Are my expectations too high for my XMG U705?

Hi guys,

Having gone from a desktop PC to a laptop I'm not sure my expectations are way too high for this laptop. Please don't think I'm complaining I'm not I just want to see what other peoples opinions are.

First off when I first got the laptop I had to send it back as there was some coil whine and a couple of other issues. The resellers were awesome and their customer service is second to none.

What I'm getting at is there are a few things I cant seem to not let bother me.

Such as the heat. Unless I stick the fans on maximum the cpu and gpu are running at idle at about 50 Celsius. When I encode a movie using Handbrake the cpu can shoot up to over 90 Celsius. I appreciate I can stick the fans on max but wow they are loud.

The laptop is not all that quiet either. I still think the 980M is still making some coil whine. I am going to test this by removing it and seeing what the difference is like.

The battery is not that good either in my opinion. I have been sat on my laptop whilst typing this post and I would say I have been using the laptop for 25 minutes max and the battery has gone from 100% to 77%.

Should I consider changing the thermal paste and if so which one? I have some MX-4 laid around which I used on my desktop computer.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. thanks

 

You have the most powerful desktop CPU (88W) plus a 100W GPU inside your laptop. Things will get hot and battery life will be abysmal. What did you expect?

 

Yeah I sort of knew this. I was also trying to ascertain if my temps were normal.

 

They seem pretty normal to me, out of the box. It´s not uncommon for idle temps to pass 50 and cpu to shoot to 90 under load. And 4790K often climbs past 90 too stock.
What you can do is tweak it to your liking. Undervolt the cpu and test for stability. -50 to -100 mV could net you 10 C under load.
And repaste. Try MX-4 if you have it, otherwise IC Diamond or Gelid Extreme (or Liquid Ultra if you´re feeling ballsy).

 

Hi

Changing the thermal paste can bring improvements in temperatures but we don't use the stock Clevo thermal material and what we use is comparable to MX-4. You may see a couple of degrees difference with IC Diamond but doing what @Mr Najsman said in undervolting will bring about much more noticable results. You can do this very easilly in the Intel XTU software that came with your laptop!

Regarding the battery life, notebookcheck measured a maximum of 2h 30 so. On the U705 overview page (in the specification section) we list the battery life as "2hs general usage" so what you are seeing is to be expected. It's just the way that the laptop is set up and with a desktop CPU pulling much more power on idle/low usage than mobile CPUs do.

Thanks for the positive comments on your RMA. We replaced the whole chassis for you and I believe that we have chatted about the battery life and coil whine with you via email since the replacement was sent to you, specifically that running WinSat does produce some coil whine but in games it isn't noticable.

I have talked quite a bit about the coil whine on this forum, but to just explain to anyone who may not have seen the previous posts there are two possible sources of what is known as "coil whine" in these laptops. The first is with the first generation of mainboards, which by no means is a problem with all chassis and in the small percentage that it can be heard it varies in severity. The new revision of these boards don't suffer from this issue and we have been actively filtering out chassis from the original version which did show the issue.

The second possible cause of coil whine is the GPU. Nvidia does not consider this an issue, but it is tested for in production by us. If it is noticable when playing games or in other similar scenarios, and it is lound enough to be heard under normal operating conditions then we would be happy to look into it further for you. Please note that if you remove the GPU as suggested, the laptop will not power up correctly because the laptop does not run graphics through the CPU as it does in laptops which do have Optimus support.

If you need further assistance or advice please do contact us and we will be happy to continue the conversation.

 

Encoding video is really intensive and will force the fans to have to work at max to keep the 4790k within limits, it's pretty impressive it manages it to be honest.

 

Thanks for the replies.

I will try some of the suggestions. What is concerning me a little is when I am running the laptop on battery the gpu is making some very annoying noises. I am presuming this is something to do with its power intake as its not present when plugged in.

 

During idle on battery the GPU will enter very low idle states which could be the cause, you could try raising the clocks by setting high performance over balanced in the nvidia control panel but battery life would go down.

 

Yeah I have just tried this and it was worse. I will get some audio later.