Dell Dell XPS15 9550 laptop Ebay official copy out and dismantling upgrade

LZ started Alienware 17 R2 by his brother Amway almost six months ago. At the time, he also wrote an article out of the box.

I usually put my office in the office for office use. “Occasionally” I would show it out to customers for demonstrations and training. In the midsummer of Guangzhou, you can imagine how I ran around outside. And, yes, it's "squeaky," because you can't find a suitable backpack to carry it, so you put it in a handbag to hold it (the alien's backpack is too strong). Although the performance can completely meet my needs, and the customer sees me bring such a thing out, is also very satisfied and will produce inexplicable trust. But after taking it on a business trip to Guiyang, I finally got the idea to change the machine. It was really overestimating my physical fitness before...

At this point, I calm down to re-examine their use needs: due to the work of the relationship, CPU performance can not be too weak; because often see PDF and write form bids, so the screen must be 15 inches, and must be full HD or above; Gently, gently, gently, gently; for many years working in the field, and occasionally returning home to rest, so it is best to have significant independence, play games when you go home to rest;

With these ideas, less than six months after the cut, LZ once again embarked on the road to buy and buy under the guidance of his brother.

Selecting machines is indeed a very painful and very simple process. why? In fact, in accordance with my needs, the final exclusion is nothing more than a few: XPS15 9550, Macbook Pro 15, Recreational 15, Y700, UX501.

After considering the weight, screen and other factors, only the XPS15 and Macbook pro are left. Taking into account the applications I need and a certain degree of game requirements, of course, the most critical brother Amway factors, and ultimately chose the XPS15 9550.

With the previous experience of Haitao, it turned out that there was nothing wrong with the personal turning of the officer. For me, the notebook is a productivity tool and it belongs to consumables. The individual does not really care if it is brand new. As long as the machine is in good condition, it can be satisfied. In the beginning, I saw the message pushed by my aunt:


Later, he discovered that he did not use the coupon code (for China only), and that there was a need for a business trip at the end of July, so he had to look up on Ebay again. In the end, the i5-8G-1T+32G+GTX960M+ full HD version was selected. After using coupons, it was less than 6K. After the skylake i5 upgrade to 4C4T, in fact, performance is not too bad.  

Next is the extremely painful transfer process . The whole process is to use WeChat to operate. This tells the truth is really very convenient. but! but! but! The transport process of LZ this time is considered to be a setback. Received the machine from the 29th, and then to take off on the 1st to the domestic, and on the 5th to clear the customs, has been cleared until the 21st to clear .

The total clearance time was 16 days. Before I bought alpha, I cleared my balance for 1 day. When I bought Alienware 17, I switched to use and cleared it for 5 days. Although they are mercilessly taxed, the overall experience is still very good.

After an impatient wait, finally on the morning of the 21st, I received a message:

Guangdong Province, express mail respected users, your e-mail has reached the Guangzhou Exchange Bureau, the need to impose a tariff of 300 yuan (can visit the Guangzhou Customs website http://gzcustoms.gov.cn/ query download tax form). Please pay tax online within 5 days (mobile phone pays attention to “Postal Express Express”) and use “e-Express-Hai Tao Inquiry-Guangzhou Express Post E-Smart Platform-Online Taxation” for WeChat payment; or visit the customs post The e-community website, ghzx.gdems.com, pays tax on "pay tax online - Alipay tax". After receiving the tax, we will deliver the mail to you in time. Thank you for your support and help to China Post Express Logistics! Tel: 11183

At that time, my heart jumped. It wouldn't be a fraudster's information. The result was a check on the internet.

After all, it was a notebook that was shipped, reinforced and bought insurance.

Well, finally arrived before the business trip. Hurry to pay customs duties and get a glorious tax bill.

Uncle EMS was also honest and paid the tax in the morning and sent it in the afternoon.


In the long wait, nature can make people think a lot. Before the machine arrived, I studied the dismantling, evaluation and other related contents of this machine. In fact, XPS15 9550 this machine is still in the market evaluation is good, the calling rate is also quite high, in the value of buying has also been measured. Overall, this machine can be upgraded as follows: wireless network card, memory, hard disk (M2 and SATA port are all), battery.

