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

Half the F5's I've sold have beaten my expectations. Like Matt here, coming back with crazy scores and such. In my own tests I do not push them this far, I make sure they can handle 5.0Ghz easily and then do stability tests around 4.5Ghz to 4.9Ghz to see if it survives without the fans on max, and then I do a quick estimation for a bench and see what it scores. generally 15,000 points in firestrike and it's pretty good. That's more then you should get for a laptop this price by far, That's about what you'd get with a desktop for this price. So yeah...
About the components, its really the coils and vregs and mosfetts on the motherboard that maintain the proper voltage at higher clocks and such under load... you could try to measure EM coming off them and try and isolate any that might be weaker then the next, testing draws coming through them might not be as indicative as you'd think of anything not working perfectly, but coil whine and noise and any EM would indicate some are at thier limits, maybe replace them with higher quality ones from Japan. It can be done easy enough if you find the right parts and person with the appropriate knowledge and such. I think there is like 8 phases for the CPU itself, on this motherboard, hence why it clocks so well.

 

Haha well luckily I have no realistic use for a stable 5.2GHz outside benchmarking, but like many of us here, the joy in over clocking to the max has me pushing. That and I'm pretty sure my 1070 overclocking has maxed out with the current VBIOS, so the 7700k is where I might be able to squeeze out my last few points for now.

 

Absolutely. Life without overclocking isn't living. It's way too much fun to even think about doing without it. If I were going to stop overclocking, then I wouldn't buy anything more expensive than a cheap throw-away Dell Inspiron, Acer Aspire, or a low-end Chromebook from Wal-Mart.

 

Well, I attempted a Linux install tonight, but I didn't get very far. The good news is that I had a spare 480 GB SSD on hand, from an older laptop that I don't regularly use. It had a 480 and a 256 onboard. I yanked the 480 and will reinstall Linux on the 256 for the older laptop, making it still viable for its occasional use as a test machine.

Put your brain in humor mode, and come along for the ride...

I opened my new machine for the first time, which was refreshingly simple. The first time you remove that bottom panel, its thin construction and flex is a little disconcerting, but you soon realize it's meant to flex that way. Getting the panel back on is a little more challenging, but not bad once you learn the tricks. Seat the back first, place the sides carefully so the locking clips don't get caught outside the main housing, and when seating the front clips, push away from you and downward on the bottom to force the cover to flex slightly. It's hard to describe but easy to do once you realize that's the way.

When installing my SSD, I quickly discovered that I had forgotten to order one important accessory from HIDevolution: A disk carrier. Oops. I was able to improvise with some closed-cell foam pads, obtaining the foam from my armoring workshop. (Doesn't everyone make armor in their basement?)

Drive installed, close the bottom cover, confident that any idiot can install an SSD.

Apparently, that means "any idiot except me." BIOS said, "SATA SSD? I don't see any SATA SSD!" I open the cover again. I check the drive closely. Ahhhhh..... Somehow I managed to put the very thin SSD underneath its socket rather than into the socket. I fixed that and added a thin foam pad beneath to hold it steadily in the correct position. This time, less cocky, I tested BIOS before closing the cover. All is well!

I needed to pick a Linux distro, and make a bootable USB stick. My preference is Debian, but I decided to go Ubuntu because that would have more recent device drivers. Now, how do you burn an ISO image to a USB stick on Windows? On Linux, it's really easy, using the "dd" command. The answer on Windows turns out to be "get a copy of Rufus".

I burned an Ubuntu stick with Rufus. At one point, Rufus offered me the choice of ISO mode or DD mode. Since ISO was "recommended", I chose that. Big mistake. That makes a drive that the BIOS does not think is bootable, as I found out when, well, I tried to do so!

When the USB wouldn't boot, I remembered that choice in Rufus, booted back into Windows, and burned the same USB using the DD mode from Rufus.

Again, no booting joy, so I checked BIOS settings. It seems BIOS can either configure the USB device as a "USB HDD" or a "USB DVD". One would think it does not matter, but it does. USB DVD is the needed mode.

