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

Hmm, I've seen all these mods way before now. Where did I see them from again?... It seems like they came from the same sick genius who was taking a hole saw to his new notebook when many critics warned him about side stepping the intended flow path of air through the system all while attaching thin copper plates to everything imaginable inside that same book.

 

I think it is time to call it the Prema Fox Edition. Due to @Prema amazing BIOS and your awesome mods, this laptop is the best around.

 

Yup...I'm guilty. Although I still say the copper plates do nothing. We have tested with and without, and find no difference.

 

I would say the same. I have 32 Ohm Beyerdynamic MMX300's and the EVOC drives them just fine. The K7xxs are pretty much the same. Definitely get an amp for the HD6XX, those things have some high impedance, probably a mismatch for nearly any laptop.

 

Thanks for the kind words. Genius sounds a lot better than weirdo or nut-job. Maybe I'm a Heinz 57 cocktail.

Most people tend to avoid disruption and status quo is kind of like comfort food. It's not very good for you, but it tastes good and it's easy to swallow. In many ways I enjoy disruption and being disruptive. Normal or average is generally boring. If we listened to everyone that knows what they are talking about we'd never make any progress on anything. It's probably a lot easier to believe the ODM took time to do things right and did adequate testing to confirm their calculations were correct. Yeah, they did that. Yeah. They did. That's the ticket.

Yup, they did nothing for me either. Looks impressive though. Kind of like chrome valve covers and air cleaner lids don't make cars run faster. I think almost everyone is attracted to bright shiny objects whether they want to admit it or not. Plus, now I don't need to find a good way to waste all of those copper squares that I bought from China on eBay. And, what's not to love about more metal... even when it's pointless. Metal is always awesome.

 

Thanks. I will definitely look into it. I also may just order the modded bottom panel now that it's available. For $59 it will be worth it as I'm planning on keeping this computer for a while.

 

Do both. Delid is so crazy easy (and safe) with the tools made for it. The first 3 or 4 times I de-lidded a CPU it was with a razor blade. It always ended well, but man... I was always sweating bullets.

 

I think I will. With expensive chips like that I'd be sweating too but the results seem to be worth it and the risk minimal so why not.

 

It's more of a risk not to do it. Watch YouTube videos on applying TIM after the delid and follow the directions closely. Be careful with any microelectronics because a small static discharge can destroy them. Ground yourself or use a grounded mat to avoid undesired damage.

 

Yes, although as you are probably aware, higher impedance is not always better. The best drive efficiency is when the headphones and the audio signal fed to them are the same, or nearly the same, impedance.

 

I believe you may be misinterpreting the core settings. You're not changing the clock "for each core", but rather, based on "how many cores are active".

Working with @Phoenix and @Mr. Fox, I found that my system is much more stable if I keep the turbo clock the same regardless of core count, basically titrating for max speed and stability. I'm also using static voltage rather than adaptive voltage, and that made a big stability difference for me. I'm very stable on 4.7 GHz turbo regardless of core count, 1.140 V static. YMMV, of course.

 

Where is this ?

 

Check two pages back.

 

Ahhh I see, it's not the actual new bottom panel that's being designed for the F5/F7 though, its a custom mod. Though I like it very much.

Are we able to send in our bottom panels for a reduction price, I'm relatively sure some customers would be interested in that.

 

HIDevolution customers can get the mod for $29 when they send their EVOC 16L-G-1080 in for the Prema BIOS. For others, just put 'Bottom Service' in the search box on our website to get the modded panel for $59. At $59, it is kind of hard to worry about the price, particularly if you ever have to send it to the vendor, other than HIDevolution, for warranty service. Just put the original back on.

We will not mod non HIDevolution customer's panels, so no point in sending them to us.

 

I shipped mine in earlier today for the Prema BIOS. I figured I'd get the modded panel while it's in. That's not a bad deal and it looks really nice.

I'm excited to get the monster back. I already miss it! Hahaha

 

I miss my beast too but good things come to those that wait.

 

I'm hoping I'll be ready by the time HID has had their chance to work their magic on the F7 or whatever MSI labels it. I just can't imagine buying from anyone else.

In the meantime I'm going to enjoy my micro beast, because, usually, there is something better waiting to be released.

 

I'm happy HID offered this panel mod the same time when the Prema BIOS came out, my laptop will finally be complete!

 

This might be silly but will this back panel work for my Tornado F5 by Eurocom since it is the same frame?

 

It's the same machine exactly. HID just ships theirs with extra love inside. Think of them as an after market tuner for this book and Clevos.

 

Yes.