In the wireless network card part, the XPS15 uses the DW1830 3x3 802.11ac 2.4/5GHz + Bluetooth 4.1. In fact, it is actually enough to use, and it really requires a Gigabit Ethernet card for the transmission speed.

Memory is a standard 2 slot, 8G by DELL's urine nature is 4G2 dual channel, and this is exactly the same with the aliens. What made me so sad was that during the time I was preparing to enter the new machine, the price of flash particles was going up sharply, and the prices of memory and SSD all had different degrees of increase. So on a sunny day, Ma Yunbao started the 8G DDR4 24002 set of pirate ships.


The black PCB with the faith of the thieves LOGO, or let me meet a little satisfaction.

The hard drive's doorway is relatively a bit more. LZ has been using SSDs since 2012. From carefully buying 64G to helping friends with machines, at least 256G is required to start, looking at the interface from SATA3 to later M2 and U2. His machine to naturally replace the SSD to Swap friends. For the XPS15, we can choose two interface SSDs, namely M2 and SATA3. Moreover, due to the support of the chipset, the M2 interface on the XPS15 takes the PCI-E X4 channel, which means that we can select some high-performance SSDs to enhance our experience.

Currently, there are two types of M.2 interfaces: Socket 2 and Socket 3. Socket2 supports SATA and PCI-E X2 interfaces. If PCI-E ×2 interface is adopted, the maximum read speed can reach 700 MB/s. The entrance can also reach 550MB/s. Among them Socket 3 can support PCI-E × 4 interface, the theoretical bandwidth can reach 4GB/s.

We often see the AHCI is to regulate the SATA physical interface, is the product of high latency mechanical hard drive era, solid state hard drives early adopt AHCI, the current speed of SATA3 6G has become a bottleneck. The NVME protocol is produced under this environment. NVME is the standard for standardizing the PCI-E interface. The combination of NVME and PCI-E breaks through the bottleneck of AHCI and SATA3.

The SSD of the NVME interface is directly connected to the CPU by the native PCI-E controller. Compared with the traditional AHCI, the AHCI needs to transit through the southbridge controller and then connect to the CPU to simplify the calling mode. The register does not need to be read when the command is executed. Each AHCI command needs to read 4 registers, which will consume 8000 CPU cycles, resulting in a delay of 2.5μs, improving SSD IOPS (read/write times per second) performance, adding automatic power state switching and dynamics Energy management features. Therefore, NVME is the general direction of future SSD development.

Let's talk about the upgrade options of the M2 interface hard disk. XPS15 9550 factory gives customers two options, one is 1T HDD+32G M2 SSD cache disk, the other is pure M2 SSD, the capacity is optional 256G and 512G. But even the original large-capacity M2 uses only the low-end M2 interface SSD of the Samsung TLC particle, PM951, which is too weak for the hard disk of this interface. In the current retail market we have three options for upgrading and replacement (it will soon become 4).

Samsung SM951. In fact, this product is strictly speaking, there is no retail version, so the warranty can only recover the sales of the business. The earliest circulation on the market is to OEM versions of Lenovo, Microsoft, and other machines (in fact, the disassembler disk), so these disks have more or less some write-in time and data, but in fact they are used without any problems. Later there was a 0-powered version with an encoding end of 00000. From a performance point of view, the SM951 is much higher than the PM951, which is arguably one of the best choices for our upgrade. This time I also chose the SM951 as an upgrade disk.





