Razer Blade 14 (7700HQ/1060) beatdown log

Yes I won't definitely buy a laptop without minimal 2 years warranty.

That's what I'm feeling about Razer Blade since Blade 2015 till now Kabylake 14 compared to my old MacBook Pro, except higher Fan noise and temperature which I can compromise because from gaming benchmark it's around 10 times better than old my old MacBook Pro with around same weight, size and battery life.

ASPM off bumping GPU performance, in my experience i didn't see the temp also got higher but it reduces the battery life so if I need battery power i turn it on again.

 

I did quite of bit of testing of the battery life with ASPM enabled and disabled, and detected no difference when using the iGPU on battery, only a slight difference if using the dGPU like when gaming or using HDMI. Since I don't game on battery, mine just stays disabled.

 

Okay, because ASPM is battery saver technology so I felt by off-ing it reduce my battery life, I was not quite measuring it though, but yes I play PUBG sometimes on the go so I thought on ing it will increase the battery life. Yes it's quite disturbing me since I have to go to Bios to shut it down and I'm also quite comfortable in off mode since it bump the GPU performance quite a lot.

 

razer decreased the battery capacity in the newer blades from 2016 onward. Its because they added a separate IO board underneath where the battery sits. instead of incorporating the CPLD for fancy keyboard macros and lighting on the motherboard, like they do on the 2013-2015 boards, they instead added an additional board for it on the newer models. this takes up space where the battery goes, so they had to decrease capacity slightly i guess. They tried to make up for the fact by choosing more power efficient components in the power circuitry. These new choice of components do not appear to be holding up very well from what i see. Of course I am still learning the newer boards as I just saw them a few weeks ago, so may have more to report at a later date. Just some initial findings.
Also ASPM as you are talking about on pcie port 0, would have no effect on battery life unless gaming with DGPU, because otherwise DGPU will be disabled with optimus in most normal tasks anyway. Razers entire bios seems to be optimized for power efficiency mainly. So much so, that sometimes things don't work as they should(such as hdmi audio due to DSP and power gating enabled on IO)

 

I guess the only way to find out the longevity is purchasing one They indeed offer a 2 year warranty for EU purchased Blades. I got a timely response from the CS, which was nice aswell.

I've ran a 2016 Macbook Pro 15" for a couple of days now, even played some overwatch with the onboard Radeon 450 and it played quite nicely @ 1920x1200 / Medium. Build quality is impressive aswell as the screen, but im still steered towards the Blade. Smaller formfactor and lightspeeds ahead in GFX power while maintaingin more battery life.

 

Sure I will post it here if I come around trying it for real

 

I can verify disabling ASPM has no impact on battery life.
Also you guys could try modifying your bios to support autonomous Intel SpeedShift. I tested it for a few days and it works great so far.
Giving the CPU autonomous control over P-States makes the system much snappier and in many cases cooler due to faster reducing and ramping up P-States. Battery life is unaffected as far as I can tell. Especially on Battery the system feels a lot less sluggish.

To get access to it you have to set "User" to : Setup > Advanced > Power & Performance > CPU - Power Management > Intel Speed Shift

 

My skylake was enabled by default, on kabylake speedshift was disabled?

 

Speedshift is enabled by default, but it is Win10 controled Speedshift. What I suggested is completely autonomous Speedshift which lets the CPU decide what the best P-State is. You cut out the latency between the OS responding to load and then setting P-States. Autonomous Speedshift on the CPU can react very fast to load changes.

 

I see. My skylake bios is different then, I have all the options unlocked, but it only has the option for Speedshift technology Enabled or Disabled.

 

Then that is probably the switch for autonomous Speedshift. On the Kabylake Bios this Option is not accessible by default, but Win10 has access to SST (in this case non autonomous Speedshift).
You can check with HWinfo64.
It should show SST in green if it supports Speedshift and tells you if its autonomous or not in its tooltip.

 

Cool....yes mine looks the same, it is set to autonomous. Won´t make much difference, but I noticed your RAM timings, you can tighten the timings if you like, to something like 15-15-15-35, it will reduce latency a litlle. It probably can go lower to 14-14-14-34, but if it you go too low, you might have to reset the CMOS. I have mine at 12-12-12-32 but it is running at 2133 and not 2400.

 

The difference is not day and night, but it is noticeable on battery. At least on Kabylake.

I am hesistant to fiddle with Ram timings on a laptop. Stability is my first priority and in my experience overclocking RAM on desktop boards, it is very hard to find 100% stable timings (especially subtimings). Laptops have too much temperature variation to really guarantee stability at all situations in my opinion.
If your timings are indeed stable all the time you probably have a very nice latency reduction.

I only managed to get 2400mhz 10-10-10-30 on my desktop board stable. But it is DDR3 and a desktop board, therefore so much easier to stabilise.

