Acer Predator (Vega 56+Ryzen 2) Helios 500

Try doing a clean install.
Remove the old drivers completely using DDU utility in safe mode, then install latest drivers only (you can reactivate Freesync with some modifications to the registry through a separate utility which was described earlier in the thread - in short, there's no reason to use the Acer drivers anymore) and test it out like that (if you hadn't already).

 

The Acer Helios 500 has a desktop Vega 56 GPU in it... so, technically, the desktop drivers should work fine...
Admittedly, the laptop version was modified to work in a laptop (even though it uses desktop grade drivers).

 

Tried fresh install and with ddu, still not fixed. Tried different versions of adrenalin 2020 and nothing. Just settled with the recomended version. Dont really mind the sleep anyways.

 

Didn't work here either.

 

Has anyone succeeded pushing the GPU higher than 1500Mhz? I tried different power play tables, including desktop ones for 56 and 64, but no matter what I'm getting black screen crash if I apply more than 1480 under load. Any recommendations? Right now I'm running 1450/920 as somewhat stable OC, still a big improvement over stock, with only 150-170W max!

 

I think its because the voltage on vbios of the vega 56 is locked. Thats why we cant push Past 1500 mhz.

 

You can't push it more probably because the voltage is hard-locked.
Just be happy with the existing OC and happily move on.

 

You can use Hybernate mode instead (that seems to work fine).

 

Selling mine in anticipation of the 4000 series laptops. I'd probably keep it if I could put a 3000 desktop chip in it. http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...elios-500-ph517-61-amd-r7-2700-vega56.831995/

 

Guys, has anyone tried to do a clean install of the latest drivers using DDU or AMD driver removal utility with latest chipset drivers as well but in a way that you DISABLE Internet connection BEFORE you remove the existing drivers?

Also, try disabling ULPS after doing all of that and see if that may solve the static noise problem.

A lot of the problems can be attributed to Windows installing their own drivers once you removed the AMD ones from the system.
I'm just curious to see if that helps.

 

Yup, I've done that many times before over the years to beat Windows Update to the install with my drivers over theirs.

DDU booted in Safe Mode, remove the ethernet cable, boot into Windows and install the new driver(s) and then reconnect the ethernet cable.

Sometimes Windows Update will prefer it's driver choice even after going through that, so maybe disable Windows Update before going into Safe Mode would work too.

 

So I got this laptop last September and now Hardware Monitor is saying that the Battery Wear level is at 24% already.

I know battery is not that great but, 24% wear level in just 5 months is crazy! Anything I can do to fix it? I did take out the battery and push the battery reset button but still nothing.

 

Yeah, don't use it on battery would be my recommendation. If you do, only use it for light web browsing. Consider it more of a UPS and not a laptop battery.

 

Possible solution to waking up from sleep with static noise:

On AMD community website, someone posted that when they installed the Radeon Pro for Enterprise Driver, it solved all of their problems.
The laptop wakes up from sleep mode without issues and Freesync also seems to work (though as I no longer have the unit in question, I cannot test/verify).

 

It is true. Tried those drivers and it's basically new drivers with old AMD UI. No problems so far, however in my case I did freesync trick with CRU to get freesync being "supported". Other than that, everything is working fine. Performance is completely the same in all benchmarks I run compared to the newest gaming software from AMD.

 

Nice.
The enterprise driver may be of more use for productivity software too - considering that gaming performance seems to be the same compared to regular drivers.

Oh btw, been meaning to ask if the Enterprise drivers include 'Radeon Chill' option?

 

Yes. They do.
I was with team blue/green for a while. My first red mobile VGA was with Asus G73JH. I was hoping that something changed from that time and opted for a great option for 900$ here from Acer. But unfortunately things haven't changed much from that time. I am still like a beta tester trying to fix things that should work out of the box. So I was playing around with mine and came up with some tweaks for it. Will be posting those later today. Now machine is working the way it should.

 

RX 5500M?

