Clevo makes the worst laptop keyboard EVER!

Agreed, they put out good sound for laptops.

 

If you live near me I'd loan the 17R4 to you

 

There's a place near me that has AW models on the shelf and I'm planning to pick up something else there this weekend.

 

I just want to second that I think that Clevo keyboard aren't the best. On my 3 year old Clevo P375SM, the keyboard feels like a cheap toy. It's hard to explain, but it definitely has a lot of bend and flex when typing, giving it a cheap feel. I also noticed that it doesn't take advantage of the 17" form factor, it's too small for the chassis. I also noticed a very strange issue where every so often the keyboard won't register a keystroke. Lame keyboard on an otherwise high end (at the time) system.

 

@Phoenix did you ever test the N-key rollover of the DM3?

 

the what?

 

Mash buttons on kb and see if there's a max registration limit for pressed keys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(key)

 

Never tried that

 

Oh right, the keycaps will fall off.

 

NKRO, for when you need to type with your entire face.

 

Well i agree with topic premise title. A Clevo from 2004 was in practice dead in it's 5 year because of keyboard. Too old to replace it operating again. The current one from 2013 sometimes i get two characters instead one typically a `` or " or ^ currently is already missing a key so not even is durable. It is probably the biggest reason i have been looking to other manufacturers for next laptop.

 

Follow-up, the AW keyboards are pretty nice. I think I still like the MSI ones better though.

 

SteelSeries Keyboard FTW.

although in all honesty, the ASUS and Alienware Keyboards are also good. Anything but a Clevo keyboard for me (personal opinion)

 

I wasn't terribly impressed with any other brand I tried there.

 

Acer keyboards are awesome in my experience.

And the mousepad on their Predator line is the best mousepad in the world

The mousepad on their nitro lines is at the opposite end for me.

But their keyboards are amazing. I have literally no idea who makes them, how, or why, but they are the best keyboards in the world.

 

Just looking at the Clevo keyboards had me seriously concerned. They look cramped, it's insane that they use a cheap 15" keyboard on a 17" laptop (My dell has a better and fuller keyboard on it's 15" size), and the layout is absolutely horrid.
This has confirmed for me that the keyboard is indeed as bad as I feared and possibly worse, and has me seconding guessing Clevo.

Any advice on anybody else that sells a desktop CPU in a laptop? I'm almost even willing to save $1000 and step down to a laptop CPU, but I don't think I'm quite that far. Yet.

 

They don't exist.

 

MSI makes the 16L13, but I'm not sure how widely available it is yet.

 

Sadness. Such a shame to hobble an otherwise decent machine. I will seriously never understand the mentality of companies like this that let the bean counters have control over product design.

 

It's entirely demand-driven right now. Here in these forums, where it's all we talk about it may seem like there's a lot of demand and manufacturers are ignoring the entire customer base (counting beans), but if you took everyone here who wants something like that and compared it to the general population of laptop consumers, we have never had and will never have a majority. We are hopelessly outnumbered on one side by consumers who don't care about BGA/LGA or if something has a desktop processor, and on the other by consumers who want performance and have no need of mobility and so get a desktop instead. I don't like it and I'd love it if every company had at least one DTR with a 7700K (or upcoming Ryzen desktop CPU) in it, but they exist in proportion to who is wanting one.

 

EVOC 16L-G-1080 15.6" Custom Built Gaming Laptop w/ nVIDIA GTX 1080

It has an awesome MSI / SteelSeries Keyboard with great key travel and chiclet keys

 

Cool. Thanks Pheonix, I'll check her out.

 

That's the one. I haven't been able to get my hands on one personally yet.

 

it's a small beast

 

Too bad they didn't do that with the main line GT, but still, it's very cool.

 

Likewise. I spoke too soon in saying, "They don't exist." I didn't remember this model having a modular processor.

 

Kind of came out of left field for me, I thought MSI was done with that kind of thing. Good on them for bringing it back.

 

I'm not all that keen on how the money game works here, but I've imagined that LGA equipped laptop boards have potential for a nice profit margin. It's good for everyone, really, no matter how convenient BGA may be for some.

