Why you should not buy dell xps 15 9550 (at least yet)

I've been pondering to buy this laptop for a month and finally did. Had it for a week and probably will return it soon. Here is why:

1. This product is not ready. Simply put it has been rushed out to get the xmas buyers. Exhibits:
1.1. The carbon fiber body looks great, untill you touch it: even if you wash your hands everytime before use it attaches oil fingerprints in an embarrassing way for a person that might share his contents with other people. This is a clear clue they did not do any testing on this product.
1.2. The hardware is on the bleeding edge of technology, just too new:
- drivers poorly manage cpu.
- Dell bios is not ready for NVMe technology so you cannot really boot from nvme, not using at its full potential the samsung ssd PM951 m.2 drive.
- the 4k screen is gorgeous, but windows 10 does a poor job scaling in many cases and most software is just not ready jet so it is not usable at native resolution.
1.3. Because previous point, battery life is not in high-end standards. Even with many caution you hardly squeeze 6 hours from it.

2. Dell quality is not up to the price: I received my laptop with all the drivers, the bios and windows not upto date, ie manifesting many issues. Ok for windows (it is what it is) but they took 2 months to ship this thing after I paid 2k euros. I expect better. (I've been using a macbook pro for 10 years, I hate to sound like the classic apple fan, but Dell just gives you the sensation that they do not care about giving a product that works and feel well. This is not "high-end" in my book).

3. Dell claims are silly overselling upsetting a thinking buyer: the laptop is advertised as 3.5ghz with up to 17hours battery life. My bios says the max cpu frequency is 2.6: special intel drivers (which apparently works poorly on these machines) could overclock it to 3.5ghz, but this is something very different than let you think you have a 3.5ghz that can eventually downclock for power saving. The battery life claiming is just stupid marketing: you don't even get close to half of that and everybody has a bad feeling at the first usage.

I'll try a clean install of windows 10 and see if performance get a little better and if I can live with the ugly fingerprint the body attaches, otherwise i'll return. I'll post results of clean install as I couldn't find anyone really confirming that it improves battery life or performances.

Best

 

The carbonfiber oily-thingerprints-magnet body...

 

Just for the reference, it's the same with the XPS 13, both 9343 and 9350. So.. it's been in use for a while. It's annoying, but using a damp cloth it is cleaned quite easily. And from what I read from people who owned their XPS 13 for almost a year now, it doesn't seem to wear off, so I'd rather have "needs cleaning regularly" than "just looks always ****ty after a year". And it feels more comfortable than metal does.

 

I'm not sure I have a strong opinion on this. It does seem to get a bit smudgy where the wrist lays, but all things, particularly mice, tend to build up some gunk. I like the feel of this material better than smooth plastic, although it might be easier to wipe down smooth plastic. Seems like this is just going to be more personal preference than not doing any testing. I don't plan to share my laptop, so I guess I can be OK with it. ;-)

When going into battery mode, then switching to AC, it apparently has a slower disk and CPU speed. These things will likely get fixed in driver or BIOS updates soon. In this case, I think you're right, that it feels like it's not quite "finished", but they've been releasing driver updates, and I think they'll get there soon.

What do you mean? The stock drive seem to work OK for me (except for the sleep mode issue).

I've been mostly browsing the internet, so it's been making use of the native resolution. Some apps, the scaling is apparent, but is it really worse off than if you had a lower-resolution display? And this sounds like more of a Windows-legacy-app problem than a Dell laptop problem. It's not as if Dell is going to provide a revision that fixes legacy software; or do you mean you'd prefer a Mac, feeling that Retina support is better?

Why is it because of the previous point? Anyway, yeah, the battery life isn't what they claim. One person posted that a BIOS update will be released that will help with this, as well as the speed issue; I hope they're right.

The computer looks and feels "high-end", while being less expensive than some other high-end notebooks. Yeah, the driver situation is annoying, but at least I haven't had "many issues". I did update the Intel display driver, which seems to help with the display reset. For the speed problems, I await the BIOS update. Aside from that, I'm pretty excited about the machine.

Spec-wise, it seems much better than some others I compared it against, such as the Surfacebook and MacBook Pro; there are online comparisons if you are curious.

I checked the Dell sales site, and yeah, they say "up to 3.5GHz". Technically they're right, but if someone is not familiar with how the newer Intel processors work (the Core processors, for the past several years), they could be easily misled. Even so, you don't really want the cpu running at 3.5 all the time. It should throttle based upon workload. Even my several-year-old desktop works like this; when I give it work to do ( like processing RAW photos), it momentarily increases to its "turbo" speed. Why should it go into turbo-mode while I'm simply browsing or doing light work? And yet, it's there when I need it.

So, yeah, it seems like they have some updating to do, and perhaps it's part of being on the "bleeding edge", but I really wanted a better laptop -- touch screen, SSD, latest processors, etc. This is really a good value for a higher-end machine.