Samsung 950 PRO, I think this do not need to talk too much about the goods, after the M2 interface on the Z97 these boards, one after another has been a lot of players began to use it to enhance the performance of the machine. It can be said that this SSD represents Samsung's highest level of consumer-grade SSD, and of course its price is also worthy of its identity. The drive used on the 950PRO can also be used on the SM951


Toshiba XG3, the model is THNSN5XXXGPU7 (XXX refers to the capacity, there are 128G, 256G, 512G), this SSD and the early SM951, the current circulation of the market are OEM disassemble disk, there is no new disk. Toshiba's XG3 performance is very strong, and the 950 PRO is not much difference, but the price is flat with the SM951, even cheaper than the SM951. Some people also put it on the XPS15 9550, can be used normally. There was no driver in the early days and only the NVME controller that came with Microsoft could be used. However, OCZ's RD400 dedicated driver can now be installed. However, I learned from my peers that there are still many ESs on the market and that there will be a case of restarting the lost disk (no problems with the normal switch, and it will be lost if it restarts). In the absence of reliable merchants, I eventually did not choose it.

4. OCZ's RD400, in fact, this product is the XG3's market retail version. The RD400 is already on the market and is soon available on the market. Its price positioning is slightly cheaper than the 950PRO, but its performance is comparable to that of the 750, which is also much stronger than the Intel 750. It can be said that it is quite a sincere product. Toshiba has released its product under the name of OCZ. It seems that it hasn't completely abandoned the brand. There will be two versions of the RD400, one with a riser card that can be inserted into a PCI-E slot, and one with a riser card that plugs directly into an M2 slot.


As for the SATA3 port hard disk, the current market choice is more. In the market environment dominated by price factors, all manufacturers have launched their own TLC products. Although from a practical point of view, using TLC is not a bad idea, but the things you use yourself still hope you can use better products. In a coincidence, a friend told me that there was a batch of Toshiba's Q-pro trays, which was quite good. I immediately asked him to get one for me. 350 is only 256G, but also a bicycle.

The packaging is old enough, and the Q300 is about the same size. However, Q pro is actually the product of MLC.

The Q pro uses a 9.5mm disk and can be mounted on the xps15 9550 after research.

On the battery side, the XPS15 9550 has two options, one is the 56wh battery and the other is the 84Wh battery. If you want to use the hard drive bit of the sata port, you can only choose 56wh battery. However, if you wish to have a larger capacity battery, you can also choose to remove the tray from the sata port and replace the larger battery by yourself. (Taobao sells, and changing the battery is not difficult, is a few screws thing) Because I have no need for the battery life, so I did not replace the battery.

Having said so much, it finally started to unpack!

The big DELL LOGO, which is also the reason why the Customs unbuttoned the Customs Tariff immediately, purchased Kangaroo's reinforcement service. At first it thought that it would add a carton, but it did not.

Slightly cutting the tape, the eyes of the Made in china power cord and shock-absorbing foam particles. Whether these bubbles were added by kangaroos or ebay merchants, I don't know.

Like the alienware bought at the time, the machine was tightly wrapped around the paper with a plastic film. Accessories in addition to the power adapter are only small manuals on warranty, security, etc. (also think ebay business will send a U disk å•¥ =. =)

Well, remove the plastic packaging and take it out, eh, the appearance of no scratches, metal A surface matte texture is great, and MacBook pro like.

Open up, the design of the narrow border is really very pleasing, the overall machine is very light, easy to pick up with one hand (after all, only AW less than half the weight of ah ... 1.78kg)

A closer look at the appearance, and finally found two small bumps, the problem is not, anyway, sooner or later to buy back normal use will have this scratch....

The C side of the notebook is a carbon fiber based + skin type coating. Feel very delicate and comfortable, this design also effectively reduce the weight of the fuselage. But think about my previous VAIO S15 but 1.98Kg ah ..... The biggest problem with this design is that it is very sweaty and oily. It's hard to take care of it. Especially for me who have a lot of sweat, this C face will have to be changed sooner or later, so I finally chose to paste the shell membrane...

Duang! Make a second change.

Interfaces on both sides of the machine are shown in the figure. Personally feel that the USB 3.0 interface is better if you can add another one. The battery indicator is obviously a copy of the Macbook pro. Practicality is a matter of opinion. The lack of RJ45 interface is a result of compromises due to the thin and light body. In order to make up for these two regrets, I chose to buy Akihabara's type-c interface, which is cheap and easy to use.


