The areas where users actually rest their fingers, namely the keyboard and touchpad, stay even cooler, never getting anywhere near uncomfortably hot. These measurements also refer to the hottest area right above the CPU and GPU. The same area above the keyboard often reaches 120+☏ in our thermal testing of other laptops, so both the XPS 15 and 17 keep things pretty cool. We ran the stress test again with both laptops in Optimized mode, and the temperatures stayed around 102☏ for the XPS 17 and 98☏ for the and XPS 15. However, switching to Optimized mode barely raises these temperatures. These temperatures are quite good considering the hardware these systems are packing. ![]() During the stress test, the area above the keyboard sat around 101☏ in the case of the XPS 17 and 96☏ on the XPS 15. Since this setting increases fan speed, it does a good job cooling down the system components. Our thermal testing reinforces our view that users probably shouldn’t bother with Ultra Performance mode unless you want to maintain performance over more extended durations. However, as we mentioned at the top of the previous page, we didn’t observe any performance difference between Ultra Performance and Optimized, so we recommend that users stick to the default Optimized mode to cut down on unnecessary fan chatter. While in Ultra Performance mode, the XPS 17 reaches a level of fan noise on par with some dedicated gaming laptops running at full tilt. Our takeaway from this testing is that neither laptop gets annoyingly loud under heavy load. Nonetheless, the change was minimal enough not to be noticeable without the help of the sound meter. We made sure to mount the sound meter on a tripod and run the tests back-to-back to avoid moving either the laptop or the sound meter, so we’re not sure why Ultra Performance mode resulted in a slight decrease in fan noise from the XPS 15. In Ultra Performance mode, the smaller XPS laptop put out around 44.8dB of fan noise. Oddly, though, we didn’t measure a noise increase, but rather a decrease in the case of the XPS 15. Dell’s power manager utility says that Ultra Performance mode increases fan speed, so we unsurprisingly observed an increase in fan noise with the XPS 17 set to Ultra Performance, measuring around 51.5dB during the test. While in Optimized mode, the fan noise coming from the XPS 17 stayed around 48.5dB, and the XPS 15 consistently produced around 45.6dB of fan noise. I've never tried to make a call to the DoBFn method outside of C# but I'll play with that and see what I come up with.Regardless of setting, the fans in both laptops quickly spun up and stayed steady during the runs. "Class" and "Selector" are both shorts and I have some of the possible values listed here and here, with links to where I got them from (Linux code). It has a single parameter called "Data" which takes the byte array buffer that represents the command. The "DoBFn" is the method that needs to be called. In my limited experience, the presence of this method is the indicator that the system supports this WMI interface. The BFn class has a method named "DoBFn". This one lists all of the methods in the root/wmi namespace with the class that they are attached to. > Get-WmiObject -Namespace root/wmi -List | select _Path -Expand Methods | select Origin, Name, _Path > Get-WmiObject -Namespace root/wmi -Class BFn I've done some PowerShell mucking around this area before, but my comfort level with the syntax isn't the greatest. I care a lot of about fan control so I have gotten it to a point where it is workable for my purposes, but I haven't been able to find time to finish a fully fleshed out release.) (This is a sort of hobby / side project for me. ![]() Regarding logging, I haven't fully built that out in Dell Fan Management but if you run it from the command line, you will get some text log entries dumped out there. Starting in 2021 (Tiger Lake systems) they removed the old interface that HWiNFO and other tools that can deal with Dell fans were using, so WMI is the only way to go now that I am aware of. I think any Dell system from 2018+ (maybe older), desktops included, supports the same WMI interface for reading the fan speeds. ![]() I did a lot of slinking around Dell's libsmbios C code (for Linux SMBIOS support), a lot of BIOS token/variable dumps, and some reverse-engineered Dell Power Manager code to figure this out. I am author of Dell Fan Management and I would be happy to pass along any information to help with this implementation.
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