Am I right in thinking P170SM gets a 230W PSU in Europe?

I've seen that many people in America get 180W PSUs with their Clevos which apparently is not really enough for the GTX 780M and quad core Haswell CPUs in the latest Clevo builds.

While looking around for a reseller for the P170SM I saw that all of the UK Clevo models apparently come with a 230W PSU according to all the websites.

Is this true? Does it make a difference? I'm guessing it just allows for more overclocking potential - is this correct?

As a side note, if it is true I feel sorry for those stuck with 180W PSUs.

 

The P150SM has a 180W PSU and the P170SM has a 230W. Or am I wrong?

 

OK a little more research done and I think you're right.

 

You are correct.

The 15" models get shafted on power :/ or shall i say ran right to the limit.

Basically we can't populate every drive bay, memory module, usb port and have a 4900MQ or better and a 780M and run her full throttle as it doesn't make enough power.

I have similar issue on my NP8150... With all ports full and bays and modules full I can trip the fail safe in the PSU if I stress the machine. I can even do this with the internal monitor off.

It's rare that someone have everything full like that but it can happen.

I suspect that is a copy/paste or typo issue (in regards to the one site you found that did list 230w on the 15"). You edited as I was making hah
No 230w PSU exist with the end we need for the 15" models as the tip doesn't support that much power legitly.

 

I was accidentally looking at the wrong model when I said about the 120W one (so I quickly tried to hide my mistake ) but OcUK claim to have a 230W for the P150SM if you read the full specifications! Maybe a typo.

Ooh sorry to hear that :/ glad I went for 17" now. I also notice that MSI GT70 has only a 180W PSU. Seems like I dodged a bullet there going with Clevo as I was considering the MSI for a while!

 

Some of this also depends on the CPU you use. I don't know that the MSI uses the higher power usage ones.

Many people use the default CPU which uses less power, I went with the second to the best and always do lol so they are power hungry. I couldn't imagine what an extreme CPU would do to me hah.

Your 4800MQ is listed as 47w as is my 4900MQ but they actually can and will ago above this power usage wise, esp with turbo and mine more so.

That said I think you will be fine with the 17" models. 230w seems to be perfect. I imagine 200w would be the sweet spot for what my machine really wants if I tax it. (on the DC side, AC will always be larger).

 

Is it possible to keep the power consumption over 180W (or whatever the PSU can actually do) over a long period of time in real world usage?

If not, as long as the battery is in it should be fine.

 

Real world usage? Yeah, it all depends what you are doing.

If you're doing something that taxes the GPU & CPU that will just about do it.

Figure 780m is 110w-122w and 4900MQ is 47w, what little left has to be shared for LCD, memory, drives, MB, USB etc... If I remember right the screen can use around 10w and 2 memory dims on a laptop will use a few w and drives can range from 1w to 4w so you see we run out of power really fast, not even account for random spikes like when the cpu can peak at around 56-58w.

As for the battery being in, on these models it doesn't help any. Our notebooks don't draw from battery when on AC. It might for a split second but if it does it's shutting off the machine as mine does when I stress it if I don't disable internal LCD because when on battery you GPU won't run at anything above 2d speeds because a battery can't output that kind of power without going poof.

 

It looks like I'm very lucky. I have a P150EM with 3720QM, 7970M and standard 180W PSU. When I run some scientific simulation/visualization the CPU, iGPU and dGPU all get pushed near the limit. This is probably the heaviest compute workload one can put on the machine. I've never seen the machine force shut down under load.

Still, your calculation is making me worried. I may get a bigger PSU if possible.

 

With 17" laptop your PSU will be fine

The other machine, if it has never shut off, don't worry about it.

Like I said, it's rare chance to impact users, very small %. I just happen to be one of them. I also know it's not from faulty equipment as I have done it on another laptop with same specs when moving hardware around lol.