Of course, the original party can also choose DELL's DA300, through the Type-C transfer VGA, HDMI, RJ45 and USB3.0


The machine's D surface material is also aluminum alloy, you can see the large strip of heat sink air inlet, two protruding pads not only lift the machine to ensure the smooth flow of the air inlet, but also separate the air inlet and the air outlet. The efficiency of heat dissipation is a great design. XPS nameplate machine under the fast service code, in fact, I think the XPS series can be replaced by DELL's LOGO XPS, ah, this level is not higher?

To come and the Macbook pro15 than the size, overall benefit from the narrow box, the overall body area is slightly smaller than the macbook pro15, thickness is less than half a catty, almost. In weight, the non-touchscreen xps is lighter than the macbook pro (1.78kg).

Backlit keyboard brightness level is not adjustable, only three options: off, dark, bright, not enough humane. If you look at the front, the backlight effect is not obvious. The keystrokes of the keyboard are slightly shorter. The feel is far inferior to the alienware 17, and it is worse than the macbook pro. It can only be said to be an acceptable level.

The power button in the upper right corner of the C plane, there will be lights on the boot

The large touchpad is very, very, very, very comfortable to use. It can be said that the wp platform notebook I have experienced is the best. Although it is slightly inferior to the macbook series, it is really easy to use. The entire area can be used as a left button. However, because the material is also skin-like, it has to be affixed to the film... Personally, I really hate the kind of creamy touch I feel after the oil.

The screen is lighted, and the narrow frame looks comfortable in the bright screen. The XPS15 uses an IPS matte screen and is not afraid of reflection. The screen gamut of 98% of sRGB and 79% of AdobeRGB is better than Alienware's 91% of sRGB and 71% of Adobe RGB. Because of the use of two machines, I can feel the difference between the two models.

OK, after watching it out, we can start to disassemble it. In general, the XPS15 9550 is very easy to dismantle, and it is also very convenient to clean the dust in the future. This is better than the current generation of Alienware. Do not know DELL å’‹ planning, aw previous advantage is that you can easily replace a variety of accessories, and now even have to remove a fan to disassemble the eight.

The hour has come and start. The screwdriver used is a Nanqi S2 screwdriver set that is pushed many times over the value

A total of 12 screws need to be removed to open the bottom cover. The first is the 10 plum blossom T5 at the bottom.

Open the nameplate, you can also see two Phillips screws, do not forget.

After removing all the screws, look for a card around it and remove it with the buckle open. In fact, it's not a big problem to break the one or two buckles slightly.

With the bottom cover removed, most of the parts are in front of us (the battery is 56Wh, the figure is wrong...). Before starting to replace accessories, it is best to pull out the battery interface, safety first.

I bought this machine with 32G Hynix SSD as a cache disk to accelerate (the truth is not good .... probably because the SSD is used for a long time), only need to screw a screw to remove, do not screw Throw, there is still use. This supports up to 2280mm M2 SSD.

The HDD part only needs to remove the four Phillips screws in the illustration, and remove the hard disk cable to remove it.

Using the 1T blue disk of the Western Digital. As mentioned in the previous article, we can choose to replace the 2.5-inch hard disk drive with a large-capacity battery. In turn, replacing the battery with a 2.5-inch hard drive is also possible. See personal requirements. If you want to install 2.5-inch HDD, this hard drive line is a must, you have to sell it on Taobao, dozens of pieces can be solved, before listening to friends say a few hundred oceans at the repair station

The XPS15 9550 supports 2.5-inch hard disks of 7mm and 9.5mm sizes. If it is a 7mm hard disk, you need to attach the two strips on the hard disk to the two sides of the hard disk and fix the brackets. I installed a 9.5mm disk this time, so I couldn't use it. However, I still had better things left. After 1T SSD cut prices, I could cut my hand again.

The DW 1830 wireless network card in the upper left should be customized by DELL. It seems to be Broadcom's solution and dual antennas.

The original memory is also Hynix's, replace and replace, 16G memory in place.

