Dell XPS 8930 RealTek HD Audio Interface Review

[Azeia]

Don't overpay for an "audiophile" motherboard. Buy an outboard USB DAC instead. This site has uncovered (and covered) quite a few inexpensive - or dare I say cheap - yet very high-performing USB DACs.

Would still be interesting to see if their claims stand up to measurements though. In my situation I am currently using my Crosshair VII Hero's analog out for my speakers, since they're not exactly fancy speakers anyways (I might switch to something better next year), but I do have a DX3 Pro for my headphones of course.

I didn't buy this motherboard because of it's audio marketing tho, it was more because of it's high quality VRMs, since I got the 16-core Ryzen CPU and wanted to make sure I had good power delivery, I also didn't want an X570 board due to those blasted chipset fans.

 

[NTomokawa]

16-core Ryzen CPU and wanted to make sure I had good power delivery

Of course. That makes sense, especially if you overclock.

One of these days I'm building a Ryzen computer. One of these days...

 

[Bruce Morgen]

You can find out the exact Realtek chip number via the "Realtek High Definition Audio Manager" utility, which if you have it installed will be clickable from one of Control Panel's "Icons" views -- just click the "i" button in the lower right hand corner just above the "OK" button.

 

[amirm]

You can find out the exact Realtek chip number via the "Realtek High Definition Audio Manager" utility, which if you have it installed will be clickable from one of Control Panel's "Icons" views -- just click the "i" button in the lower right hand corner just above the "OK" button.

Dell doesn't ship with that utility.

 

[Bruce Morgen]

Dell doesn't ship with that utility.

Assuming you're interested, the ZIPfile is only 267MB and apparently includes the latest drivers as well as the utility, which also has a crude (but effective) EQ feature and a few other gizmos. AFAIK it works with Windows 10 and any extant Realtek chip. If you'd like, I can e-mail it to you.

 

[bennetng]

The setup guide to the DELL XPS 8930 states you have a Realtek ALC3861 chip inside, but the vendor code DEV_0899 identifies it as ALC899 - for which I cannot find any datasheet.

I'll tell you something: that Realtek chip may well be rooted in the 48kHz world, my previous HTPC had a ALC889 inside, using an insidious implicit resampling scheme to get 44100 (see chapter 7.2.5) and a single clock running at 24MHz (chapter 7.1.1) to create all output frequencies.

@amirm Perhaps you could venture a 48kHz test to see if that fares any better?

PS: the delivery scheme for the source data ("providing a low long term frequency drift") as described in 7.2.5:
View attachment 42691
View attachment 42692

Most (every?) Realtek chip does this but the effect is not as dramatic as this review. See my ALC892 tests here. I still got 82dB (-3dBFS) SINAD at 44.1k.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-sample-rate-is-enough.4037/page-3#post-95240

With these kinds of codecs something like an AP is not necessary to verify the quality. It is just Dell screwed up the whole thing, not the Realtek chip itself.

 

[amirm]

Assuming you're interested, the ZIPfile is only 267MB and apparently includes the latest drivers as well as the utility, which also has a crude (but effective) EQ feature and a few other gizmos. AFAIK it works with Windows 10 and any extant Realtek chip. If you'd like, I can e-mail it to you.

267 megabytes??? I shudder to think what all will break after that monster install.

I will be returning this Dell machine once I get my custom build going. So no, not interested in digging into what it has beyond this.

 

[mshenay]

267 megabytes??? I shudder to think what all will break after that monster install.

I will be returning this Dell machine once I get my custom build going. So no, not interested in digging into what it has beyond this.

I'll admit I enjoy my little Dell Touch Screen Laptop but I've had a custom built PC since 2012? Highly recommended, nice to see these measurements tho. But heck even before I got into all this audio madness I never liked to listen to music from the "Pc headphone jack" always sounded bad. I had a few CD players and eventually a Zune HD, likely not a huge improvement but it was better enough to my ears

PC was just for video games and youtube lol

 

[mkawa]

the custom build is using an aorus z390 master. codex is advertised as alc1220-vb, dac is ess 9118. it has one of those dac-up ports if you guys who also use one want to test whether better supposedly better usb power regulation helps. my guess is that it makes no difference except for with poor usb implementations. eg it might help with an smsl sanskrit 10th or some poor schiit designs.

regardless, i'm hoping (i built it) that it will be much faster and more reliable for amir once he gets set up on it. ahoy then.

 

[Fone]

Frank Azor ran the Alienware/XPS group at Dell. He left Dell in the summer. I don't think those groups produced particularly good computers but now those groups seem to suffer a leadership vacuum.