 

Thank you for this information, was not aware I could do this. My 1080 has been getting up to 89/90C when playing PUBG and Overwatch on it which is a little hotter than I would like it to be getting up to under load even though it may be okay, that's pretty hot. I am going to look into using this option in afterburner to see if I can manage temps a little bit better, granted I will have Prema and the bottom cover mod at some point so hopefully things will improve after that and maybe repasting as well.

 

Thanks for the reply, looks nice a nice option to lower temps.

 

Can you do me a favor, and check to see if the voltage curve is available for tweaking on these laptop GPU's with Afterburner? It's Control + F to open the curve by default. I've managed to get my desktop 1070 down from 180w peak, to 140w peak while still maintaining my 2050mhz core clock. Thermals dropped dramatically as well, as I never exceeded 60C in an ITX case (Node 202). If you need help using the voltage curve, let me know and I'll walk you through it.

 

Order placed. Thank you.
Customer wants, customer gets !
Cheers !

 

RE: Skylake / Kaby Lake Hyper-threading bug

 

Thank you for your order!

 

Your welcome. It was my pleasure. I like that you keep up with mods, no matter what it takes.
I am much the same myself, when possible.

 

I need to share a recent discovery/experience with my F5 with the 120Hz display. Ever since the creators update, possibly before I have discovered that randomly my 120Hz panel was essentially lower its response time/refresh rate randomly. I could never pin point exactly what was triggering the issue, and figured it was the Creators Update/Win 10 trash and/or a combination of not being able to use the latest Nvidia drivers or lack of the updated BIOS support (I am now on the recent BIOS and all drivers work).

I reached out to Eurocom and got my BIOS updated and that included brightness controls and the ability to use recent Nvidia drivers without the dreaded black screen issue. I had hoped this was going to fix the issue, unfortunately it didn't. The issue continued to come back.

The issue in a nutshell:

The screen would be working perfectly at 120Hz, chugging along at a beautiful refresh rate and response time on the desktop or in games, and then all of the sudden it would randomly become super sluggish/blurry akin to a 60hz panel. It was easily noticeable, and dragging windows and apps around would be noticeably blurry. Games looked 60Hz and blurry and less responsive. I went into the display adapter properties and sure enough 120Hz was selected. If I selected 60Hz at this point the panel would freak out and flash and blink rapidly. A reboot was the only fix. After reboot the screen was perfect again and displayed 120Hz properly.

I purchased the screen from Woodzstack about 6 months ago and was one of the first adopters of the 120Hz on the F5. I don't think at this time it's some sort of hardware issue, but rather a bug or driver issue because like I said a reboot makes the screen perfect again, and also allows for 60hz to work as well properly.

Temporary fix:

I decided to try a fix I came up with after thinking about the issue for quite some time. I downloaded CRU, and completely deleted the 60Hz profile (never used) from the detailed resolutions and rebooted. It remained gone, and I'm not sure if it was a placebo effect or not but the screen immediately seemed better than ever. The 120hz seems even more responsive and fluid. Best of all the issue of refresh rate/response times swapping randomly is completely gone for now. I haven't had the issue return yet, and while my testing hasn't been super extensive I feel confident I might have found a temporary fix.

I figured I would let you guys know just in case anyone has noticed this issue or maybe been suspicious of such issue. For anyone that has extensive use of high refresh rate panels its very easy to notice when the screen suddenly reverts to a much lower refresh rate.

Take Care.

 

Does the original BIOS have the fix? Not that I've ever seen a crash. Is super rare.

 

Perfect, thanks for sharing Talon !

Having all this here is much better, so we can all get a clearer idea if this is common issue or what causes it etc..

 

Guys I'm at a Dilemma here and I NEED your input.

What to do, should I keep my 4K Panel with G-Sync or switch to 120HZ FHD no G-Sync?

The GTX 1080 gets toasty with 4K gaming, it can't run even constant 60FPS on 4K, I play games like Battlefield and Star Citizen and use the laptop for work like MSOFFICE, Zbrush, Photoshop and browsing/video watching.

Most apps will not display correctly on 4K panel which is a pain.....thus I'm not sure, should I wait for next gen GPU to run 4K 60FPS or get now the 120HZ Panel in hopes of getting DSR Nvidia to display games at 4K super sampled in the FHD 120HZ panel?

 

Mr. Fox, sorry, I'm asking you this in the wrong forum but I'm running Premas original version from Eurocom. (1.06.01EC v1) Do I need to contact Eurocom and update? I've had zero trouble that I know of. Only issue I've ever had was I get the "Current Limit throttling" in XTU, which I shouldn't be running anyway.