The M2 SSD is mounted in the same way as the memory. Insert it diagonally and press it with screws to fix it. However, note that the M2 interface is much shorter than the memory interface. Don't press too hard.... Considering the heat problem of the NVME SSD, I also added Sticked with a heat-conducting silicone strip (it is usually attached to the South Bridge).

Looking back at the bottom cover removed, you can see the details of the CNC milling machine. A large Mylar sheet is attached to the bottom, and the Mylar sheet is also attached to the metal sheet to ensure strength. At the same time, the air intake barrier at the bottom is not a complete one, but only opened at the bottom of the two fans. In fact, it can also be dust-proof.

At this point, the hardware replacement is complete, insert the battery cable, and start the system.

At this stage, Win10 is the best system for NVME SSD support, so we recommend that you use win10. In fact, hard to install win7 is also possible, that is, when you install the system you need to load the driver to find the hard drive, and find the driver is also troublesome. Here I use win10 as an example to explain.

The approximate process is as follows:

Before installation, we can write down the genuine serial number of the original machine and use it when it is activated. The simplest way to get the serial number of win10 is to use aid64, which can be found in the operating system column. My machine was bought back without internet, and the system was automatically activated after loading the system....

For hardware, first install the M2 disk and install the system; then install the 2.5-inch disk. This is the conclusion drawn after reading some information. Partition guidance is not easy to cause problems. I am doing so and there is no problem. Friends who are interested can completely mount the hard disk and then install the system, remember to tell LZ back

In terms of software settings, we first downloaded the original CD image from MSDN, and wrote ISO to a U disk production system disk of 8G or above. If you have no experience in this area, please read this article:


SSDs that use the NVME protocol must use UEFI+GPT as the boot mode. For the XPS15, the BIOS defaults to the UEFI boot mode, so this does not need to be changed. As for the GPT disk format, the system will automatically help you when installing win10.

We need to set only two items in the BIOS. Press F2 to enter the BIOS when it is turned on:

Change the SATA mode to AHCI, otherwise you will not find the hard disk when installing the system

Change FN Lock options to Lock mode enable/secondary. In this way, pressing F1 and other keys is not a multimedia function when adjusting the volume and other FN+ key combinations, which is in accordance with the habits of most people.

If your U disk is made correctly, you can see the UEFI boot options are ready in the BIOS.

The system information also shows that the M2 PCIE SSD has been installed.

Press apply to change settings, exit bios, press F12 to select the startup mode. Select UFI boot under UEFI BOOT boot

Successfully entered the installation interface, but also find the hard drive (win10 do not need to load the driver to find NVME's SSD, WIN7 will not work). All the way to the next step to wait for the installation to end. I installed more than two minutes here to enter the system welcome screen...

After installing the system, you see that the storage controller is Microsoft's standard nvme controller

Randomly running a point, can not see at all, but also very slow, directly abort

Install Samsung's driver for the 950 pro (for SM951), download link:


At this time there is Samsung's nvme controller

Both hard drives are normally recognized, the effect of adding silicone strips is indeed good, SM951 is not very hot

At this time, I ran a minute and it was finally normal. Very cool

Q pro from 13 years is not bad

The boot speed will probably maintain this speed

Hard disk with NVME protocol feel? In fact, it is difficult to see the difference between the SATA3 interface SSD and the SATA3 interface. The difference in the boot speed is a few seconds. There are two main differences, one is the speed of software loading. Under NVME's blessing, it is basically seconds to open. The other is copying data, you can see the following scene:

So when copying data or unzipping things, I often see dialogs and flash through, thinking that I haven't finished the process. Who knows I'm lying there?

So, if you have a motherboard that supports the NVME protocol, don't worry about it. Buy it and buy it.

As for the 3D MARK's running points and endurance tests, I didn't do the temperature test. The big gods of the test have done a very good job.

Last but not least, the bought DDR4 2400 is running at 2133 under the XPS15 9550, and there is no XMP-related option in the BIOS... It's embarrassing, but I see XPS15 in the hands of other players. 9550 for 2400 memory will automatically run under 2400, is it because he is I7 I5 I5?

