Aorus - Some interesting files

Glad we can agree on the fact that P650SG, like most other laptops, do throttle under certain conditions as it was previously stated that it never did, which is incorrect.

I considered a couple of Clevos (sold under a different name though) but in the end came to the conclusion that I wanted a powerful, light (well, relatively at least ) and slim 17" and I couldn't find a better option than the Aorus X7 Pro. Clevo do have a few 17" but quite bulky in comparison (at least the ones sold here). For anyone wanting a powerful 15" the Clevos are probably a nice option though, as are the MSI GS60.

 

#Main post edit: added BIOS archive password

On an unrelated note, does anyone have an Aorus X7 Pro (X7v3) service manual?

 

All good and well, but I'm glad there is a company out there that is innovative and is pushing the limits. It's up to the potential buys if he want the trade-offs or not. So go back to you tank like 55 miles per hour 2 ton vehicle, I'll gladly spin my Ferrari (*) and take the shortcomings.

(*) not sure what your experiences are with top cars, but in contrast of maybe popular believe they too come with trade-offs and shortcomings attributable to the limits or form factor they are trying to achieve. That's something that you know as a consumer for such products, there's always that Chevrolet pickup truck if you want stability and toughness

 

Not a good analogy. It's like driving a tank at 150mph or a ferrari at 150mph. One just keeps on moving regardless of what's in front of it while the other will crash and burn with the slightest bump. It's not like the bigger and thicker laptops move slower. They just aren't as light and sleek.

 

His analogy was a bad one to start off, I'm only pitching in that ball game.
I think you're smart enough and got my point that some are willing to take sacrifices for thinner form factor, looks or weight.

 

Let me expand on my analogy.

You make a sleek, sexy, ferrari-looking car. It costs a lot because of its looks. You put in an engine and whatever that can get your car going to 150Mph. The rest of the car however cannot support the engine at that speed, and passing 120Mph will cause the car to overheat and shut down on the road. This is the Razer Blade and Aorus and Gigabyte etc.
You make a normal-looking car; a bit bigger, roomier inside. It costs less despite the larger chassis and extra room/storage. You put in an engine and whatever that can get your car going to 150Mph. The rest of the car is built, using the extra room and stability of its new chassis to allow the car to go to 150Mph and even faster should you manage to tune the engine and such properly. This is other thicker laptops like the Clevo P6xxSx and P7xxZM.

My point is that making the first kind of car is not "pushing the engineering envelope" at all. All it is doing is cramming power inside that the rest of the machine cannot handle... and then charging more for it. What would be really impressive is if the machines could fully handle all the hardware inside of it... even if you couldn't overclock it one iota. THAT would be impressive for the tiny form factor. But as far as I'm concerned, the minute you tell me "this machine can't even handle stock" I tell you that you're a disgrace for even thinking of charging money for that.

 

I'm sorry to say but that just seem to be a black & white approach. To you the Aorus X7 either works or not, no room for nuance, no no D2 Ultima knows it's not up to snuff, it sucks it's a failure. Thing are never as black and white and while the Aorus may have it's flaws just like any other gaming laptop out there it deserves far more credit than the cheap stuff you throw at it, which sounds to me like nothing short of some sort of idealistic naiveness, however I think you know more than that, so I take peace with the notion that you like to overstate to make a point. That's just my asses, you don't have to agree with me.

Now I'm not saying you should take the drawbacks or settle for less than what you expect from a product, but don't go preaching about with strong words such as disgrace, garbage, TERRIBLE design and whatnot. Leave room for those that do like to take the hit on the cons for what they see as pros more important to them. If I would take your every word for truth the Aorus X7 is a crappy product and that's just not down to reality, but hey the benefit of this place it to look five seconds to one's signature to put someone's words in context.

 

What D2Ultima is saying, even if it sounds extreme, is that what you are buying is not exactly what you are getting. Mainly because the components in there are misleading in what they can do and how fast they can run.

It is the sad truth, for example, with HQ processors. No matter your cooling solution, you will power throttle. If your cooling solution is not robust enough, you will thermal AND power throttle. If your manufacturer was too conservative, you will dramatically power AND thermally throttle at different settings. So you have 100 laptops with the exact same 4700HQ CPU, and somehow, only 8 manage to run at their speeds. The rest run at considerable speed deficit.

