Razer Blade 15.6" (GTX 1060/1070, 2018 edition) Owner's Lounge

My unit managed -125 without a hiccup. I’ll look into BD PROCHOT. Also I could try lower undervolt. I did lose 5-10 degrees so far.

Then I hope to develop an “on battery” protocol in TS, and try to learn enough to implement a “critical heat” or emergency protocol.

However...

My power brick, which had no coil whine, nor ran hot, died yesterday. (3 days) I only found out when my laptop said the battery was getting low, while downloading LOTRO. Changing power cords, and outlets, did got get the power brick light to come back on. I’m exchanging for a new one with @hidevolution, and did order a new one from the Razer site. They seem to be back in stock at Razer, and are only US$ 140. I’ll be more secure when I get shipping confirmation, as I have from @hidevolution.

Is it all the power bricks with troubles, or only the 230w units for the 1070 graphics laptops?

Someone needs to sell an adapter to use with other power bricks, with the standard barrel connectors.

 

Aggressive meaning taking the time to find the maximum stable under volt for CPU core/cache, GPU core/cache, system agent, and using afterburner to lock Nvidia GPU to the lowest voltage while finding the clock speed sweet spot. Mine happened to be 1797 @ 0.8V

 

Yeah, ok, taking the time makes sense, if there is advantage to tuning for that last bits of undervolt then it's worth the time for sure. Thanks.

 

Just want to share another successful LM from Razer forum. I think He got also over avarage timespy score for 1060 maxq (break 4K), my old Blade 14 with full 1060 could only reach 3,7K.
https://insider.razer.com/index.php?threads/liquid-metal-my-2018-razer-blade-15-results-here.42926/

 

Maybe he was going to the bathroom while undervolting? Personally I was having a scotch when I undervolted my Blade so it was hardly aggressive

 

What program is running to put the temps and specs on the bottom left on his videos? Or is that part of the paid 3DMark system.

And...

Recommend a guide to using Afterburner on this system?

 

It’s on title, precision xoc from evga, I think he has evga 1080ti on core setting when I’m not wrong.
I’m using afterburner since 3 months ago with OC value 210/700 with -130 Intel XTU undervolting, stable, mostly I’m using that profile on esports titles, open world like from Ubisoft I’m using balanced mode or core setting for higher resolution.

Is it solved now power limit throttling things? Didn’t check that recently...By off-ing BD prochot?

 

So my laptop is slated to arrive on Wednesday! I've heard that Razer doesn't put a lot of bloatware on their laptops, but I do have a copy of Windows 10 Education from my university that I can install. So I was wondering, would it be worth taking the extra time to do a fresh installation of windows on my laptop when it arrives?

 

I was not impressed by the temps he was seeing. As mentioned on the forum I was getting as good if not better temps on my stock paste job with an undervolt of -0.140.

 

Yes temperature wise you’re right but performance wise on timespy, isn’t that great for maxq 1060? My old Blade with full 1060 even couldn’t break over 3,7K, it was with 30% lower performance 7700HQ though. Blade 15 is made for OC, LM may increase its OC capability. Well for lowering cpu temperatures I’ve Core setting so atm I don’t see the need for repasting, just good to know the performance increase for sometimes in the future when when I’ve nothing to do and I think he’s first Blade 15 user who published applying LM on YouTube.

 

This is @Raidriar undervolting.. ( @hmscott is in the other cube..)

 

More lik damn mad because he saw the aggressive Cpu throttling

 

Stick, keyboard, whatever's at hand I guess.

I'm sure I'd have intervened before the PC mayhem stage... that poor guy probably just needed a Snickers bar.

Spoiler: Click to See Video

 

Someone modded their BIOS to reach the approriate idle C states, thus increasing battery life

link

 

" Be advised that while you can't really screw anything up by just flipping a few carefully selected options or knowing what you're doing, some of the hidden options in the BIOS can be used to physically damage your device. Additionally, something can always go wrong while the flashing process is going on. Don't follow these steps if you don't want or can't risk your device being bricked. Recovering from a brick will require a hardware flasher and microsoldering skills. Don't hold me (or Razer for that matter) liable if your device goes boom."
(This warning is at the bottom of the Reddit post)

 

I’d really like to know what BIOS settings can make your laptop go BOOM, other than screwing the thermal management so bad that it overheats and dies. Everything else would either give instability or simply not POST, and you do a CMOS reset.

The BIOS flash part is always scary though, there is no known recovery procedure, and I’m always scared it can fail.

 

Hey there! I made that post.

