How to upgrade the Phoenix (Clevo P870DM-G)from FHD to 4K (PICTURE GUIDE)

Thanks for the replies, good to know not to brick the system.

Let's see if I got the rest right. I have the g-sync card, g-sync bios (both mobo and gpu) and the 4k non-g-sync panel.

If I want g-sync to work, I need both modded bios and vbios on the system. If they're available anywhere I'll give them a shot any time

Now, the other way, If I want it just to work I can flash the GTX 980 non-gsync bios over my card, this part I am not sure if it works or not. Also the stock bios on the link is for the g-sync version only. Is this even viable?

I'm pretty sure the Eurocom guys are awesome but I am pretty far away from their reach and I have already assembled the system. Plus I am already semi-paralyzed without the VGA working properly so shipping the laptop somewhere for fixing is not an option. Worst case scenario I'll swap the 4k for the old panel until there is a easy way out of this.

 

anyway of using G-sync with 4k? seems possible, if only we could trick the driver....

 

i think you can not have g-sync with no g-sync screen, due to the driver limitation. only if someone would figure out how to fool the driver...

 

this is not possible, and even if was - it would not help, due to different ID of the board, which is physically attached to the PCB

you need a BIOS without LCD whitelist, if that exists...

 

4K and Gsync works right now, if my information is correct, but I do not have the laptop yet to confirm.

 

really? isn't that against Nvidia licensing for G-sync?

 

They did recently add the first 4k display onto their white list, so if the GPU is wired to support G-sync it means you can activate it.

 

good news

 

but does that mean no more 13d7 980m?

 

I do not understand your question...

There have been SLI 980M and single 980m that do support Gsync, you just have to buy a Gsync supporting GPU from the start, and the 4K panel. And buy from a store which is a PremaMod partner. Like HIDevolution.

 

We will likely see both versions around until they are replaced.

 

He is referring to the non G-Sync 980m. AFAIK there is some hardware switch / info that makes a card G-Sync compatible? I might be wrong.

 

There is a slightly different hardware layout on each card that determines if it supports g-sync or not.

 

A Firmware/vBIOS won't make a g-sync card out of regular model or vice versa.
For g-sync you need a g-sync model GPU.
There is no 4K AUO screen specially for g-sync, it's the same screen with the same EDID as it doesn't need to go above 60Hz on this model.

 

A higher refresh rate would break the eDP specs and the controller chip

 

i mean there will be no more non-Gsync cards from Clevo.

 

Sure, but point being that the 4K doesn't need another EDID. FHD panels need 'g-sync version' of the EDID or they will only run@60Hz even in g-sync mode. That's why some people complain about having lower refresh rate on same model screens than others...

 

It's all still the growing pains from being mostly stuck at 60Hz for so long.

 

Let's not forget that we where used to have 120Hz until they killed those panels by not updating them for the newer slimmer form factor...just to re-introduce them later this year as the "next big step"...

 

They were TN panels, we only just got high refresh rate IPS panels on desktop.

 

And insanely premium pricing

 

What you need 120HZ for????

 

Well.... I spent the WHOLE day getting this panel profiled and correctly calibrated, and wuill explain later why you NEED a profile to be installed even if it does not do anything... (it does though...)

I had to do a lot of research and my head hurts now... I think I got it overheated....

here is and advancve of what I got... just, FYI, the issues on the super bttom and top values are still there, and I'm waiting instructions on how to create a custom color chart to measure that, but if we ignore that, the average delta error is impressive.

 

A note on the graphic posted, the black luminance is 0 but that is incorrect, there was no black on the strip I measured. It is about 0.15 cd/m2

 

So i gather that the "clipping" is somewhat fixable using he right calibration? Too a certain extent i mean.

 

In theory by selecting a black level over the value that clips, but that means you will not have a true black, I'm yet to discover what value is that, and also by setting the screen in like 140 cd and calibrating it to 135 cd for example, but all this brings in a big reduction of dynamic range. Also, the LUT curve applied to obtain this low delta is an aggressive curve, the screen uncalibrated has an average of about delta 4 with some reaching about delta 8. Which is a lot for an uncalibrated panel. The native gamma curve of this panel seems to be about 2.6 which is also quite a lot (not a bad thing though) and is the gamma curve of DCI-P3 available on the new iMacs with 5K screens, but the gamut needed for that, is much wider than what this panel can cover, way bigger. It certainly covers 100% of the AdobeRBG and actually can do about 130% of that, but the red won't reach the level needed to cover DCI-P3.

