So many of us that have purchased the Dell XPS 13 (9333) with Haswell core i7 processors have noticed a rather annoying and near constant electrical noise. If you have an earlier generation of this laptop (early 2014 model year) you’ve probably heard this noise. If you’ve looked into this at all, you’ve probably found that Dell has a replacement board to fix this problem.

Unfortunately even after replacing the motherboard, upgrading the BIOS, etc. you’ll still have this noise. That said, there seems to be a simple solution, until an official second fix from Dell is released. This solution is to remove the back cover (Torx T5 required) and unplug the right side speaker from the motherboard.

I believe the noise that people are hearing with the upgraded motherboards is related to poor electrical shielding around that speaker assembly.  Once unplugged the noise will be almost completely gone, (There is still some noise, but nowhere near as loud as before).

I’m thinking that I might try to use RF shielding tape around the entire speaker assembly, as well as below the WIFI card. Sadly, I don’t have a nice scope, so I can’t really go probing around to see where the noise is being introduced.