Just wanted to say that Razer's Reddit community is not very technical. This is why I kept it a bit on the "safer" side, so no one with two left hands goes and shuts their laptop down during flashing or sets crazy current limit values or something. There are people there who don't even know what a BIOS is. The ones who know are free to ignore the beating around the bush.

I certainly know what I'm doing. I'm just not skilled enough to really get into real modding. As I wrote at the beginning of the post, this was to make this specific option available to a wider range of people until Razer switch it over. I contacted them over two months ago about this and nothing happened. So I wanted to do something about it myself. It's that simple.

 

I and I think a lot Blade 14 2017 users moded the bios in order to unlock aspm options to somehow increase graphics performance, as bonus points you can undervolting and doing other tweaks directly in it. But on Blade 15 i don’t see the reason to do that.

 

You're absolutely right. There aren't many functioning options in the BIOS that can be leveraged to increase performance by a lot. As I pointed out in the comments of the Reddit thread, the battery life at almost idle raised considerably, but in the grand scheme of things this is obviously just a miniscule tweak that only affects battery life at idle.

What would be interesting though I find is access to the EC firmware to set different power limits, because I don't like how Synapse in Gaming mode interferes with MSI Afterburner when setting the GPU overclock (MSI Afterburner locks up and hogs CPU time). But that's unfortunately the only way for getting constant a constant 45W TDP limit for now.

 

I believe it’s also from bios, there’s thousands setting there if you flash it and look at the setting, 99% I don’t understand, changing value and default or user accessible option will unlock bios options (that pops out when you press esc after booting). There was also not save even it looks easy to do, i saw user that bricked his Blade 14 doing that. Btw it’s not only with afterburner, once you click gaming mode gpu Core clock and memory will rise to plus 100 and 300 to any gpu connected (my dGPU 1070 inside Blade and also to external gpu in core setting, I used also firestorm (Zotac version OC software like afterburner), it’s also same.

 

Can't confirm. There are the usual settings for controllable TDP limits and other CPU and platform-related power limits, but none of them overwrite the 25W power limit that kicks in for me a short time after a heavy CPU load comes in. As far as I understand it, it must come from the EC firmware. I tried setting locks on the TDP settings in the BIOS, but they also were ignored. In fact, I couldn't find any setting referring to a 25W limit of some kind. It's all the usual 35W, 45W, 60W and 80W limits.

As I wrote in the thread I was able to raise current limits, but we don't need that if we're TDP limited. The current limits are high enough as they are by default.

I'm rechecking undervolting through the BIOS right now. I can't imagine that the overclocking menu is really completely locked down. There should be exactly two options locking overclocking. But, well, we'll see.

That's to be expected, but still uncool. The more you know...
I'd love having a wonderful voltage/frequency curve like I have with my desktop 1080Ti to have more granular control over how the GPU behaves, but alas the Max-Q GPU runs at a low enough voltage that MSI Afterburner's V/F curve is effectively useless. It only gets down to 800mV, but that's around where the 1070 Max-Q hovers when under load...

 

Yes it’s true there’s a lot options that are locked somehow, like fans behavior on temperature we were able to access it on but didn’t work (Blade 14 2017). Is there any performance bump? GPU wise? Games use more GPU than CPU so I don’t really give attention to cpu power Limit throttling, I think they do this for thermal reason. I uploaded somewhere here 3D Mark when I tested it and it’s quite great for non repasted machine being able to hit 15,2K Firestrike and 5,8K timespy with doubling OC value to 200/700 via afterburner, with no throttle.

 

That's absolutely an EC firmware thing. At least in laptops.

You're right in that. You just need to keep in mind that your CPU should be powerful enough to issue all the draw calls to the GPU, handle physics, other rendering tasks and so on. For most modern games (which don't have a heavy reliance on one of the components) you will be GPU-limited. As long as the CPU provides a certain baseline of performance, you should be golden. The 8750H at its 3.9GHz all-core boost and the 1070 Max-Q should make a pretty balanced system in regards to performance. The CPU just has a relatively small die and dissipates its heat via a smaller surface area. Hence the comparatively high temperatures when up against the GPU, which overclocked (220/700) sits at ~70°C for me at full load (~20°C ambient). If the CPU core clock drops low enough because of power or thermal limitations, you will at some point get into CPU-limited scenarios where the GPU will be waiting for draw calls to be issued. Especially with engines that haven't implemented multicore usage for rendering tasks. But that shouldn't be a problem with the 25W limit. The 2.2-2.4GHz I get when at the 25W limit (in Prime95 I have to add) should be enough, but could be more of course.