I'm happy with today's findings, this is all going into a document for the manufacturer, it's partially done, just need to include examples of the clippings, and can only do it at night since my house is full of windows everywhere and can't get a proper exposure to take a photo of the clippings, that can not be shown on a screenshot.

In some of the measuring a I did today you can see the dip on the white at the end and the bump of the blacks on the very dark gray. Normally I would suspect of the LUT curve to be the culprit of that, but as it can be seen even in a non corrected situation, it is not the LUT curve. Also most Spectrometers have bad reliability under certain luminance, discarded for the same reason as the source of the problem.

It's a very pleasing and great screen once correctly profiled. The native white point is too red to be used uncalibrated, but get it correctly calibrated is tricky too. A colorimeter might not be good enough, my attempts with the Spyder 4 were unsuccessful. A C6 may do it but I don't have one

Tomorrow night I'm going to post the rest of the measurings and how I did to calibrate it like this. It still can be calibrated better I'm sure.

 

Stereoscopic 3D. Also pretty much makes g-sync obsolete if your cards can push enough frames.

 

120hz is really nice for many content: smooth internet scrolling, good hz to frame ration for movies, 3d content and seems less stressing for the eye.

 

Good HZ for frame rotation for movies I suppose you are talking about the panning of the camera, in that case if the movie was shot at 24 FPS, your 120 HZ are not going to make a difference unless you are using one of those horrendous systems that create new in between frames.... Ughhhhhhh... Sorry.... I work very hard to make things to look like film and have a cinematic look so when I see this TVs that have those 240HZ "smooth" systems ON that make everything looks like it was shot with an iPhone or a cheap video camera I just want to puke

Nothing personal, I just hate the electronic look of video uprise to 120 or 240 HZ.

For 3D. I get it, understandable. Too bad I have not found yet a pair of glasses that can totally isolate the image of each eye, there is always some core eye contamination.

 

it does make a difference vs 60hz, since it has a integer ratio. 24x2.5=60. so every other second you have frame drops.

i do though like the artificial quality uprise, especially for 3d movies, but it has to be good quailty interpolation. i played a lot with these for the last year and i am very satisfied with the results achived for my "home theater". can't watch anything in 24fps anymore, for me it's like as slide show and gives me headache.

what makes you feel "cheap" is only your brain "habbit". . had been feeling the same at first, but once got over it - there is no way back for me.

 

For these panels you are right, not sure why the drivers don't let you lower the HZ to 48 like the Eizos. I've see no video at real 60 and even 120 frames per second and it does not bother me. It is the drag of crossing elements that create artifacts on the smooth systems that bothers me the most.

What brain??? I have nothing left.

 

It makes a massive difference.
Specially if you use 3D Software Suits like Maya and 3DS Max, the viewport is way smoother. Also 120-144hz is way easier on the eyes, so less strain. Videos, do not have too much noticeable difference.
And if you are into competitive gaming (CS/DOTA/LOL/etc) it even gives you a slight edge in certain scenarios.
Once you get use to 120Hz + , 60Hz feels horrible. But then again , some people are overly sensitive to higher refresh rates and some dont even notice it.

 

when you use quality content such as Blu-ray and quality hardware interpolation with proper settings, there are actually no artifacts and you can see the objects in the fast scenes which otherwise would have been blurred. i am actually very picky when it comes to the picture quality/blurr/artifacts.

 

You should be able to create a custom resolution with a lower refresh rate.

 

Thanks! I didnt knew it was possible

 

HAAAAA!!!! And we spend a ton of money renderfarms to properly render with motion blur at an acceptable speed. ))))

 

but motion blur in really only need for less than 30fps content. can't stand it really. i call it: "imitation of fast motion" kind of like you see that something happeining really fast, but you can't really figure out what exactly.

but if you dont use motion blur with ~ 30fps content, you get a stronger feeling of slide show.

haha. i am sure it costs a lot to render it, still cheaper than 60fps rendering

 

makes more sense to OC it to 72 or 96hz, as some panels tend to flicker at 48hz

 

It's worth trying a variety of settings and seeing what works best for your panel.

 

OK, here are my measures of this panel fro those curious if is good or not.

