*** MSI 16L13 (Eurocom Tornado F5)/EVOC 16L-G-1080 15.6" Owner's Lounge ***

yea im thinking of doing to atleast 40gb ram, but the problem is there is no kingston 2400mhz available here in pakistan and cant really risk in getting incompatible ram here as we dont have a return policy like amazon. hopefully next time my brother comes to pakistan i'll be getting both ram and liquid thermal.

 

Some have probably already been mentioned but these would be on my wishlist.

Slightly increase size/number of vents at the front of case.

Slap a heatsink on the PCH.

If you are having a new motherboard designed!? Mount all RAM, PCH and CMOS battery on the easily accessible side of the board.

Slightly increase the depth of the bottom cover to allow for enlarged/denser heatsink, fins, pipes and thicker fans.

Offer Bitspower IHS as part of delidded option.

Built in coffee machine.

 

Will we be able to purchase the bottom cover mod on Eurocom or HIDevolution or somewhere else in the future?

 

While this is true, the heatpipes from the cpu cross the gpu pipes which seems to slow down heat dissipation. Any additional heat from the cpu may drive up temps on the gpu. I need to download throttlestop so I can set up multiple profiles. I've been really happy with this machine and as much as the temptation to drive my clocks up is, I think I'll take it slow so I know as much as I can about what my changes are impacting. I don't imagine that I'll ever compete against the big dogs, and I'm really just looking for performance that I can enjoy on a daily basis. My goal is to set up a profile for min fans, max fans, and max fans and cooling pad.

Thanks! I'll take the bottom one.

 

From what I understand, Eurocom is working on implementing the bottom cover mod, while HIDevolution is planning on offering the bottom cover as a replacement so we can feel comfortable modding our own.

 

That's an interesting suggestion, considering my bakes are going faster, and I already have paging turned off and have 32 GB of RAM. My system shipped with 32 GB, and I never tested baking with paging on, so I can't say anything about before/after, but I wonder how much of my results are due to these two factors.

My main reason for turning off paging was simply that I don't need it with 32 GB RAM, and I wanted to avoid the wear on my SSD.

 

Yes, there are some real gurus on this thread. I'm a 30+ year IT veteran with two engineering degrees, and yet I was an absolute newbie to overclocking. The folks on this forum have been immensely helpful in getting me up to speed. I've still got a lot to learn, but with great teachers.

Quality of thermal engineering varies even among server-grade equipment. A few years ago, my employer was paid to have me do laboratory studies comparing the thermal design of several very expensive rack-mounted server systems. At this price level, none of them were "badly" designed, but one brand clearly stood above the others in the attention to detail in the thermal design. Ever since I conducted that study, I've stayed with the one brand of equipment for my company's critical systems.

One thing to keep in mind is that covers and enclosures are actually part of the thermal design, not an impediment to cooling, if they are properly designed. I am not disputing the results of @Mr. Fox and others on this forum who have modified their enclosures -- all I am saying here is that if you do so, you need to know what you're doing (as they clearly do). Don't just assume "open is better." A properly-designed enclosure doesn't block air, but rather directs it to where it is most needed. We have some servers in our data center that run quite cool with the covers on, but will actually overheat if you try to run them with the covers removed.

Experts use finite element analysis, extensive lab tests, and mathematical models to carefully craft a proper thermal airflow design. They also have to weigh airflow versus dust ingress, enclosure durability, foreign object penetration, acoustic containment, and other factors. Problems happen in consumer-grade equipment when the manufacturers short-circuit that process in the interest of time-to-market or R&D budget cuts.

TL;DR: The engineers generally know what they're doing and want to make a good product. It's hard to do so, though, when Marketing started printing up brochures before the first prototype was built, the CEO told the shareholders they'd get rich before the brochure ink was dry, and your boss is telling you that if you make him miss the milestone on his PERT chart your next cubicle will be a broom closet.

 

@UsmanKhan

Exactly, tune the RAM size to the job so you don't need Windows VM to take up the slack when you get close the edge of memory, as that additional IO will really slow processing down.

 

Believe it or not, there is actually one case I know of where you want some swapping to occur, and to deliberately constrain the physical RAM. That case is running Linux on an IBM mainframe under the z/VM hypervisor. Mainframes have I/O that is so extremely fast, you actually benefit by forcing each virtual machine to swap a little to prevent Linux from trying to do its own I/O buffering. The overall throughput of the system (as a whole) is better.

But I digress. Sorry for a slightly OT post; I just wanted to point out how even "universal" rules of conventional wisdom are sometimes not truly universal in the complex world of computers.

