Acer Predator (Vega 56+Ryzen 2) Helios 500

Yes, you apply compound to the gpu and hbm modules as they're all cooled by the heatsink.

 

Vega isn't a chiplet, it is a die. Just because you have an interposer and memory integrated on package does not mean that it is a chiplet.

With that said, now that I know what was actually being said, yes, you put paste on the GPU die and both stacks of HBM.

But, you evidently missed my point, which was thinking he was discussing chiplets, e.g. disintegrated chips where components such as memory controllers, south bridge, pcie controllers and the like were separated to a different die, with cores and cache left. The use of chiplet in his statement made me think he was referring to the upcoming Zen 2 designs. I thought the reading of my statement would have made that clear. Chalk it up to miscommunication.

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A chiplet is a term referring to integrating multiple dies on a single package, which is exactly what the Vega56 and vega64 do. Given the context of the thread and recent discussion (acer predator helios 500, repasting it), I'd think that should be enough clue he was talking about the Vega gpu and hbm modules, all of which could be correctly refered to as chips or chiplets or dies.

Maybe the chiplet term has been in the news recently due to the zen2 stuff, but that doesn't really have anything to do with repasting this laptop and the terminology was correct.

In any case, I'll do some temp testing when I get mine on the stock tim and then repaste with tg kryonaut and report back as it doesn't appear it's been done yet.

 

I had no idea what he was talking about which is why I didnt respond lol

 

How's the screen brightness on these units. like below 300 nits?

 

According to this review, right at 300.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/acer-predator-helios-500-amd-ryzen,5566.html

 

Well, the Helios 500 arrived yesterday evening right as I got home from work and I've been playing around with it. When it first got here, I thought I'd made a huge mistake. The box was HUGE and really heavy, I was thinking no way this thing is even portable. However, they had packed the living hell out of it, it was nested in four different boxes with tons of packing, so when I finally got to the laptop I was relieved to find it more portable than I had expected - about half the weight was just packaging. The power brick, however, is like 3-4lbs, it's huge. So while the laptop is fairly portable, it's brought down by the brick, and you're not going anywhere without it.

First impressions were decent, keyboard is probably the best laptop keyboard I've ever used. The keys are really nice to type on, good effort and positive clicks, but ever so slightly wobbly. Externally it's less offensive than I was expecting, it's mostly plain black except for the silver fan outputs and the Predator logo. I may black out the silver cooling surrounds and logo, not a fan of the look. The rgb on the keyboard is ok, I changed the color to a warm yellow and like it better, but the power button and touchpad are still a cold blue and I'd like to get rid of the touchpad lighting, it's not necessary in any way, or at least match it to the keyboard. One of the first things I did was go into the bios and disable the startup sound, again, not a fan. I feel like if they got rid of all of the 'gamer' touches on this thing it'd be a lot better. Give me a blacked out version without the stupid Predator branding and I'd be happy.

Software wise, out of the box it was set to high performance power plan, which doesn't work well with Ryzen. Due to the precision boost clocks and xfr, balanced works better as high performance pins all of the cores at high clocks, leaving them all stuck at 3.4-3.5ghz. Setting it to balanced lets it clock higher on lower loads, so single core boosts up to 4.1ghz and lower 3-4 core loads will hit 3.8ghz or so and overall it runs cooler. I had to download and install Ryzen Master for the Predator sense software to work, but nbd. Radeon drivers were old, 17.12 which are about a year old, so I grabbed the latest 18.12.1 and installed those. Windows also had a bunch of updates to load. It had a few other things installed I didn't want so I uninstalled, but fairly unobtrusive and fairly easy to set up.

Battery life with battery saver and min brightness is around 2 hours browsing the web and downloading stuff. Not good but serviceable in a pinch. I could probably get it higher than that if I limit cpu clocks on battery, but I don't think I'll bother, this thing isn't really meant for that. Only reason I was running on battery was so I could hook into my gigabit lan to grab files off of my main PC, and I decided to see how long it'd last.