 

@Vistar Shook
You got me curious as to how low with full stability it can go. I reduced CL/tRCD/tRP timings to 15-15-15 but increased tRAS to 45 cycles, as the Jedec spec would have been. I found it kind of odd razer set timings to 17-17-17-39, since tRAS has to be the sum of CL/tRCD/tRP.

Tested in a temperature controlled environment at work, it is stable up to 40°C ambient temperature. I didn´t want to go higher with the temperature because of lifespan reduction.

I will test even lower latencies when I got the time to spare. But right now I am positively suprised. Thanks for the suggestion Vistar

 

Also try the stability with the command rate at 1T instead of 2T. I am pretty sure that the formula of tRAS is the sum of the others is too conservative, frequently the tRAS is lower than that.

 

I will give it a try, but I think DDR4 is not optimized for 1T and low latencies in general though. It is more designed towards throughput from high clockrates and low voltages.

I also have seen many RAM sticks not following the Jedec recommendation. Maybe they compensate the tighter tRAS with looser subtimings.
But my knowledge about SDRAM is not that advanced to properly fine tune them.
Unlike CL/tRCD/tRP, tRas does have a neglegible impact on performance. I am unsure if it is worth the hassle.

 

Certainly adjusting the RAM timings won´t make any noticeable difference, it is mostly for those that can´t stop tinkering...hehe.

 

@Mobius1, my conductonaut order arrived today and I want to use it on the cpu. On my last repaste I used k5 pro to substitute the thermal pads, but I do have some fujipoly pads, is it worth it to clean up the k5 pro and use the fujipoly pads or the difference is neglible?

 

For this system I would use fujipoly if possible, but not necessary.

Only on the VRAM, but the VRM area works better with K5.

Also remove the thermal pad as @pbhenry3 said.

 

True

Ram timings can be important if it complenents other system latencies. For example if one can´t adjust the timing skews for specific portions of the systembus.
Sometimes it is even beneficial to raise some latencies to achieve an overall lower total latency.
I think total system latency is a very underestimated factor by many.
My dayjob is developing embedded appliances and many of our customers didnt´t even know how much of an impact latency has on useability until they experienced the differences for themselves.
Interestingly many favored the lower latency even though it also had lower performance.
They probably wouldn´t have decided so if they had only seen spreadsheets with performance/latency numbers.

 

spreadsheet warriors


ugh

 

Yeah makes me feel the same way.
Unfortunately many suits and even engineers only care about them

 

Regarding latency, I experimented a little with windows10 settings. Disabling dynamic ticks gets you a noticeable latency reduction, but possibly at the expense of batterylife. I estimate around 15% less battery runtime and 20% latency reduction.
For those who like to play First Person Shooters on AC mainly it is worth a try.
To deactivate dynamic ticks execute the following in the console with Admin privileges:

Code:

bcdedit /set disabledynamictick yes

Afterwards reboot.

 

I have been running some stress tests to have a baseline for comparison before I repaste with LM, such as occt and fs loop.
I tried the aida fpu + gpu test that @Papusan mentioned, and it is very intense...ran it only 5 min since cpu temps reached critical temps quickly....my question is, this particular test does that with most notebooks out there?

 

Running the aida cpu+gpu test....less extreme, so I will stick to that for comparison.

 

Yes, but will quickly reveal overheating, bad paste jobs or poorly fitted HS. Fully working notebook cooling will handle the load. Some better, some worse.

 

Then there's another firmware level limit to throttle well known benchmarks like AIDA64 or OCCT whilst running on CPU utilising AVX2 or Linpack based benchmarks, if you feel there's something when some benching apps are running, you can write your own CPU stress test to check it, if the temps aren't spiking like AIDA64 workload test then look no further its firmware level throttling. You can see similar kind of power throttle in nvidia inspector profile for OCCt and Kombuster.

 

I know this is an old thread, but I acquired a 2017 Blade and using your method, I can't seem to get voltage monitored in Afterburner to see what the GPU volts are landing at.. I did the unlock voltage checks in afterburner to no avail.. is there another method?

Edit: NVM, I see the voltage in HWInfo64.. And i'm running at .800v as well at the same clocks.. fan still ramps up to super loud levels in most AAA games at ultra settings.. but if you dial back some settings it will maintain the much quieter fan profile! Good find and thanks for the tips!

 

How is the 2017 razer blade pro working out for you?

 

Good to hear it worked out for you

You can further reduce noise by limiting the frameoutput of your GPU to ~60hz and still use high settings.
Use Riva Tuner Statistics Server and set a fine grained limit to your actual monitor refresh rate. Razer Blade 2017 TFT has exactly 60.020hz.

You can use my value below if you like in RTSSes Global profile. It has very low input latency due to the gpu not rendering a lot of discarded frames. You can even use Vsync with relatively low input lag that way.

