TONGFANG GK5CN5Z / GK5CN6Z / GK5CQ7Z / GK5CP0Z

Upgraded the stock 16GB RAM that I had overclocked to 3000MHz to 32GB of G.SKILL 3000/CL16.

 

Out of stock still =(

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

 

Yea, I did something similar with Dell G7, I used copper plate glued to back cover and a couple of 1.5mm thermal pads stacked. It works for decreasing temps by same amount, but there is no performance benefit. I do not overclock anything, though, so maybe there is some difference for people who do.

 

Yes, you are correct. If the PCH is not overheating it will not improve performance. If it gets too hot it will reduce performance and cause throttling.

It does not overheat on this machine, but I live by the idea that cooler is always better and even if the temps are not terrible, I like to make them better if there is an opportunity to do so. The heat ends up going somewhere and increases the temperature of the air inside of the chassis, so managing that is the best approach in my mind. All high-end notebooks and all desktop motherboards that are worth owning have some sort of PCH cooling. Only the less expensive options run the PCH with a bare die. Unfortunately, the less expensive options do not have a way to attach a PCH heat sink (usually two holes positioned diagonally at opposite corners of the PCH chip). So, using the bottom cover made it easy.

On the Tornado F5 I used Arctic Silver thermal adhesive to permanently glue a copper heat sink onto the PCH die. That worked awesome, but there is less space in this chassis and not enough room. (My copper RAM sinks are more than 5mm thick and won't fit between the PCH die and bottom cover.)

I got the idea from the factory heat sink this machine has attached to the bottom cover to cool the M.2 drives. It works very well. My NVMe and M.2 SATA SSD rarely exceed 60°C with that stock heat sink.

 

That's a pretty nice PCH temp. Too bad the PCH on G7 is next to GPU heatsink plate so even with extra heatsink it still heats up a lot, up to 63c when playing games.

 

yup that is the one im talking about, unfortunately its been sold out for ages. i'm wondering if tongfang is providing xmg/eluktronics with theirs, as they are happily selling laptops with our desired batteries left and right. someone still produces these batteries but wont sell them to private people which is a shame

edit: been goofing around for months now. i bought one from ebay for around 130€ with shipping. lol that was a really tough decision to make. but since i want to basically keep this laptop forever and enjoy it way too much i think it will payoff.

 

Looks like I am taking #1 in just about everything compared to other systems with the same specs. Able to pull 92W from the 2060 by keeping it cool.
https://www.3dmark.com/fs/20662317

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/8849148

@B0B @Papusan

 

Never hurts to have a little help from your friends, too... if you're not using ThrottleStop, you should be.

 

Good work @Mr. Fox.

A good looking laptop, inexpensive considering its performance, easy to work on, and easy to tweak with ThrottleStop so one can achieve maximum performance out of the 9750H. Intel engineering would be proud of your scores.

All of the other manufacturers should be ashamed at some of the poorly engineered laptops that they are turning out.

 

This is within striking distance of @Prema's 2060 Fire Strike score in a notebook with an 8700K.

https://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/20664046/fs/18970005


@Falkentyne

Chilly-willy (AC cooling)



@B0B

Thank you. And, I could not agree more with your comments.

 

Couple more...

 

More #1 scores for these specs.

 

GoW4 Benchmark - 125 FPS on Ultra/Max settings

GoW4 - Temps @ 30 minutes of gameplay (Conductonaut on CPU and GPU)

 

Hi guys, any ideas why my keyboard has totally stopped working? I turned the laptop on this morning and there are no lights and the keyboard is totally dead. I also noticed that the option to change keyboard lights in Gaming Control Center is no longer there. The light bar controls are there and it's working fine. I can't even get into the bios with F2 because nothing is working on the keyboard.

 

Hi Guys.

For me it was exactly the opposite, LED strip not work, keyboard perfect. Motherboard replacement after 2 months RMA.

-------

From one day to the next is broken the display flashes, vibrates when I set the brightness. I suspect the low quality BEO 144Hz panel is the cause. If anyone could know some 60Hz compatible panels please post in the forum. (40ping, right) (Ebay, Ali not porblem, I live in central europe).