Performance wise it's impressive, I was seeing 3.4ghz all core and 1230mhz on the gpu, and temps were hitting a max of 62-63C on both with the stock fan curve using afterburner to monitor. I pumped the fans to max as it has one of the hotkeys setup for it and temps dropped to 48C gpu and 56C cpu, under load! That's extremely impressive, I don't really see any reason to mess with the stock tim, it's already running very cool. There's not danger of throttling, and actually the gpu could probably be pumped up some and maybe a 2700X dropped in, it has plenty of cooling overhead. That'd make one hell of a portable workstation, but I'll probably wait for zen2 and maybe drop the 2700X from my main desktop in this if I upgrade. I have another 16gb of 2400mhz ram in my Dell that I might swap over for full 32gb, but we'll see, it'll depend on how it does on some of the 3df zephyr stuff I'm working on.

 

Aside from potential binning, not much point in dropping in the 2700X when you can just make it run the same clocks, you'll just have to spend the time tuning the voltage.

 

You'll get higher single core clocks on the 2700x - it boosts to 4.35. Not many (if any) 2700's can hit that, as the only way to go over 4.1 is to all core overclock. That's a definite possibility, but if I'm going to swap out my desktop 2700x it'll be easy to drop it in this.

However, I'm now getting the same issue some reviewers did - clocks are stuck at 3.45ghz all core and have stopped boosting up/down. Not sure what did it, I'm going to update chipset drivers and make a few other changes and see if I can get it to properly boost - it cut some gaming fps down 10% as it's stuck at 3.45 instead of boosting up to 3.8 on a few cores. Really odd as when I first changed the power plan to balanced it was definitely boosting properly, it's almost as if it's stuck on high performance power plan.

Edit: figured it out, it's the Power Mode slider above the battery, if set all the way to the right it forces high performance plan and ruins the clock boosting. Dragging it back to the middle (Better Performance) fixes it.

Also, FN+F9 lets you selectively shut off the different lighting, so hitting that twice shuts off the touch pad lighting, which fixes one of my gripes.

 

I wasnt aware that you couldnt match the clocks, but i suppose thats going to be one of the teething issues considering its only 1 of 2 products to feature desktop ryzen chips...

 

So some experimenting with MSI Afterburner, and I can easily set the Vega clocks to 1500mhz gpu and 900mhz HBM, max temps only in the low 60's. This results in boost clocks of 1450mhz and 900mhz HBM. This is actually faster than a stock Vega56 - they run 1475 gpu (resulting in around 1425mhz actual boost clock) and 800mhz on the HBM and most of them run nuclear temps. Not sure if they run really highly binned gpu's in this or the cooling is really that good, but you can boost the clocks 200mhz gpu and 100mhz HBM without issue - no need to even modify the stock fan curve, voltages, power limit or anything. Just to see how much cooling overhead there was, I turned the fans to 100% and the temps dropped to 48C gpu and 54C cpu, which is positively cold. There's TONs of headroom if you want to o/c on this thing. I'm honestly amazed at those temps - I'm basically running with full on no compromise high end desktop performance in a laptop, which is kind of mind boggling to me.

 

Yeah and they came with the 330w brick so lots of headroom to play with iirc

 

Anyone try the 2019 Adrenaline Release?

 

I installed on mine, had to enable clock, voltage and power adjustments in afterburner for the wattman options to show up in radeon settings. Only issue I had is that chill locked the gpu clocks at 150mhz, shutting it off fixed it, though.

 

Does it actually hold 1450/900 under full GPU load? IIRC the power limit is only 120W.

 

Yeah, it was running around ~113W with 99% utilization, so maybe a little left in it. I didn't try any undervolting, not sure if that's possible.

 

Wow, even without an undervolt? What application did you test it with?

 

In gaming, see attached.

 

Interesting. Afterburner is able to monitor GPU power for you?

 

Think will we get bios support for Ryzen 3000s announced around the time of the official release?

 

I'm a cynic but don't think so. If Acer want to offer this system with newer processors they will probably make the new BIOS compatible with the current ones, if they don't (like Asus didn't update their Ryzen systems) not likely.
On the other hand I'm positive that someone will make a modded BIOS sooner or later. Just hoping it will not need an external programmer:
https://octoperf.com/blog/2018/09/02/acer-predator-helios-500-mods/#helios-500-bios-mod

 

I recommend you to install the latest AMD Chipset drivers which also install the Ryzen power profile. The Balanced option on Windows does not work very well with the core scheduling, causing big latency issues on sensitive apps like games and WinRaR.

I also got this laptop but a week ago after selling my Asus GL702ZC and love its performance. The keyboard is easy to type on, there is a very small rattling when the fans are on very low but does not bother me. The screen is not as bright as the Asus but still very bright for indoor use. The sound definitively is more punchier. Overall I am very happy with this powerful laptop.

