The BIOS issues with the Dell XPS 15 9570 rumble on. Previously, the company had informed us that its Product Engineering Team were working on a fix for the power limit throttling that some NVIDIA GPUs have been experiencing since the release of BIOS 1.3.1. This update was to come in the form of BIOS 1.7, which the company expected "to be released by [the] end of December".
This date passed with no updates from Dell, but a representative reached out to us on Jan 2 and offered to send a beta version of BIOS 1.7 for us to test. Unfortunately, Dell has since followed the offer up with the following statement:
As per [the] latest update I [have] received from our Product engineering team, they have postponed the new BIOS release.
Worse still, there is currently no ETA for the new BIOS release and no explanation for why the company has postponed it. We have asked for clarification and for a new release date, but Dell has not been forthcoming on either matter. We will run tests with a beta BIOS if we receive one and will keep you updated when we hear any further information.
Update
Inexplicably, and without warning, Dell released the BIOS 1.7 update earlier today. We reached out to the company to clarify the u-turn and received the following response:
…the issues have been resolved and they [the Product Engineering Team] have released the update. You can update the BIOS to the latest version.
The changelog for BIOS 1.7 states that it has fixed the following issues:
- where the Windows BitLocker recovery prompt gets displayed when starting the system with a device connected to the Thunderbolt port.
- graphics performance where it becomes limited when the temperature of the system is low.
We shall be testing the new BIOS to determine whether it has fixed the NVIDIA dGPU power limit throttling issue and will give you a full breakdown of our findings in the coming days. You can find the link for the new BIOS update here, but we recommend exercising caution with installing it until we have tested it fully.
Please let us know in the comments if you have experienced otherwise or if you have contacted Dell about dedicated GPU issues with any of its laptops.