Dell G5 SE 5505

Hardware	PCI/USB ID	Working?
GPU	1002:731f	Yes
Wireless	8086:2723	Yes
Bluetooth	8087:0029	Yes
Audio	1022:15e3	Yes
Touchpad	04F3:30CB	Yes
Webcam	0c45:671f	Yes
Ethernet	10ec:8168	Yes

This page describes Dell G5 SE 5505 laptop.

Installation

Disable Secure Boot in your BIOS (press the F2 key on boot). Install Arch Linux as usual using UEFI installation method. You may have to use the amdgpu.runpm=0 kernel parameters if you are experiencing GPU crashes.

Firmware

There are a few ways to update the firmware on this device. Using Windows and the Dell provided tools on the support page for this laptop is certainly one of them, but that method often causes many issues.

Before we begin, make sure UEFI Capsule Updates is enabled in the UEFI settings. Passing firmware updates (especially UEFI or similar I/O updates) from an OS to the NVRAM (where firmware data is "physically stored" on the motherboard) is impossible to achieve otherwise.

Since we are downloading files to a storage medium with very limited storage capacity, it is important to make sure there is sufficient available space in the NVRAM partition. Often times the above referenced Dell support tools used to install capsule updates from Windows fills the NVRAM with dump logs.

Navigate to the /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/ and make sure to remove all dump-* files within this directory, if any.

Now there are no dump files, we can update the system firmware by running fwupd. When running fwupdmgr update your device may restart: do not touch anything, especially the power button/AC adapter and let the updates run their course.

Graphics

Works out of the box, install mesa if you want to use 3D applications. If you want to use the dedicated GPU, use DRI_PRIME=1 command, where command is the command you want to launch with your dGPU (see PRIME#For open source drivers - PRIME). Wayland session works out of the box on gnome with pipewire. AMD's Smart Access Memory (or Resizable BAR) should work since kernel ≥ 5.11.4.

Screen tearing

Works out of the box for Wayland sessions.

For X11, see AMDGPU#Tear free rendering.

Power management

CPU

acpi-cpufreq is working down to 1.40 GHz. amd_pstate fails to load with BIOS Version 1.14.0 (11/30/2022)

kernel: amd_pstate: the _CPC object is not present in SBIOS or ACPI disabled

GPU

Battery life below two hours when amdgpu.runpm=0 is used and the dedicated GPU never turns off.

Since Kernel Version 6.0.x and BIOS Version: 1.13.0 amdgpu power management sees fewer GPU crashes.

Show power management profiles:

# cat /sys/class/drm/card?/device/pp_power_profile_mode

Enable power saving mode (as root):

# echo manual > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level
# echo "2" > /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pp_power_profile_mode

See amdgpu kernel documentation

Suspension and hibernation

Does not work. You can try to enabling its support via BIOS injection, see [1]

Sensors monitoring

By default the kernel loads the k10temp module to check CPU thermals. To monitor GPU temperature and see fan speeds, you will have to force load the dell-smm-hwmon kernel module (see [2] for its documentation), which is not loaded by default on this laptop.

# modprobe dell-smm-hwmon restricted=0 ignore_dmi=1

To make this setting permanent, create:

/etc/modules-load.d/dell-smm-hwmon.conf

dell-smm-hwmon

and

/etc/modprobe.d/dell-smm-hwmon.conf

options dell-smm-hwmon restricted=0 ignore_dmi=1

You should now see a dell result in the result of sensors.

Fan control

An easy way to manually control fans, or to manually create custom fan curves is to use a python script which can more accurately push the fans according to CPU and GPU temperatures. This script also restores the defunct Fn+F7 "boost" functionality by providing a command that manually activates the boost profile defined by UEFI data.

Thermal management, overclocking

CPU

The packages ryzenadj-git^AUR and ryzen-controller-bin^AUR (gui for ryzenadj) should work out of the box to control maximum temperature and TDP of your CPU. For instance, the following command restrict your CPU TDP to 40 Watts and maximum temperature to 70°C (perfectly safe on this laptop)

# ryzenadj -a 40000 -b 40000 -c 40000 -f 70

Warning: Do not touch anything that you do not understand, a too high TDP or temperature can permanently damage your CPU/iGPU !

see [3] and [4] for detailed instructions on how to use theses tools.

Undervolting and overclocking are not available on this laptop, zenstates-git^AUR does not seem to have any effect on zen2 processors see [5] .

Also see Improving performance for more performance tricks.

GPU

You can try to use corectrl. Also see AMDGPU#Overclocking.