At last, I got the Linux GRUB menu, meaning I was ready to boot Ubuntu! I selected the "Try Ubuntu" (live disk) mode, and booted to...

...a black screen. Ctrl-Alt-F1 does not bring up the usual character mode shell, either. Obviously a graphics driver problem.

Boot up Windows, go to Google. Learn that I need to add "nomodeset" to the GRUB boot options during the boot, using the GRUB edit menu.

Adding that parameter worked! I was able to boot up Ubuntu, and it ran quite nicely -- if you don't mind 640x480 screen resolution. I tried moving to the next step, but there was no way to scale the UI down to fit onto that screen, so I soon realized it was not usable that way.

Reboot back to Windows, use Google to find out how to change the screen resolution during boot. I remembered that the GRUB parameter was "vga=_____" (something), but couldn't remember the mode number. The online reference said 799 was the mode I wanted (1600x1200), a nice medium DPI setting for installing. I could change it later to use my full 4K screen.

Unfortunately, vga=799 was ignored. It still booted to 640x480. I tried a couple of other modes, but no joy.

I decided to give up on Ubuntu and move to Debian. Debian booted very nicely with its "netinstall" media (again on a USB stick). The graphical installer came up with a reasonable screen resolution that scaled perfectly. I thought it was going to be fine, except that Debian can't find the network adapter (neither wired nor wifi). I tried every driver I could find, but nothing worked.

After all of that, I decided to call it a night. I'm not giving up yet, but it's late and I have to work tomorrow.

At worst case, even if Linux on this machine is a total bust, I have a nice 480 GB addition to my disk space -- so the evening was not wasted. And I already have Linux running very nicely in a virtual machine. So even the worst case here is not so bad -- but I'll keep trying to load Linux natively from that spare drive, at least until I run out of patience.

MODERATORS: I probably should have posted this in the MSI 16L13 Owner's Lounge. Feel free to move it if you think it fits better there. (EDIT: They did. Thanks!)

 

But wouldn't it be more of a rewarding challenge to get those machines up to stuff ? Get unlocked bioses going on those... maybe solder different BGA cpu's..
bah screw it, just get an F5, 99% the work already done for you ! hahaha

 

I put it here
Eurocom Unlocks BIOS In Tornado F5 Gaming Laptop For Overclocking - Tom's hardware.com

 

Nope. It would not be rewarding. It would be immoral to even make an effort IMHO. BGA is trash and doing anything to minimize the undesirable impact this inferior garbage has had on our industry would be a waste of time and go against the culture of seething hatred we are trying to foster for it. That would be kind of like taking steps to convince people that it is OK to eat brownies made with dog manure simply because the nasty odor and taste has been masked by sugar and chocolate.

Exactly... worthless as tits on a boar. Get a TF5 or a P870 and give BGA the nasty finger. Both of my 7700K CPUs will boot 5.0GHz with stock voltage. I set the one in the P870 to 1.255V static/override and the TF5 I set to 1.260V and they are as stable as running BIOS defaults with stock core ratios.

 

Clean installed Windoze OS X Creators Abortion and Windows 7 Pro on the TF5 and the P870. I put both of my X400 512GB SSD in the TF5 and now have both NVMe in the P870. TF5 palm rest has never been this cool before. And, there's not a darned bit of difference in how the systems run or feel (either one of them). NVMe is such a huge waste of money, LOL. It actually seems to boot a little faster without the NVMe.

 

haha nice

 

deleted

 

Did you ever end up posting this article?

 

What article ?

 

Where can we read your article?

 

I've been working on a performance comparison article featuring the Tornado F5 and Clevo P775DM3. The reason why I didn't post it yet is work is kicking my butt and I want to be fair to the Clevo P775DM3. I think my heatsink is warped and I'm going to see if I can get a replacement or at the very least try new thermal pads which are coming. The GPU core will not go over 180+ at all, whereas the Tornado F5 1080 can hit 250+. If I were to post what i have now, the Tornado F5 wins at the top end (7700K @ 5.1 and 1080 @ +260/500).

EDIT: If you looking at both machines, I recommend the MSI 16L13 aka Tornado F5 with unlocked bios - should go without saying.