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Yeah, software wise this thing isn't great, but hardware wise it's stellar. I have had to finagle and tweak it quite a bit but it's running great for me now. Here's what I've done to get it working at top speed:

Download and install the latest predator sense from asus website - if you use it - as the version it ships with only works with an old version of Ryzen Master (that is only available from Asus website). I use it as it allows fan speed adjustment, but that's about all I do with it.

Install the latest version of Ryzen Master and find your max o/c - for me it's 4.0ghz all core at 1.325V. I can run 4.1 if I disable SMT, so if all you do is game you can try that and see if you get a higher o/c. For me I do other stuff so leave SMT enabled. If you really want to get the very maximum out of it, you can try per-core o/c and then use process lasso to push games to only the highest clocked cores. Not worth the single digit percentage for me, but might if you really want to push it. With fans at max you won't really be able overheat the cpu or gpu, but I generally leave them on auto so it doesn't sound like a jet and it keeps the cpu under 85C and GPU under 80C. With fans on max they only hit a little over 70C.

Set ram timings to 14,14,32,14,14,46,60ohm,12. You can try tighter but you might get stuck in a boot loop. I did this once at CL12 and had to remove a ram stick to get it to boot and reset the ram timings, resetting bios to defaults didn't work (I think because the timings aren't exposed there). Removing a single stick of ram is a pita as it's under the motherboard, so you'll be disassembling the whole thing to get to it. Luckily that worked for me as otherwise I'm unsure what else to do. Careful here, but the above shouldn't cause a boot loop, at worst some minor application instability. Stock timings are CL17 so it's a pretty big improvement, even if it's still stuck at 2400mhz.

Download and install the latest 20.2.2 drivers and reboot

Download and install msi afterburner. Check 'enable extended overclocking limits' in the settings and reboot again. This is all I use afterburner for, I o/c via the drivers.

install the registry file posted earlier in this thread to increase power limits and reboot again.

Go into the drivers and increase the power to +60%, then test overclocks. I have mine set to 1429/900. It generally hits 1375 in games. I'm mostly cpu limited at this point, so haven't bothered pushing it higher. It peaks around 160W power usage so there's still some headroom as it should run up to ~185W but I don't play anything that hits the gpu hard enough to need more.

If you run into performance issues, go back into the drivers and set the min p-state to 7. I have to do this in certain VR games that are very single thread cpu intensive as the gpu decides to downclock itself causing stutters. I don't know why it does this as the gpu load is still fairly high, but setting the above fixes it. Only issue is it changes idle power draw from ~15W to 35W so will drain the battery faster. I rarely use the battery so it's not a big deal, and if I do want to use it on battery it's easy enough to change it back to min p-state of 0.

With all of the above done, it performs about like a 2700X/vega56 desktop would, which is no slouch, especially at 1080p. Only issue at this point is no Freesync. I disabled sleep a while back and use hibernate so no idea if that issue is still there.

If anyone has ideas on how to enable freesync, that'd be great, but I don't notice any tearing so I'm not overly worried about it. I tried CRU but nothing I did got the drivers to let me switch it on.

 

You should be able to use CRU software to set the refresh rate of the display manually to 60hZ.
That should bring Freesync back into operation.
Also, you could try installing latest Enterprise Radeon Pro drivers - this should also re-enable sleep-mode on the Acer to function properly.

I'm still very disappointed in Acer for not releasing BIOS support for Zen 2 or faster RAM.
Don't get me wrong, the laptop is still strong going forward, but this is a huge dropped ball on Acer's part (along with their termination of support).

 

Faster ram should be possible if the ram has a jedec profile, it just doesn't support xmp (which I agree it should). I'm more disappointed in the lack of zen2 support, I'd throw a 3950x in there if it had support.

So in CRU (and in display settings) it shows both 144hz and 60hz supported already, so do I just switch to the 60hz profile and then see if the option is enabled in the display drivers? Right now I have it set to 144hz instead of 60...

