New Acer Predator Helios 300 with 9th gen cpu and gtx 1660 ti

https://www.harveynorman.com.au/acer-predator-helios-300-ph315-52-718q-15-6-inch-gaming-laptop.html

https://www.notebookcheck.net/2019-...with-hip-and-edgy-narrow-bezels.416187.0.html

 

thinking about buying this, good deal on amazon.

 

Got mine on prime day. Happy about the price-performance but it's definitely not the perfect 9750h-1660ti unit. Optimus and throttle to 3.5ghz with its full 56w turbo load (thermally not doing too badly with a pushed down heatsink and pads to raise the bottom for its size). Hopefully fan mod and hooking this up to an external display will solve the optimus and completely solve the thermal issues in one swoop. 3rd fan should also let me run the original 2 at lower rpms for equal or better cooling vs max with less noise.

 

What did you get it for on prime day?

What did you pick it up for $ on prime day? Can you explain a bit more detail about the mods your going to do?

Solve the optimus? Can you explain.

I did watch some mod videos on this machine. Repasting, fan vacumes and coolers can help with temps along with duel channel memory. Repasting voids the warranty though if thats a concern. Their is an extra Sata 3 of course so thats an easy one. Anyone recommend their favorite Sata ssd for this machine?

Here are a few good vids on the Helios 300 15inch; Link0, Link1, Link2, Link3.

 

I picked it up for 999.99 (used 270 in gift card money I'd been saving to jump from my old fx502vm). The laptop drives integrated display by using igpu. No option for dgpu. Optimus is less than ideal seeing as (gsync or external monitor via displayport are driven by dgpu so no igpu caused penalty)

The mod I'll do is simple: Cut and fit a third fan, small fan (either a 40mm x 6mm or 50mm x10 mm fan) into the backcover so that it'll sit in between the original 2, and use one of 3 USB ports as a power source (will strip usb cable for positive-negative leads to splice to the fan leads if it's 5Vdc; else I'll grab a 5v-12v stepup converter in addition). Repasting doesn't void the system in my jurisdiction. It's a normal maintenance activity and covered by Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act as in accordance to the FTC's interpretation in 2018. My fan mod not covered but this isn't something that'll cause an issue as long as I clean the areas I cut well so bits of plastic don't get where they shouldn't go.
I could invest in blowers to extract air but I'd like to better maintain portability (must fit in my backpack for airtravel easily) and also turbo'd fans are extremely loud. 3 fans at lower rpms should still be able to equal 2 at maxxed in terms of heat flow but not make as much noise. My unit's been raised with furniture pads in the corners so even if the 10mm fan is jutting out, there's enough clearance for that to not be problematic. Mine came ootb with 8GBx2 cl19 2666mhz ram as par course for the prime day config.

The point of the mod is to lower thermals when I do something like play games on rpcs3 which can be very demanding on the cpu and decently demanding on the gpu (depending on the game in question). Lower thermals should also decrease power consumption for a given frequency by lowering leakage (leakage increasing with temperature is a very, very well investigated phenomena with semi conductors in general btw; I observed repeatable temperature dependant variation on my old fx502 with the 6300hq between consumption numbers at the beginning vs end of a stress test or benchmark) as a slight bonus. The more important thing to me is that acer set prochot to 92C. I think this may or may not be a clue in that several board components are only rated to 85C and I've had the system sit in the mid to high 80s when under worst case load like what rpcs3 can do. This is primarily why I really would like to lower thermals by at least another 5 and ideally 10C and not give up performance.

About the leakage phenomena: https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...-power-consumption-with-the-i7-2600k.2200205/

Much larger power consumption but the percentage delta between both this guy and normal laptops at say 50 vs 90C shouldn't be significantly different

 

Were talking about the same laptop here, the 15 inch helios 300 from 2019 with a GTX 1660 Ti 6GB. Your saying the GTX 1660 Ti 6GB is a igpu and not a dgpu?

cross that, sorry iv been out of the loop awhile with pcb's and laptops in general. I think im understanding what your describing.

 

I am talking about the helios 300 2019. The display being DRIVEN by igpu is the issue because the dgpu is being treated as a co-processor so cpu-> gpu -> igpu -> display instead of cpu -> dgpu -> display
That extra hop from dgpu to the igpu eats some bandwidth and eats some of the power of the cpu (because of igpu involvement). Especially with higher frame rate games you don't want optimus on or at least the option to drive display with dgpu which is where gsync and external displays come in.

If you're gaming and not being cpu bottlenecked nor going for high frame rates this doesn't matter. If you are you want a MUX switch or just no optimus in general.

I'm in a power limited situation and want to maintain or reduce power consumption while getting higher frequencies for better performance.

 

Very interesting, I havent heard about this. Its not a deal breaker for this kinda machine though you woundnt say because obviously you bought in in the first place. How much of a performance hit is their? Is this common in this segment of gaming laptop?

Ok so if im reading you correctly the reason they use the igpu to drive the display is because of optimus? Machines without optimus wouldnt use an igpu to drive the screen?

 

Yes to the last paragraph. Machines such as my old fx502vm which had disabled igpu just used the dgpu to drive display. The performance penalty from what I've been told by others on discord who have MUX switches is about 10 to 15% in situations where optimus would matter and negligible/identical outside the situations I outlined above if stuttering due to driver bugginess doesn't happen. The stuttering I'm referring to is if say the driver bugs and switches from dgpu to igpu and then back.

I didn't consider optimus a deal breaker because I was already running with an external monitor with my asus Fx502vm at home (I honestly really enjoy the motion characteristics of the dell s2417dg), but if I didn't have my monitor this might've been a deal breaker for me. I honestly just tried for a 8750h or better and at least a gtx 1060 6gb equivalent or better with the best price-perf I could find. The helios 300 seems to fit the bill nicely when I saw stress test results from other people.

 

Well one could easily find out by comparing external performance with the integrated screen right? Thanks for explaining this stuff, very much appreciated.

 

Small little update here, haven't done all my mods yet. But i did do a stress test where the only difference between it and a prior one were this one was hooked to my external 1440p monitor and heaven was set to 1080p.
So it does appear that all 3 or so odd watts that were going through igpu have gone to cores this time bumping me up the 3.6ghz all. Temperatures weren't the best but not bad given conditions (my home is also about 2 or 3C warmer than wherever the earlier test was done).