It’s been a long time since the PC experts at Dell have brought a notebook in the 17 inch format onto the market. Naturally, the expectations of the fans were all the greater. Now, however, a downer has become known. When Dell’s big reference product is under high resource utilization, the power supply unit doesn’t pass on enough power to the device. Is this possibly intentional?
Power supply unit too weak
The XPS 17 discharges itself when playing with the power supply. But the device isn’t the only product of the US-American manufacturer that suffers from this problem. Thus, the Dell Precision 5750 is also affected by the too low power through the adapter. The two sibling products have to access the energy of the battery when the load is high. Thus, the device inevitably switches itself off after a certain period of high utilization.
The reaction of Dell
Of course the manufacturer had to react to the problem in some way. Here, Dell turned to the website “Notebookcheck”. Surprisingly, Dell pointed out to the website that it was by no means a fault. It’s rather an intentional feature of the 17 incher. However, it shouldn’t present itself in such a negative light.
The gaming bolide
The high energy consumption of the XPS 17 and its sister product is no accident. As it is typical for a gaming notebook, Dell installs powerful hardware here. Aside from the GeForce RTX 2060, a Core i7-10850H with eight cores works under the hood of the 17 incher. These two components, together with the rest of the hardware, ensure that the notebook consumes 135 watts under full load.
The power supply is too weak
Surprisingly, the adapter only supplies the gaming notebook with 130 watts. Conversely, the notebook is inevitably supplied with too little energy under full load. This is a concession to the battery size of the device. Thus, Dell wanted to keep the notebook halfway portable despite its 17 inch size. Dell wouldn’t have expected that the 5 watt difference would have such negative effects according to its own statements.
USB-C connection causes another problem
As if this were not enough, the USB-C port also contributes negatively to the problem. Thus, the limitation of the port ensures that both the XPS 17 and the Precision 5750 even only charge with 105 watts. This ensures that one percent of the battery charge is used within two minutes – despite connection to the power supply. As a result, both the GeForce RTX 2060 and the processor throttle down after only three hours of full load. Long gaming sessions are therefore not possible with the XPS 17.
