Feedback to Clevo R&D Team: What's missing or broken in your Skylake laptops?

Bad voltages cause freeze or random restarts, this can be solved by adjusting voltages, sometimes a windows reinstall fixes it, or drivers reinstall. (I'm trying to help)

 

could be lots of things: software related (drivers, windows/system files), cooling related (bad paste job, bad thermal pad placement, warped heatsink), or hardware related (defective ram modules, popped mobo components, dying gpu). so isolating each component and checking it separately is a must to pinpoint the exact issue.

Sent from my Huawei Mate 8 NXT-AL10

 

I don't know if it applies to your situation or not, but it wouldn't be too surprising to learn that the majority of the people experiencing this instability are under-volting their CPU with a high negative offset in an effort to improve temperatures. Anyone doing that should set it back to default voltage and focus on making the cooling system more effective. In other words, it might be more effective to focus on thermal management rather than trying to take a short cut or masking the real problem by lowering voltage.

Thermal paste quality is important and some of the most popular mainstream thermal pastes are not very good. CLU is the best, but anything less than ICD or Kryonaut will never be good enough. Thermal pad thickness (thinner is better as long as it's thick enough to make contact) and thermal conductivity quality of the pad are important. Good thermal pads are expensive, but worth it. Also the most important thing is making sure you did not get one of the famous warped Clevo heat sinks that does not fit correctly. You need to find out first and foremost if you drew a short straw on the Clevo heat sink lottery while it's still under warranty so the financial burden for fixing the factory defect isn't your cross to bear. You'll be wasting time and money fussing around with pads and paste if the heat sink does not make excellent contact with the die on the CPU and/or GPU. Coincidentally, improving quality control on heat sinks is one of the things that Clevo needs to fix as noted early in the thread.

 

I haven't uv CPU, it's Kryonaut repaste by me, Thermal pads are stock ones.
Warped clevo heatsink well i have heard a little about them but never seen any... Please can you send me link to one of these?

 

System freeze or video freeze? What OS? What video drivers? What Clevo systems (model numbers)? Are they all the same? What's your internet connectivity like? Have you tried grabbing an mp4 of the video you're watching and see if it freezes if you play it back locally from disk?

 

i'm getting it during standard youtube video playback (random movies). Windows10 drivers BIOS 1.05.06, EC 1.05.03 P751DM2-G. What it is interesting 2 hour haven + xtu stress test was without issues...

 

You get what? Video freeze? System freeze? I'd be interested to see if you can get a hold of the youtube files on disk as mp4, mkv or whatever using a converter and then retry playing it from there. Same freeze?

 

My tip is that they should use better fans.. Clevo fans are a total joke... Look at Asus fans, they push similar amounts of air and are much quieter... Stop cheapening out to save pennies..

Sent from my LG-H850 using Tapatalk

 

This is currently a very hot (excuse the pun) topic in our discussions with Clevo ;-)

 

Any chance you will be able to sell exchange fan kits for the actual Clevo owners?

 

I understand some people are really hung up on the loud fans and that is understandable even though I have no objection to them. Loud fans are a helluvalot better than a hot machine. I'd prefer quieter fans, but not if it meant accepting higher temperatures as a compromise.

I hope Clevo's #1 drop-dead on the list is fixing their cancer BIOS/EC that causes severe CPU malfunction (throttling and spastic behavior in general) on so many machines. This one stupid thing can make a purchase tragically regrettable and utterly destroy the joy of having an otherwise awesome machine. They never should have released such a horrible mess to mass production. This kind of thing can give the impression that (a) they don't a rat's ass, and (b) they believe their customers are too stupid to notice.

 

Not in the immediate future, because new fans would first need to be manufactured in bulk to be used by Clevo themselves in production. Either the fan blades can be redesigned or the whole package redesigned because other fans which exist at the moment and perform betters in some areas won't just drop into the current Clevo chassis.

I wouldn't rule it out long term, just depends what the decision is on the current fans.