But anyways, calm down people, don't let it get to your nerves

 

Your "assessment" is "it's acceptable for a company to make a device that is designed to not work up to its own specs". This is my problem. You're advocating the sale of hardware that is designed to not work to its own manufacturer-defined specs.

Listen, if you have to force such hardware into such a tiny form factor, why don't you put a ULV chip and two 965M cards? Because that's a bad match. Why don't you put in the i7 and disable hyperthreading at a BIOS level, essentially making it an i5? Because then people complain no hyperthreading. WHAT'S THE FIX? WHY NOT MAKE IT A BIT THICKER LIKE A P670SE! But no, that's too much, so overheating, broken hardware prevails.

Look, it's not a matter of opinion. If a device can't work to the specs it's sold for, EVERYBODY gets annoyed... unless it's a laptop. If you bought a vacuum that wouldn't suck up crumbs but sucked up everything else, you'd be pissed. If you bought a fan that can only use "low" and "medium" speed and its "high" speed causes it to burn out after 5 minutes, you'll be pissed. If you bought a treadmill that wouldn't let you go past 3 miles per hour speed you'd be pissed. So why is a laptop that's not designed to use its CPU or GPU properly a "good thing"? Because it's small? Why does a laptop get a free pass? Can I sell you other broken pieces of hardware, make them look good and you'll be happy to buy them? Please let me know, I'll get into that business immediately.

So yes, it's a "black and white" approach. I expect that my devices work as intended.

 

one way around this is to game on consoles

 

It's not a matter about whether it can game or not though. It's a matter of people are condoning hardware that doesn't work properly. And they're doing so with their wallets.
Things are not going to get better for the laptop market if people show that it's ok or encouraged to sell half-assed hardware as long as it's thin or looks good.

 

Jeez, get real ok, the Aorus X7 Pro is not half-assed hardware. You all found your argument based on some imaginary fact that it power and thermal throttles all the time while benchmarks clearly show this is not the case in most situations.

And yeah playing crazy CPU hog, aka BF4 which brings even a lot of desktop processor to their knees, did show throttling, but even then it never went below the core clock specifications and gamers said they didn't see an effect in-game.

Allow me a summation of all the nonsense you wrote in this thread, and I quote, "Aorus doesn't make good laptops", you think "most of the super technical people here wouldn't be using one", "they cram too much power in there to run it well", "TERRIBLE design", "it's half-assed hardware", "a disgrace" and it's "not even a matter of opinion" you say.

The entire argument comes out if thin air and the seemingly irrefutable notion that it does not perform as advertised, a black or white tunnel vision based that an instance of where it throttles is undeniable proof the machine sucks and it all the above things you state. Looking at the benchmarks I have a hard time to find that horrible terribly designed piece of hardware which is a disgrace and consumer misleading. Here's some benchmarks, including that game where the CPU throttles, heaven forbid, while still maintaining a whopping 99fps:

Bioshock Infinite on max settings = avg 144fps
Borderlands: Pre sequel max settings = avg 136fps
Lords of the fallen max settings = 78fps (ref. desktop gtx980 = 86fps)
Metro last light very high = 66fps
Battlefield 4 max settings = 99fps (ref. gtx 980 = 86fps, gtx 980ti = 109fps)
The Witcher 3 max settings = 60fps

Look at the benchmarks and realize you are making a non-argument with all that fuzz around throttling. And even staying purely theoretical you don't even have a founded 'condoning hardware that doesn't work properly' argument on the table, an Intel CPU that does not always hold it's turbo boost speed 100% of all time does not constitute not working properly. Intel nor Aorus never specified the turbo clock setting is achievable for 100% at all times, and even then, look at the BF4 benchmarks for crying out load, you're argument is theoretical and the fact do not warrant all the nonsense you state about the laptop.

Oh and by now I hope you realize you are nowhere with your imaginary heavy throttling you probably going to play the fan noise tune, and hey there I can find agreement with you, it comes as a high cost of fan noise, but that brings me to my original point to begin with => that's a cost I'm willing to bear due to it's slim form factor. You may and should not agree if you want a more silent machine, all good and well, but that's FAR from calling the machine a disgrace, half-assed piece of hardware, terrible design and all the other nonsense you ventilated here. You got that?

 

Average FPS is a good general indicator but far from telling the whole story. Average FPS, FPS plotted over time, frame times, and CPU and GPU temps and speeds, as well as surface temps are what you need. Granted yes who gives a rat's behind if the CPU and GPU are throttling if the FPS is consistent and reasonably high. But this frequently is not the case. When something starts to throttle there are hitches and jerking that are visibly noticeable. G-sync will help mask that somewhat, but sudden changes in FPS you just can't mask no matter what technology you use.