 

Are you saying it took 2 months to fix it?

 

No, usually 15 day max, They did not find the exact source so they changed the motherboard and it was good.
---

From one day to the next is broken the display flashes, vibrates when I set the brightness. I suspect the low quality BEO 144Hz panel is the cause. If anyone could know some 60Hz compatible panels please post in the forum. (40ping, right) (Ebay, Ali not porblem, I live in central europe).
Update: GameCenter control of brighness??? I deleted and my brightness issue fixed... Interesting...
Update 2: MyApp 1.6 Works good. If you have a similar problem, feel to switch to it.

 

How old is your laptop? I received mine on early August last year and few weeks ago my keyboard stopped working like your. I opened it and found that the battery has swollen probably pinching the keyboard cable against the bottom panel and damaging it. In fact by mooving the cable sometimes the keyboard lights up again. I still didn't RMA my laptop because I need it and I use an external keyboard anyway. Maybe I'll seize the opportunity to upgrade to the bigger battery and if possible to the silent keyboard.

 

I bought the laptop in December 2018. I will have to look into this, sounds interesting. Are you saying though that yours is actually damaged by this? Moving the cable didn't fix it totally?

 

Yes I think so. Maybe in your case it’s not the battery the cause but the cable is damaged too. Initially moving the cable fixed the issue till restarting the pc, than only for few minutes and now it doesn’t work anymore.

Does anyone know if keyboard’s cable is directly soldered into the keyboard or has a connector? In case It should be possible to replace only the cable.

 

Well the next issue is finding a replacement keyboard and or battery. I have no idea where to start and I like you can't be without my laptop for 15 days, I use it for business.

 

@clone1008

i have the same problem with the keyboard since last week. i played a bit apex while it stopped working. first i thought it was only the light, but the keyboard stopped at all. i also opened the laptop to check the cable and after this, it worked for about 1 second. then it died completly. so i had to send it back to the manufacturer/assembler which is in my case Schenker (Germany). My Laptop is the XMG NEO 15 from Oktober 2018.

now i'm a week without my book and i think it will take another week to get it fixed.

PS: my battery looks pretty good, nothing swollen or so. i have no idea what the hell happend to the keyboard or the cable. also i dont think that the keyboard connector is soldered to the board. it should be the normal connector on the other side of the board. i found someone who sells parts from this laptop, but i think only 2B2.

https://www.fortunetechnology.com/fortune-spares/12141/

 

well, my laptop returned today after 8 days (including weekend). they fixed it for free by changing the mainboard. now i have to repaste again with LM, but thats no problem. i'm glad Schenker/XMG has such a good and fast support.

 

Gears 5 benchmark...

Puget Systems Photoshop Benchmark

 

I've been checking religiously for the battery upgrade and I'm happy to share that Eluktronics has the 4-cell battery back in stock.

https://www.eluktronics.com/4-cell-batt-mech-15-g2-mech-17/

 

Hey Mr.Fox, First of all thanks for the detailed review and posts regarding this laptop, really helpful for the rest of the community.
I noticed that your later posts tend to have significantly lower temps than your original review, could you explain what made the difference?
I am running the CPU at 35w and repasted with liquid metal both the CPU and GPU (1660ti) and during gaming load cpu temps get up to 90c.
Another thing I noticed is that a few people encountered (myself included) an issue with ThrottleStop which significantly reduces battery life (by as much as 75%)
but you didn't mention it so I assume you didn't had such issues?

Anyway thanks a lot for your updates looking forward the next ones.

 

Hi bro. You're welcome. Glad to contribute. I appreciate you letting me know you found the posts to be helpful.

Depending on what benchmarks you were looking at, if the temps were crazy low it might have been running on portable AC cooling. I have liquid metal on the CPU and GPU and running max fans while gaming I still see low to mid 80's. If I were in a warmer environment I have no doubt that it would easily hit 90°C. But, I am pulling way more than 35W from the CPU. More like between 80-90W.

