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

Thanks for your reply! As I mentioned, I've already solved the issue by exactly doing what you said. I just was very confused, because for my ears the sound was flat and I had no real bass with my headphones, although I had v6.0.1.8413. Additionally, I was a little confused that the name of my device was somewhat different to what I remembered, but I wasn't quite sure. Both made me look for a solution. So I installed the Realtek driver via Windows updates and then changed the used driver to the Windows "high definition audio" one, now the sound is perfect and the device/driver name is as I remembered it.
The thing about Dolby Atmos; as far as I can see, yes you can install it and you can select when you click on the speaker icon and go to surround sound. However, I guess it only works if you pay the "one-time" licence.

 

like djcgeez2189 said ... I had to redownload the tool

 

I don't believe it's a setting in game because I have the game installed on both systems my Razer Blade and my Dell Latitude (Work System) and my dell doesn't exhibit anything like that. I actually believe it's a setting within windows or something like that where you can control the sounds of every application specifically.

 

The different systems are most likely different in several regards such as power performance settings in Windows, different Windows version, maybe one system has NVidia Shadow play on and the other doesn't, etc.. It may not be an option in game, but it is an application configuration item somewhere to allow this to be turned on or off. A quick search shows others with this problem and changing the options text file.

 

So I opened my new blade to do a repaste and my new model has the copper heatsink instead of the black one the Heatsink is also thicker than the older one. Maybe that explains why my new machine runs slightly cooler than my first 15. Also it has Thermal pads on the SSD and their are more thermal pads on the underside of the case too that werent there before.

 

Which kind of repaste have you done? Does your repaste has any positive impact to your machine?

 

I always use Arctic Silver 5 as Silver is the best non metal thermal conductor, a side effect however is it takes longer to cure and get the best results than other pasts so i will see how it fares in about a week. Right now im getting between 78-82c during gaming but CPU is power throttling like crazy but thats just the nature of the blade it has terrible CPU power management

 

Thanks for answering!

Without repaste I get in bf5 nearly the same temps. So it seems repaste does not have biggest value for me.

 

Did you do any photos of the internals while doing that? Would be nice to compare yours and others.

 

I tried to post pictures but it keeps saying its too large, even when i crop them to 2mb

 

A repaste will help in the long term as factory paste is cheap crud they throw on and move it out the door they also put waaaaay to much. So its okay for the short term but I wouldnt put much faith in it long term. My razer was swimming in paste when i opened her up.

 

Wow. I hit 100c playing Wolfenstein 2 on my cpu!

Well that's what it said the max temp was.

 

Hey guys! Been busy with work and such. Still keep an eye on this thread but it took off and there’s a ton to catch up on. Any breakthroughs or new findings with thermals/power throttling etc on CPU etc?

Performance dips or gains from anything in particular? Just kind a looking for a follow up in the past couple months on things. Anything I can pass off to the engineers/QC team that has been alarming for example. Otherwise hope all is well and happy holidays!

 

I stripped the SSD screw when I upgraded my SSD. So that could have been better!

People are highlighting plastic threads on the chassis for the screws that they're worried about.

Someone raised that the monitor isn't always lg. And can't be set to 144hz.

The battery does get pretty warm during charging. I assume this is a 230w thing.

Also it's my first razer system and I'm blown away by the footprint of this thing and the feel to it! I think they did an amazing job getting everything this powerful into such a small package!

 

Wtf?! I ve never reached temps over 90. But i am only using balanced Mode, the panel in 60hz Mode and vsync always on... I think that make big difference. Also most games like bf5 running with a throttlestop Profile with a Limit of 2.5ghz and undervolting. The only game witch needs massive cpu Power is assassins creed.

 

It appears that the range is only 100% - 500%. I was hoping to scale the system font a little smaller than 100%. The reason for this was due to one of my software packages not displaying all the options for an operational sequence in a dialog box that I thought might be font dependent. However, it turned out to be the trial version of the offline robot programming software does not offer all the options in various dialog boxes. The full license version does. I have my annual license for the robot offline programming software installed and all is good. Thanks for the reply.