I have some XPS laptops; the industrial design is beautiful. But the engineering is poor overall. After 4 generations of basically the same laptop, Dell is still trying to sort out the BIOS and some drivers.

The headphone jacks and related audio are a mess in every XPS laptop I have owned. Swapping from internal speakers to headphones frequently requires a full reboot of the laptops (still). The waves audio integration is a mess and somehow keeps trying to reinstall itself.

The XPS laptop is a sleek productivity laptop.If you are willing to clean install windows, experiment with drivers directly from the makers, repaste the CPU/GPU, don't need good DPC latency performance, do not need sleep to work properly, can address backpack overheating scenarios, and will not use the internal headphone jack. . .

(Oh Bluetooth and USB3 are wonky on the older 9550 and 9560. I can't speak for the two newer models (which look identical))

 

[jcadduono]

267 megabytes??? I shudder to think what all will break after that monster install.

I will be returning this Dell machine once I get my custom build going. So no, not interested in digging into what it has beyond this.

That is a shame, as PCI audio card drivers tend to engage certain registers that can drastically improve the audio vs. Windows generic driver. (in the case of mine, removing nearly all the background hiss and occasional crackling)
In case you decide to try the Realtek drivers, I've gone and copied just the bare minimum of the latest Dell Realtek Audio driver into a zip for you:
https://adduono.com/mirror/RealtekHDAudio_DELL_6.0.8858.1_WHQL_Win64.zip (91.8 MB)
You should be able to right click your Realtek Audio device in Device Manager, click Update Driver, browse my computer, and select the extracted zip folder. It should try to install from HDXDELLCSMB2018.inf. (I found your ALC899 device and SUBSYS code in there)
As an INF only install, you can probably remove the entire package just by using right click Realtek Audio and Uninstall device (check Delete the driver software for this device)
If you need to configure additional options (unlikely needed beyond installing the driver INF), you can download the Realtek Audio Console from the Windows store as it is no longer bundled with drivers, and very easy to right click Uninstall as well.

 

[Degru]

The funny thing is many of Dell's business laptops actually have very respectable headphone outputs for being an old built in.. my Precision M4600 puts out a little over 1Vrms and sounds quite decent with everything I've plugged into it thus far; I can even listen to my er4b through it without cringing, which cannot be said for my modern smartphone (moto g7 power) nor any of my older Thinkpads (all outputting less than 0.5Vrms and sounding like crap). The only major downside with it is it has 30 ohm output impedance, which luckily does not affect any of the headphones I use with it to any meaningful degree.

Side note: I also encountered very similar results to the measurements here trying to use the built in from my desktop.. Close to 1Vrms into an amp but almost nothing into headphone loads. It wasn't hard clipping at max, however I did notice significant droop in the bass even through amp; it lost all impact and made me think something was up with my amp at first. I was hoping for an easy way to use HeSuVi without installing extra software (since built in had surround outputs), but alas it was not meant to be.

 

[kn0ppers]

incredible!

We have found something that perform worse than an Audio GD product!

Conclusion: We need discrete R2R DACs on PC Motherboards?!

 

[NTomokawa]

We need discrete R2R DACs on PC Motherboards?!

Oh Goodness please don't give them any ideas.

 

[majingotan]

Conclusion: We need discrete R2R DACs on PC Motherboards?!

We might create the worst performing DAC of all time lol

 

[Jimster480]

Incredibly poor. I remember listening to my realtek interface through my work desktop and my phone would just blow it out of the water.
It wasn't until later that I discovered hifi USB DAC's and the difference is night and day even with most high end laptops today.

 

[Fone]

Dell XPS laptop headphone outs are terrible (in 9550 and 9560 models I own). Very obvious distortion and not much power. Frequently laptop requires a reboot when removing the headphones from the jack. The wonky Waves software keeps self installing and is driving me nuts.

 

[kn0ppers]

I would be interested to see how MacBooks perform in this regard? Are there any tests available (haven't looked properly yet)?

After all, they have hardware and software under their control, little driver issues, for example their WiFi (from my experience) works better than any other portable device I owned. They showed they surely can bring decent audio quality in a very low footprint with their usb-c adapter. Shouldn't be too difficult to find one to test?

I might be wrong here, but I think they used custom Cirrus Logic audio codecs in quite a few devices in the past.

 

[amirm]

I would be interested to see how MacBooks perform in this regard? Are there any tests available (haven't looked properly yet)?

I have a MacBook that I plan to test at some point. It is a pain because my analyzer software doesn't run on it so I have to play files one at a time.

 

[majingotan]

I have a MacBook that I plan to test at some point. It is a pain because my analyzer software doesn't run on it so I have to play files one at a time.

Bootcamp or Parallel's software?