Dell pushes out BIOS update for XPS 15 7590 to fix GPU throttling issue

Dell's XPS 15 series of notebooks have often struggled with various forms of throttling since 2015.

The XPS 15 7590 has suffered from a severe GPU throttling issue under sustained load since it's release over a month ago, but Dell has finally pushed out a BIOS update to help fix the issue.

Douglas Black, Published 07/31/2019

Dell's recently released XPS 15 7590 notebook mainly improves upon the last generation 9570 by including options for an OLED display, upgrading the GTX 1050Ti Max-Q to GTX 1650, and moving the webcam to above the screen.

The GTX 1650 GPU on paper provides up to 25% more performance than the 1050Ti Max-Q in the previous year's configurations, but many users (myself included) found a severe bug that crippled performance while gaming. With stock firmware, the GPU would downclock to just 300 MHz anytime temperatures hit 75C, resulting in framerates dropping to just 10-20 FPS in most modern games.

The new firmware (version 1.2.3), however, seems to adjust the throttling frequency to around 1125 MHz rather than 300, which substantially improves performance and seems to make games playable again. We will continue testing the XPS 15 7590 with the latest BIOS update more comprehensively over the next day or so to determine whether the issue has been resolved.

To download the firmware update, head over to Dell's support page for the 7590 here.