 

Hey everyone, it's been awhile. Wanted to ask, and please answer if you actually know and aren't guessing, what is the overall importance of CPU wattage once the clock speeds have been obtained? for instance, when gaming in fortnite, I manually set my clocks to 3.4ghz in throttlestop and that is obtainable within 25w, no issue for even balaced mode limit. Why would I want 50 watts at my CPU or really any higher than whats required? I know to play at 3.8ghz i need around 30w. But, Is the wattage actually a thermal output value or power in this case? The temps stay low low 80s and my desired FPS is achieved at 3.4ghz 25-30 watts, so was just curious why youtubers seem to want so much wattage when it feels like "a waste" to me. Input appreciated.

 

Is it on gaming mode? With default settings and gaming mode I can easily hit 100. But not balanced mode with propriete cpu undervolting, it'll keep AC Odyssey on high 80ish some cores may spike to 90 but thanks to power limit throttling that draws back again to 80, with average long gaming sessions around mid 80ish. This cpu is known running hot on max frequency, it’s expected run so without tweaking or adjusting the setting, on mentioned game there’s no huge FPS difference between gaming and balanced mode since cpu rarely load over 50%, unlike shadow of the tomb raider.

How much FPS do you need? And it’s also depends on games, like shadow of Tomb Raider that I could notice the difference between gaming mode and balanced mode, or AC Odyssey that even on balanced mode with 25Watt tdp limit outperform average FPS from notebookcheck gaming FPS. I played AC Odyssey on 1440p all maxed with similar fps with other maxq laptops in 1080p on that list, same setting ultra high.
CPU Temperature is also mostly on low 90 to high 80 with tdp bounding up to 3,7 (I don’t do throttlestop only xtu undervolting, with Turbo Boost on), limiting it may reduce temperatures but also FPS.
I also note on some review that new Alienware m15 is also locked to 25Watt, to avoid thermal throttling.


Above is pure on Blade 15, on egpu Setting it’ll be like this, though i play that game on 5xxxp x 1440p ultrawide on this Setting which is quite laggy on 1070maxq with similar FPS achievement on balanced mode.

 

If you know the basics of how a processor (GPU or CPU, doesn't really matter) works, then this will be pretty easy to explain. Steve from Gamers Nexus recently had a similar question asked and explained it pretty well: Link

The power consumption is very dependent on the type of load the chip has to deal with. For example, a decently optimized modern AAA-game will try to utilize all 12 threads of your i7 8750H, but the instructions the CPU cores have to process are definitely not the same like when you render a 3D scene in Blender. Blender can make use of the AVX instruction set (Advanced Vector Extensions) that, put into layman's terms, helps utilize the CPU more effectively for floating point operations and get more parallel computations out of it. What you get from an application supporting AVX is better performance, but also significantly higher power consumption and thermal output as a result of that, even when Windows task manager shows a 100% CPU utilization in both cases.

It will also depend on a game to game basis. Take Assassin's Creed: Origins (or Odyssey) with their heavy implementation of DRM that decrypts data all the time on the CPU resulting in much higher CPU usage across all cores than a cracked version of the game(s) where the DRM mechanism is completely removed. There also are a handful of games actually utilizing AVX instructions, but it's very rare.

So, to answer your question directly: If you only play a single game or only perform a single high-priority task on your machine, then the CPU power draw is unimportant, given you achieve the performance you want already. If you play games or perform tasks with varying CPU requirements, then you'd want to give the CPU the potential to pull as much power as it needs to get the absolute most out of it. But ultimately it depends on whether you're happy with the performance you have already. Just know that limiting the CPU in such a way will yield lower performance in heavily CPU-dependent scenarios.

 

I received my mercury RB15 today, any tests you guys would like to see ran?

 

Thank yall for the replies. The gamers nexus video did explain quite a bit on workloads. I suppose my own tweaking is needed between whatever different tasks I'm doing. Im mainly just optimizing my gaming for temps and fps, sitting around 150-160 fps in frotnite at low 80c.