 

Yeah, I would have to agree. The Tornado F5/EVOC 16L-G-1080 is definitely a better product than the P775DM3 overall. Maybe this would help the Clevo.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-polish-heatsinks.789541/page-2#post-10496402

It is also possible you got a very poorly binned sample of a Clevo 1080. The +180 max overclock on core suggests to me that it is a defective GPU that should have been culled and sent back to Clevo. That's not even worth messing with. You'll never be able to produce respectable benchmark scores with that.

 

I appreciate all the work @Mr. Fox and @Rage Set have put in with this machine and communicating their experiences to the community. All of the videos and dedicated threads/posts have really boosted my excitement for the 16L.

I really can't wait to get mine and dig into it with @Phoenix.

 

I'm not sure overclocking over stock by some arbitrary number means it's defective unless it's been officially built to do that. In which that would be the new standard.

So if nvidia became so precise with their yields and the confidence in oem heat management that it was extremely consistent to the point where they could gain maximum performance ootb you'd be dead in the water without being about to get more than they give you?

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

If most part of the graphics can OC to a certain level and a few can't... I would call it defective.

 

That's the nature of the bell curve. You're always going to have some outliers at the bottom. It's not defective, it's just incredibly unfortunate if you get something a few sigmas below the mean.

 

How can I unlock the power limits, core voltage and temp limit? On my desktop it is open but on the laptop I just can't do anything. So far I hit+235 without crashing in a game, I tried it on Rise of Tomb raider, it is a sensetive game before even getting to the main menu I can tell if my GPU needs more juice, so anything here to unlock those limits?

 

Exactly bro! Nevertheless, I don't think my reseller (or any reseller for that matter) for this particular machine will understand that. For "normal" operation it is working and no overclock range is guaranteed. So with that said, I'm going to put my P775DM3 up for sale, very soon.

 

The GTX 10xx series is locked so you can't change anything with regards to voltage not even sure if Prema can unlock those with a custom VBIOS due to the protection nVIDIA has placed on the VBIOS.

 

Ah that is a letdown from Nvidia....It's not that bad I can still live with it

 

It is that bad. Why should we accept the trend of manufacturers taking away our ability of using a product we purchased as we see fit? It's fine if we void warranties, but don't take away that control. It's ridiculous that we've accepted how few rights we have left with the hardware and software that we own. (I know we don't own software and there has to be copyright protection, but the state of software control is unjustly regulated against the consumer in my opinion)

 

So anyone else getting the F9 Tornado ? We even have the F15 "Eagle" Tornado which offers 2011v-3 chips like this one :

Spoiler: 6950X @4.5ghz

(Yeah thats my 6950X BTW... people said 4.4Ghz is like hitting a wall.. so I tried to go over the wall. *shrugs*)

comes with a nuclear powerplant to mitigate the dual 780W PSU's offered in the F9. LOL...
you can have a laugh by reading about it here : http://www.eurocom.com/ec/release(372)ec

didn't think anywhere else would be a good place to show these.

 

yeah thats not fun. They did all this because they want more direct control over how we as consumers upgrade and what our perceptions are, and if we could unlock the voltage then we'd unlock its true potential and wouldn't need a new upgrade in 2-3 years.
Like how many of you guys have a good 980Ti and have it OC'd +50% ?

 

That's a very very crude joke....The bad thing is that some people are going to believe that machine is real.

 

Well the bench mark of mine is real, that same chip is even on ebay for sale.

 

Btw guys, does the GTX1080 require some tweaks before it's optimize for gaming? I realize that my FPS in The Division is pretty low for this graphic cards (avg 90, ultra preset. vsync off, AA off). My friend's msi gt73vr gtx1070 is hitting the same average FPS as mine. My gpu easily gets to 90C but It's not throttling. I just wonder If I need to tweak my settings in Nvidia control panel to get more FPS..

 

whats the resolution of each screen ? A low performing 1080 can be as low as a higher performing 1070.

Also imagine your on 4K and he is on 3K your scores should be the same.