If you are using ThrottleStop to get the most performance from the CPU it is going to dramatically reduce battery life. However, you can create a total of four profiles change the settings to focus on battery life. I almost never run on battery power and the thought of testing that and commenting never crossed my mind. I have the larger battery and the couple of time I used it on battery power (sitting in the airport terminal) it was something like 2.5 hours with ThrottleStop set to use the same High Performance power profile I use for everything else.

 

Can you post some more details about what sort of testing you did? Was it a fair apples to apples comparison? A 75% difference is pretty significant. ThrottleStop by itself should make virtually no difference to power consumption. It is not a significant consumer of CPU cycles.

If you are using ThrottleStop to under volt your CPU core and cache, it will be consuming less power compared to how it was shipped from Intel.

If you are using ThrottleStop to get the most out of your CPU and then you try to do some gaming on battery power and add an Nvidia GPU to the load, you are probably going to damage your battery in a short period of time. Most batteries in gaming oriented laptops are only intended for light duty use. High current draw can quickly damage any battery.

A more appropriate name for a gaming laptop would be portable laptop. Yes, you can use it between Point A and Point B but for any serious use, you need to have it plugged in.

 

Sounds odd I know, Didn't had such issues with my older 7700HQ Helios 300 or X230 thinkpad.
With my current GK5CP6Z I had the dGPU manually disabled and CPU power limit at 15w(battery profile) and settings like Speed Shift at 200.
From some reason my 62wH battery drained really quickly even at minimal brightness and load (CPU never exceeded 15w and dGPU was completely off)
Also had an issue where sometimes the CPU PL suddenly became capped at 30w with no way to increase it except restarting the laptop.
What eventually fixed the issue for me was deleting the Control Center app, ThrottleStop, and any related registries.
Once I had done that I could reinstall Control Center and it worked fine but Reinstalling ThrottleStop reintroduced said issues.
It seems like there is some sort of a conflict between the two programs considering I never had any issues with ThrottleStop on different machines.
I'll do some more testing to see maybe I can find specific settings that cause the problems.
My model is the Eluktronics G2Rx with 1660Ti.

 

Are you using the FIVR - Disable and Lock Turbo Power Limit feature? You should be.

There might be some weird interaction between ThrottleStop and the Control Center app. All I know for sure is that ThrottleStop by itself should not be a significant drain on any battery. I know ThrottleStop is not responsible for randomly capping your turbo power limit at 30 Watts. That sounds like a Control Center issue.

How did you do this? If these laptops support Nvidia Optimus, you should not have to do this. It should go into a low power state automatically. Some monitoring software will keep the Nvidia GPU active. This can significantly reduce battery run time. Perhaps the method you used to disable the Nvidia GPU did not truly disable it.

When using ThrottleStop to monitor the Nvidia GPU, you should see --°C when the Nvidia GPU is in its low power Optimus state. ThrottleStop tries to be smart and does not wake up the idle GPU to sample its temperature. Some monitoring apps will wake it up regardless.



If ThrottleStop is showing a temperature number, that means the Nvidia GPU is awake. Try exiting any other apps that might be using your Nvidia GPU.

I use the free version of BatteryBar to monitor the overall battery discharge rate. Scroll down to the bottom of his download page and click on the button, Try Basic Version.
http://batterybarpro.com/

When your computer is idle with only ThrottleStop open on the desktop, open up the C States window and post a screenshot of that info. If you have a significant amount of background activity running on your computer, that can also kill battery run time. You should be seeing cores spending 99% of their time in the low power core C7 state. These CPUs support package C8 for further power savings but many laptop manufacturers turn off this low power feature.

Hopefully you can do some further testing and find out what is really going on.

 

Is anyone else noticing that their hinge has a small creaking on the left side? Also is there anyone who found a hard plastic case like they have for the macbook?

Also I emailed GETAC about the battery and will let you all know about their response.

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

 

Anyone having a lot of static on the microphone input? I'm noticing A LOT of it on a G430 and an amazon cheapo. The amazon headset didn't seem to be as noticeable, but it is still pretty bad. I can use a noise gate to deal with it, but I'm wonder if I have any other options other than a USB sound card.