 

@syscrusher , could you tell me if you notice the yellow tint on your 4K display?

EDIT: If anyone else have the 4K display, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know if you also experience the yellow tint. Just want to confirm if I have a dud or its just the way it is with these Samsung panels. Asus Zenbook I used to have also had yellow tint issue on its 4K panel, but that was a long time ago and I hope they would've fixed it by now.

 

Wonderful post! I've been learning a lot going back and forth with couple of thermal engineers regarding the vapor chamber heatsink and realized just how ignorant I was to the complexity involved in efficiently moving heat around. They mentioned that the stock heatsink could definitely be improved, at the expense of weight and bulk which seemed to be an important factor when they designed this laptop. They agreed that the bottom cover leaves much to be desired, but can definitely see why it is the way it is to allow airflow to move from certain areas of the laptop as well. So I absolute agree with you that these engineers knew what they were doing when they designed the laptop, they just did not have the same priority as we see it.

EDIT: Another thing I should mention, did the original MSI design change at all with Tornado F5 over time? If not, I do not think MSI engineers ever intended this thermal design to support OC'd 7700K and GTX 1080 running at 100% load.

 

How long do orders typically stay in the "pre-production" phase from HID out or curiosity?

 

Who could disagree?!?

 

Hey buddy, sorry you are still waiting but shouldn't be too much longer now considering our previous discussion about this last week. I waited more than a month for mine but that is mostly due to me changing things around and ordering the Silicon Lottery CPU that they did not have any in stock. You should contact @Donald@HIDevolution to see if they are waiting for a part or something to make sure.

However, once they had all the parts come in, things moved rather fast and was delivered promptly.

 

I'll be glad to respond, but I'm not sure what the picture above is showing. Clarify, please?

 

Additional factors:

• Passing regulatory requirements (EMI shielding, fire safety, mechanical durability) in multiple countries.
• Manufacturing cost per unit (sad, but true, even at the top end of the market).
• Ability to have robots or low-skill workers assemble the enclosure without errors.
• Field serviceability.
• Aesthetic constraints from the marketing department.
• Recycleability (meeting RoHS or similar specs).

I probably haven't come close to listing them all. I'm an engineer, but not a product design engineer.

I've often said that engineering is the science of compromise.

 

While I believe this statement to be accurate, I have to say that I've not been troubled by temperatures too much on my book and I run my 7700k OC'd to 4.7 GHz 24/7. Thermals are the first thing I would ask to be improved, but the fact that thermals can be tamed is a testament to how well this 15.6" book was originally designed.

 

I'm more concerned about the GPU temp actually. During actual gaming, CPU always hover around 70-82, which I'm perfectly fine with. However, it's almost guaranteed to hit 88-93C on GPU during 4K gaming and that's where I think the thermal design did not account for.

 

The above is the white background on my LG monitor at home, and bottom is the white background on the F5. Its not as noticeable by itself, but put a white piece of paper next to your F5 and let me know if you can see the drastic difference that I'm seeing. Also, the yellow tint makes other colors look very 'off', yellow looks slightly green/neon and etc.

 

Have you tried some of the suggestions @Mr. Fox has offered? I am running an undervolt and have tinkered with a few other settings. I am not running 4K so I have more headroom to adjust performance profiles in games, but I have also enjoyed better thermals after following many of his suggestions and exploring a little on my own.

 

Any games I've played on 1080p barely pushed the GTX 1080 and its temperature, so I believe it is definitely specific to 4K. Even on wife's F5 with GTX 1070, it simply crushes anything 1080p without going above 80C, so unless you are 4K gaming, I don't think you'll see this kind of GPU temps.

The bottom cover mod will shave few C off hopefully, but honestly, I don't think it'll make much of a difference in the end considering how consistently hot the GPU is running. I ordered bunch of mini heatsinks that are 3mm tall, and thinking about lining the entire GPU heatpipes with copper shims and attach the mini aluminum heatsinks all the way across to see if that helps at all.

Having said that, I'm afraid the original MSI thermal design simply wasn't intended for 4K gaming and isn't going to be able to handle that kind of heat efficiently. I believe it is due for a serious upgrade, if it wants to be able to truly tame the GPU such as 1080 while keep the temp well away from throttle ceiling.

