Hello! I received my Batch 9 FW 13 Pro (Intel) last week and it’s been my absolute favorite laptop yet. I’ve been showing it around some, but after taking the input cover off for a peek, my display started flickering. It doesn’t seem to flicker in BIOS but it does in TTY and the desktop.
After some searching, I tried resetting the cable a few times and looking to see if there was anything pinched. I also saw that I could set the kernel option (xe.enable_psr=0). This seems to take care of the issue but has me worried that there is an underlying hardware issue here. I’m also worried that this will have an effect on battery life, that’s probably the most important feature to me. Edit: the battery life is noticeably worse after making this change
I’m been on NixOS (w/ a locked flake) this entire time, so my underlying software hasn’t changed at all.
Just for good measure the other end of the display cable may have come loose in transit. It is much more involved to get to it though.
Start a ticket with support if not done so already. The BIOS screen is not a heavy driver or the display so that is not as surprising.
Maybe get a Fedora or an Ubuntu USB and bring up a live session and see if the pattern still exists. If not then the display is ok and it is OS related.
I took it apart again tonight and took a look at the eDP cable connection behind the display. It was taped in pretty good, so I didn’t pull it out to re-seat it. I also re-seated the secondary cable harness and made sure that both cables were routed well. After that, I haven’t been able to reproduce the issue… hopefully it’s good now I opened a support ticket earlier, but if this issue doesn’t come back in few days I’ll mark it as resolved
Fantastic, it probably was just not making a solid enough connection. I had a similar issue when I had to swap my standalone 11th Gen board with the one in a a laptop because a firmware update went weird on me and the only way I knew to fix it was by having it in a laptop config with a battery.
When I put the original 11th Gen main board back in the laptop after fixing the standalone one the display was a little iffy, took it apart and reseated it twice and the issue never came back.
The little connnector pins are so small and the slightest misalignment can cause issues like what was witnessed. I was probably too gentle to begin with because I was cautious of bending connector contacts if it was not perfectly aligned. That is the issue with being much older, my fingers are much bigger and wider than when I was really young and could be more dexterous inside a computer. Plus everything has continues to get smaller and more dense over time so that is not helping too!
I opened a support ticket earlier, but if this issue doesn’t come back in few days I’ll mark it as resolved