Finally came the summary link. This purchase of the XPS15 9550 gave me a sense of excitement when I bought electronic products that I had not experienced for a long time. May be mainly because of customs clearance wait too long and much lighter than AW 17. I personally are very satisfied with this machine, it is quiet, light, good screen quality, heat dissipation is also possible, all aspects can meet my requirements .

Here I summarize the issues on the xps15 9550 discussed more on the Internet.

1.1080 or 4K?

The future is definitely the world of 4K, but under the current WIN10 blessing, the utilization of notebooks for the high score screen is still too weak, and this is no doubt that the macbook pro will do better. However, the 4K screen version of XPS also has an advantage, that is, the screen color will be better. However, individuals are still more recommended to use 1080

2. Is the screen smear problem serious?

I saw this machine on the DELL official website and it was released in June. It was relatively new (I bought it at the end of June). I specifically tried to see the movie play games, did not feel the problem of screen smear. As far as I know, there are more people who reflect this issue in the early stages, especially under the circumstances. However, as far as I am concerned, this issue does not exist. DELL's latest BIOS for XPS15 also feedback to solve the problem of flash smear on the screen under low light:

3. Samsung NVME driver installed? Still not installed?

In one of the two articles that were tested, one of the gods raised the NVME driver that did not propose to install Samsung.

The environment he tested was using the original PM951 SSD. After installing Samsung's NVME driver, there were several problems:

First, since the installation of this driver, each boot BIOS screen will be reloaded once, and the boot time will be longer for a few seconds. (The earlier version 1.4.6 driver is more obvious, 1.4.17 version driver improves this problem, but Still a few seconds slower than RAID-ON mode)

This point does not appear on my side (BIOS has been updated to A10 released on July 5th), boot BIOS screen is not reloaded

Second, and the first boot after power off, the keyboard is always in a state of loss, need to restart the keyboard again to use the keyboard

This point did not appear on my side. The keyboard is normally used after booting.

Third, another issue that affects the use experience is that after installing a third-party Samsung NVMe driver, the entire notebook cannot wake up once it enters sleep or hibernation. And installing Windows' own driver does not have this problem.

This problem does have this problem. Sleep can occur after sleep, showing a black screen, keyboard lights and power button lights. With regard to the problem of sleep death, some people on the Internet also discussed that the intel graphics card driver/IRST driver was the most important thing. Intel's nuclear program showed that I had updated to the latest, and IRST had not had time to test it because of the time. Then modify the article.

Fourth, this issue is raised by the forum on the big brother D, his hand M5510 (and XPS15 look exactly the same, it can be said that the workstation version of XPS15) After installing the SM951 and Samsung NVME drivers, there has been a reboot time-consuming special The long problem is mainly reflected in the tens of seconds of cards in the DELL logo. This problem first appeared on Alienware that supports NVME, and later it updated the BIOS to resolve it. At present, on this computer in my hand, there is no such problem. I do not know if it is an example.

So, as mentioned above, if the XPS15 you are using is the original PM951, and you are not going to change it, then there is no need to install it. If you change like me, it's still loaded. The problem of sleep does affect the experience a bit, but now it takes a few seconds to boot, and it's not much worse. Maybe later firmware update just fine? In addition, in terms of SSD testing, CDM has better support for NVME than AS SSD, and the data is also more beautiful (see above).

In the subsequent release of the new XPS15 9550, some users reported that the M2 SSD has been changed to a Toshiba disk. Follow-up RD400 listing, if the price is right I will try it out.

On this XPS15 9550 out of the box and upgrade to write here, this tossing process always makes people feel special enjoyment. The overall cost is temporarily as follows: fuselage 5766 (real exchange rate discounted price) + 322 shipping + 300 tariff + 800 SM951 + 350 Toshiba Q PRO + 600 sneak boat memory + shell film 50 + 129 Akihabara re-wiring = 8317. Replaced by the memory and hard drive probably can also sell more than 400, count less than 8K ~

Follow-up thoughts come back to modify, come back regularly to answer questions raised by friends. I wish you all happy in the second half of the year. Thank you~~

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