 

A good solution that might eliminate the need for new fans is what @Johnksss@iBUYPOWER suggested with a low/med/max static fan speed profiles using FN+1. If they could make it to where FN+1 cycled through those fan speeds it would be an excellent solution.

 

I couldn't see Clevo implementing this kind of idea unless there was some sort of over-ride. Their first argument would be along the lines of "what happens when someone sets it to fixed low setting and then forgets to change it when they boot a game", the first you'd know about it would be severe throttling/overheating. If an over-ride could be a solution then at what level would it be set?

Current discussions are regarding fans which would be quieter at high load but which don't negatively affect temperatures

For the majority of people the issues regarding fans are 1/ ramping speeds at low -> moderate load and 2/ volume at high load (gaming load more so that, but not excluding, Fn 1 setting)

 

I don't know, I get full fan speed while browsing this forum page on chrome,... Something can be done.

 

If that's happening then there is something else wrong.....there's no way under normal circumstances that your temperatures should be high enough to ramp the fans to full speed with just Chrome open.

 

Unfortunately, the decisions of OEMs are frequently guided by their lowest common denominators. They can't trust that all or most of their customers are going to be savvy or observant enough to avoid user-induced problems.

That would be ideal. I use only "auto" and FN+1 right now and I find it doable. I do not have CCC/Hotkey installed and my fans are pretty docile. I seldom hear them. But, I actively monitor thermals during gaming or benching and the moment I see the temps are starting to climb I reach for the FN+1 keys. While they are undeniably loud at max speed, I really do appreciate the amount of air they violently force through the radiators. I hope that part does not change to give favor to lower noise levels. If they can push as much or maybe even more air with slightly less noise that would be great for everyone.

 

I gave you the solution in the OC thread. Same as bro @TBoneSan do

^^^

 

It is very risky to let ODM/ OEM's start to juggle with the fan profiles. I have still not forgotten Dell's rotten fan profiles in the AW models(saved by Hwinfo). We should have complete control of the fans in a fan app+bios. Clevo can just enter overide in the EC for the fans if the temp gets too high.

 

This is also what I thought.

But the fans stay idle, when opening chrome with this very site, the fans spin up to full speed for 2-3 seconds while the page is loading, then they spin back down. I'm a software dev and cannot really see what is going on. CPU usage doesn't really increase, but temps show some increase when opeing those pages...

 

Yeah.. One needs to delid.
Even with this crappy BIOS I'm now running 4.5ghz everyday and gaming is quiet as anything in CPU demanding games.
Mind you it wasn't this way out of the box and there lies the caveat of most Clevo 870 DM2/3 coming off the assembly line. In a sense it's bitter sweet as alot of us get these machines because we can tweak and see rewards.

I've got a bit to go and trouble shoot to get temps as good as I had in my DM1 but there's variables I need to explore first.
I was hoping to get hold of a Prema Mod to get things perfect, but even as is I might do a video today to try and put this to rest. The fans are fine, one needs to
1. get a good heatsink
2. delid
3. tune*

 

I'll quote muself

It seems that other apps do make the fans go full speed like light rendering, but ... CPU usage is at 15% maximum, but temps increases per a single core up to 75C during the process. It's kinda like the app cannot use all cores...

 

Hey Brother @Georgel - Do you have XTU installed? Do you have CCC/Hotkey installed? If you have either one installed, do you see the erratic fan behavior, like ramping up with Chrome open after those programs are uninstalled? If you have any monitoring programs installed, like HWiNFO64, HWMonitor or AIDA64, what if those are not running? I'm only guessing, but it could be something is messing around (interfering) with your EC causing the fans to misbehave.

Also, if you haven't already done so, disable hardware acceleration in Chrome (advanced settings, near the bottom). Clear both of these check boxes, then restart Chrome. If Chrome is causing the GPUs to run in 3D acceleration mode (which is often does) the EC may be reacting to this rather than temperatures. Any 3D process running the the background could potentially trigger this behavior if the EC is programmed to react to GPU clock speeds regardless of GPU or CPU core temperatures.