I'm sure the X7 Pro is a nice performing laptop. But from my experience they are very hot and loud. Would it really kill them to add 4-5mm thickness to the machine and offer proper cooling that is more quiet and provides cooler components and surface temperatures? This race to be thin as possible is a bit annoying IMHO. In this case, I have to say the laptop is a half-baked engineering design. It's truly form over function and comfort. Surface temps to the 60C's+ and db levels well over 50 are not what I'd consider good engineering design. Your skin may be scalded and your hearing damaged, but gosh dangit, I can get 100FPS in BF4 on ULTRA! (OK, a bit exaggerated, but how can you make a point if you don't!)

I do feel though that if a system is prone to throttling, excessive fan noise or heat, that OEM's should limit the performance of the CPU or GPU so that it doesn't throttle or result in a hot loud mess. I'd rather have cool and reasonably quiet and consistent performance than one that bounces around and is loud and hot as hell .

 

I wouldn't spend too much time arguing your point here mordresh, what you say is valid but if it doesn't have a socketed CPU, dual upgradeable MXM GPU's and overclockable to 7+ GHZ 24/7 while being 4" thick using dual 600+ watt power bricks many here instantly write it off as rubbish.

I kid a bit of course , no hard feelings to anyone ha, but I am glad to see Aorus pushing the boundaries of what is possible. I'm still not sold on the dual mid range cards being better than a single faster GPU based on previous experiences in the past (HT nailed it, overall smoothness trumps peak performance IMO), but I love their designs. You are exactly right though, bottom line is the machines run the games well, and that's what matters.

I know it's probably not possible, but if they had a single 980m in either a G-sync x5 or x7 with USB 3.1 I'd be all over it

 

And you have the data that tells the whole story and backs up the statement that this thing is half-assed piece of hardware that is a disgrace? And I'm not talking about them 5 to 10 minute searches on Google and come back with some fancy screens, I'm talking about tangible tests across multiple units and games that show a clear defunct. Because really that is what I'm challenging, the manner in which the machine is slammed on the shame wall here and the data of which such bold statements are based on, mostly directing my efforts exclusively to D2 Ultima which has a good feel for dramatization.

I don't have a thermal camera myself but I've seen some thermal imagery that suggest an entirely different thing when it comes to perceivable heat by the user. There is no debate though that this thing is loud, not going to fool around. That's something everyone needs to determine for themselves to accept this as a trade-off for the sheer power and I'm not surprised that a lot don't, it's freaking loud.

You are entitled to your opinion of course and if it's too hot or loud for your taste, exercise your right to not buy it. This is subjective matter, I find a stereotypical brick of a gaming laptop not at all appealing and a discomfort. While there is an audience that is perfectly fine with bulky form factor & weight, understand that on the ther side of the fence there's also an audience that takes the cost of hot and load for a smaller form factor and weight and sheer computing power potential.

Some may find that condoning of something not functional, I find condoning a 42mm brick of plastic that looks like it got of the line where my sons Fisher Price toys roll, not mentioning it's weight which just about equals my son on my arm, just similar questionable. The difference is that I don't barge into a thread about the product waving statements such as disgrace, half-assed and whatnot. It's all about accepting the shortcomings for the benefits, and both products have them.

 

Yeah that became clear very quickly. And I know among hardware enthusiasts there's a lot of passion and I also do not pretend I'm mister subjective. We all have our opinions and different views, I'm just reacting and preaching on a bit or more nuance to what I found unwarranted exaggeration like there is no tomorrow. I guess in midst of their passion some are to close to their binary little friend of a gaming laptop and seem to be limited into thinking in either 0 or 1, either good or bad

 

Trust me. I've tried them all. Razer, Alienware, Aorus, Clevo, Asus, MSI... the thin and lights just have their deficiencies when it comes to thermal and noise. There's no way around it. I get it, it is a choice. And I really would enjoy a nice thin and light that runs reasonably cool and quiet. I found the Clevo P650SE that does just that. No it's not as thin as a dime, nor as light as a feather, but it's only a bit more than that and does the job well.