 

Ryzen balanced power plan hasn't been necessary since last fall, windows updated the balanced plan to no longer park cores so the ryzen balanced plan is redundant.

The problem is the mixed reality portal puts the cpu in its highest state, which runs all 8 cores at their max boost, around 3.4ghz. This despite no load (<5%). If it's allowed to boost itself, it will run only the loaded cores at max boost, which works out to 3.8 to 3.9ghz (see my post with afterburner stats on) in games. That's a ~15% performance hit as iracing is cpu limited in vr, not gpu. It only loads 2-3 cores, and one of them (the render thread that processes draw calls) is the limiting factor.

Unfortunately, it does that no matter what power plan is selected.

 

Did a small upgrade today - I had a 4gb ddr4 2400 stick lying around from another laptop upgrade so grabbed another one for $30 off of Amazon and a 1TB 2.5" HDD as I've already almost filled up the ssd. Install took about 5 minutes, 2 screws to remove the bottom panel, 2 more to remove the drive cage, 4 screws to attach the surround to the 2.5" hdd, plug in the cable and screw everything back together. Now I've got 24GB of ram and 1.25TB of storage to match the compute horsepower!

 

I keep going back and forth between getting i7/1070 and the Ryzen/56. With price being basically a wash, and this destined to be my gaming laptop (I have an MBP for most of other productivity work), I think the single core speed of the i7 wins out. Vega also seems to do worse with DX11 games, and I'm a huge Witcher 3 fan. Finally the power consumption with a desktop CPU and Vega is obviously higher...

On the other hand, the 2700 is a monster, newer DX12 games like Vega better, and it's just nice to get something besides Intel... I'm frozen with indecision, help!

 

Well, I think you pretty well nailed the trade-offs between them. I'd just add that the power consumption doesn't really matter, you'll have to be plugged in with either of them to do anything meaningful.

If it's purely for gaming, the intel/nvidia combo will probable be slightly ahead, game depending. However, I think the amd setup will be more future proof, and right now it's also significantly cheaper, at least in the US. For the current $650 price difference you could grab a 2700X, 2TB 2.5" drive and 16gb of 2933mhz ram and drop them in the AMD laptop and still have money left over.

 

Thanks. When looking at power consumption, I guess it's more about thermals/noise, since it's the same chassis. I did see one review though on YouTube where it looked like the cooler setup for the Ryzen chip is beefier though.

As far as pricing, it's a total wash in the US, at least with the two configs I'm looking at - i7-8750H / 1070 and Ryzen 7 2700 / Vega 56. Intel is $1,699, while AMD is $1,749.

 

Ah, I was comparing to the i9 version, in the case of the i7 it won't have any cpu advantage, even in games, as it only boosts to 4.1ghz.

This thing is over built cooling wise. Fans aren't loud with the stock curve which keeps temps to ~70C. You can turn the fans to max and then it does get loud, but temps drop 20C on both cpu and gpu. That's really only for overclocking, but does bring up one of the gripes with the system - no way to adjust the fan curve. You can run the stock curve, set it to max or set it to another custom, static value (50% drops the temps a few degrees without being too loud). Not a huge deal, but it'd be nice to be able to adjust the curve.

 

I'd much prefer the Ryzen 2700 over a i7-8750H. The 8750H clocks are low and it's a locked CPU. The GPUs are a bit of a wash - the 1070 is cooler and more efficient but they should perform similarly.

I'd choose the AMD version out of those two for sure. An 8950HK would probably change my mind.

 

I wouldn't buy anything for the next 2 weeks. CES 2019 starts Jan 8; there is bound to be some interesting releases and announcements.

 

@polbit

It's always the way this time of year, with CES around the corner and "normal" new laptop release cycle shipping new laptops in Late Feb - April.

Usually it takes a few months for the laptops to arrive after being announced at or around the timing of CES.

If you've been waiting for the after Xmas and New Years sales to get the laptop you've been jones'n for - you might be better off buying now and start enjoying that gem of desire right now.

It may take a good amount of time from announcement to release, and further time for drivers and software to fully release and fix performance and bugs usually seen at the release of new hardware - not to mention production issues to work out - and even more disruptive, hardware issues that need design solutions to resolve in later models.