 

1080p, 100% scalling...

 

well, your in the high FPS area, pushing past a certain point is gonna also require other things, like CPU and overall PC speeds and latency, without having both laptops infront of me how could we tell ?

 

True... I guess ill try to overclock a little bit my cpu after deliding it since its a ''K'' series anyway
Thanks for helping

 

I tried the steps in the following video (except for trying the beta as there was no beta available), but was only able to unlock the voltage (which is adjustable as a percentage and not as mV), but not the power or temp limits. But I haven't actually tried increasing the voltage yet (as I don't have the experience yet) and don't know if it actually works or if it's advisable; I just wanted it unlocked just to have the option in the future. You'll have to watch the video on YouTube to be able to view the description where there are some links.

 

I think @Mr. Fox can PM me or tell me from where I can get that VBios he uses here in this Tornado F5.


I know I have a GTX 1080 as well that needs some OC!

 

You won't be able to get those vBios. The Bios/vBios he has are for his machine alone, developed for him by Prema as a Bday gift. Each of his machines are unique, like the Fox AK I have.

 

Do you mind sharing your temperatures at stock for CPU and GPU? Is 90c typical?

 

@Mr. Fox where did you get the spare cover? With the GA heat coming up I will probably do the same type of panel mod.

 

You can unlock the voltage control slider but because it's actually locked in the vBIOS it does zilch. At least it looks cool right?

 

Im still at work so I cant show you anything but ill take a pic for you once I get home.
from memories, playing the division, at ultra preset, vsync off AA off, for about 2-3 hours, my cpu tenps goes max 94C and hover around 86C. GTX1080 get up to 91C. Everything stock, deliding this next week
Edit: sorry my cpu isnt stock, its -75mv. Altough the temps arent much different even after undervolt

 

Are you forcing your fans to max?

 

your welcome. You need to give us more details for more assistance though

 

Yep, max fan when i get 80C +

 

@CedricFP So theses are my temps on idle, ill play The division for a while to show u the post temps. My fan will be on max after 80C and undervolt -75mv.

 

You mean each machine it's Bios and VBios are custom made with some sort of signature besides it's unlocked options?

What about your Fox AK, is it a commercial version or a personal one like with @Mr. Fox ?

Basically I'm looking for unlocked VBios, since I don't see it being sold around here, I will have to find it from somewhere else, I don't like my machine being tied down by software while there is power to be used within.

 

My @Prema firmware is unique, created especially for me. It even has my name embedded in it. Even the vBIOS does, LOL. It says, "Mr. Fox - Not for Resale" every time the vBIOS boots at power on.

Nobody has 1080 Notebook vBIOS mods. Assuming you can find one someplace that is known to be good, then you will also need to remove the GPU and use another computer with a TL-866A USB flash programmer and a 1.8V adapter to flash it mechanically. Unfortunately, all of the Green Goblin's Pascal filth has write-protected vBIOS chips now. So, you cannot use NVFLASH to apply it like the good old days. These bastards went full-retard Nazi control freak on us this time.

 

Thank you, I look forward to your post!

 

First, thank you for this lesson.

Secondly, I need to go and learn what is a "TL-866A USB flash programmer", what is a "1.8V adapter to flash it mechanically" and I give up at this point because of the write-protect vBIOS chips, I didn't know they had something like this in it.

I guess I will have a choice of upgrade in the near future, be it Volta or a 1080Ti or AMD new GPU, wouldn't need GPU like AMD to lose G-Sync but I presume Freesync is software based so...

 

@CedricFP So I kinda will let you down a bit. I don't even know what happened and I didn't tweak on any settings but my temps tonight seems so be so much lower compared to yesteday!! The only problem I found tho, is my clock speed is SO much lower than yesteday. I get max 4.4Ghz ytd and 3.4Ghz today(power option on high performance too =/ ).dunno what gives. Once again, max fan speed

 

@Mr. Fox are these the correct items?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/TL866A-USB-...-FLASH-8051-AVR-MCU-GAL-PIC-SPI-/221197938454

And I can't find out what a 1.8V adapter looks like....so many things!