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. Regardless of setting, the fans in both laptops quickly spun up and stayed steady during the runs.
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