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

what were we seeing int he before after pic ? The 4 screws on the heatsink ?

 

Yes, he swapped out the destroyed screw and the 3 good ones for stainless ones. Showing they fit well

 

You were able to unlock the vBIOS? How much power is that 1080 pulling?

 

No, not yet. The vBIOS is limited to 150W by design and the most I have been able to force it to is around 155W so far. It will be unlocked soon. As soon as Brother @Prema has some spare time to work on it.

 

Does that mean he's gotten around the encryption or are you going to desolder it and use a programmer?

 

I'm curious to hear some thoughts on the 120hz panel once more people have it installed. Outside of the Notebook Check review of the Sager unit that had the same monitor I can't really find many details on it. It's what I chose on my EVOC and I'm slightly concerned about the colors being off for video editing, but it still feels like the best option between the current 3 choices so that's why I went with it.

 

So I have the 120hz display sitting boxed up... Once I get my laptop I will add all my parts besides the display than try to do a comparison of the 2. I do not have a color calibrator. But I will go by stock look of the screens ( I know this will be different for every panel, but it's the best I can do)

 

Thanks! If you want, here is a link to the calibrated profile from the Notebook Check review using the same panel. I plan to try it myself when I get my hands on my EVOC.

 

I still have locked bios on the original F5 tornado, I am limited to 4.4 on a 7700k. I updated to the new bios.

What the hell happen to Eurocom saying that the Bios will be unlocked by Christmas. Or should I say fuc it and never buy anything from Eurocom again. I really hate when a company will say something and they dont release it.

 

That's a pretty sweet score in FireStrike.

EDIT: After posting this, I realized that only gamers could turn a test of gaming hardware into a game. IOW, "Meta, much?"

 

I'm very impressed with the Graphics Scores considering only 150W is the max power draw. What clocks & corresponding voltages does your GTX 1080 run at during the benchmarks? My desktop GTX 1070 runs 2062Mhz and 1.062V or 2050Mhz and 1.05V, and consumes 200W in some portions of Firestrike for instance - it would be interesting to compare mobile & desktop because it would be interesting to know where the power savings are coming from considering you're only at 150W max, yet scoring so well.

 

This is very interesting, because it suggests one could down-throttle on purpose to save power, and still get "pretty good" performance for casual use when "screaming fast" isn't needed.

I wonder if anyone has studied the effect on power usage as a function of temperature, independent of other factors? Semiconductors behave more like resistors the higher their temperature, so hotter running actually wastes more power, other things equal. What I don't know is exactly how big a factor that is on modern CMOS transistors.

 

Higher temps require higher voltages for stability at the same clocks, presumably because the RC constant increases for the capacitative elements with temperature, leading to a longer charge time.

 

Pascal's boost behaviour shows that it boosts to higher frequencies at lower temperatures - I've noticed my card dip down from a stable 2050Mhz down to 2037Mhz if 60degC is broken (not TDP limited at any point) - IIRC the voltage drops when it steps down to that lower frequency too. If it's ever possible to underclock your Pascal mobile GPUs then you probably get increased efficiency for the performance - I think the closer to the 2000Mhz/2100Mhz marks (pretty much the maximum) you get the more innefficient these GPUs become.

 

Sigh, my display is no longer showing any images. Not even the bios splash screen.

Played gta5 last night for about 4 hours and everything was fine. Powered down with no issues. Powered up today and nothing. Im going to find a TV or another display to HDMI in to to make sure its just the display and nothing else.

Edit: Scratch that, 2 HDMI cables and 2 separate displays, no image. The max fan button still works and the keyboard light works as well.....but as of today I have a brick.

Edit 2: I imagine an RMA process through eurocom won't be great considering I have delidded, lapped, applied cllp, and dremeled out a stripped screw.

 

Ok turn off the laptop, take out the battery, then leave it out for this whole process:

Press and hold power button for 15 seconds (do this 3 times--don't hold it down for 45 seconds, you have to let go each time)

Now plug back in the battery and try turning it on

Edit: don't leave the power cord plugged in while you do that either^^

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

No luck. Still no display. Thank you for the suggestion though.

 

@woodzstack

Sorry to say, it's sounding like an LM related sudden death. Same kind of symptoms reported for a LM leak induced failure.

It could be something else

 

Unfortunately, thats what I'm thinking too. I used cllp on the GPU as well but I taped around the core to prevent leaks from spilling over as a precaution.

I'm waiting for the stainless steel screws to come in before I tear this down again. Any recommendations? RMA back to eurocom, more than likely have them tell me the GPU is out and pay for a replacement GPU?