So yeah, I'm pretty sure Razer implemented the 25W limit because of thermals and loudness concerns and it's surely enough for gaming. The cooling system is able to handle a bigger load though, albeit not a much bigger one. Try running some CPU-heavy task while you hit the GPU with a high load. As I need my machine for game development, I occasionally have tasks to throw at it that need as much CPU horsepower as they can get (lightmapping levels, creating 3D renders of objects or making builds for example).

15.2k is a pretty good score for this machine it seems. I wasn't able to push past just a bit over 15k: https://www.3dmark.com/fs/15984733. Time Spy is also close: https://www.3dmark.com/spy/4109949

EDIT: I've made sure to not miss anything. Seems like the overclocking menu and its options don't have any effect.

 

It’s not huge difference between 15K and 15,2K. I can’t also achieve that 15,2K anymore after upgrading SSD, this time is better with 970Evo, could pass 15K overall Firestrike, Before on 2 SSD 960evo somehow GPU score was meh, keep me on 14,5K.
Yes on rendering I want also higher wattage for stable 3,9ghz all cores. But on my needs, gaming CPU usage rarely cross 50% so I’m okay.

 

Moving on to the real king , bye bye 2080.
Just got today my Asus Turbo and run some benchmark, this is noticeable improvement over 1080ti and 2080 egpu setting, happy with the upgrade.
https://www.3dmark.com/fs/16519755
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/4539017
FFXV 4K High (scroll dooown )
Tomb Raider still not maxed 60fps on highest setting though, but on 4K high setting mostly crossed 60fps in gaming.

Now OC time

 

Was that in a core v2?

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

 

Yes only 500 watt PSU, I was skeptical at first but seems fine almost 4 hours continues usage. Maybe I’ll face issue now on overclocking though.

 

That's good to know! Your bravery is appreciated

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

 

I’ll update if there’s any problem. Yes guys on nvidia forum asked me also if I should build mini itx etc but eGPU isn’t my main for esports titles, only for 4K/1440p quality over performance titles like Witcher. On 1080ti 1080p high FPS was lame compared Blade 15 1070 but now it seems also fine, just played Far Cry 5, FPS is better now even on 1080p max, and that is on internal screen with reduced FPS due data looping, I don’t have external monitor that has more than 60Hz refreshes rate anymore.

 

I think I finally understand why Razer set the deepest package C-state to C2. After using it for a while with the unlocked setting, today while in a silent room I noticed more capacitor squeal emitting from the CPU's area than I was used to before.

Well, obviously it must have to do with the CPU going between C-states, as that's the only option I left changed. And yes, switching it back to a minimum C2 made the squeal go to its old levels again.

Intel has implemented countermeasures for that with their "Acoustic Noise Mitigation" thingy, by ramping between voltages slower than they otherwise would. And of course the BIOS has settings for that. By default the CPU cores and iGPU have ramping enabled, but not the chipset and ring voltage (still called VCCIN in the BIOS). Activating the slow ramping for the ring voltage brought the capacitor squeal back down. Should also be the true for other similar cases.

EDIT: By the way, I have to mention that for some reason I only heard the squeal at system startup, but not while in Windows. Don't know what to make of that.

 

For those who wanted to have full control over the multiplier all the way down to 8, and also changing the C state using ThrottleStop profile in Windows, you can check out this thread, I wrote it for those who has access to the required settings in BIOS, this should work on all AMI BIOS laptops purchased in year 2018

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...trol-of-the-i7-8750h-advanced-version.823065/

No fix for the Razer TDP issue though.

 

This with access to the BIOS settings is really valuable.

 

Couple of months later and I'm still super glad I went with the 1060 model over what many of you guys are doing and getting a 1070 Liquid Metal version from HID:
Proof is in the Pudding


In short it's pretty hard to beat the 1060 version with an eGPU (And 1070 Desktop Card included) that costs the same price as a 1070 Razer Blade even with Liquid Metal. Better performance, Better Thermals, Better Battery, Better Price, Better Version...

 

They probably did the 1070 MQ version just to compete with the rest of the companies doing it.

Honestly if they had a 1050ti version of this laptop I'd probably snag it in a heartbeat.

 

Are you sure gtx 1070 egpu performance can beat maxq 1070 on Blade? On 1080p i can beat it firstly by 2080ti egpu Not by 1080ti or rtx 2080 egpu. About thermal it’s only cpu matter that’s also Problem on other similar laptops like gs65 and Aero 15x, they do also tons tweak to reduce temperatures without loosing the performance like through bios, repasting etc, gpu temperature won’t leave 70ish even with gaming mode. My CPU temperature are fine by low 80ish gaming average with undervolting only. Having 1060 laptop before, made me no reason going for 1060, for my need it just can’t good enough to run good 144Hz experience, to me on go especially, with proper tweaks I can say this is full 1070 laptop with 2,1Kg weight without loosing its tough build quality compared to competitors.