 

What he said ^^^^ !!! But also there's a lot of content and adverts that load on some forums now and this can cause a short spike in CPU usage. If you have a fan spin jump when you first load a forum but then it is fine when loading other pages and reading through threads then that could be one reason (if it's limited to a forum or specific website for example).

 

Most forums / sites spin the fans up at full speed for ~5 seconds or so while the pages are loading, and chrome is not eactly responsive while the pages are loading.

I'm never loading less than 8-10 pages at once though.... I mean, I click them all to open in new tabs, and for 1-2 seconds chrome doesn't really respond to scroll wheel, and for 3-5 seconds the fans blow at full speed.

It seems to happen with this forum, head-fi sometimes, FB a lot. Doesn't really seem to happen with doom9 forums.

Thank you, Brother @Mr. Fox !

CCC / Hotkey is installed, without it, it doesn't happen but the fan profile is not aggressive enough so there is some over heating. IT happens regardless of HWiNFO or AIDA or HWmonitor running / installed.

It became kinda normal right now. What I would want to avoid is Dota2 loading the CPU fans at full speed, because while loaing the pages makes the fan spin last for 1-3-5 seconds, dota2 makes only the CPU fans run at full speed for the entire game sometimes, there is no load but there is heating, so something is generating the heat. No idea what since Dota2 runs perfectly smooth on a 3rd gen i3 laptopy.

 

If it's all sites, might be a plugin as well, not necessarily a particular one, but if for example there's a script that runs on every page to modify it somehow that might be creating some extra CPU use on load.

 

Started off just being this site, then confirmed as other sites....anyway seems the issue has been resolved/sidestepped now

 

Good to know, just recalled having a similar problem that I tracked back to a chrome plugin, so thought I'd throw it out there.

 

I could see a method.

FN + 1 = Max fans.
FN + 2 = High fans (80%).
FN + 3 = Medium fans (50%).
FN + 4 = Low fans (30%).
FN + 5 = Auto fans.
Double tap any number for "auto" fans as well, as FN + 1 currently works.

With low and medium fans, if 80c hits on any component, the system switches back to auto fan profile until it cools down below say... 65c.

With high fans, if any component hits 90c, it forces max fans until components arrive under 80c once again.

It sounds a bit complicated, but it should not be difficult since it follows logic gates. Anyone who understands the language should be able to code something so basic in, since it's a simple "if X do X".

 

just that ud have to switch around a lot of Fn + functions, for trackpad, camera, sound, etc. could be that 10 digits aint enough to cover everything

Sent from my Huawei Mate 8 NXT-AL10

 

He means the numbers 1-5 rather than the function keys

 

d´oh! right

 

Sure, I wasn't suggesting that it wouldn't be possible for Clevo to do, only that I couldn't see clevo doing this without a failsafe to stop overheating. The original idea was to force the fans on a certain % with hotkeys, but if you then have a 80C limit for example where the fans switch to Auto then this could be argued to defeat the point of having set % fan speeds in the first place. The Auto setting works in the exact same way that is being suggested, it's just that the voltage increases are set at different levels and fixed. Having the auto fan table set to 30% as default would mean that the components would heat up more, the difference being that when they truggered the higher fan speed it would be much more of a violent fan speed change than the normal AUTO fan curve. In Clevo's eyes this would defeat the point.

 

Doesn't the auto fan curve switch far below 80c? Even if we used 90c force max fans as a failsafe break point... your statement was that a failsafe to prevent thermal throttle limits needed to happen. I would think if you were using low or med fans and 80-90c was commonplace for your daily workloads then you're using an unrealistic fan setting for your workload, and it's an effective way to keep fans lower speeds without the danger of "forgetting" it on a low setting.

If users really have so many problems with that and the fanspeed behaviour was listed publicly in the manual they get with the machine etc, then... you can't please everybody and PEBKAC is a thing?

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@D2 Ultima I'm just trying to give an idea of how Clevo would look at this type of request.