 

Cool.
Here, try to follow this guide:

I) clean install newest drivers,

II) get Custom Resollution Utility (it just adds information in system registry in for display:

CRU (Custom Resolution Utility) Tips, Tricks and Monitors OC (LCD/LED/CRT) | guru3D Forums

III) run CRU and follow the steps (if the image is too small, open it in new tab):



-> step 7: type in refresh rate range - for this display official range is 60 - 144Hz. Then Accept and OK out of the CRU

-> step 8: restart the pc,

-> step 9: notification about freesync display connected should appear, Freesync option is now available!

 

Hello everyone!
As promised my story and tweaks for the system so far. As I said I've expected great user experience out of the box. But unfortunately... I was looking to replace my MSI GT73 and found Helios 500 in my local store with Ryzen 2600, 16Gb of DDR4, 512 Gb SSD and 1Tb of HDD for about 900$. That was very good price/performance here around. I've got Ryzen 2700 lying around and that just pushed me towards this system.
So after getting everything from the store I've faced good old buggy drivers from AMD(really hoped that everything changed for the best, but NO...). More on that later...
I was looking for powerful system with good cooling, but my CPU with MX4 applied idled at around 50C(with frequencies fluctuating around 3.2-4Ghz) and max 75-80C however. That was not what I was looking for and I've start digging how to make my laptop cool on idle and light load, but have full power when needed.
Since we have no ThrottleStop for AMD systems, I've created custom power plan that was giving me low clocks at idle and boost them with any reasonable load. Power plan is attached and can be imported via CMD using powercfg command. Now I am idling at 39C on CPU and 37C on GPU with ambient at 23C and 42-50C while doing light productivity work(chrome browsing, office tasks).

After that I've installed power plan manager to automate my power plans and it automatically switches my power plan to balanced or high performance when I am in game, and getting me back for my custom power plan when I am at the desktop. I am getting max load temps 75-77C for CPU and 69-70C for GPU on full load. Cinebench 15 gives me ~1400 points in multicore on custom power plan, so multicore performance haven't suffered much.
As for the GPU, I've tried bunch of drivers and faced all kinds of problems starting from freesync to static noise from sleep mode. My workaround here, that can allow to stay on more or less recent drivers, is to install Radeon™ Pro Software for Enterprise drivers. These are simply new drivers with old UI. Performance is really in the margin of error with Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.2.2. Attached benchmark results for them.


Got 0 problems with them and no static noise after sleep issue, except that I needed to perform CRU manipulations to enable freesync on them. Installed those after wiping old ones with DDU. But even after that Windows 10 decided that I need most "recent" drivers and automatically installed drivers dated November 2019 through update center. So I had to disable driver updates specifically for GPU via group policy and now I am good. No windows updates for my GPU. System is now super stable and cool as I wanted it to be.
Hope that my workaround will help somebody.

 

$900?
Wow.
That's a really good price for a system of this calibre.
Here in UK, Amazon charges just over £1900 for a brand new Helios 500 2700/V56 with 512GB SSD, 1TB hdd and 16GB RAM.

On e-bay, its possible to find a used one in Germany for about £1100 (which is a lot more reasonable).

 

This is exactly what I did - tried a reset and did it again and still no freesync. Not sure why, but nbd as I don't notice a big difference on this machine for whatever reason.

 

Try removing graphic driver via DDU in safe mode, then clean install and CRU. That way it should work.

 

You know, given that Zen 2 mobile is literally about to be released mid this month apparently, I was content to wait for it, however, I'm actually giving myself pause on it.
Why?
Mainly because Asus is releasing most Zen 2 laptops (with no AMD dGPU's) and absurdly high prices.
Given my negative experience with GL702ZC and overall poor Asus quality control (especially with cooling and noise), I DON'T WANT to get myself an Asus Zen 2 APU with an underpowered NV dGPU.

If anything, in light of the fact that Freesync on Helios 500 PH517-61 can be restored with CRU and sleep-mode reactivated with using Enterprise Pro drivers (which have better use for productivity and identical gaming performance), I'm actually torn between getting myself the Acer again (and not touching the BIOS updates) while basically maxing out the RAM eventually to 64GB and increasing SSD capacity or get the Zen 2 laptop from a different OEM.