 

I think the number of users who actually care about it is a lot smaller than a glance at these forums would indicate since we're kind of concentrated here. I love that they're doing things like this for enthusiasts, but I imagine their cheaper/thinner/lighter BGA models will outsell these by an order of magnitude at least. But count me as a fan of this decision for sure.

 

Oh, I wholly agree. The market wants what it wants. I tried to find a sales statistic to back this up, but it's a bit esoteric.

 

Just to chime in with my experience here. I got my new P870KM-GS based laptop last week and after roughly two days of very light use (basically just installing software and doing some basic testing and some minor typing, I hadn't even gotten to opening up the baby and installing my spare SSDs and HDDs yet so it just happened out of the blue) the A and Q keys were no longer being recognized. I thought that the Q and A keys were a bit "slow" to react on first use of the computer compared to the other keys, but after a reboot they seemed to be fine. But then a couple of days later these two keys just stopped working altogether. I tried to patiently and carefully reseat the keyboard and it's flex cables, but it didn't help. I called @XMG support and after about 1-2 minutes of talk the friendly and competent Support tech helped me promptly and dispatched a new keyboard under warranty (I have to say that I'm very impressed by their technical support), I hope that will fix the problem.
After reading the stories in this thread I'm seriously considering to order a spare keyboard just in case the replacement breaks down the line again so I won't have to wait a couple of days for another replacement to arrive by mail until I can fully use the notebook. But we'll see.

As for the other topic discussed in this thread, the 15" keyboard in the 17" laptop chassis instead of a full/fuller, spacier keyboard, it is truly is a shame. I do have to say I miss the wonderful Alienware M18x-R2 keyboard and would love to have one of those in this new XMG notebook - which seems truly great otherwise - as well. I definitely have to get used to the key positions, although my typing experience on it hasn't been all that bad so far.

 

@Glzmo thanks for the positive feedback RE our support but sorry you had to contact them in the first place.

We actually have a pretty low RMA rate on keyboards, so although it may seem a bigger problem on threads like this it's not a big problem overall. Also not that much different when compared to keyboard issues on non-Clevo based laptops that we also sell. It would be extreme unusual for another one to go bad for you unless the issue is the ribbon socket on the mainland itself but that's also a very rare problem.

P.S. [ EDIT ] nice avatar ;-) The guys in marketing would on the one hand love this and the other be pulling their hair out!!!!! There's obsessive rules on "XMG" logos being only green and the "Schenker" logos being blue.

 

I still remember my problems with 157sm keyboard, it was disaster of response and comfort. It should be never on sale with that stuff. How testers put this to market I don't know

 

Same here, not many returns on them.

They are mechanical in nature (in the sense of moving parts) so they are prone to have defects come out quite quickly if they are going to turn up, especially with the physicality of shipping.

 

Yup, in @Glzmo 's case it sounds like the ribbon cable has a fracture - it's usually this that causes problems when issues with more than one key occur.

 

Dittoing Meaker and XMG in that we don't see a high failure rate on any keyboard (we see more abuse to them than anything)─ and while having a spare isn't a bad thing, you may want to hold off until you can test the new keyboard. In rare scenarios, it's not a keyboard failure, but an issue at the main board.

 

Agreed, if shipping is going to cause a problem it's first going to be with something can move (KB/fans/mechanical drives) and second with something that isn't supposed to move but rattles loose. But for being defective, keyboards seem to have really dropped off in number lately.

 

Thank you all for the replies. It's good to read that the keyboard failure rate isn't that high. Sorry if my post made it look otherwise, I really don't have any meaninful sample rate/experience since this is my first.
I'll hold off on ordering a spare then. I didn't see any apparent fractures when I examined the ribbon cables (one of them seemed to have been diagonally bent/folded by dafault, but that was the lower cable for the non-letter keys which appear to work without a hitch), but I suppose there could be microfractures to the cable that's responsible for the letters that aren't visible to the bare eye. I sure hope the new keyboard will fix it and it isn't the mainboard that's the culprit as that would require me to ship the whole system back which would likely leave me completely without a computer for about a week (right now I just use an external USB keyboard until I get the new internal one) thanks to slow postal services across countries (it sure would be nice if the "beaming" technology was advanced). Fingers crossed.

