Clevo P375SM-A

Good Day lads,

Since I had enough with AW and its continuous misbehaves, I went and ordered a Clevo P375SM-A because I can swap almost all of the components in 17R1 to the this Clevo. This is my first Clevo and I had couple of questions:

1- I asked the reseller to make sure the machine has the latest bios before shipping. Was that a stupid idea because my understanding is that the bios downgrade process in Clevo is a bit complicated and if the new bios is crappy am I stuck with it and can't downgrade?

2- Are W10 drivers from different resellers for the same machine compatible ? because I see some drivers are newer for the same machine but from different resellers (Basically what matters to me is the hotkey manager, soundblaster ... etc.) Audio, Video, wireless are irrelevant because I use the drivers from their respective sources anyway.

3- Is there anything specifically critical or important about this model or something that I should know or take care of when I am using it? so far I know the trackpad and sound bar lighting are ugly and found the ways to disable them. Is there something else?

4- I know this is highly subjective, but did any of the members here who made the switch from AW to thsi specific generation of Clevos feel that it was a severe downgrade in quality or is it more or less the same? I know new clevos are of the same or higher quality than current AWs.

 

My P370EM3 has served me well for 4,5 years. No fails so far so your's should be fine too.

 

Perfect! That's the same generation, that gives me comfort.

 

- No worries about the BIOS update, U'll be wanting Premamod anyways.
- Resellers pretty much have all the same drivers, as long it's for the model it's compatible.
- Probably loud cooling solution and mediocre temps
- I had pretty much all notebooks and honestly it doesn't feel like an upgrade or downgrade. Overall they are equally as good, alienware is stronger in some regards, clevo in others, end result will be both are pretty much equal.

 

I had to ask as I have never seen a CLEVO in real life before

 

By "all components" I hope you don't mean GPUs, Dell GPUs don't work in Clevos

I really like the P370 chassis. Simple, elegant, great feel, durable. Clickboard took some getting used to (if P375 also had it?) but I will miss it, and cooling needed some enhancing since I was used to P870 temps...

I have had it over 500W wall draw no probs so it's overbuilt i.e. safety margin for "standard" operation. Keep it cool and it'll do well. Max fans all the time will wear them out but they are the cheapest thing on it to replace.

 

I already had a CLEVO GPU in my machine and I kept it with a CLEVO vBios that I undervolted myself, so no problems there.

The strange location and shape of the touchpad seemed like it will need sometime getting used to, but I rarely use the touchpad so no problem there too.

Now cooling that is problematic. Do you have any recommendations? I will be using my own new thermal pads and GCextreme paste, is there something else I should do?

 

Clevo tend to be horrible at making their heatsinks fit and the mass is almost always lacking.

Getting a shim for your graphicscard is probably a good idea, the GPU cooling is downright terrible since they made it so that it doesn't touch the die with enough pressure. 0.3 or 0.5mm thickness should be good. If you're really unlucky you might need 0.8mm or even 1mm.

CPU cooling plate will depending on your luck also need a good ol lapping round.

If you can, adding a couple of fins on the heatsinks will also decrease your temps a couple of c's. If you get a small fan and a couple of ram heatsinks, you can make a heatsink on the GPU die which blows the air out, this mod will take another 10-20c of the GPUs.

The only good thing about the cooling solution is that they actually have big fans, so if you fix a lot of problems heatsink and heatpipe wise, you can create soemthing decent out of it, it requires a lot of work tho.

Oh and before I forget, if you use the notebook to listen to music to, then getting external speakers might be a good idea or use a headset, the speakers on clevo notebooks are terrible.

 

Ouch! To me temperature and sound quality are everything to me ... How hot are talking about? I run my UVed 980m in the AW around 65-70c under load never seen it going higher. The Haswell is around 75-80c under load. Should I expect more than this out of the CLEVO ?

 

Don't worry, all notebooks have their issues, at least you can fix them in clevo. MSI notebooks are probably the notebooks that have the least problems.

 

But my god they look so childish it's repulsive. Or maybe I am getting too old.

 

Dno, I think that's all up to the person using them. I personally think that the Dominator series notebooks look very good and I like the material, however I really dislike the thinner ghost series, they are meh. Also most times notebooks do look a lot different on photos than irl. The lightning and material really makes a huge difference.

The thing I do love about those clevos tho, is the keyboard, it's the most comfortable keyboard I've ever used in my life. It has a rubber finish on them, making the keyboard feel very soft and nice and the FN key allocations aren't as stupid as on other notebooks. Many times I simply want to change the volume on my MSI for instance and get annoyed byt the fact that I have to use 2 hands to use fn + volume up, while on my Clevo the keys are in reach, I can always use 1 hand to contorl it.

So to sum it up, the pros on the clevo is:
- Lots of ports and possible modding
- When heavily modded can be very good.
- Case and quality is overall good.
- Drivers tend to be easier to deal with and compatibility is less of a problem
- Lots of experienced resellers here on NBR
- Upgradability of the parts
- Lots of finetuning with premamod.