 

(whoops, double-posted because site didn't respond)

 

Vidgamer, I find your position too docile: this machine cost more than average because: 1. 4k screen 2. ssd nvme drive, 3. cpu/gpu but all these three have hardware/software/driver incompatibilities right now, which is when they put the product on the market and we bought it. I just find unprofessional to do so, but it is my personal opinion. Other producers (ie lenovo, apple etc) didn't launch machines that are not ready to use without problems: i find this policy more respectful of costumers money.

 

Well, you have to make judgement calls as to whether or not problems are "showstoppers" or something that can be worked-around or updated. I seldom see a perfect technology product. There are generally good and bad aspects to anything.

So, you suggest that people avoid the machine until it is updated, although a couple of your complaints are not going to be affected by any driver or BIOS updates. I think some things simply come down to personal preference. There are other things that people probably should know about the machine before buying. For one thing, it was pointed out in the main XPS 15 9550 thread that the screen has a lot of "ghosting" and probably isn't a good choice for a "gaming laptop", even though it has the GPU. (So far, this still hasn't been a problem for me, but I'm obviously too docile. ;-) )

In the case of legacy software, I don't see Dell upgrading whatever you're using. It appears that a future update will address the throttling issues. Once that's fixed, I don't have a problem with the machine, so I guess I'm OK if you suggest that people hold off until that fix is in place.

Surely, you jest. I've been struggling through iOS 8 and 9, and only until iOS 9.2 does my browsing seem stable on my old iPad 2. Why did they release those other versions on the iPad 2 if they knew it worked so poorly? Or, did they fail to test? The fact is, they all operate this way -- they try to get the important things to work, then fix remaining problems, and some things may never get fixed. So, best not to purchase some things if they don't already have the features you want.

In this case, I trust Dell to fix the throttling issue soon (we'll see), and then I think it's about perfect. But that's just me.

 

The only thing I agree with here is the 4k screen. The first 9550 I got had the 4k screen and I couldnt stand it. The glossy was hard on my eyes, and the scaling was horrible. Plus the drain on battery life.

So I returned it, got the FHD screen, and everything is now great.

I love my 9550 now, and none of the other items on the list bother me at all.

 

Have you not seen the Samsung 960 Pro spec.. running in this laptop?? Definitely running NVMe to get those speeds. 2500MB/s Read and 1500MB/s Write!

 

yeah I don't have any issues with my 950 pro and booting.

 

1.1 -> The last 3 generations of XPS machines have had the same soft-touch coating, this one has a pattern to make it less obvious and I don't find it particularly bad. I actually find the coating on Lenovo Thinkpads shows fingerprints much worse, Alienware laptops also have this issue as does any other brand using a soft-touch material. Weighed against the way it feels, I'd rather have the soft-touch than not, but I have particularly dry hands.

1.2 -> The Intel GPU driver is crashy, which is annoying (although they just released a fix supposedly, I'm not done testing it yet). My system boots fine from NVMe on a PM951. But there is a bug that lowers SSD performance after sleep (this could be a driver issue). Other brands of notebook with the Sky Lake series of CPUs are having these problems too so this is more of an Intel issue.

There are also a few things they need to fix with a bios update, like the CPU throttling when power is removed and reconnected. Which they claim they've worked out and will release a fix for, we'll see.
I haven't had issues with the CPU not performing correctly, but I have the i7 6700HQ so that might account for that.
As for scaling, that's on you. You bought a system with a 4K screen. I actually haven't had issues with scaling but I'm running 200% which might be a bit lower than most of you. because it's exactly 4:1 of 1080p scaled content actually looks ok, other than being not as sharp.

1.3-> Doesn't bother me one bit, 6 hours is great for what I use it for.

2 -> No one ships laptops pre-updated, not even Apple. I don't have any build quality issues either, as far as I can tell if I compare the 9550 to the MacBook Air I have sitting here it's about 95% as good, the join between the carbon fiber and aluminium definitely could be better, otherwise it's great.

3 -> Maybe you have a point here, I never actually read the marketing and just check the real specs anyway so i wasn't disappointed.

You don't like it, return it. Seriously, just do it. I had an XPS 15 L521x for about 2 months in 2012. That notebook had runaway thermal problems, terrible Wi-Fi and horrible build quality problems. It was so bad I convinced Dell to give me a refund after 2 months. If you're not happy with a notebook, just return it ASAP. That way you're not stuck with a machine you hate. I ran this new one through every test I could find to make sure it will do what I want it to do and I'm happy with it, but you get a very short return window from Dell so you have anything you don't think you can live with with a Dell computer return it immediately.

 

New Dell BIOS update is tested:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-X...HD-InfinityEdge-Notebook-Review.156462.0.html

CPU throttling issue is fixed, and we have shorter battery life.

 

you didn't mention the very slow response time of the display, at least 1080 FHD panel! Unable to do gaming at all! This is the issue can not be fixed by any update.