Vega GL now up on Spectre x360

(mine arrived on the 10th) completely agree with the review/comment above. my only major concern is that it runs hot. under normal load i am pushing 70deg celsius. Dropbox being the main culprit but i would have expected it to be running a lot cooler with just dropbox. i will be load testing on the week end with video editing. the fan is always on and can be heard quite easily
lovely screen, nice keyboard and track pad, beautifully made. It is fast, although its not lightening fast. the wifi is incredibly fast. and as above, heavier than expected.
only bloatware was mcafee which was the first on the list to be removed.

 

Well I don't like the sound of that. I'm not sure this is the correct model, but if it is there is a new bios from March that "Improves system thermal condition."

 

I'd love to hear about battery life. Really thinking about picking one up and selling my two dells.

 

I have the CH004na model which has the 8705g chip 1tb 16gb ram. the fan hasnt switched off since i have had it running for 12hrs. like you say, hopefully they will release a bios update shortly.

 

Some HP laptops I have used in the past have a bios option to "Always run the fan while plugged in". It will also likely run the fan if any kind of updates are running or the battery is charging or something has activated the Radeon GPU.

 

Rly Curious about The New spectre. I want to get this one Or the Dell 2in1, the Dell seems to have a really Amazing screen. However, I prefer the keyboard and looks of the spectre. How is the screen on the vega model of the spectre?

 

I am loving the screen on the spectre, cannot fault it. keyboard is superb. despite my previous comments above regarding the spectre running hot, i think it was mostly down to the initial setup, lots of downloading and installation. idle temp is now at 38deg c

 

That sounds great. If the cooling is made better then the previous version and can handle the vega gpu / 3,1 base speed it would be really Nice. How is the battery life? And How is the screens Brightness? In my country it is not available yet But really lookin forward to it!

 

The screen brightness is ok, more than adequate for what i need it for. its not super bright but good enough. I am very disappointed with the battery, lucky to get 6hrs under normal usuage. i guess if i tweaked my power settings and dimmed the screen i might push 8hrs but not tried that yet

 

HP's estimate of the battery is kind of misleading to me. "Up to 13 hours and 30 min (MM14), Up to 12 hours and 15 minutes FHD Video Playback".

If you read the fine print at the page bottom, "Tested by HP using continuous HD video playback, 720p (1280x720) resolution, 150 nits brightness, system audio level at 50%, player audio level at 100% played from local storage, headphone attached, wireless off, auto dimming off."

Who would buy a 4k laptop to use in 1280x720 resolution?

 

Someone who wants long battery life?

 

Good comment

 

Just been doing some 4k video editing in sony vegas and to be honest, i am not overly impressed. preview stutters, high 80deg c temps. it just struggles, i have ensured the gpu acceleration is enabled for the radeon chip but i think there are some driver issues as it seems to be using the intel gpu. the whole laptop handles like standard notebook and i honestly cannot see the benefit of the radeon chip

 

FedEx must be using rockets to go back and forth from California to China in an hour.

4/13/2018 - Friday
4:27 am In transit
SHANGHAI CN

3:42 am International shipment release - Import
OAKLAND, CA

2:39 am In transit
SHANGHAI CN

2:36 am International shipment release - Import
SHANGHAI CN

4/12/2018 - Thursday
11:39 pm Arrived at FedEx location
OAKLAND, CA

 

Damn, that does not sound good. Hope that it Will be fixed in the near future..

 

Vegas probably isn't the thing to base your performance impressions upon right now. Their forums are filled to the brim with issues on "legacy" hardware so it doesn't surprise me that it isn't performing on all cylinders on a brand new chip.

 

Any posts pertaining to the new x360 vega system? I can't find anything about it yet.

 

thats exactly it, its not "firing on all cylinders" it just feels like it has soo much potential, yet its not quite up there yet. it could be that the software needs to catch up with the hardware.

 

If you believe Vegas is using the intel graphics processor, make sure the OS is using the Radeon GPU for Vegas. I've only used laptops with nVidia processors, but the way they work with an iGPU is that you have to tell the graphics driver which GPU to use for each program if it doesn't choose the correct one automatically.

 

Some apps, including Vegas don't switch, even if you try to force them, you are stuck with the rendering via iGPU, unless you try rendering with CPU - it allowed.

This is one of the sad Optimus gotcha's, there are apps that just won't use anything but the default GPU - which is iGPU in Optimus systems.

