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Comment by bobowzki | Hacker News Reader

Bought a Dell XPS 13 and then returned it because of the horrible coil whine.

The new BIOS updates addressed the whine issues I had. Might have been worth checking out before just taking it back :)

EDIT: To be clear, my issues were resolved after an update back in Dec 2017: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDet...

"Optimize CPU loading to Improve EE noise" is specifically one of the issues that BIOS update addresses.

Wow, I'm impressed that a BIOS update can fix a coil whine. Got any background info on how they did it? Or did they just disable some core hardware feature for it?

I have no idea on the implementation, but it seems that they resolved it with 'CPU loading' optimizations: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDet...

Oh, that is great news. I have an XPS 13 (9350) and the whine is incredibly frustrating.

This is one thing I've seen mentioned a lot, but never really noticed. Though my office (where I mostly use the laptop) is near an HVAC system, which usually provides a few dB of background noise to drown out subtler sounds.

Surprisingly, I found coil whine much harder for the ears than fans. I installed an APC UPS under my desk, and there is a slight coil whine that it driving me nuts, while my GPU fans going crazy when I play never bothered me.

Make sure to install the Dell power management tools. Could be Placebo but I've noticed the whine significantly less with them installed.

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