Clevo + Ryzen: possible?

Very well put. IMO It's really not the end of the world that there isn't more on the AMD front right this second, and if it does come I don't want a product rushed out because there's some kind of uproar about it not existing yet.

 

What this thread has become: http://www.eurocom.com/ec/release(372)ec

 

Correct, it bears absolutely no relation to the discussion whatsoever.

And especially fundamentals in how the industry operates.

I don't expect everyone to understand how the industry operates, that's why I try and explain things clearly and simply. Also there's a huge amount that I can't say without giving away further information i.e. direct sources, which meeting/conf call/event I was in and who was in the room with me when I heard a statement, argument etc etc. Calling bs to me is an insult on a personal and professional level, there's simply no reasoning with this kind of logic or statement.

 

april fools day

 

A worthy successor to the Panther 7N. Too bad they've reduced available RAM, though .

 

I can't believe I never saw this. It's beautiful.

 

April 1st

 

I thought I had seen all the good April 1 announcements, this one is better.

 

Back on topic, I can say this: Clevo is working on a Ryzen machine, just not y'all expect.

 

Calling it, it's going to be all BGA low voltage and we're going to be treated to a plethora of bodily function related portmanteaus about whatever it's called.

 

Those are the ones selling the best, unfortunately. BGA cr** to the masses, an understatement of what Ryzen will and is.

 

It begins.

 

There is a new acer with a desktop ryzen 2700 cpu

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/ac...-laptop-with-ryzen-7-2700-and-rx-vega-56.html

No news from clevo?

 

Interesting news. Thanks for that, Brother @sicily428.

Too bad they did not use an unlocked Ryzen 2700X instead. Maybe that can be a drop-in upgrade along with an unlocked BIOS mod. It is SUPER NICE to see Acer build something that is not BGA filth for a change. The nice thing about this is Ryzen CPUs do not have a crappy integrated GPU (aka AMD APU) to have to put up with. So, it will require discrete graphics. If the Vega GPU is also MXM, there may be a strong basis for respect and hope for Acer Predator notebooks after all. If the Vega is BGA, well that's just going to suck massively. I hope it is MXM.

I think Clevo may not need to be too interested in AMD since they are using Intel desktop CPUs. It would be nice to see them offer the option for those that want it, but that could also be risky for them. Not sure how many people would buy a Clevo with an AMD Ryzen CPU. Unless and until AMD starts producing CPUs that overclock as well as or better than Intel, they will remain on my do not buy list. Even so, this is still a pretty a huge step in the right direction for Acer. It puts them into the same general league as Clevo and has potential to break their monopoly on laptops that use real CPUs instead of disposable toy CPUs. Now, they need to beef up their cooling for 100W+ TDP CPU and 200W+ GPU and knock it off with the wimpy sissy-boy 65W TDP CPU in the Predator laptop lineup.

It truly sucks that Acer is still turning to BGA filth for the Intel version of the same laptop. One step forward, two steps backward.

 

Unless something changed all the Ryzen processors are unlocked.

 

All AMD CPUs are unlocked by default. The X is just to denote XFR which is some auto-overclocking type behaviour.

Not using the X processor is probably just for safety as the AMD processors use vastly more power as they clock higher. e.g. The difference between a stock 2700 and [email protected] is almost 80W increase for not much actual performance increase.

Hopefully the best part about an AMD laptop will be the heat distribution of their cores is vastly superior to Intel. So even at the same power draw the cooling system should be able to actually pull the heat away more effectively.

 

And one more point chipset support for new CPU not like intel and at the end price.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

 

As well as BIOS support.

Otherwise it becomes like the GL702ZC situation that can't be upgraded to Zen+ and future gens because Asus is not providing BIOS updates, even if they physically fit.

 

What kind of VRM did Acer put in that laptop?

 

Would love to see that as well

 

Unloced R 2700X is an 105W chips (stock clocks). You need minimum chassis size as Clevo P870 series.

How much can Clevo save going from Intel to Amd? And with low clocked ram (Amd chips need fast ram to perform and we all know we won't get needed faster ram who works in notebooks) and on top low clocks for the Cpu. All this means only we will get a worse product. A No go from me.

 

I agree, but a laptop with an AMD Ryzen desktop CPU is still better than an Intel i7 or i9 BGA turdbook. I'm not saying either one is good, only that the socketed desktop AMD CPU is the lesser of two evils. The Acer should be thick enough to manage cooling a 2700X as long as Acer engineers are not too stupid when it comes to designing the cooling system. If they botch that up, nothing will be right about it. It won't matter what it has under the hood, it will be junk. Or, if the GPU is BGA instead of MXM, then it will still be a piece of garbage no matter what it has for a CPU. Those of us that learn from history and personal mistakes know that an AMD GPU is usually the first thing to die in a high performance system, and especially if it is in a laptop. Who in their right mind want to pay extra for another motherboard and CPU if the GPU is the only bad part? (Answer: nobody in their right mind does.)