 

Make sure that the cable is seated in all the way otherwise that is a good time to reach out to TongFang for a warranty repair or whoever your reseller is.

 

There is something going on with my GK5CN6Z keyboard, for whatever reason it's detecting the backslash vertical pipe key as return. I've tested it on windows and linux and the issue exists on both.
Any idea what is causing this? These are optical keyswitches so it shouldn't be detecting wrong keypresses unless they keyboard controller is doing something stupid

 

Having you tried resetting BIOS defaults? It may have some corruption of data stored in NVRAM or something.

Does that key feel "crunchy" or abnormal in any way besides not being mapped correctly? Are there any other keys that are not mapped correctly, or just that one key?

 

After leaving it off for a while it reset and the 1 key is working again, but yes the keys are pretty crunchy and I was asking earlier what the best way to lube the keys was but got no response. Not sure what the best way to lube these optical key switches is. Its odd that the \ key was acting as enter as it would reflect an ISO key layout. When it was not working when booting it was acting as if the shift key was pressed down though neither key was depressed.

 

I am wondering if one or two of the key mechanisms is getting stuck and causing problems. To the best of your knowledge has anything liquid or particulate ever been spilled on the keyboard? If not maybe the keyboard is defective. Something may have happened to it before you bought it.

 

Here are some more #1 scores for systems with the same specs...

 

my laptop randomly shuts down completely (without BSOD) when running on battery, it doesnt even freeze the power just snaps off; also didnt happen when it was plugged...
third time this happened now since yesterday (didnt have time to go into testing/replicating the error yet).. any idea what this could be?

 

Sounds like maybe something is wrong with the battery to me. Perhaps it is only a bad connection. Try pulling off the bottom cover and re-seat the plug in the socket, and make sure each wire is pressed in all the way into the white plastic housing the wires go into.

 

i have had a similar problem with my asus g74sx back in the days after i dropped it.

laptop with battery power, or on AC with battery in will randomly shut down. take out the battery with just AC in no shut down problem. maybe mobo somewhere damaged unsure.

 

replugged the battery (imo it wasnt loose at all); issue hasnt reoccured since. many thanks!

 

Cool. Hope it stays that way. Let us know if the problem returns.

 

hey All!

Looks like the 4 cell battery is back in stock! Just ordered mine from Eluktronics, lets see how all this goes.

 

I've already given up hope of getting one of those larger batteries.
But now I'm quite happy - the store where I have ordered the battery now says that 40 pieces will be in stock on 15th of November (the price is also quite fair I think).
https://www.laptops-akku.de/laptop-akku-getac-p-8498.html

 

there any socketed DTR from these tongfang guys? we enthusiast could use more of those options.

- clevo, cheap out on design and heatsink
- alienware, gimp, gimp and more gimp, custom form factor junk design
- msi, great heatsink, half assed DTR with either cpu/gpu soldered
- asus, don't even talk about it, a combination of all of the above

 

Does anyone know how to go below the minimum 30% fan speed limit in the Control Centre software? Also is it possible to remove the automatic max fan speed at 80 degrees celcius?

 

Anyone know how long Eluktronics takes to ship their batteries? I am pretty sure I am spoiled by prime shipping but they haven't even got a tracking number yet.

 

I ordered mine from them on October 20th and I contacted customer support on October 28th since it had been a full week of "awaiting fulfillment". In their defense they replied quickly and shipped it out that same day and I just got it on the 30th.

 

I'm not 100% able to confirm this is true but based on the following the photos (source NOTEBOOKCHECK reviews), here is the 17" old gen chassis with the small 3 cell battery, https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/9/6/csm_xmgneo15_22_dba282498a.jpg Now here's the next gen 15" TF chassic https://www.notebookcheck.net/filea...MG_Fusion_15_XFU15L19/SchenkerFusion15_19.jpg

The next 15" gen is at 20mm as thickest point, the old gen 15" is at 22mm. Battery connector is the same, save 14.4V.
New possible upgrade? Maybe...