 

I have to admit that question mark key placement is horrible though, I hope they redo that for the 2019 blade 15

 

The Question Mark key placement was the same in every laptop since 2016 release by Razer. My guess/assumption would be that if they were to move/change that it would be a huge overahaul on all of their systems and laptops not specific to the blade 15. Again if you look at the RAzer Blade Pro it has the exact same placement. I was stunned when everyone was complaining about it because we had already seen it for 2 years with the Razer Blade Pro, I suppose the Razer Blade Pro was so expensive that nobody really noticed it until the more affordable Blade 15 came out. But for me it was nothing new.

 

Just wish they would patch the CPU power throttling issue. I never noticed it before until i started playing Shadow of the tomb raider which has great DX12 support and uses all CPU cores this is a problem on the blade 15 because anytime the CPU uses more than 40% the clock speeds tank to 2.4ghz no matter the temps. Is there another way to fix this besides putting it into gaming mode in the cortex because then the fans go jet plane mode without any benefits to cooling.

 

I think that was only the Blade 17..

The Blade 14 (the one I had) and Blade Stealth had a different arrow key configuration of half-height up/dn arrows so it fit under that row, so I guess they thought that to get full size arrow keys they needed to shift the ? key over. Which is a horrible decision IMO, as most people use more than one keyboard all day long, and it's hard to get used to that for switching back and forth. The keyboard on the Lenovo Legion 15 looks awesome IMO. I'm considering the Y730 as my next..



I am not a fan of the half-height up/dn arrows, but I'd rather have that then shifting the very often used question mark over and putting another key there. It's pretty bad.

 

Highest 1080p setting, gaming mode Fans 4700, volume 70%, i didn’t notice jet sound, the plane already crashed in the jungle didn’t it

 

doesnt show what your clock speed is for the CPU when you run the gaming performance mode in the razer cortex the fans are obnoxiously loud compared to the normal mode. its not horrible compared to older models but still loud and obnoxious enough coming from other games where i dont have the TDP problem. There has to be another work around.

 

those are interesting numbers did you use liquid metal? those temps are crazy?

 

Okay I’ll see that, actually I don’t really care Core clock on gaming as long it runs beautiful, no lags, high FPS and low temperature. I don’t need full 3,9ghz all cores running do I?

 

No default paste, it’s hitting 80ish though on some scenes.
It’s bound between 2,2 to 3,9ghz, all smooth. You’re right if I mute it it’s loud, around 50dB.

 

Update on Razer power supply. I ordered a replacement from HIDEvolution, which is in the mail, I get credit for sending the broken one back.

I also ordered a spare through the Razer site, and it arrived today, and is working great. So, they are in stock, and down to $140.

 

when it comes to tomb raider it does because its a game that benefits from CPU power. But as far as performance I cant get a smoth 60fps on max settings so i have to drop shadows to normal and AO to BTAO as HBAO+ kills me it will be 60 85% of the time but when i get to a town or a set piece forget about it.

 

1060 Model?

 

no 1070m model. with the new patches running on the latest nvidia driver. My temps are good gpu sits at 73-76c even when at 99% usage my cpu fluctuates between 82-87c so everything is business as usual and when im runing around tombs and the open areas it runs smooth but when i get to town like the first one it dips to 55-57 regularly as i run around areas with alot of people. not horrible but noticeable and on the flood scene it was in the 50s the whole time. I had to turn my AO to BTAO and the shadows to normal and depth of field to normal everything else is maxed.

 

I play it actually half and half depends moods between 1080p 144Hz on Blade and 4K 60Hz on core setting both highest setting on Blade I didn’t tweak the game setting at all only set to highest, though I double default OC, by 200 on Core 700 on Memory clock through afterburners and mostly got 70ish FPS yes it drops also to low 60ish on Blade 1070 but not suddenly that cause struggling. On core setting it’s also between high 40ish to max 60fps but same, not suddenly, Synapse gaming mode bring also OC to my rtx card on core by 100/300 like default, sometimes 50/300.

 

yea its not bad but its consistent enough that it doesn't lock. the 1070m is not enough to run this game at a fluid 60fps as the card is maxed at 99% majority of the game even on mid high settings. I will get a core eventually for now i just max the game out and run it at 30 fps so I can turn everything up and get the full beauty Just wish the game had better AA