My favorite though, was the MSI GS60 Ghost Pro. Awesome and well built machine. But in the end, the lack of accessibility for upgrading, constant running fan (never stopped and always audible), and meager battery life made it a no-go for me. It's thin, it's light, it has powerful components, well built. It ran reasonably cool as well. See my review here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...with-gtx-970m-6gb-review-by-htwingnut.765829/
But in the end, those shortcomings just made me realize it wasn't for me.

The Razer was also very well built, but it was uncomfortable to touch it felt hot, and got very noisy, and customer service was just horrific. When I asked them to address a couple issues. They kept wanting me to send in the laptop to inspect the issue instead of actually trying some simple root cause analysis that would have fixed it, among other things that I won't go into here.

 

Yeah, the attitude that it is either black and white is a bit extreme. Even if these machines do have their limits, they do still work. A lot of issues are not even on Aorus or the manufacturers themselves, but directly with intel etc.

My one pet peeve is exactly the HQ processors from intel. Since they are all TDP regulated, there is little to no noticeable performance difference after something like 4720HQ, compared to the higher end versions. Sure, in short bursts, the higher end versions can achieve 30 seconds of 4Ghz or something, but after pushing the system over 1 min, they all default to 47w TDP and end up at very similar speeds.

My issue itself is with intel, for not releasing higher w TDP versions for soldered processors, as well as being basically unable to change TDP.

Games than don't push the CPU too much, will always run at turbo speeds. But any game like BF4/Borderlands 2/ Witcher 3 that heavily use the CPU, you will have power throttling. Luckily, the CPU itself is still capable of pushing high fps on such a state, so 60fps are easily achievable. But gaming at 144hz with HQ processors is close to impossible for newer games haha

As for temps, as long as the product works and there is no thermal throttling, it should be fine. Some might not be comfortable with the temps, but for the end user, as long as the experience remains, you will be happy gaming.

 

I respect your opinion, obviously manny gaming laptops have passed your knowledgeable hands. Originally I admired the MSI GS70 2QE Stealth Pro Red Edition but the specification weren't simply up to my demands, and then came in the dreamlike Aorus X7 ProSync a daring project, a similar form factor however with monster specifications. As my car when I was eighteen years old, it may have an engine for which the chassis has trouble to keep up, but oh do I love the power and sheer potential

 

*sigh* I do believe I'm always misunderstood here.

My problem, as Wingnut said in one of his recent posts, is that designing a machine that cannot handle its power is an issue. And I do not mean to "close every program open and game fullscreen on a single monitor". What if I'm in teamspeak, or in a skype call, and have headset and mouse software running that take a bit of the CPU, or when I play something like GTA V that fully taxes the entire system (where many gigabyte laptop owners were complaining that even manually lowering their speeds AND undervolting their CPU still forced them to hit thermal limits or be well above 90c all the time), or whatever else I plan to do like render a video out (which is 9001% within the capabilities of a gaming or performance laptop), for my hardware to bug out on me is unacceptable. Nobody with a desktop will sit there and go "well I got a smaller case so I guess I can't render a couple shadowplay videos on this thing" or whatnot.

Yes, gaming is a large part of these machines and a large part of what I do on my machine, and I'll never hamper someone for telling me that all they care to do is play a few games on a laptop.

But my entire point, the long, short, whole of it, etc... is that designing a machine chassis to handle <power limit 12.6> and then putting in hardware that reaches somewhere around <power limits 15.2> is a terrible, terrible idea. What do you achieve? A hot, loud system that only works in perfect conditions with the truly demanding titles and never in a more real-world scenario, but is very thin? I mean granted, your real-world scenario can differ greatly from mine. Never get that wrong. But look at this. That is my "default amount of stuff open". I can do whatever I want with that, and by the specs (amount of RAM, CPU, GPU, etc) the Aorus and the Razer Blade and whatnot are perfectly capable of doing exactly what I'm doing right now... except they just can't in practice. And the thing is, there's people like me out there. Maybe not as many tabs or whatever open, but definitely people like me around. A lot of us. And when people like me acquire machines like this, we usually find them here on the forum in a couple months trying to "fix" their laptop's design. And you can't tell me that they don't exist, because you never encountered their issues or you use your laptop differently.