 

Yep. I have opened the hp graphics settings and selected Vegas to use the Radeon you. No change. My render speeds are not to bad. But if I add a few 4k tracks and apply some colour correction. It's dog slow and crashes.
Back to editing by proxy I guess

 

Which version of Vegas are you running? It's had this problem for a long time, but it might be worth checking their forums for support and maybe a newer version will finally work with iGPU/Optimus to use dGPU.

This why many need a dGPU only laptop, or one with a MUX switch to boot on iGPU to save battery and boot on dGPU for performance on AC power.

Even with Vega GPU, it's not a powerful one, and rendering is a heavy thermal load, not optimal in a thin profile laptop. So maybe you aren't missing much...

 

Thanks I am using magix Vegas 15

 

It looks like Vegas 15 has a "fixed" list of supported AMD GPU's, see last comment section I quoted below, so you can ask their support people - open ticket? - and ask Magix to add support for the Intel/Vega GPU in your HP (Intel 8805G?).

Try watching this, and read the comments, it works for the author, but not all the people that try it works for them:

How to enable GPU Acceleration in Vegas Pro 15


SkyBlade 6 days ago
Hey, tried this out and it seems like CPU rendering is about 5x faster and according to Task Manager using GPU acceleration puts next to no load on the GPU. My specs is i7-6700HQ, 16GB RAM, and a GTX 970M. Any help?

TechSroat 6 days ago
Did you set up "Render using GPU if available" in Render format? Try to use MAGIX AVC/MVC render format in "Render template list", if you haven't already.

SkyBlade 5 days ago
TechSroat Yep. I also rendered again in NVIDIA NVENC, which actually put load in my GPU, but it was no different. Guess I'll use my iGPU for now.

--------------------------

lucasblack29 2 months ago (edited)
My laptop has two gpus in it, an Intel HD Graphics 620 and Nvidia GeForce 930MX. When i selected the GeForce 930MX as the GPU acceleration of video processing, the preview doesn't update when i'm editing a text media even though i have enabled Allow legacy GPU rendering support. Currently i have driver version 390.65. Is it because my GeForce 930MX doesn't support NVENC or is it something else?

TechSroat 2 months ago
Sorry for late response. Your GPU support CUDA so GPU Acceleration should work without any problems with that GPU. Also, that GPU meet minimum system requirements of Vegas Pro. Do you have Vegas Pro 15 or older? What's Vegas Pro 15 Build you're using? (Check it in Vegas Pro > Help > About, or while opening program)

lucasblack29 2 months ago
TechSroat My Vegas Pro version is 15 build 261

TechSroat 2 months ago
Hm, I think GPU is a problem. Vegas Pro always has problems with enabling GPU Acceleration on dedicated laptop GPUs. Unfortunately, I don't see any solution for that problem.

lucasblack29 2 months ago
TechSroat Ok, thank you for answering my questions. I appreciate it

------------------

onicblitz81 4 months ago
the problem is you CANNOT select an AMD card. can you please make a video on how to force it to anyway?

TechSroat 4 months ago (edited)
You can't "force" it because Vegas Pro 15 is not optimized for all hardware.If your AMD graphics card is one of these, and Vegas Pro 15 doesn't detect it, that could be a problem. List of AMD graphics cards supported by Vegas Pro 15 : AMD Radeon RX 500 series AMD Radeon RX 480/470 AMD Radeon R9 390X/390/290X/290 AMD Radeon R9 Fury X AMD R7 370 AMD Radeon HD 6970/6870/5870
----------------------

Maybe a newer version of Vegas will add the new Vega GPU in the HP

 

Mine came in today. I like it so far, although it doesn't take much for the heat and fans to ramp up occasionally. I'm still trying to get everything setup right now, like making a restore usb, and then I'll do some testing. I'm planning to try throttlestop and lower the voltage and reduce heat. I may do a clean install, it has a lot of HP stuff, but I'm just not sure about the drivers. I'll have to investigate some more.

 

Yep my heats up pretty quick. Went into the bios settings. You can toggle the fan to be off or on. I left mine on. I didn't find much bloatware only macafee which I instantly removed

 

Yep, McAfee was the first casualty. Installed Bitdefender. Do you know who will provide new drivers for the Vega? I read somewhere AMD will provide them to Intel and Intel will put them out.