If you've already been playing the long game waiting for prices to drop on your desired laptop, you might as well follow through and enjoy the pay-off from being patient, and be patient again for the new models later in their life-cycle.

AMD in laptops will also likely lag their new desktop CPU's / GPU's, and the long standing announcement from AMD for high performance GPU's / Navi is for the 2H of 2019, so that might still be the case.

Also, if you buy at the sales now, check the return policy - you likely have 7 - 30 days (or more) to return for full refund (or small restocking fee), so you could time it such that if some miracle arrives from CES you could return your long awaited bargain, and start waiting again.

 

After some more testing, I'd get occasional ctd's with the gpu set to 1500mhz in afterburner, so I dropped to 1450mhz which yields 1350-1375mhz in games and no instability, temps top out around 68C. I probably could get 1500 stable by adding a little voltage but then it'd hit power limits and throttle anyway. That's only 25mhz lower than a desktop Vega56 and the HBM is still running at 900mhz, which is 100mhz higher than a desktop card (same speed as a Vega64). Pretty incredible considering it's rated for 120W vs. 210W for a desktop card. It'd be nice if we could boost power some as there's plenty of cooling headroom, but given it's a laptop there could be power delivery (either vrm or power brick) issues if it's pushed much higher.

 

Had a problem with the camera activating/deactivating all the time for instance when watching videos (youtube and locally). For some reason this stopped after removing the candy crush bloatware, maybe the uninstall forced Windows to correct some configuration?

Edit: More problems, the most significant is that headphones aren't generally detected as plugged in. Sometimes they are but most of the time internal speakers are activated instead - which isn't acceptable for my use case. Reinstall of the audio driver doesn't seem to help, I'll continue troubleshooting. Still an extremely nice machine, things like these aren't exactly uncommon when beginning to use a new computer IME.

Edit 2: Let Windows install a standard Realtek driver and for now the detection seems to work - but it worked sometimes in the past too so will have to wait and see... Camera on/off crap started again but is gone after disabling Waves Nx (!). Can't imagine why branded equalizer software have to access the camera but it may be Windows bugging around as usual.

 

Although googling it doesn't come up with anything, this video shows a new Acer Predator 5000 Ryzen + Vega model

AMD Acer Predator Helios 5000 Notebook Ryzen 7 2700 + AMD Radeon Vega 56 32GB DDR4 256GB SSD 1TB HDD

At about 01:00 into the video...

AMD Launch 2nd Gen Ryzen 3000 Series Mobile At CES 2019 !
OWNorDisown
Published on Jan 13, 2019
AMD at CES 2019: Ryzen Mobile 3000-Series Launched, 2nd Gen Mobile at 15W and 35W to compete against the 15w and 35w Intel chips with integrated graphics. Combined with Vega graphics expect both better CPU and GPU performance plus also improved battery life.

 

At work so can't watch the video but only difference I see is ram size?

 

They don't break out much detail, it may be no change, or it might be an evolutionary change of some details, maybe there will be some comparison of specifications and hardware changes available at some point.

Also the name change is interesting, as the 5000 series is their desktop line, so perhaps Acer is trying to emphasize that the laptop has desktop components? That might be the only real change, besides larger RAM as a new model option.

 

Thanks for sharing.

Either way it looks like they want to continue selling them so at the very least should expect support still. The launch was a hit iffy in this model but maybe the desire for it just wasn't as great as we thought outside of this forum.

 

Hello AMD Helios 500 owners. I am unsure of the state of Wattman on this laptop, but if you are currently unable to access it in Radeon Settings, you might like to try what worked for me on the GL702ZC (Ryzen 1700/RX 580).

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/asus-rog-gl702zc-owners-lounge.809882/page-144#post-10849124

 

Yup, that's the method I use. It's disabled by default but unlocking via afterburner enables it, though I just use afterburner to set the clocks. I then have profiles in Wattman to lock p-state in games to get max clocks.

 

Could you peeps tell me what version of Agesa the bios is running? I currently got a GX531GS (slim thin asus laptop), only got it cause price was pretty low in decemeber but I have ran into an issue and the only replacement I'm considering is this laptop, I'd probably sell the 256gb nvme it comes with and either grab a 512 or 1tb.

I've been hearing great things about the tempeatures and it'll fit the needs of mine, the machine will mostly be for running unreal engine 4 and working on projects in UE4 while not at home.

