the fan ?

 

There are a lot of options. Starting with cooling stand. But in my case I found 2 parallel thin (about 2cm) pieces of wood.
And place them on different sides. They close fans. But just about 5%. Which is totally fine.

But they are unstable. So I came with 2nd approach.
It all depends on your creativity )

I think 5 - 7cm should be enough

 

Plus I forgot to add. I changed some configurations in Nvidia control panel.

1) Max prerendered frames. Set to 2
2) power management mode. Set to prefer consistent performance.

Don't know if that helped

 

I've got the fix, I'm pretty sure. And, crazy, but after doing all I could to disable the thermal management, new paste, ThrottleStop, undervolting, etc., etc., the answer that I found, ironically, was rather than try to destroy the Intel Throttle Management, was to embrace it.

I did a clean install for 1803, upgrading from home to pro, but failed to put in the Thermal Drivers or the Chip set.
For XPS 9550 - Windows 10 64 Bit
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/drivers/driversdetails?driverId=NWWR5
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/drivers/driversdetails?driverId=H5FY9

I've been running my game, full screen and full fps, ZERO throttling.

I've only run about 10 games (A8, love that sh*t); which would have gagged by now. If it eventually gags, I'll edit and update. But this is the best performance I've seen since 1803.

 

Maybe you have no throttling because you don't have thermal checks anymore? Is it really a solution?

 

Holy cow, I'm thrilled to report it's really a solution. It's not that I don't have thermal checks, it's that they are working properly now. Actually it was a tech guy who suggested this solution to me, and he predicted that it was probably the lack of proper drivers because without them it will default to the most protective and extreme measures it can, but with proper drivers it will moderate its management more reasonably.

I played last night and here's the results:

Before installing the Thermal Drivers and Chipset (which I provide the links for), I was running A8 about 1/2 screen, on 'Medium' graphics, having upped the priority to 'RealTime' in TaskManager, and closing out every single other available background resource that allowed itself to be closed. I had ThrottleStop undervolting me. I'd turned off Turbo. After about 5 to 10 minutes (if lucky!) I would be throttled to 800Mhz performance, basically 1/4 of what I can get without throttle, and making games unplayable.

I updated those two drivers, rebooted and played for 1 hour, full screen (3840x2160), 'Extreme' graphics setting, without undervolting (I turned off ThrottleStop), didn't up my priority, didn't close background tasks, and EVEN HAD Pandora running on Chrome to I could play to tunes! For a friggin' hour and it never throttled me! Smooth as butter play with movie-like FPS. I'm back to 100% stellar gameplay.

I hope this works as well for all of you as it did for me, because I am out-of-my-mind stoked! And, sincerely glad I never got the Dynamic Thermal Control to completely uninstall, because if I had I'd be getting the same result but risking my laptop for no good reason.

Good luck.

 

I am confused. I thought obtained an improvement by NOT installing intel DPFM.
Anyway, good for you.

 

<snip - found answer in thread>

 

@mhtritter - my apologies but I don't understand what fix you are proposing here to resolve 9550 throttling. Could you summarize the fix again?

 

I think his summary is that he installed the drivers in the links provided and now doesn't have any throttling. I'm not too sure though since it was a little jumbled.

 

Oh. I have been running those for a while and don't notice any difference in performance. . .

 

Clean install of windows + latest dell drivers == less throttling!

 

Sorry for my English. I have been testing mhtritter's method and it works! So I am a happy owner of a Dell XPS 9550 4k, i5-6300HQ 2.3GHZ (3.2GHZ max) for 5 months now. I have done the repasting and undervolting (-155mv, throttlestop). I only do some light video editing and some light gaming (like the Witcher 3, GTA V, etc.).

But mostly I use it to watch 2k and 4k videos. The laptop handles 2k and 4k 30 fps with ease. However, when I play 4k 60fps and 2k 60fps videos, the CPU throttled so hard I could barely watch it without stuttering, lagging and audio does not sync with the video. The temp was barely 50C, the core came from 3195MHZ (before opening the video) to 2100MHZ (first minute) to 798 MHZ (second minute)! And the temp was still barely 50C! I lift the laptop 5cm above the surface for better ventilation, Throttlestop was on, Ultra performance in Dell Power Manager and High performance in Battery Option. The problem was definitely not from temperature.

So I have downloaded the two things from mhtritter's post and tested it again. The result was awesome.



After >1 hour:


I'm not sure if Aida64 is too weak compared with Prime95, Realbench or the like or I need to test it longer. But I test the 4k 60fps video again and it was so smooth. Still, bench testing it right now (2 hours) and still no throttling as I'm writing. So the question will be the what do the two aforementioned software do to the system?

 

Check only the box Stress Fpu for Cpu and the Stress Gpu. Re-run.

 

Anyone tried to do it for the 9560 ?