 

Sad but true, seems to be something about their GCN GPUs that makes them fail more than nVidias equivalent. Polaris and Vega seem to be doing better since I've not heard any issues from crypto miners yet, but I doubt they will reach the heights of the ATI days ever again. I look forward to their 8nm CPUs though, as for once in about 10 years they are actually competitive (might be more suitable for notebooks if they can reduce the power usage too). BGA would be the worst crime, there is no reason to use a BGA 580 as there have been MXM versions sold in China for a while now. I'm not going near BGA again after the infamous GeForce 8000M failures (personally saw 3 laptops with the 8600M fail in under 3 years). I would take a crappy APU over BGA any day as long as it's socketed like an old HP I had.

 

^^ That's not the problem ;-)

 

Then, what is the deal?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/clevo-ryzen-possible.801836/page-2#post-10469075

Some of this is still valid.

 

Ah, yes... makes sense. But, Clevos still has them whipped with 8700K, so not a big deal at the end of the day.

 

Certainly it's more interesting for tweakers.

 

Most of the feedback I've seen is regarding cheaper CPU options than Intel, also with the performance - but as you said that's not always the case. There's definitely demand for AMD as you can see from other vendors who have already integrated their CPUs but until you can compare a Clevo chassis and their implimentation of both Intel and AMD it's pretty difficult to tell which choice would be the best - apart from going on generic figures from other ODMs.

 

Probably going to have to rely on comparisons with similar models from manufacturers who are willing to take a risk on ryzen.

 

We have already seen enough from existing reliable sources, including people in our own community, to recognize that AMD Ryzen processors are, while powerful, not a great option for an overclocking enthusiast. Not a knock on Ryzen, simply a statement of fact because they do not handle overclocking well. Being a powerful stock option won't make the cut for those in that niche. That would knock out a segment of Clevo's customer base that would never consider the AMD option unless or until AMD does something to change that aspect of their product. Pretty much the same can be said about their GPUs.

 

On the GPU side I can understand more. I recall some problematic AMD cards in Clevo models a few years back that put a bad taste in my mouth about the whole idea of it.

 

^^^^^ yup fair point, although the overclocking percentage of Clevo owners is still small and it's the much larger section of non OCers who would want the AMD option at some point.

 

The latest AMD chips are more like GPUs in how they turbo pretty much to the limit. Hopefully 7nm helps the clocks.

 

Also to consider, there seems to be a growing number of people who feel like they need to buy something that's not Intel/NVidia and don't know/care about OC in the first place as long as they feel like they've voted with their wallet.

 

From my reading of the market the workstation aspect to the P570WM has been abandoned with the P870 being more skewed towards gaming. So as a gaming product why bother with Ryzen?

Sad to hear Asus have abandoned future support for the GL702, but not surprising. The upgrade path is a major selling point of AM4 on the desktop. I would have thought a new SKU with a 2000 series Zen would be an easy way to have a new model available without much effort, maybe sales are not high enough for them to bother.

Silly of AMD to let it die too, even if they have mobile specific CPUs/APUs they'd rather promote, it's not a great look to have jilted buyers of the first amd laptop worth buying in a decade left complaining about being abandoned

 

You are right there, it would have been in AMD's interest to see support for that machine continue to help foster a community.

 

If the programs I use are AMD supported, I do not use intel.
Asus uses 1700x processor, Clevo can use 2700x processor

 

Looks like AMD have tapped MSI for the 2700 series this generation. Try reading @XMG posts for the reasons.

 

Definitely agree with you and @Support.3@XOTIC PC (especially on the think-with-wallet). I think there's definitely a large market potential for AMD option in Clevo. Just look at AMD's 1) better future potential of more cores and better upgrade path and their 2) potential price/performance.

Ryzen 2 on 7nm is expected to have more cores so can expect to surpass 8 cores for the highest core count on a consumer CPU along with the possibility for higher clocks. So I can see there being a potential market in a Clevo with AMD set up for developers and content creators on the go; higher core count on current offerings and the potential for higher core count and clocks on future CPUs is very enticing for devs and content creators as it means better productivity and a potential increase in said productivity. Intel does have their Coffee Lake and it does beat or match current AMD offerings in terms of multicore work loads (if there's overclocking to >= 5.0ghz). In fact, overall (when overclocking >= 5.0ghz) it probably is the better choice for developers and content creators because it beats single core loads while mostly matching AMD's highest offerings' multicore workloads. But overclocking varies from chip to chip, so it's sort of a gamble on whether you'll beat Ryzen offerings (one could argue that there's a lot of 8700k that can reach 5.0 Ghz but it's still a gamble). And the future looks bleak on Intel's side what with a so far lack-luster Cannonlake development and at only 10nm to boot while AMD is moving on to 7nm.

