Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Dell Updates M17x Owners on DPC Latency

Dell's "John B" updated his post over at the official Dell forums concerning progress with identifying and resolving the DPC Latency issue on the M17x.

His posted update today states:
Update, 12/2: Some good news! The engineering team has successfully recreated the problem and identified several causes. One root cause has been identified and can be addressed by a BIOS revision, and an updated BIOS is now being validated. The engineering team is hopeful that the other root causes will also be resolved via a BIOS change, and are working to confirm this so a full BIOS update can be implemented.
I would like to add my 2 cents on this. Be very careful when taking this at face value. When talking about a BIOS update - well, anything can be introduced without you understanding exactly what the fix is. The BIOS update for example, may lower/alter performance in such a way as to produce a clean DPC Latency Checker result.

As pointed out by a couple of other posters @ NBR, a BIOS update was released for the XPS M1530/M1330 to 'correct' an issue with the GPU. This was nothing more than a band-aid fix to the problem. The actual problem remains (to this day) and the BIOS did nothing more than activate the fans from power up. The result: Decreased temps and lower battery life with a faulty GPU which should have been replaced.

My advice:
Once they release their "fix", be sure to test everything. Make sure nothing has been compromised. Its one thing to see nice green bars on the DPC Latency Checker and a completely different issue to find your GPUs are locked at full clocks as a result (just 1 possible result).

If you are one of the lucky ones who are not having any issues, I suggest holding off on updating once this is released. Let the rest of the owners be the "testers". ;)

All for now...