 

Is it only the 128GB SSD which is a SATA 3 Model or is the whole Interface Slow? I mean, can I swap the SSD to a faster one and get the complete PCIE Performance?

 

its only the 2.5 bay that is SSD the OS drive is a NVME drive. I would leave that alone and just upgrade the 2,5 to a SSD and you will be good to go. 1TB ssd are found all over the place for around $150US or less

 

the m.2 slot is a combo drive which means it can support NVME or SATA drives. Obviously NVME drives will have faster read/write speeds.

 

Thx. So it is basically the same device as the ones with bigger storage (the base modell)?

 

Yes and yes.

On 128gb base model it’s sata3, only 256 base model has nvme.

As mentioned above the difference only on SSD type, Razer usually puts cheaper SSD on lowest model. That’s why I went with 512gb on 2017 model it was faster Samsung nvme than nvme Model on 256gb Model. This year I think advanced model lowest ssd specs comes with pm961 and 512gb one with pm981, my 256gb is also pm961, but anyway I bought it for replacing with 1tb 970 evo.

 

That would not be a problem. So I can insert my own 512GB NVME drive and get the full speed of it?

 

Yes you can even put up to 2Tb, I remember I saw someone here before, upgraded to 2Tb nvme and 4TB 7200HDD that faster than default 5400 one, that made that machine is almost as expensive as my advanced 1070 model.

 

How much speed difference is there between SATA and NVME? For gamers I would suspect a noticeable difference but how much? I am a business user, not a gamer, so the base model with the 128gb SATA works for me. I upgraded with a 2tb SATA and 4tb ssd and my system seems plenty fast for my needs. Just curious.

 

A good sata like 860Evo boot windows and load games not much slower than nvme maybe few seconds behind, but for Video rendering or copying files it’s noticeable. Didn’t find the article but I read that comparison online with great benchmarks from rendering, windows boot to gaming load, several Sata and nvme as comparison. I’ve 860Evo on old hardware it’s noticeable slower compared to my nvme 970Evo loading games with full texture like FFXV, AC Franchises but maybe because the cpu is also older 4 cores than my current 8750H on Blade.

 

Data transfers (or rather data backup) is something I do on a regular basis to back up my business files. I have found that the speed of my RB15 is faster than my old Dell XPS, most likely due to the USB 3.1 that the RB15 has. I have also found that data backup to a portable ssd external hard drive is fairly fast. A few seconds of load time doesn't affect me. Data transfer rates do matter but I can always do data transfers during idle time. If this becomes a real issue I can always get a NVME m.2 and perform a fresh build as most of my data is on the 2.5" ssd.

Thanks for the response.

 

I just noticed my right fan rattles a bit at low rpms. Anyone else have this issue? This isn't normal, right?

 

It's not. I had a rattling fan and had to RMA to have it replaced.

One of mine is about to go back for the 3rd time. I have two. One has been perfect and the other is snakebit.

1st time for horrendous thermals. 2nd time for fan and x key depression and now the bottom plate is pulling free of the body.

 

Hopefully I don’t regret the purchase ... x:

 

Despite the QC issues and expected lousiness of Razer support, I've wanted a Blade 15 ever since the company launched it. The proposition became even more tempting when they brought out the Base version. The 1080p/60 Hz screen is a bit of a letdown, but the built-in Ethernet and M.2 + 2.5-inch upgradable storage are big pluses that more than compensate for the smaller battery. My local Best Buy had a 128 GB SSD/1 TB HDD model listed in "satisfactory" condition with "multiple scratches" for less than $1,400 so I took a look. Upon unboxing the system at the store, the rubber pads on the bottom panel had some bits of gunk on them, but the outer casing was otherwise immaculate. The same was true of the screen, keyboard, and power supply, so I snagged it and a 2-year accidental damage warranty for less than what a new machine plus sales tax would have cost. I'm going to replace the 128 GB SSD with the 1 TB one from the MSI 16L13 I'm currently selling.