The potential price per performance just comes from comparing Intel's and AMD's desktop market strategies; AMD has always been priced more accessibly while Intel has been more expensive. If the same is true for laptop manufacturing i.e. they can have lower prices (compared to Intel equivalent) for their motherboards in Clevo, then a Clevo P870xm base with AMD might just be cheaper. I say 'potential' because Clevo could lower the price of Clevos with custom AMD motherboards because of AMD's lower licensing/royalty cost in making custom motherboards, or Clevo may just price the AMD version similar to the Clevo with Intel and make higher margins on Clevos with AMD. But, man .... if they can deliver the former and have like a B350 equivalent at like 200-400 dollars cheaper than the current Clevos with Z370 chipset, I'd get that AMD variant in a heartbeat.

I've been watching the ASUS GL702ZC, and I think part of the lack of success of this model came from ASUS mistakenly advertising this as a gaming laptop instead of pushing as a business/developer/content creator system. There's a couple of reviews, but this one probably best sums it up for devs.

 

Read through the thread, AMD has a certain barrier to entry they need to cross, they have to beat intel across all parts, especially performance/watt and provide support in a higher end market along with throwing off the stigma of their previous behavior with partners. It's a fair bit to overcome.

 

I read somewhere in this thread that manufactures had a bad history with AMD quality and support - particularly with AMD MxM boards. Additionally, it seems that the overall sentiment of the forum is AMD = bad overclocking = no market potential, but I wanted to offer another perspective of their potential. I might be speaking from a budget-minded consumer perspective, but for me, the barrier of entry for AMD is lower: if they can give competitive performance and performance per watt at lower price than Intel, then I think there's a financial incentive for people to purchase them. As you said, they could completely beat Intel across all parts (performace, performance per watt, performance per dollar), and I think that would offer 100% incentive for all to switch to Intel.

And we can see that they've already sort of started to address this stigma of being poor quality/poor performance per watt. Forgive me for looking at BGAs, but compare the latest notebook chips by both parties: AMD's 2500U has a 15-25 watt TDP and is only a little behind Intel and in some cases it is matching the performance of its Coffee Lake equivalent, the i5-8520U, which is roughly the same TDP. AMD still has a lot of work in terms of driver support, but it's priced lower than Intel equivalents and drivers will hopefully get better with time. It's too early to say if AMD will fully get over its stigma, but if it is moderately successful in BGA deals with Dell, Acer, and HP laptops, then maybe there's a possible future for AMD to work with Clevo on socketed laptops as well.

I'll try to better read the thread before answering next time...

 

This was a few years back, I recall there was a popular AMD option that was being sent back so much that they were just offering to change to the NVidia equivalent for every RMA. Can't remember the exact model though. I wonder how much that affected the current state of things.

 

This was primarily with the 7970M, loads of driver problems and with Enduro etc. The issue with getting AMD into laptops more recently i related to AMD's expansion back into the "performance" sector with Ryzen. I explained one of the main issues in the post below from page 2 of this thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/clevo-ryzen-possible.801836/page-2#post-10469075

Since then, we saw one a-brand laptop manufacturer launch a Ryzen laptop as expected, then in early 2018 a handful more followed. This was in response to demand from the laptop manufacturers, but you can see that one laptop manufacturer had exclusive Ryzen for a period of time whilst many others wanted to offer Ryzen but weren't able to. Even now, there are companies which want to offer Ryzen but can not - you could say that this is beacuse some manufacturers are further down the packing order for AMD, but the initial issue was as I explained in the above linked post. Perhaps another argument that could be made is that AMD was sensible in limiting the number of partners that it worked with on Ryzen so that they could manage the quality and roll out. Wether that was the result or not is open to discussion!

 

is AMD CPU+AMD GPU a must at the moment for having Ryzen support?

 

Yup, I remember the 7970M cards after a couple years of ownership were dying left, right, and center.

 

7970M, that's the one. Unfortunate, there was a lot of salt surrounding it.

Makes sense that they'd have a gradual reintroduction to the market rather than jumping all the way in though.

 

Is that a side-effect crappy SAC5 solder balls used between the die and the carrier?

Tons of Nvidia GPU's died as well due to that, and it was not only limited on older models..

I replaced a lot of dead 740m's..

 

For the first wave where you are exclusive with AMD I would expect so.

 

Ryzen CPUs run surprisingly well with NVIDIA GPUs.