 

Well, it's a toss up really, until you identify the failure point, it could be anywhere a drip fell.

I would eye ball the board out from the CPU / GPU with a bright light to catch the dull burn area - if it's visible.

Hopefully it's just the motherboard, easy to swap, otherwise it might be elsewhere requiring a GPU swap.

Good luck, and please come back and let us know how it works out.

 

I'm pretty sure the motherboard would be cheaper to swap out. It's just more labor-intensive, but that doesn't really matter if it's being RMAed.

 

That makes perfect sense to me. I would expect C not to change very much, so delta R would govern delta T.

 

The clock won't change itself as a direct result of the temp; there has to be BIOS or a driver involved somewhere -- although it's safe to assume the author of the BIOS or driver would have accounted for the inefficiency at temperature, which may partially explain why they lower the clock.

 

As another owner who has CLU on the CPU/GPU, this is terrifying

 

GPU core drops as low at 1850 or so at times, but never exceeds 150W give or take a watt or two. Most of the time in the 140's even when the GPU boosts up to 2150MHz. I am eager to see the 150W power limit lifted and the below-room-temperate throttle cancer fixed. I'm fairly certain this GPU can handle 200W since my 980M can.

Hate to break it to you, but Pascal DEFINITELY throttles, and somewhat severely as a direct result of temperatures. And, we're not talking hot temperatures either. We're talking normal GPU operating temperatures, unfortunately. Brother @Johnksss@iBUYPOWER and I have been trying to explain this for a while now. You can set your GPU at any clock speed and if you keep the core temps below 45°-49°C the GPU is going to run at high clock speed and return a notably higher benchmark score. The vBIOS needs to have that cancer code removed so throttling is postponed until about 85°C for Pascal GPUs to be as amazing as NVIDIA wants everyone to believe they are. We think they are amazing compared to Kepler and Maxwell, and they are. But, they kind of suck compared to what they could be without a cancer vBIOS. Hopefully, @Prema is going to fix that for Clevo owners. I don't know what everyone else is going to do about it. Probably not much.

 

Hi,

I reset defaults in my Tornado bios. It rebooted and is stuck on boot logo. No matter how many times, I can't get past that or boot into BIOS setup.

Mike

 

He's just saying that it's not an electrical property, but an intentional one governed by the VBIOS.

 

I think most of you have probably seen/read this, but here's our Eurocom Tornado F5 (MSI 16L13) review. 4/5 stars. That's about as high of a rating as you'll see for a gaming notebook on this site; as a matter of fact, it's rare we give a rating that high to any notebook.

I didn't make the temps a big deal, though I did feel obligated to note them. Here's the blurb I got in about the performance/thermal enhancement you all have mentioned:

So when you all become famous, don't forget about me, OK?

Charles

 

I mean when are they going to release the 120hz with GSYNC? Sorry if I didn't make myself clear.

 

It was quite the informative piece and I applaud you for the majority of the review. However, given the components in this machine, why is a "thick chassis" under the cons? You've stated throughout the review that this machine contains desktop aka LGA components but you punish it for being thicker. Yet in the same vein, you praise its performance. An anecdote is a thicker chassis equals stellar performance.

It is a great review overall though and I hope it brings more attention to which is the most powerful 15'' in the market.

 

Eurocom is currently working to get the 120hz panel whitelisted for G-Sync to work with the MSI 16L13. There is no set timetable for the panel to be whitelisted. You could be waiting weeks or months.

On a side note, @Donald@HIDevolution says this panel is IPS and not TN. Based off all my research on this particular panel (B156HTN05.2), it is indeed a TN panel.

You check here http://www.panelook.com/B156HTN05.2_AUO_15.6_LCD_rfqitemdetail_11924.html

As I have stated before, there are no 120hz 5ms 15.6'' IPS panels commercially available.

 

I don't think we disagree. I agree that Pascal throttles; my assertion is that throttling is not intrinsic to the thermal properties of the silicon. I probably wasn't clear on that; sorry.

 

For whatever my opinion is worth, I thought the review was well balanced and useful. Your comments about the non-flashy design amused me. To some, that's a problem, but I have ordered one of these for business use, so to me it's a feature.

You're the first one I've seen commenting on the reduced numpad key size. I'll have to experience that for myself, but in my case the main use of numpad keys is for viewport movement in Blender, so I doubt it will be a problem for me.

In any case, thanks for the review.

 

The 120Hz panel with G-Sync is already released, I have nearly a dozen people in this thread or on this forum who have already gotten it or are using it, HOWEVER - note that the bios is still in the works for supporting it, so ATM - the G-Sync is not white listed in the bios. It needs to have the hardware ID of the panel listed in the bios as A-OK for enabling g-sync.
Other then that, the panel does support it and is working.
The support for this is a work in progress, that only time is going to fix.