 

The 1080 runs hotter than I would like it to in this machine. The heat sinks, radiators and fans are too small. I think MSI focused more on making it smaller and lighter and quieter than I would have liked them to. I don't care about any of those things too much. They are not very important to me personally. The main reason this machine is attractive to me is that it is extraordinarily powerful for a 15-inch form factor and infinitely more potent than any of the much larger BGA gamer-boy jokebook toys. If I cared about thickness, weight and noise I would be using a $500 (or less) Walmart 15-inch turdbook made by Dell, Acer or HP.

 

lol, how many chips did you ruin this time papusan with your antics and humour ! LOL j/k

But seriously, imagine someone takes the one joke of the day you made and goes literal with it.

 

What demanding games you play ?

 

Can't agree with you any more on that. In my humble opinion, GTX 1080 is extreme overkill just to run 1080p games on a laptop. GTX 1070 can do same at much cooler temperature from my experience and I would've definitely stuck with that combo if I wanted to stick with 1080p display on this particular laptop, knowing the thermal design limitation that I know now.

4K gaming on a 15.6" laptop has been long time coming and finally, we have one that does it well, but at a serious cost to the temperature and what that entails. Without a doubt, something must be done with the heatsink/radiator/fan combo at the minimum if Eurocom was serious about making this the 'Super Beast'.

EDIT: Bit off topic but on the KM1s with single GTX 1080, does anyone have a picture of what the vapor chamber heatsink looks like? All I can find is the SLI version of the heatsink, and wanted to know if anyone have a photo of it for reference.

 

A very very good advice. If you never have done a tweak before and other has done it before... Read you up and use more than one sources People need to read between the lines You ain't stupid before you show you are stupid

 

They are, we have some plans in the works, things just do not happen over night. Realistically sometimes a plan feels like it took them a week to prepare and do, when in reality it's hardwork for 6 months getting things just right to get something done.

 

I know a 1080 is overkill for FHD gaming (then again I thought my 980 in my desktop was too at the time) but I ended up going for it because if I'm spending this much money and getting a beast of a machine like this I want to at least try and have the best options available that I can. Not only that but I want this laptop to last me for 5+ years and be good going forward as games potentially become more demanding and require more power to play. Also as I went with the 120hz screen I want to make sure I have that extra power to run all of, or as many of my games over 120fps as possible.

 

No doubt about it, just dealing with few engineers on whats involved in designing a heatsink is making my head spin so I can't imagine what goes into making a laptop of this caliber.

 

Ah, thanks. I didn't realize that was another monitor in the pic.

My colors seem pretty good on the 4K panel, although I did have HID Evolution calibrate mine during the build.

If I put a white paper next to it, I might say the color is very slightly yellow versus the paper, but not nearly as dramatically as yours.

As it happens, I literally just bought an X-Rite colorimeter, because my wife's machine wasn't factory calibrated, and I'm setting that up for her. A colorimeter is not a bad thing to own, anyway. It arrived here on Friday.

That being the case, what I can do is run a calibration on my own panel and see what the software tells me. If yours hasn't been calibrated, that would definitely be the next step I would recommend. I had to reinstall Windows here, and when I first installed and the calibration profile (a ".icc" file) had not been applied, colors were not very good. It makes a huge difference.

Hope this helps. I'll update when I get time to run another calibration.

 

I'm curious what games you're playing. I run Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout 4 at 4K on mine, and although the fans run hard, I've not had excessively high temps.

 

My turn to report a couple of issues, to see if anyone else has seen them:

• Most of the time suspend works perfectly for me, but occasionally when coming out of suspend the machine does a cold start, behaving exactly as if I had done an orderly shutdown. Windows does not think it's a crash. The only clue I have here is that once the machine took itself out of suspend just as I was closing the lid (but that doesn't usually happen). I've got Windows power settings instructed to ignore lid position.
• Occasionally, plugging in an external monitor fails to show an image there. Windows sounds its "device detected" tones as I plug in the cable, but then it still thinks there is no external display. Again, this works perfectly 95+ percent of the time. It is reliably corrected by restarting Windows; I do not need to cold-start the hardware.

Anyone else experiencing either of these?

 

FF14, Nier, Witcher 3 and Tera Online at 4K, with couple of settings lowered to maintain 60FPS will gurantee 88~93C within 15min of playing. I mentioned in my earlier review, certain 4K games run very well while hovering around 80C, but I haven't tried Skyrim yet. I'll get it installed and check out the temp for that one.

 

The danger there is assuming that gaming is my primary objective. It's not... overclocked benching represents about 90% of what I care about most. Gaming represents about 10% of what I do for fun with my computers. I love gaming, it's just not as high on my list of priorities, and it doesn't require the best hardware in terms of CPU or GPU horsepower to have a decent gaming experience. Overclocked benching requires the most horsepower you can get if you want to place high on the leaderboard. If you don't want to place high on the leaderboard, then there is no point in bothering with it.