Yes the fans increase in speed before 80C, but one of the issues this could cause e.g. low fan set 30% with a swap to Auto fan curve at 80C is that you're running at 30C until 79C on a component. As you say, the user shouldn't have the fans set to a manual 30% if they are utilising the components enough to hit 80C but it's also causing a huge thermal build up in the chassis.

 

I own the p650rs with 1070, and I have been very pleased with everything except exhaust for the CPU. I upgrade about every 2 years, and I will probably not buy another clevo if the chassis is not redesigned to exhaust CPU out of the back instead of the left side.

As a leftie, this is really annoying. Additionally, I can rest the edges of other gaming laptops between the insides of my thighs without blocking vents or getting too hot, but I cannot do this with the Clevo chassis.

Oh yeah, the fingerprint reader sucks. Not sure if this Is due to hardware or windows, though.

 

I don't think I've used a fingerprint reader I've actually liked. If Clevo could make one that doesn't irritate me that would be a first for any brand.

 

I've had them on HP elitebook work laptops for years, and those have always worked very well.

 

I've heard they're OK. I could also be pushed to admit the S7 Edge has a mostly functional sensor, but it would be grudgingly.

 

I tried the fingerprint reader out for curiosities sake. It was clumsy as heck - I gave up. Besides that for those W10 users sending telemetry, do you really want MS giving your finger prints ever Tom, Dick and Harry?

 

As far as I know, fingerprint readers don't actually use your "fingerprint" as a password. They use your fingerprint to automatically enter a stored password for you. I could be wrong, but I think that's how it works when I tried it a long time ago.

 

That's interesting to know. I've always been wary of them from a data collection perspective.

 

I used to do some kinds of tricks like that. I used autologon to use my windows password at boot for years... that way I could boot the system and instantly load windows, but if I locked the screen (switch user) as someone was coming up (win + L shortcut) they'd see a password required. Same if I put it to sleep and woke it up.

It confused a great deal many people into thinking you require a password at boot, that it did

 

This is correct for most biometric systems, Windows included. I prefer it that way, because then it requires you to have actually come up with a password for when the biometric device inevitably doesn't work right.

 

I have a Clevo P650RS-G and I find the following issues with the BIOS:

1) When running in non-UEFI/CSM mode (for Windows 7), disabling the NIC PXE option from the Boot Order causes the laptop to hardlock with 100% CPU usage when going to Save Changes and Reset

2) When running in non-UEFI/CSM mode (for Windows 7), disabling any connected hard disks from the Boot Order causes the laptop to hardlock with 100% CPU usage when going to Save Changes and Reset

3) Perhaps most strangely, when running non-UEFI/CSM mode (for Windows 7), it appears that this laptop is unable to boot from a custom Win7PE USB stick, giving the following error "Error Code 0xc0000017, There isn't enough memory available to create a ramdisk device". This may be related to the fact that the stock BIOS lists "System Memory" as 640KB, and "Extended Memory" as 32GB. The same Win7PE USB stick boots fine in a Clevo P650SG running Prema BIOS, so I am pretty sure that this issue is BIOS related.

If anyone by any chance knows any fixes/workarounds for issue #3, I would be most grateful for the help.

Unfortunately, I did not buy my P650RS at a Prema Partner, so I have no path to his custom BIOS whenever they are released. If anyone knows if it is at all possible to purchase and or donate for them, I would greatly appreciate it.

 

Delete only "HKKbdFltr" line? "SynTP kbdclass" stay?

 

Correct. Then reboot.

 

Not as many minimized/hidden icons on the bottom right corner for programs such as keyboard lighting, etc

 

+ a million.
Even just expanding the 'custom profile' area in CCC would be good. If an annoyed Inspiron owner a decade ago can write an excellent customisation utility (i8kfangui) for Dells that were thermal throttling due to stupid low speed stock fan profiles, it can damn well be done properly on a modern unit!

At least provide the API or publish the technical data so someone can write a utility to customise fan control, or be able to interface with HWInfo64 or others.

 

Sorry, I think I am going to ask here but this may derail the topic a bit:

Anyone here uses Windows 7 with these Skylake laptops?