 

Downloaded CPU-Z and HWINFO both of which should be able to display the AGESA version however I'm not capable to find anything about it. Any other way to find it without rebooting?

It have a very impressive cooling system for sure. Should make a nice workstation as long as you remember it's a big heavy machine.

 

Would be amazing if ryzen 3k could be installed. Sounds like you would be able to reduce heat quite a bit with those cpu

 

@Megol

If you go to hwinfo and under motherboard, it doesn't show it under the bios section in the printout?
I might try to see if I can read the bios file and see what version it currently has.

 

Acer released a new vga driver for the Ryzen laptop.
Can anyone check if they lowered the Freesync vrr window from 60-144 hz to at least 50-144 hz?
It's a long shot since it probably needs a screen panel edid update too, but I still wonder...

 

I'm sorry but I simply can't find anything anywhere that seems related to the AGESA version. Insyde BIOS version 1.07 is essentially all information in both HWINFO and CPU-Z.
Don't know if AMD bundles AGESA updates with CPU microcode updates (long time since my last AMD processor!) but if so microcode revision 8008206, SMU firmware revision 43.19.0

Edit: rebooted and checked the BIOS setup - nothing.

 

Desktop != Desktop replacement

 

Nope 60-144Hz. Planning to make a low Hz screenmode later but don't like doing it in CRU while not having enough free time to fix possible problems. That's from experience...

Well...

 

Did some ram tweaking using ryzen master - it appears the stock ram can run 14-14-14-32-46-11@2400mhz without issue using Ryzen master. However, my additional 8gb (2x4gb) of ram that I had installed can't, it could only run 15-15-15-36-50-11 with all 24gb installed. I haven't tried lower timings than that as you can run into a boot loop (found this out the hard way) where it will POST but then crash when it loads windows, meaning the timings get stuck. If it fails to POST 3x, it will reset the ram timings, but if it posts and you can't get back to ryzen master, you'll have to either re-flash the bios or figure out how to do a full bios reset - using the reset to defaults toggle in the bios doesn't change the ram timings. Luckily I was able to just pull the extra 8gb of ram and it booted up fine, but I don't think I'll try more aggressive settings than that until I find another way to reset the ram timings. I did try out another set of 2x8gb ram I had in another laptop and it worked fine at the cas 14 timings with 32gb total. The system does set the command rate to 2T with all 4 banks populated and 1T with just the stock ram, and that doesn't appear to be adjustable (nor does it appear to meaningfully affect speed). I pulled that ram as I'd rather have 16gb in the other laptop for now, but may put it back in at a later date.

Right now I have the system running 4.0ghz all core with 16gb@2400/cas14 ram and the v56 set to 1450/900. I can get [email protected] on the cpu if I disable SMT, but I tried up to 1.39V and couldn't get it to work with SMT enabled, so I just backed off to 4.0ghz at 1.35V. This makes it barely slower than my 2700X desktop in cinebench, which is pretty impressive for a laptop.

 

It actually ran fine at 4x8gb, but they were matching sticks and may have been a closer match to what comes in it (I have no idea what the stock ram is). The 4gb sticks were not matching, one is hynix and one micron. Still worked fine at cas15, but I'd rather have the slightly higher speed than the extra capacity right now. I can always put the other 2x8gb sticks back in later if I need more than 16gb.

 

Hello everyone! I've been lurking on this forum for a while and have been following this thread since it was created. Recently, I finally made a decision and purchased this laptop. It seems to be really nice. I just wanted to ask everyone a couple of questions on how to set up this thing since I don't get new laptops often and I wanted to set this one up properly. First, I wanted to ask about the battery. I didn't charge it fully the first time before turning it on, manual stated that I just need to plug it in before turning it on. I did turn it off after and let it charge to 100 percent then drained the battery and charged it again. Apparently, Acer suggests doing this three times in order to properly condition a battery. Do you guys think this is necessary and do you think I messed up when prematurely turned it on the first time? Second, do you recommend doing a clean windows install or simple fresh start will do. Also, should I get rid of the recovery partition or keep it just in case? Finally, I got this laptop primarily for it's processor and the fact that people stated that it stayed rather cool. I wanted to ask you guys whatt temps are you getting on GPU and CPU in Heaven benchmark after one run through all areas until it recets with computer on stock settings? I know I sound pretty much illiterate when it comes to laptops but I figured I'd do this one right, so any advices are appreciated. Thank you.

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