Helios 500 is powerful enough to last years to come for productivity and gaming (especially in productivity given its compute power), however, I'm admittedly put off by the fact Acer messed up the RAM positioning below the keyboard which would necessitate disassembly of the entire unit and of course no Zen 2 or fast RAM support.

On another hand, if I wait a bit longer, a possibly more reliable OEM might release a laptop with 4800H and say 5700m (Acer effectively terminated support for Helios 500 in totality) for a reasonable price.
The question is, how much longer is one supposed to wait?

 

If you wait till like summer there might be a MSI I aptop with Ryzen, and Lenovo are releasing ThinkPad with AMD, not sure if they will do Legion with AMD though.

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My concern is that OEM's will be pairing Zen 2 mobile apu's with NV gpu's, and Intel CPU's with AMD dGPU's in laptops.
There might not be any 'all AMD' solutions to choose from, and if there are, I'd be questioning their quality control and cooling performance (also noise).

Waiting until the summer might be viable, but it seems like a long wait.

 

All AMD PC has always been a desktop thing. The RX 5700M is pretty much confirmed spec wise but how much better than the vega 56 mobile it is I actually do not know.
I know for a fact that an OC RX 5700 will beat OC Vega Liquid by a few fps.
In my opinion 2020 is arguably a year AMD will do well with the laptop market specially on CPU side.
That is why I am waiting on big Navi and proper AMD laptop.
HP has also hinted on a laptop with RX 5700M in Q2

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Q2?
Sheesh... OEM's are certainly taking their sweet time releasing Zen 2 mobile.
Dunno, at this point I might just end up getting the Helios 500 again.

 

HP already has a 5500M MXM module. It's a option now on their Zbook 17 G6 Mobile Workstation. It would be great if it eventually had a 5700M and 4800H variant. The pricing would probably be more than most gaming laptops but it would be a really nice workhorse.

 

Interesting, be cool to see if it works in other laptops.

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Since 5600M and 5700M have been out in the wild for a 'while' now, there's really nothing that would prevent them from working in other laptops... OEM's simply need to integrate them into their designs and produce viable cooling assemblies for them.

What will be interesting to see is how those GPU's PERFORM... especially when paired with 4xxxU and 4xxxH series.
I'm thinking the 5500M could be used in some U series APU's as a basic laptop with a decent entry mid-range dGPU (if you opt for one with a dGPU).
5600M/5700M would be reserved for upper end mid-range and higher end gaming (usually APU's of H series) - and by U and H series, I'm talking about Zen 2 mobile.

From what I can tell, both 5600M and 5700M are essentially desktop class GPU chips (seemingly equal hw) with lowered clocks compared to their desktop counterparts (though to be honest, even the desktop versions with stock clocks would probably work just fine in a laptop environment with a nice undervolt... or just a minor underclock up to 100-150MhZ maybe - or both).

Here's a reference on what people were able to achieve by undervolting (and underclocking) their RX 5700XT:
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/testing-undervolting-with-my-5700xt.258313/

I'm thinking OEM's should really start paying attention to GPU testing and optimisation so they can set up each GPU individually to lowest voltages that work for that card (that IS what they are supposed to do - create, optimise and test their own versions from reference designs).

 

And here I pump over 300w daily lol, but it's true that 5700xt does quite well with undervolting.

 

300W?
You mean just 5700XT?
5700XT (at least on stock) doesn't pull more than 250W (or Total Board Power).

But if you ARE indeed pulling so much from the GPU alone (I can see now in your signature its set to 2.2 GhZ), you might want to pull back on the clocks without sacrificing much/any performance and also undervolt in the process.

I think 1900MhZ can achieve same performance as 2GhZ core clocks but with a pretty good reduction in power draw.

I'd definitely recommend it as I don't think you're getting that much more crucial performance with such high clocks (there are diminishing returns to consider).

 

My temperatures are quite low and I game with headphones so dB doesnt bother me at all. Im still tuning for best possible performance as I am also using it now in HWBOT. I am most definitely pulling about 320w on the card using 1.3v and +99 Power slider. As you saw its on my 5700 XT from PowerColor, still trying to get top ten TimeSpy Extreme with it, #12 at the moment.