 

Personally, I would always go with higher refresh rate over higher resolution but I care more about the gaming experience on my machine than "usable work space". If you do a lot of stuff in office or photoshop etc and use that extra screen real estate then it may be worth it for you to keep it. You can always run your games at a lower resolution to help with performance and heat. FWIW my 1080 has been running at about 89-90 when I run demanding games and I am on the 120hz FHD panel. Could just need to be repasted and running a little hotter than it should but I get the feeling everything is going to run fairly toasty in this machine when under heavy load.

 

My best recommendation is to go with the 120 Hz 1080p panel. That gives you a lot of options. You can limit frame rates on games to get your temps down when your book is running too hot, but you have the ability to run those extreme frame rates when you can control your temps. You can always hook it to a 4k external monitor whenever you want that experience and the monitor can be larger than the 15.6" screen to really take advantage of those extra pixels.

Either way you go, ultimately, you have to do what works best for you. If you are sensitive to input lag or ghosting the faster refresh will be better. Going with a 1080p screen also allows you the option of running the game at 4k and outputting at 1080p which gives a very clean image. On the other hand, the 4k screen has Gsync to mitigate the visual issues of lower fps and the image will be sharper.

 

YIKES! on 120HZ FHD and still run hot.....I guess I'll save my cash for the next Gen MXM GPU XX80 series and stick with my current 4K G-sync panel.

@leftsenseless thank you for your input. I have the Asus G-Sync QHD 144HZ 27" monitor, I need a DP to a Mini DP adapter for my EVOC to be able to hook it up to it, will look for one.

 

That is just what mine is currently running at, it could be an issue of needing to be repasted but I mean it's a 1080 in a 15 inch laptop it's always going to run pretty warm but I know I have seen people get their temps lower, the bottom cover mod will also help a lot as well. You should try running your games at 1080p rather than 4k and see if that makes any differences for your temps and would give you an idea of what a 1080p screen would do for you.

 

I pretty much never have my temps get that high. I also have the GTX 1080 with the 7700k. I don't let my temps break 80 C if I can help it, which usually I can.

 

how hot does it get, 105C ?

 

Best advice is, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" so I would not worry about it.

 

This is one of the reasons I absolutely despise 4K notebook displays. I find them absolutely miserable, and I have had several notebooks with 4K display panels. You need at least a 25-inch display for comfortable text viewing at 100% scaling, and if you use over 100% scaling with text size comfortable for reading then everything else is screwed up, not to mention the loss of usable screen real estate (the primary advantage of 4K is you can fit more stuff on it at once... side-by-side document viewing, seeing more Excel rows and columns without scrolling, etc). So, considering I am a die hard 4K-hater, take my recommendation to go with the 120Hz 1080p screen as "for what it's worth" advice.

 

Yeah your right there, however I find something like 1440p okay for 17" 1080p is good at 15"

 

Yes, I love the 1440p 120Hz screen on the DM3 and the 1080p 120Hz screen on the 15" micro-beast is just what the doctor ordered. Anything lower than 1080p resolution on any size notebook is unacceptable to me. And, 1080p is probably the best one-size-fits-all display resolution. Everything scales perfectly at 100% and looks great as long as the panel itself is good quality.

 

If only I could find a 1440P 120hz panel for our laptop. My original 4k cable I purchased did not work for the screen I purchased which I don't understand why unless the way MSI wires the cables is different for whitebooks and retail versions. I am about to order a different one to try here once my Ebay bucks post in early July.

 

Which screen was it again ? a Sharp or Samsung screen right ?
There are 40 pin and 30 pin eDP cable for those screens, what you probably needed was a cable that goes from one to the other.

 

The 120Hz panel on this laptop is seriously amazing, I would say go for it. 4K gaming is not really feasible at this time, not even with my 1080 Ti in some games unless I was happy with 60Hz or less (I'm not). Gaming at 120Hz+ is very very enjoyable, and I can never go back to 60Hz. Remember that that by trading off the load and temps from 4K on the GPU, you are loading the CPU up to now help render those 120fps instead of the <60 you are getting with the 4K G-sync panel. TBH I don't miss G-Sync on this 120Hz panel that much. G-Sync is nice for sure and it would be great, but it won't ruin the experience that is high refresh rate gaming. If you want to get around screen tearing to an extent you can limit your FPS to 1-2 fps below native refresh rate and with minimal input lag it will almost completely eliminate screen tears.

The 120Hz panel with brightness control made this laptop complete for me.

 

This is exactly my experience.

 

Well I can't argue anymore....I want a next GEN GPU but that will take time to arrive. I guess keeping the 4K panel isn't feasible now.

I will inform HID of my changes....120HZ it is.

 

So the 120 ha panel doesn't have gsync? Is it TN or IPS.