 

Hi, did you ever give this a try? Curious to review all options before repasting. Seems a shim between the pipes and GPU could take some of the risk out of using liquid metal and see the best results. Thanks.

 

This laptop has been out for awhile. What's everyone's thoughts on it now? BB has it for sale for $1599. Looks slick and could be fun https://www.bestbuy.com/site/razer-...lid-state-drive-black/5753110.p?skuId=5753110

I need a permanent machine for work and some occasional Overwatch. Something built well (I love our Apple for its build quality) and not too large. 14" seems about perfect for me.

If I should look elsewhere just say so. My heart isn't set on anything.

 

It's a great bet. The only concern I would have if I were you would be that NVIDIA's new mGPUs will come out in Summer-ish (not a fact, but seems likely).

I also owned an MSI GS43VR Phantom Pro and liked that a lot. IMO, both that and the Razer Blade 14 are the best size/performance laptops. I sold the MSI too early...my travel for worked picked up again so I decided to pickup the Razer for a change. It has been great. I own a v5 with the 6700HQ and GTX 1060. I had a 7700HQ in my MSI and I notice no difference.

Go used if you can to tide you over, get a good price - then sell and buy a laptop with the new NVIDIA mGPU in a couple months, that's what I am doing.

 

I would highly advise against it - the thermals, noise, durability and support are horrible. Razer support is next to useless and the quality control is extremely poor - we've had people RMA Blades 4 times before finally getting a working one and each RMA would take 1-3 months. Not to mention that most of these machines have pretty glaring design flaws as outlined on @pbhenry3 's channel.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pbhenry3

 

Thanks for your input and advice I’d love to go used but I really only prefer to buy my stuff here for the most part. And there’s nothing available in the marketplace at the moment. I’m looking for something likely within the next seven days from now.

 

Check pricing on different laptops - take it as a fair warning.

 

If you do opt for the RB go for the extended waranty from BB or Microsoft, just in case.

Enviado de meu Pixel 2 usando Tapatalk

 

Thanks for your help guys. I’m definitely gonna pass on this one. I love the aesthetics of it immensely and the parts inside suit be great but it must be very reliable.

 

I saw a video past afternoon where a technician/repair specialist showed a motherboard where wired where soldered on presumably because the original design had flaws. So instead of making a new board desig. And ship those to customers. They patched faulty boards instead with soldered on wires. Thats how they ship it to customers out of the box. They should be called out. They do not deserve our money.

 

No unfortunately my Blade 2017 has a problem with booting. I cant boot into windows or any graphical UI any more. DOS and other non graphical commandlines work fine. Nvflash does not detect any nvidia cards, so my guess is that the VBios chip underneath the heatsink is dead from all the heat.
Maybe @pbhenry3 can give me a clue on what this could be besides VBIOS.

So I need to fix this first before attempting to mod anything.

 

did you attempt custom vbios flashing or bios flashing before having this failure?

 

VBios is stock and no attempts were made to flash it since it is protected. Main Bios is modified, although it worked fine for around half a year.
I did clear CMOS by disconnecting both main and cmos batteries. Unfortunately it did not help.

I will try to read the contents of the VBios chip with an external programmer next, to see if it still responds.

 

Hi, can you reupload the files again? I tried it but it's no longer available. Thanks!

 

Ahh I have a booting problem with my RB 2017, I think it is bricked, I bought it real cheap and the guy who sold it to me said that he tried to update the bios to never see windows again haha, I took it to a Tech service, and the guy told me that if I could get my hands on a BIOS he could get it to work.

Model: Razer Blade 2017 KabyLake.
Problem: Only boot to BIOS, if I let it run it gets to the automatic repair loop, to black screen (tried everything, from changing ssd, clear cmos, check bios options, etc.)

If anyone could help me with some files I would greatly appreciate!

 

@warhouse : check your PM.

 

Yep, there you go

http://depositfiles.com/files/nmd748hq4

 

Btw, I was able to read out the contents of the SPI VBios chip (Winbond W25Q80EW).
I compared the dump with my original VBios dump from ~half a year ago and they matched exactly.
I reflashed just to be on the safe side, but it did not solve the problem.
Maybe it´s the uncooled MOSFET on the top side of the board.

@pbhenry3

Can you comment on this ? Any tips would be highly appreciated.

 

Hi folks, I'm upgrading thermal paste and past to my blade 14 2017 7770hq gtx1060.
For the paste I will be using therma grizzly kryonaut along with thermal grizzly thermal pads.

I don't know what kind of paste/pad is needed for the vrms, wich have now a thin layer of a strange semi-solid thermal kind of paste. Can you help me?
vrm is not throttling so i'm only going to re done the vrms cooling if sure that I'm improving stock heat dissipation.

 

I'd like to know the exact same things: How thick are the thermal pads and what was used on the vrms?

Thanks in advance!