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Comment by kingosticks | Hacker News Reader

My XPS 13 9350 is undoubtedly the best computer I've ever owned. I don't seem to have this coil whine thing or I just don't notice it. The 8GB of RAM has served me well and I'd never want to sacrifice any of the battery life for increasing that - it's an ultrabook after all. I've always run Ubuntu and while I did have problems with WiFi and resuming when it first came out, they are both rock solid now. I have never tried to use the webcam, I don't even know if it works, so I'm happy with the design choice to minimise the top bezel. I personally see no reason to buy the new model but only because this one is so good.

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Coil whine can easily be tested with this website (probably not a good link if you have epilepsy or Chiari malformations)

https://thume.ca/screentunes/

In my experience virtually all LCD displays have it to some degree, you just don't notice it except with certain patterns (like that one) that interact with the scanout mechanism.

I'm not sure why I would actively seek it out - ignorance is bliss.

This is very interesting. I found my Surface Pro 4 had a very audible buzzing while my 12.9 inch iPad Pro didn't have any sound. It could be that the latter is better sealed so it muffles the sound effectively.

To be sure, what you're hearing from that website is not coil whine (inductor phenomena), but mechanical resonance caused by piezoelectric effect on solid state MLCCs[1] charging/discharging in your monitor during frame refresh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_capacitor#Microphony

In common parlance, I'm not sure there's a distinction between coil whine and capacitor whine. That is probably not something you can distinguish without taking apart the component in question.

If by common parlance you mean amongst not electronics engineers, then I can see where you're coming from. The miscommunication that I'm seeing is asymptotic to the common misuse of Baud as a universal measure of bitrate...or in programmer speak, char and uint8 as immutable equivalents. From a hardware design perspective, qualifying the whine with coil transforms the remark from generally descriptive to technically specific with distinct implications.

Disassembly may not be required to trace root cause with high probability depending on the type of hardware exhibiting the issue, e.g. on a laptop, manifests upon affixing power adapter (as some have described) or tracks display pattern (as parent link).

I have an XPS 15 9560 and I _love_ it. Never had coil whine or any of those problems. I did spend a bit of time re-pasting the CPU* when I noticed CPU throttling during gaming. That fixed it.

I put 32GB of ram and (now) Fedora 27 on it. I love everything about it. LOVE!

The comment I get the most is "that screen is incredible" from mac users.

* https://www.ultrabookreview.com/14875-fix-throttling-xps-15/ (PS, unlike a mac this is something you can do. Which is part of the beauty). To get the gpu dynamic switching working "right" with bumblebee you need to compile a custom kernel with CFG_ACPI_REV_OVERRIDE. See https://xps13.landweg.nl/

> I did spend a bit of time re-pasting [...] unlike a mac this is something you can do

Why couldn't you? [0][1].

[0]: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Image/meta/6JoCTCytFZE4gSOU

[1]: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Function...

What resolution screen? I love the screen on my precision 5520 (basically the same computer) but I'm having a hell of a time with DPI scaling with distros I've tried.

Scaling is ten times worse than it is on a Windows

I also have the XPS 9350 and love it. Noticed a little coil whine at first but it went away after the first BIOS upgrade.

I noticed that the 9370 went from 3200x1800 to 3840x2160. Not sure if that's something worth doing at 13.3"

I just replaced my 5 year old XPS 13 and didn't even bother researching other laptops. Hands down the best hardware I've ever owned.

Same experience. I got XPS 9350 and could not be happier. It's been my main machine for over a year until it got stolen :(

Then I got a Thinkpad Carbon X1 and I like it, but not as much as I liked my XPS.

Both are great dev machines, but XPS is somehow nicer to use in my experience (and I know all the Thinkpad fans will kill me for saying that :))

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