Dell G5 SE 5505

Hardware	PCI/USB ID	Working?
GPU		Yes
Wireless		Yes
Bluetooth		Yes
Audio		Yes
Touchpad		Yes
Webcam		Yes
Ethernet		Yes

This page describes Dell G5 SE 5505 laptop.

Pre-installation actions

• Disable Secure Boot in your BIOS (press the F2 key on boot).

Installation notes

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.

BIOS updating, GPU firmware updating

Use windows to update BIOS and GPU firmware. BIOS can be updated through the BIOS though.

Graphics

Works out of the box, install the mesa if you want to use 3D applications. If you want to use the dGPU, 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 on kernel greater than 5.11.4.

External monitor

Works out of the box. The USB-c port carry a display port signal.

Screen tearing

• Works out of the box for wayland sessions. (for example, latest GNOME Desktop environment uses wayland by default)
• For X11: install xf86-video-amdgpu

Note: Arch supplies default configuration files in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/, and no extra configuration is necessary for most setups.

If no *0-amdgpu.conf is present in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ folder. Then,copy default amdgpu .conf file from /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/.

Example:

cp /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/

Edit the .conf file, and add:

Option "TearFree" "true"

Example:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-amdgpu.conf

Section "OutputClass"
        Identifier "AMDgpu"
        MatchDriver "amdgpu"
        Driver "amdgpu"
        Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection

Suspend-To-RAM, hibernation

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

Keyboard

Keyboard, functional keys and backlight in GNOME/KDE (and maybe other DEs) works perfectly fine.

Control keyboard backlight

See Keyboard backlight.

Temperature monitoring, Fan control

Monitoring

By default the kernel loads the k10temp module to check cpu thermals.

$ sensors

 k10temp-pci-00c3
 Adapter: PCI adapter
 Tctl:         +38.0°C  
 Tdie:         +38.0°C

To monitor GPU temp, and see fan speeds you will have to force load the dell-smm-hwmon Kernel module (see [2] for documentation), which is not loaded by default on this laptop.

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

To make this setting persist upon reboot edit your /etc/modules-load.d/dell-smm-hwmon.conf file

dell-smm-hwmon

and your /etc/modprobe.d/dell-smm-hwmon.conf file

# This file must be at /etc/modprobe.d/
options dell-smm-hwmon restricted=0 ignore_dmi=1

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

dell_smm-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
Processor Fan:    0 RPM
Video Fan:        0 RPM
Other:          +37.0°C  
CPU:            +40.0°C  
Ambient:        +38.0°C  
GPU:            +38.0°C  
Other:          +37.0°C

Scripts to control fans

The easy way is to use this python script which can push the fans according to the cpu and gpu temperatures.

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^AUR. Also see AMDGPU#Overclocking.