DELL Denies XPS 15 9570 Issues Despite Multi-User Reports

Performance Throttling Problems Persist

Users of DELL‘s XPS 15 9570 laptop have been having GPU-related issues for the past month now. Specifically, stemming from an NVIDIA GPU throttling problem which started with the last 1.4.1 BIOS update. The performance throttling is so bad that it throttles the performance to well below the stock clock speeds. So obviously, the result is poor performance on an expensive flagship DELL laptop.

The laptop experts over at Notebookcheck have done their due diligence and replicated the issue as well. Their test setup uses the base model XPS 15 9570 with an NVIDIA GTX 1050 GPU.

What they found was that the GTX 1050 gets 5~15 FPS in the UNIGINE Heaven benchmark. That is when the core temperature is below 48 °C. However, the GTX 1050 constantly power limit throttles to between 949 and 1278 MHz when operating below this temperature threshold.

What Does DELL Say About the Issue?

Responding to Notebookcheck’s report, DELL’s Product Engineering team apparently finds no such issue. Even going as far as to say that they “couldn’t find other users reporting the same issue and it has been concluded that this isn’t a known issue.” 

That is of course, despite Notebookheck showing their own testing, reports from multiple users on Reddit and other laptop forums explaining the exact same issue. Some even point out that simply downgrading the BIOS is not possible. Especially with the updated Boot Guard. So those who have already upgraded to version 1.5 or 1.4.1 are stuck with the problem.

The only workaround so far for users experiencing this issue, is to stop their game halfway when throttling occurs to start a concurrent stress program. Just to get the hardware to run at the advertised specs.