Cons:
- Annoyingly loud cooling solution, possibly louder than any notebook out there. (same class notebook)
- Bad heatsink fits and lack of mass, causing idle temps to force fans spinning and such.
- Hardware Sound is downright terrible, speakers are a huge joke.
- XFI Software on the Notebook is a really bad version of the desktop version.

 

Yeah, the CLEVO keyboard looks a bit similar to the AW one I have which is very pleasant to type on.

 

Idk, I really dislike the new AW keyboards. The layout is decent but the "feel" and the ability to suck literally every kind of dirt into the keyboard kinda makes me hate it. Older gen AW Keyboards were far better imo. I'd say it's prefrence really.

And the fact that the notebook would warm the keyboard like a cookingplate made that even worse.

 

Compared to old AW keyboards, the new one pales in comparison there is no doubt about this. on my R1 though I don't get the heat issues.

 

Depends on person I suppose. My hands sweat rather fast and right under where the graphicscard is, there the keyboard gets really hot imo, same as the upper part above the keyboard it also got rather hot. It was a highly OCed one tho, it had GTX 980M @ 1.41GHZ core clock and a 4940MX @ 4.2ghz. The temps were... well let's just say the reason I got rid of it was because I kinda didn't think it would last long with those temps.

 

Loud, hot, aggressive fan curve, pooooor sound quality (especially bass), touchpad, that hate moisture (he stops working till dry).
In my P375SM I had second subwoofer with his own amplifier and custom made fan drivers modules with analog temperature sensors.

 

I usually set fans to maximum speed before playing in any laptop I owned. Fan noise is irrelevant to me, but the sound quality part is very sad I hope it's not much worse than the AW. The AW actually had no subwoofer and no bass whatsoever (anything below 150Hz was not present) so I believe the CLEVO can't be worse.

 

External DAC/AMP will solve poor sound quality (almost no bass, sli clicking in some games).
True, heatsinks need some work. First thing is to close all air leaks. I used foil tape and taped fan to heatsink. This sort of tinkering is actually fun, when you see that the work you put in makes a huge difference.

 

Bad news, It will be much worse.
The speakers have no bass whatsoever, the subwoofer is okish but gets completely destroyed by drivers. I'm not joking this is how clevo is using their sound system:
high frequencies: speakers only
medium frequencies: Subwoofer only
Low frequencies: speakers only.

The speakers are a complete utter joke, they have no box which causes them to sound extremely tinny, combined with an ok subwoofer that will not get utilized on low frequencies but onlyy on medium ones. I worked a lot on my sound system to fix this. I will soon make a topic about my notebook, then you can look at how much effort you need toput into a notebook just to make it sound acceptable, it's way better to get an external solution if you plan on listening to music.

If you care about speaker quality like me, you should have went MSI. MSI's speakers are absolute insane.

 

I had to seal the air leaks in the AW as well, and to be honest in almost every laptop I had or had to work on for a friend. I was 100% I will have to do that on the CLEVO

Subwoofer for medium frequencies, and speakers for low? :O

Subwoofers are created for low frequencies, what were they thinking!

You had a 17R1 before? If so then tell me how bad compared to the R1 is it. I really find sound on the R1 disgusting even with the 2 5W speakers.

 

The sound on the R1 is pretty much like the other AW systems. The sound lacks the bass in the lower frequencies the sound on the R1 is rather mushy, it lacks the clarity, other than that the sound is acceptable imo. The Clevo has even less bass, consdering that they don't let their subwoofer do the lows and messed up, the medium tones come 95% from the subwoofer, which is a problem, the quality is ok, but you clearly hear how the sound is coming from the bottom half of the notebook, the highs are a joke, it's tinny. I'm being serious, you know when you buy a really cheap notebook which have terrible speakers? Such as Packard bell and those cheapo ones, that's the sound you can expect from the speakers without subwoofer, If it wasn't for the subwoofer, the sound would be disastrous.

It doesn't distort, but it's so tinny that you literally get a headache from listening to loud music.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sager-Clev...479669?hash=item5d6cb0b975:g:f7gAAOSwA3dYcAQj

Look at that, you got the same speakers. It's a joke.

No box, cheap, tiny, terrible sound, drivers making it even worse.

So in a nutshell:
R1 > P375SM in terms of speakers. Get external speakers unless you want bleeding ears.

 

That is an abomination :O

 

I'm pretty sure Clevo is known to have an abomination of a sound system. I highly doubt anyone who owns a clevo would say anything else.

And yes, when I first saw those speakers when I oppened up my notebook I had to wonder if Onkyo even knew how speakers work.

 

I'll be interested in laptop speakers when they can drown out loud fans. Til then even cheap 30 buck closed 40mm driver headphones are better imo.

 

Yeah I rarely use laptop speakers unless it is the occasional movie night with my GF or with friends. I find all laptop speakers disgusting, but still there should always be a minimum quality for these things.

 

The bigger machine can have some decent sounding ones like our NP9877

 

That is one beast of a machine one would assume as much.

 

Hello does this laptop have an igpu?

 

nope

 

Well the CPU has its disabled and can't be activated.