I leave it there because I am lazy, but I fully understand and promote the idea of undervolting amongst my friends in teamspeak who also have the card. (or the non XT variant)

 

300W does your room heat up quickly? I got Vega 56 pulling 400W making my room feel like a sauna, sometimes I need to open the windows when its - 20 outside LOL
But the card only goes about 75 to 80 on air

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It will if I am enclosed, even my 180w laptop would do that though, I usually leave the window cracked open a few inches and that takes care of that in large part.

 

Well, I've got the Helios 500 (Ryzen/Vega) in my possession again.
Forgotten how responsive/fast this thing is.

Hehe.
Already installed and played Ori and the Will of the Wisps - laptop is running cool and quiet.

Oh yes, I did install latest chipset and GPU drivers (Radeon Pro Enterprise ones).
The Adrenaline drivers are still producing static noise upon bringing the machine out of sleep mode.

Anyway, the Enterprise drivers work great, and Freesync is functioning too (courtesy of CRU software of course)... oh and no sleep issues with Enterprise drivers.

I lodged a report with AMD though about the Adrenaline drivers and static noise... hopefully, they will resolve it at some point... however, I just hope their future Enterprise drivers don't end up with the same problem.

But it got me thinking, is it possible that some portion of the new UI is messing with the machine's ability to come out of sleep properly?

Btw, no hangups with Freesync, RIS or Frame limiting (Radeon Chill) on my end using Enterprise pro drivers.

The only thing left to do is to pop in my second 512GB SSD into the second slot and another 16GB RAM (CL15 2666 MhZ). I figured I should use that RAM since the 2400 MhZ and CL14 is at about £30 more.

Still have software installations to do etc. but otherwise (for right now), things are working fine (oh and I'm not touching the BIOS this time - looks like its using 1.07v, so might as well leave it at that).

Windows is running fine 1909 version.

One negative thing about it is that Microsoft is bundling its own AMD drivers with Window Updates.
I already disabled automatic driver installation... but it got reactivated when Windows upgraded itself to 1909.... sigh.

 

If a BIOS works it's always best to just leave it unless something about the laptop needs to be changed (terrible fan curve or something similar). I feel bad for Dellienware and Asus owners who have BIOS updates pushed through Windows Update at complete random.

 

Its a good thing Acer's bios update isn't pushed through Windows update then.
Usually I installed the BIOS manually. Only the 1.09v didn't install correctly and ended up corrupting the BIOS (previous versions up until 1.08v installed fine).

However, this one came with 1.07v and runs fine it seems (gonna leave it as is of course).
Fortunately for Acer (again), they designed this thing to have masterful cooling which is very quiet in the process - I can't understand why other OEM's don't take the time to do the same (though, to be fair, this laptop seems to be an oddity in regards to cooling and quiet fans on the laptop market- even among other Acer laptops).

Cost cutting is no excuse since we know proper cooling can be done on a laptop and still have it more than affordable.

 

The cooling on this beast is superb which is sadly exceptional even for high end gaming laptops, can't understand it given that some other machines have more heatpipes more fans and higher noise.
Welcome back to the Helios 500 BTW.

 

Use this method via group policy. Working rock solid for me. Whenever you'll decide to update graphic drivers just revert back everything in group policy. No windows update will touch your GPU drivers from now on =).

 

My Windows doesn't have group policy installed.
Tried adding it, but the system still cannot find it

 

Tried it?

Enable Gpedit.msc (Group Policy) in Windows 10 Home

 

That seemed to have worked to get the Group policy up and running (have it open right now).
Now I just need to make the adjustments...

Thank you.

EDIT: Done.
I'll have to restart the OS soon to see if the AMD driver disappeared from Windows update.

 

They won't disappear. They just wont install. There will be installation error in update center.

 

Ah. Good to know

 

Anyone else have a problem with a dim screen after waking from sleep? Not a huge problem as another sleep/wake cycle fixes it but...