Hehe. I like to call it "XMG slaps (current) Delllienware in the face".
While the D-Generation X style green and black of the XMG brand is nice, I prefer the light blue myself, as it's more calming to me. The blue was also to meant as a hommage to XMG's Schenker heritage and the Clevo base of the system (although the blue I used is lighter and more towards the greener spectrum than the blue Schenker or Clevo use). Another reason for the different color was to keep people from mistaking me for an actual @XMG representative.

 

The cables are bent at an angle normally, but if they form properly during manufacture this is not an issue. If something happens and it's not quite right you can get what you had.

 

The smaller cable is the backlight power ;-) You can't see the fractures when they do exist - they would usually pass any visual inspection and can often pass the physical testing too. But I guess it's good that every company on here confirmed the same thing I did about keyboards being reasonably reliable, quite a big data set ;-) Hopefully it's just the keyboard or cable, as you said we need a point to point transporter but "beam me up keyboard" RMA service isn't quite there yet!

Fair enough on the XMG colour - as said I wasn't compaining in the slightest and the slap in the face comment is pretty funny!!!!! It looks pretty good in the lighter blue and differentiates itself from the "Schenker blue".

Btw it a pretty nice spec you have there - PCGH edition U727 and went with the delidded CPU option I see.

 

Did you notice any damage at the ends, where the silver contacts are?

You'll almost always see a crease or two in the cables due to the way they sit.

 

Yeah, I like the system, I got the specs I wanted and it performs very well. The delidded 7700K CPU the system came with with the Thermal Grizzly compound remains reasonably cool and reaches 70-74°C under full load on all cores at stock clocks which it's able to hold steadily.
I wish the voltage control would be unlocked in the GTX 1080's vBIOS, though, so I could undervolt it a little bit to keep the temperatures of it down some. The GPU reaches the maximum of 90°C at stock clocks pretty quickly in lots of games and professional rendering applications and throttles with maxed out image quality settings (including high levels of high quality FSAA) even with the fans set to the more aggressive overclock profile. I'd love to get it a bit lower than that by tweaking it's juice intake similar to how we can do it with the CPU. It still performs pretty well, I just like it when my components are as cool as possible without sacrificing performance (as we know with Pascal GPUs performance goes up the cooler they run), even when it's in the crammed space of a laptop.

But yeah, once the keyboard is up and running again, I should truly be able to start enjoying this baby for work and play.

When I examined them, there was a little bit of a "slightly curved line" across the cable's contacts, but some similar marks were on the contacts of all three cables, so I think it's just something that's "wear" caused by the cables making contact with the connections on the mainboard and nothing out of the ordinary.

 

I just bought my P870KM1 through HIDevolution but since I am living in Germany I need a German Keyboard and that I will order from XMG do to the fact the price is much better and shipping in Germany way easier. My older Laptop was from XMG and it was the best I ever had so far! Maybe if the price would not be so much different I would have bought this one there as well but saving more than 1000$ is a big argument!

 

I got my warranty replacement keyboard from mysn/Schenker/ @XMG today, everything works fine now and I can finally use my new laptop properly.

 

I have 0 issues with my Clevo laptop keyboard, I still prefer my mech, but yeah maybe these new 2017 models of Clevo have a better one, I am not sure. Never experienced the older models.

 

The cap design/construction is different on desktop CPU models.

 

Nothing wrong with mine. It looks nice and works great. It would be nicer if it was an inch or so wider, but no real complaints on my end.

 

I do have complains related to that too short shift button. It is the literally single complaint I have really, except that the laptop keyboard is situated badly on my desk, but that is my own problem

 

I fired up my AW17... The last proper 17 inch model from Dellienware before they went down the drain. Can not see that this keyboard is very very much better than what's on my Clevo P870. I would like a newer and bigger, Yees... But not at the expense of the internal thickness.

 

short shift on the right deserves a death penalty to the designer