I did want to inquire about the drivers. The Razer support site only has them for the Advanced series. I assume they'll work on the Base as well, save for Ethernet since the Advanced doesn't have one. I tried asking this question on the new and allegedly improved Razer support forum, but not surprisingly, I've yet to receive an answer.

 

I've found that many of the replies regarding the 2018 RB15 is how nice it looks or who wish they could afford to get one. Some chatter regarding performance or other useful information (such as driver links) but not much. I find this forum to be more informative.

 

Are there any options with regard to a smaller charging brick than what comes with the RB15 base model? This has a barrel type connection, not the proprietary connection. It wouldn't bother me if charging took a bit longer due to lower current. Not sure if that would affect system performance, though.

 

See - http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/nvme-vs-sata-ssds-for-gamers.802045/

 

Because we are real users that actually 8se the machine . Tech tubers and reviewers get passed down unite and do rush work to put out content . Forums like these are the go to for any questions

 

the base model uses a 180W brick and it uses non-proprietary connectors (standard barrel shaped), so if you can find a brick with the same specs it should theoretically work. I would not recommend using lower wattage bricks as it may damage your laptop if you put load on it and the brick can't supply the output.

the advanced model 1060 144hz screen variant uses a 200W brick with razer's proprietary connectors.

 

That's something to think about (lower wattage charger and load). I cannot see any damage as a result but the computer may be power starved if a lower wattage charger is used with it plugged in. Possibly worst case would be the computer shutting down. At the end of the day I will be using the brick that came with the RB15 base model.

 

I still can't understand the choice of connector. But then I guess Alienware just has that big plug and the blade is too thin for it.
Does anyone else find it's very stiff to plug in or unplug?

 

For portability usage I think 165Watt even enough, you can use the slim one for Blade 14 like from EBay. Maxq 1060 only consume max 70 Watt, cpu 45 Watt and even lower on balanced mode, it should enough imo. On go maybe user won’t gaming at max full power gaming mode, only charging for works and short sessions casual gaming. The thing is even 165 watt ac adapter from amazon the good one mostly same big as 230 watt advanced one.

 

Unless you bought a super-cheap, off-brand charger or one that is significantly lower wattage than stock, the worst that will generally happen is that the computer will draw from the battery to sustain power under a heavy load.

 

Maybe to avoid users using 3rd party ac adapter that may cause potential issues, or maybe also for monopoly. Do you mean that proprietary connector? Mine is easily plug in an out, though I saw a user somewhere somehow break the connectors connection inside Blade. Already 6 months and last one month, I bring it out often than before after getting MacBook Pro 15 leather sleeve (rip EBay edition ) that fit it pretty well with some DIY efforts, and plug it on off more often.

 

I have an Nvme ssd Samsung 970 Evo and was about to order the base model 128 gb
I won't be able to replace the ssd with mine ? I need to get the 256gb version ?

 

From the support page:

Can I upgrade both the SSD and HDD storage of the Razer Blade 15 (2018) Base Model?
Yes, you can upgrade the SSD or HDD of the Razer Blade 15 (2018) Base Model. The 128GB SSD configuration comes with a SATA SSD and a 1TB (5400rpm) 2.5" SATA-III hard drive. The 256GB SSD configuration comes with an NVMe PCIe SSD and a 2TB (5400rpm) 2.5" SATA-III hard drive. The m.2 slot can use either a SATA or NVMe PCIe SSD. The other slot supports SATA-III type storage, 2.5" 7mm max thickness, either an HDD or SSD.

 

You can use the NVME ssd with a clean installation of Windows. Some have stated that cloning a SATA ssd to NVME ssd might omit some necessary files for the NVME since they do not exist on the SATA. I wasn't positive on this and didn't want to purchase the NVME ssd to only find out it wasn't going to work so I went the SATA route. I had already purchased my RB15 or I might have gone with the 256gb NVME ssd version. Since I am not a gamer the speed impact isn't a huge impact.

 

ok thanks, yeah i don't mind doing a clean install.Was just worried the port was exclusively sata and my nvme would not be compatible with the 128gb base model.

 

There's no difference between the ports.