Dell has not broken USB Type-C charging on the XPS 15 9570 with BIOS 1.13.0; may have minimised fans running on standby though

We have covered XPS 15 9570 BIOS releases a few times since last year, ranging from ones that effectively broke the NVIDIA dGPU for some laptops to ones that reduced DPC latency issues affecting other devices. Several Reddit threads concerning BIOS 1.13.0 appeared following its release earlier this month, so we thought it pertinent to test what Dell had changed. Our test device has been the Core i9-8950HK model with a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Max-Q GPU, for reference. We would also like to stress that our experiences with BIOS 1.13.0 have just been with this system, so there may be issues with other devices or SKUs of which we are unaware.

Previous XPS 15 9570 laptops that we have tested have experienced issues with their fans running once they have been put into standby, but Dell informed us privately that BIOS 1.13.0 has been released to address that issue. We did not encounter that issue with our current test device on BIOS 1.10.1 through to BIOS 1.13.0 though, so it is one of the unaffected devices. Our previous test devices have been various Core i5-9300H and Core i7-9750H models, for reference.

Secondly, Dell has not imposed any additional rollback restrictions with BIOS 1.13.0 that do not already apply from earlier BIOS revisions. Hence, you can happily try BIOS 1.13.0 on your machine and then downgrade to an earlier revision. It is not possible to rollback before BIOS 1.3.0, but this has been the case for almost a year.

Additionally, BIOS 1.13.0 retains the 75 °C thermal limit that Dell changed from 78 °C with BIOS 1.3.1 onwards. There have been reports of previous BIOS revisions causing some NVIDIA dGPUs to downclock to 300 MHz briefly, but we have not been able to replicate that on any BIOS revision with our test device nor on BIOS 1.13.0. Running Unigine Heaven 4.0 and FurMark simultaneously resulted in the GPU dropping below 1 GHz after a few minutes of 100% utilisation, but this occurred on BIOS 1.10.1, 1.12.0 and 1.13.0. We also noticed no sudden framerate drops when playing Forza Horizon 4. Incidentally, we did not any performance improvements in Forza Horizon 4 when using BIOS 1.13.0 either. We conducted these tests with our device set to Ultra Performance in Dell Power Manager, for reference.

BIOS 1.13.0 does not appear to affect the fan curve of our test device too. We tested for any fan curve abnormalities by setting the device to Optimized in Dell Power Manager, during which we did not hear the fans spinning up during general tasks like web browsing and file downloads.

Finally, a reader brought our attention to the possibility of BIOS 1.13.0 breaking USB Type-C charging on the XPS 15 9570. Our test device warned us about our 65 W Type-C charger being underpowered, but it continued to charge on BIOS 1.13.0 as it had done on earlier revisions. We could not discover any issue arising from the BIOS flashing process either. We verified this by downgrading from BIOS 1.13.0 to BIOS 1.10.1 and back again with the device charging over Type-C, but our device continued to charge with our 65 W adapter regardless. We are not discounting this issue, but we doubt that it is caused by BIOS 1.13.0. Other threads support this theory, with it occurring having upgraded to earlier BIOS revisions too.

Overall, BIOS 1.13.0 appears to be a minor revision that did not fundamentally change anything on our test device. We noticed marginally lower idle temperatures when running BIOS 1.13.0 over BIOS 1.12.0, but this could have been subjective. Let us know in the comments what your experiences of BIOS 1.13.0 are and whether you have encountered any issues that we have missed.