 

The 1070 we get in this laptop performs better then the higher tier MSI 1070 desktop cards they have. So there are issues with the desktop cards too. Pascal is probably just very young and still having growing pains.

 

Yes, it could be that. Or, it could also be the latest example of the kind of nonsense they are famous for. The Jolly Green Giant is always pulling smoke and mirrors tricks of some sort. They have been artificially manipulating performance with firmware and drivers for years so they can sell something old as something new and maximize profits in the process. Not that the alternative is any better... in fact, generally not very good. Which is why the same approach continues to work for the Green Goblin. Not many people like the mediocrity offered by their competition.

 

The Armored edition of the 1070, is supposed to be some higher end version, but gets less of a score and performs less then these 1070's do. Of course I am aware that they do nto have identical stats, but this is the oddest thing, like, laptops are MORE powerful then desktops for the same price.

get a mouse, keyboard, and g-sync monitor, speakers, psu, 7700k, 1070 some RAM and a decent heatsink for the cpu/gpu , mtherboard with 2 x NVMe and support for Pascal and Kabylake, and has a built in soundcard of decent quality (not by audiophile's of course), and it will come up to more then any F5 I believe.

This laptop is a STEAL or a bargain!

 

Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that the 1070N is around 5-10% slower than desktop 1070s, mainly because of constrictive TDP limits.

 

Thanks. I listed the thick chassis as a con to balance out the review, and keep the Tornado F5 relative to the 15.6-inch notebook market. There would be no sense pointing out the thickness if I wasn't going to use it to say something about the notebook. I'm not a fan of reviews that just post specs and expect the reader to know if that means something. Like in car reviews where they say how much horsepower the car has, or its wheelbase without then using that to compare to the competition or otherwise ...is that a lot of horsepower or wheelbase? I don't know, they just said the numbers and expected me to know what they meant.
But I did put the thickness in a positive light in the cooling section:

The generic looks is listed as a con is for the same reason, to keep the review relative to the market. I think the readers will interpret it as they want, looks are mostly subjective. I did state it could be a pro or a con in the design section, but ultimately had to put it somewhere.
It would personally be a selling point for me, but in reviews my personal opinion isn't necessarily relevant.

Charles

 

That seems fair to me. Let's be honest, most of the people on this thread (including me) accept a larger mechanical size as the price of higher performance, user serviceable parts, and expandability. TANSTAAFL. But just because it's something we willingly accept, that doesn't make it a "good thing".

By the way, @Charles P. Jefferies, thanks for the spec on the power cord length -- useful and hard-to-find data, and seldom included in the official specs by the manufacturer. In the future, you might consider breaking that down into how long the IEC-standard wall cord is, and how long the low voltage cable is. That's relevant to whether the brick can sit on the floor under a desk or needs to be on the desk.

 

Could be gimped bios. I tried this on the 3 bioses for the CarbonFiber MSI motherboard. Or it could be the Armo 1070 is just not up to stuff. The PSU was a 1600T2 so it had enough power. The RAM was G-skill 2400Mhz 4 x 8GB. (couldn't get the 125.00 x blk to work either, unlike on my other desktops like X99 chipsets.)

 

It was a German engineering design for elegant and simple yet affordable. That's how they termed it.

 

I mean a 120hz with GSYNC for the Eurocom Tornado F5.....sorry again!

Nvm though, someone already answered my question here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...6-owners-lounge.797128/page-329#post-10450572

 

After this review can you make a review of the laptop like you persoanlly owned it or are you not allowed so.

Do a review with delid cpu, undervolt, etc.

 

Yes, that was my earlier mistake...but it was corrected on our website a while back, before you made this post. My apologies to all.
.

 

some of you wanted to see the back end of the motherboard.

 

Not sure IPS is fast enough to do 120hz and not have crazy ghosting effects. Only TN right now is fast-fast. The response time is very important, because it's what causes that ghosting effect if it's too high, even when your 120hz...

 

Here's another nothing special score.
http://www.3dmark.com/fs/11581860 no real overclock here, though I increased the core speed on CPU to 4.5Ghz all 4 cores. Nothing else.


This laptop belongs to another Canadian customer of mine, sharing the firestrike scores to show consistency in the scores.

 

No, I am fairly certain you are just trying to make a person whose laptop is sitting customs right now anxious and jealous

 

hahaha no I am not. It hasn't cleared yet ? At least you know where it is, and it took what, 24 hours to get to customs... the wait will be well worth it !~