All I'm saying, and have been saying, and will continue to say, is the following:
Designing a laptop that cannot handle the parts that can be put inside is not okay. Either you:
A - Design it better (same arguement of Clevo P650SE vs Razer Blade or P670SE vs GS70 vs Razer Blade Pro).
B - Sell it with weaker/adjusted parts. Lock hyperthreading for the i7s (mitigates heat; acts as i5; circumvents power draw), use weaker/cooler GPUs (gigabyte P34x manages to overheat a 970M... a P650SE with a massive overclock finds it hard to overheat a 970M... why not use a 965M?), whatever have you.
C - Cherry-pick your parts for heat/power and have impeccable QA so that any machine that goes out, anywhere, to anyone, will DEFINITELY work to good spec. Make sure your heatsinks are all perfectly polished and flush, make sure paste is always impeccably applied (use a machine if you must), etc. Those thin machines cost more than the thicker ones for reasons unknown, so they might as well be worth the money.

I don't expect someone to sit running prime95 for 8 hours, or to run Linpack, or whatnot. But a livestream or rendering a video for a while shouldn't hit me on thermal limits. It shouldn't break my laptop to play GTA V. I should be able to multitask perfectly.

 

And all I'm saying is that your lamentation is mostly theoretical, presumptuous, and also in part based on that not always having the maximum Intel Turbo Boost clock rate constitutes 'not working'. While we all want nothing short of the maximum clock rate and are fairly used to it on desktop rigs (and frankly it hasn't been shown on a large scale to what extent the Aorus is running at it's base clock or it's boost range, let alone below base clock which no one has been able to show consistently), the Intel specifications are clear on this, it's not designed to always run at 100% and more aimed at, as the name suggests, boost moments. It does not constitute a defunct product and you can drool on Intel XTU data all you want, you have shown me nothing to backup your claims that your 'default amount of stuff open' cannot happen on the Aorus X7, you have shown me nothing to back your insinuation that you cannot run GTA V without breaking it.

High end gaming on laptop has always been a holy grail if you will, but we're close and made a vast leap in recent years in terms of feasibility. There are sacrifices for the thin form factor, but any form factor, light or heavy, has them in some shape or form, and I'm certainly not claiming there aren't any deficiencies but that's up to each and anyone of us to decide for themselves weighting out the pros vs cons. While I do share your thirst for technological improvement in that regard, the idea of that massively defunct Aorus product that you cannot seem to get out of your head is largely theoretical or simply an exaggeration. But let's agree to disagree, your last post is constructive (which was my biggest beef before) and I get the larger picture you are pointing at.

 

See part about people complaining that their laptops are overheating/throttling in GTA V for not being "theoretical" or "presumptuous". We even had a user come back on the "What notebook to buy" forum 2 weeks after he bought an Aorus X7 (against us telling him not to) complaining that his machine would randomly throttle and it'd make the games very stuttery and he wanted to know how to fix it, at which point three of us said "buy a clevo, we told you so". (He then got annoyed because they weren't thin enough; no idea what he did since then)

I must correct you here. Open XTU. Open its graphs and monitoring data and turn on "power", "current" and "thermal" limit throttling checkboxes. If you are under sufficient load and not at maximum turbo for the load spread (let's use a 4-core load and 4-core turbo boost for example), INTEL'S OWN SOFTWARE will inform you that you are throttling. Either power limit, current limit or thermal limits will light up. Even if you are so much as 3.3GHz when you should be at 3.4GHz; it still lights up as "throttling". To that extent, I'm not sure why it's "turbo boost" exactly >__>. I do however expect my laptops to work like I'd expect my desktops to work. It's something I expect of all my gear. I simply can't give a machine a pass because it's thin; as I said, implement limitations for when it gets stressed. Most gaming does not stress a machine very much. People might think it does, but it really doesn't. It's quite rare to see a game pull from an entire system, and GTA V is one of the most recent ones that does. Even BF4 doesn't; not like GTA V.

I'm not saying every person experiences problems... the laptop would never be selling. I AM saying however that it's not designed to handle itself being stressed a decent bit. Most people don't stress it, but it doesn't mean that it isn't there. Take my car point: engine can go to 120Mph but car shuts down at 95... if a user never passes 80, they'll think it works great. So why not make the car's max be 90? If it can't handle above that anyway, what's wrong with limiting it?

Anyway, agree to disagree it must be I suppose.

 

I can understand something like the Blade or Ghost Pro almost if you play primarily games like CS or LoL or DotA because they aren't real stressful to the system. However, in that case why would you buy an SLI system? I don't want to rag on people for their choices though. I have sure blown money on a lot of ridiculous things in my past that other people would scratch their heads at, but to me it was what I wanted.

In any case, this is an argument we all need to agree to disagree.