Not really that much any more. When I do play, it's almost always a first-person shooter (my favorite genre). I have about a half dozen newly acquired games that I haven't even installed (titles on my wish list that I was waiting for prices to fall below $20, since that is usually the most I am willing to pay). I just don't have time for gaming very often and when I do have time I choose to spend it benching instead. The little I have done the 1080 in the Tornado F5 gets way too hot. But, I need to test with the @Prema vBIOS and gaming. It has adjustable TDP, so I'm thinking I can drop the slider and lower the clocks and still maintain a framerate that is plenty high enough for smooth gaming and not have high temps any more. I just haven't had time to check that theory yet.

 

Is yellowish tinted 4k screens a fairly common thing? I know when I was purchasing my Blade at the end of last year there were a lot of people talking about the non FHD screens having a yellowish tint to them, is this something that seems to be fairly common across higher res displays?

 

I never intended to mean you were a gamer of any sort, its very obvious where your passion lies ^^. I was speaking in general, when a company sells GTX 1080 with 4K display, IMHO, it is a high-end gaming laptop which seems to have an temp issue during 4K games due to its thermal design (Have to stress that it is VERY STABLE otherwise).

 

paging definitely not helping my bake times, but currently i can't afford any other way. also i believe you might not have baked environments with high-settings and with 4k atlas size since i have to keep my Set-pass calls low so i can't afford to generate more thn 10 lightmapped images, which can shoot page file usage upto 60gb during baking. also note that im really new to unity(4 months of experience only, i just graduated 6 months ago), so im still learning and maybe im using setting more thn what i need.

 

Oh, OK that makes sense. Sorry, I misunderstood.

 

My bad, I should've been clearer. Besides, we can't have you or Prima playing games, you have too many important thing to do!!!

EDIT: ....release the BIOS....

 

@Mr. Fox

Do the new Prema Bios include an improved EC? Or does that come at a later date?

 

since i dont shutdown my laptop i only let it sleep, i have had quit a few times this occur to me, tho its not common.
i never had the second issue, i do use external monitor everyday.

 

I have 3 new @Prema EVOC 16L-G-1080 BIOS mods to test and 2 new Clevo vBIOS mods to test, but I am tied up at work.

The MSI throttling of the CPU does not appear to be entirely in the EC. Seems MSI put cancer code in multiple areas for some crazy reason. (This has been harmful to my opinion of the MSI brand almost as much as the BGA filth that they sell.) @Prema is working very hard to isolate and remove the cancer code. It's already an excellent BIOS mod in every way. It only needs some finesse tweaking for those of us (like you and I) that want more than 4.8GHz to hold up under extreme CPU load. It already holds 5.0GHz in 3DMark benchmarks. It's only stuff like Cinebench that the TDP/Power Limit throttle nonsense takes the clocks down above 4.8GHz. So, for 99% of the world it's ready to go. It's the 1% we are trying to get it right for now.

 

wait, com'on, you don't play any games that really demand your hardware ? Have you been tempted to get on board StarCitizen ?

 

@Mr. Fox , is it possible for you to share the general process of what you and Prima are doing with the BIOS? I have absolutely no idea whats involved in doing what you and Prima are doing and wanted to get a basic handle of the process and how you are doing it. If not, I completely understand and no hard feelings, I get just how sensitive your work must be.

 

+1, a calibration tool is a great investment, I even calibrated my TV screen with it too! (Spyder4Pro I've got).

 

The thing is, I'm using the ICC Profile that I paid for through HIDevolution's calibration service.

 

Oh nice, how much did it run you for ? What are your thoughts on it too ?

 

I believe it was about $50 for the service, and unfortunately, i can't really tell the difference between stock profile and HIDevolutions profile at all. All I see is that everything has a yellow tint to it, so it makes it really hard to judge any possible improvements over stock profile.

EDIT: yellow tint is always there, regardless of profile.

 

Truth be told, get the AK II sorted out first. I am sure you want to get those vBIOS up and running on the AK II, especially considering your T5 is currently king of the castle at this point.

Lately, I have been using the AK I. With my new U3 Extreme + AC, I want to see if I can push it to beat @bloodhawk FS record. I still think I can get my T5 to over 20K without a custom vBIOS but we'll see. These new fans have opened up more opportunities.

 

I think you've got a panel problem. I'd recommend contacting HID Evolution to get a service ticket opened.