Dell XPS 17 9700 facing worrying charging issues, drops from 100 percent to 65 percent battery while “recharging”

[Redaktion]

Your new XPS 17 might not be charging even though it's plugged in. If you're running games or other demanding loads, then the system may actually be consuming more power than it can take in from the AC adapter.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-17-9700-facing-worrying-charging-issues-drops-from-100-percent-to-65-percent-battery-while-recharging.480923.0.html

[_MT_]

Have you tried swapping the power supplies? My best guess would be a firmware issue in the XPS 17 - it probably doesn't identify the power supply correctly as their own proprietary 130 W and instead behaves like it's an ordinary 100 W supply.

[modernlife73]

Thanks, good to see this issue finally picked up in a review.

I did wonder whether the XPS 17s have gone out with a development branch of the BIOS. There's an option in there for dynamic power tuning that has a note that it is for development only and won't be visible to customers (yet it is).

[JohnIL]

You know you wouldn't build a desktop with a bare minimum PSU so why accept these high dollar notebooks that don't supply a decent charging/power supply? Seems like the higher up in specs you go the more issues we have today with thermals, power, stability. What happened to over building hardware to last? If power through USB C isn't enough then use a proper separate port.

[Alex March]

Can't wait for the final review! It's what will make me decide whether to get this or not

[Joel]

Incidentally, I have a 9700 + 1650Ti + FHD model, and I have detected the AC adapter reaching and staying at 127W at the wall when gaming.  Yet others with the RTX 2060 or Quadro 3000 can't get their system above 107W at the wall.

It seems that the issue is the AC Adapter isn't providing as much power to RTX users as it does to GTX users.

[Veyron]

I've seen a handful of reviews about this laptop and I don't think I've seen even one where the reviewer didn't have to return it over some broken hardware issue, be it the trackpad, the speakers, or something else.

How can you get a laptop of this price so wrong?

I was considering importing it from the US and giving up on the warranty. I can kiss those ideas goodbye now. That Honor 16.1 is looking very attractive, though.

[Yc]

Have you tried swapping the power supplies? My best guess would be a firmware issue in the XPS 17 - it probably doesn't identify the power supply correctly as their own proprietary 130 W and instead behaves like it's an ordinary 100 W supply.

When plugged in, the BIOS recognized the charger at 130W. Didn't play any games or haven't fires up Premiere to check.

[sandybo]

Allen this is an awesome report and thanks to bring up this to Dell, instead of having the users deal with Dell where from Reddit's report, Dell level 3 technical representatives is so lack of debug ability. Again, wonderful review comes from the creditable reporter! We will wait for the update.

[_MT_]

You know you wouldn't build a desktop with a bare minimum PSU so why accept these high dollar notebooks that don't supply a decent charging/power supply? Seems like the higher up in specs you go the more issues we have today with thermals, power, stability. What happened to over building hardware to last? If power through USB C isn't enough then use a proper separate port.

If you know the draw, why wouldn't you? An engineer should be able to size it correctly, specify what he wants, test it, have access to detailed datasheets and engineering support. When you buy a power supply, you usually know squat about it beyond some marketing fluff and perform no characterization (for which you have no equipment). Similarly, you often don't know how much the components can draw and you don't bother to characterize them either. Sizing a supply can then resemble black magic. By you I mean a typical consumer. I'll tell you a secret. A well designed supply can supply the rated continuous power... continuously for whatever time frame it was designed to, under the conditions it was designed to. If it couldn't, it wouldn't be well designed. And more. It's going to handle some overloading (depending on duration - again, as per specification). You really don't need a 200 W supply for a 130 W load. And we're talking about laptops. More powerful supply is going to be bigger and heavier. Which is undesirable. You only oversize when the offering on the market doesn't meet your demands. Which doesn't apply when someone is building a supply for you, to your specification. Headroom should already be built into the supply. And you have control over BIOS and configuration, meaning you control consumption. When we oversize supplies, it really is more a show of our lack of knowledge and control. It's a different game.

Problem is that thinness and lightness are seen as important. The higher you go, the more importance they have. An expensive laptop has to be stylish. And these traits go inherently against overbuilding. Also, many people don't really need the outright, raw performance, especially sustained performance. So, it's something they can compromise on.

[uglycowboy]

"Dell has responded to our inquiry saying that the XPS 17 "can pull more than 130 W" due to the onboard Core i7 CPU and RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU even though its PSU is rated to deliver 130 W. "

Dell completely misunderstood the bug. The "130 watt" adapter is only providing 100 watts max. This is absolutely a USB PD negotiation bug. The XPS 17, with 1650 Ti, has been measured to pull about 130 watts from adapter. It  is not capped at ~100 watts like the 2060 / 3000 trims. The trigger for the 30 watt deficit bug seems to be the 2060 / 3000 GPU and its inclusion in the power requirement request through the USB PD controller.

What Dell thinks you are asking is whether we see battery drain when adapter is providing the proper 130 watts at the wall and XPS 17 is consuming more than 130 watts. In this normal case we would expect the battery to run down. However, this is not the issue we are talking about here.

If this issue is not clearly articulated to Dell it will never be fixed. For some reason this problem is confusing people. Even within the reddit community many people misunderstand and incorrectly interpret the problem the way Dell does. Even reading the comments on this article here shows a clear misunderstanding of the issue. Please push back Allen. 

[Lost_In_Space]

I am an engineer and I have the new XPS 17, I may run the CPU for a total of 1 hour per day 'full bore' the rest of the time it is waiting for me (I type way slower than any 5 GHz CPU), and it has never needed to discharge the battery to keep up. So for me and my usage I think the small 130 watt power supply is the proper choice (as it was with the XPS 15 / 5520 that I also use), I don't want to carry around a 250 watt brick. Everything is a tradeoff and for this one I am happy with Dell's decision. I mainly wanted a small chassis, solidly built 17" XPS 15 equivalent and dell has delivered.

[uglycowboy]

Thank you Allen. Your 2pm (second) update from Dell correctly captures the bug. Please keep us posted and keep up the excellent high quality content.

[Tony Shark]

I honestly don't know what people were expecting. I could see this coming miles away. It ain't rocket science. Here are some simple maths. Assuming that both the CPU and GPU perform up to their rated TDP.

Any CPU config - 45W
2060 Max-Q - 65W

That's already a whopping 110W, so the system only has a budget of 20W left from the charger. And now it also has to power the 4k screen, the motherboard, the fans, the RAM, the SSDs, the DAC/AMP, etc. Ask yourself, what the hell can it do with 20W? Of course it has no other choice but to tap into the battery.

Anyway, this is not the first time they did this either. For example, the base config Dell G5 gaming laptop with 1050Ti from 2018 only shipped with a 130W barrel plug because they decided to cut cost on that part (shame on you Dell). As a result, battery drain was quite insane when both the CPU and GPU could boost properly. The best solution for that was to shelve out extra money for a 180W barrel plug instead.

[Anon456]

For example, the base config Dell G5 gaming laptop with 1050Ti from 2018 only shipped with a 130W barrel plug because they decided to cut cost on that part (shame on you Dell). As a result, battery drain was quite insane when both the CPU and GPU could boost properly. The best solution for that was to shelve out extra money for a 180W barrel plug instead.

Exactly the same thing happened with Lenovo Legion Y530 i5/1050ti powered by the 130w power adapter. I don't know how/if lenovo addressed that issue though. Higher spec configurations had 170w psu and had no issues with that.