 

I have checked you can download the amd drivers from their website although it doesn't allow you to download the catalyst control centre

 

It's always good to backup the original image, with the vendor tool(s) and with Macrium Reflect or similar image backup tool. You don't know what apps, drivers, tools aren't downloadable unless you take the time to check, and versions on the image might not be downloadable at all - sometimes the original works best.

It's good to have made a backup before blowing away the original install and recovery image, because once you blow it away you can't download it or request if from the vendor - in most cases you have to send back the whole laptop for RMA to get the image reloaded, or find one you can do a backup from in a store or with a friends laptop.

It's nice to be able to get back to the out of the box OS image as a sanity check should you not get good results rolling your own image. At least you can double check what's installed and what is different from your image to help get it complete.

 

Nice to see activity here Unity Game Developer here, eyeing this device as a wacom drawing tablet / development machine, so I'm very interested in the graphics performance and thermal throttling.
The dell XPS 2in1 is way more expensive, but seems to manage its thermals alright. I'm pushing management @ work to buy me either this one or the dell. So I'm eagerly awaiting some concrete test results on the Spectre.

 

I can't believe there hasn't been a single review yet with some good benchmarks.

 

Yup, I've been checking youtube and google daily. Currently have a giant Asus ROG G752 laptop for work and I'm sick of lugging that giant monstrosity around.

On a side note, I found that you can use code KC5SP0CT1 on the dutch HP store for extra 50€ off.

 

Some preliminary testing.

3D Mark @4k resolution https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/26153983

Spoiler

and it got quite toasty at max as I thought it would. I just wanted to make sure the Vega would kick in

Spoiler

 

What was the CPU power? That section is collapsed in HWMonitor.

Thanks,
R

 

Oh, I don't know. I'll check it again and see.

 

There you go

Spoiler

 

and some throttling as I assumed there would be with high temps

Spoiler

-50.8 undervolt stopped the throttling. I'll try some more tomorrow and see how low I can get it.

Spoiler

 

I couldn't stop trying. A -100.6 undervolt in throttlestop brought the temps from 98c to 88c. I have it on my cooling pad for the first time now and it's staying about 38c while I'm here typing. And now I'm done for the day.

 

Hi. I was looking to buy this. Can you please do some CPU related benchmarks like Cinebench to compare it to 8550U?

Also, is the Toshiba SSD fast enough? Does it compare to the Samsung SSDs?

Thanks in advance.

 

Wow, that's great, 10c drop in thermals, stopping thermal throttling, simply by a software tweak, undervolting by -100mV

Maybe there is a little more in the tank, it's a new CPU so it's an unknown, but other recent CPU's have undervolted regularly into the -150mV and more range.

Pretty cool

 

Benchmark on the SSD.

Spoiler

You can see several tests comparing the 8550U and the 8705G here: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_core_i7_8550u-770-vs-intel_core_i7_8705g-845

This is what I got in Cinebench but I don't know how to compare it to the 8550U.

Spoiler

 

I was going to try the Final Fantasy XV benchmark but all it saw was the Intel graphics. Couldn't see any way to force it to use the Vega.

 

I was doing some more testing and something has happened to my Vega GPU.

This is what I was getting in 3dMark

Spoiler

This is now. Almost 900 MHz difference in the max graphics clock. I think my last score was like 864. wtf?

Spoiler

 

Hmm if thermals are such an issue then I just might bite the bullet and buy a surface book 2... :S

 

Surface Book 2 has just as high thermals... except you cant open up and re-paste the SB2

 

True and I really need 512GB at a minimum, which makes it prohibitively expensive & the CPU thermal throttles :/
Any pics of the Spectre Vega opened up ?

 

I fixed the problem. I restored everything from the restore partition and now it's back to getting 1011 MHz. I think the problem was caused by underclocking -0.150. When I stress tested it locked up and rebooted at the end. I still don't understand why it affected the gpu like that. Had no problem at -0.140.

 

It's rare, but you can get disk corruption during a BSOD, that's why I recommend not doing real work while working on finding the lowest undervolt, and have a backup ready to restore from

Glad you had that restore available, if you haven't already use the vendor software to make a restore USB flash drive, sometimes the restore functionality will be lost due to Windows Updates, so in laptop restore breaks.

 

Making the usb was one of the first things I did. I've been through too many reformats etc. Fortunately the restore partition on the ssd was still good.

 

See next comment (I double posted)