Here is the pre-calibration measuring, you will see a lot of error, but in part is because is comparing to the AdobeRGB target and the display have a gamut that is actually about 15% wider than AdobeRGB, so measuring against such target will always shot error for two reasons, colors being more saturated than they have to, which is not an issue, and colors deviating from the correct hue, which is a problem. As you can see, the small triangle is the Adobe RGB color space and some colors fall outside of it, that means is a wider gamut, but the ones inside are quite off place, that is becuase the LED backlight and the filters and the internal gamut curve have some errors, but this is normal. A bit high though.



and here is after profiling and installing the LUT, as you can see it is WAY better and is a VERY low error



Here is the gamma curve or tone response curve, you can see here the big deep at the low end I was talking about. What I hope the manufacturer can hope in his internal gamma table. You can see it clips a bit



And here is the error on the white where you can see the small deviation to pink, this can be fixed via LUT but it would be better if is not there so one does not have to compress the dynamic range of the uncalibrtated screen that is about 1100:1



and here are some commonly used colors, and it is impressive the response.

The Colorchecker colors, this are colors used to calibrate cameras

 

Here is the 100% saturation colors, blue is a bit off, but totally acceptable



Fleshtones



Dusk tones, here is where the display have the most problems, in the dark areas



And daylight tones. The black luminance of only 0.145 is great, the only issue is that if you want to have the clipp at the low end corrected you need to use a minimum luminance a bit higher and that cuts the dynamic range.



In general terms, impressive screen with some defects will affect people needing accuracy mostly in black and white images or match to a printer. For the averga user, probably will never see this.

The native color temperature on the pannel is a bit too warm.

And the reason why I say you shoul use this screen with a proper LUT installed is becuase as it is a very wide gamut screen if you do not have a profile installed, all will look ultra saturated, applications like Chrome, Photoshop, Illustrator, some media players, look at the ICC installed to modify the colors so they are showing you are the ones are supposed to be.

Hope you find this useful.

 

The average user will likely find most content blown out as it is designed for the 70-80% coverage displays.

 

Not really. If you have the right LUT loaded with the right ICC installed it won't happen. Only if you use it without it. But that would be like buying a TV and leave it on the Demo mode . I'll explain later

 

So, here is the thing, 70-80% monitors I think they are going to dissapear soon, to start with, to comply with the the UHD standards REC 2020, you need a wide gamut monitor, so all those UHD TVs, at least the ones from good sources and respectable brands, are wide gammut, in fact wider than this one.

Look at a comparison or an REC709, for which the standard HD panel barely cover to the REC2020 needed for UHD

And most new Apple computers are coming already with monitors that are wide gamut called DCI P3 which is about as wide as Adobe RGB but with more space on the red side.

The thing is of course Apple computers come from factory with all that's needed to use these screens without seeing stuff like if you are on LSD....

How it works on the Windows side, if you install this screen and do nothing, yes, things will look quite saturated for you, at least sRGB content, mostly internet.... and applications that does not have any CMS.

But, if you install the right LUT, that will correct the whole system, wide, color managed and not applications, the whole thing, by letting the hardware on your GPU remap the colors so they do not look saturated.

Then by installing the right ICC profile, this is somethig that tells your sofware the characteristics of your screen, the programs that can understand CMS will be able to show you sRGB images with the right saturation, and also other color spaces by remaping the values to the right place, so what would be RGB 255,0,0 in sRGB space, will be shown to you as lets say just to put an example 70% red, and what is RGB 255,0,0 in AdobeRGB will be shown to you as lets say 90% red, since this screen is actually wider than AdobeRGB.

I think there is no internet browser out there today that is not color managed and ICC aware, and any content not tagged properly is treated as sRGB.

Sure, not everyone have a colorimeter or a spectrometer, resellers like you used to offer calibration files, ive seen it on your website for my older laptop, while this is no ideal, becuase a calibration depends a LOT on the brightness the screen was at the moment or being created, the difference will be minimal for a non expert on the matter. And ultimately, if you have a $5K laptop and you spend $500 +/- more to get a 4K screen, a cheapest Spyder 5 I think is about $150.

Now, having a computer with a 70%-80% screen, thats a bummer.... becuase all the content being created lately in UHD, games, movies, TV, etc it is actually created with REC 2020 or CDI P3, REC 709 (sRGB) is on its last few days, all what you will see on those screens will be either clipped or remapped and will look lifeless and mutted. In fact, HDR screens are not that far from being affordable, and those will really have a HUGE impact of what we see today.... have you ever looked at one? it is like a window to the outside world, you can see an image where you can distinguish the shadows under a tree and have the sun in a corner and actually kind of blind you, those screens easily surpase the 1000 cd/m2 mark.... I don't know if I would have one if I could.... last time I was at a demo of those at the NAB, a dolby monitor, it kind of gave me a headache

 

Panels do have a stock profile which is what you are finding but yes we recommend you get your own calibrator as the panel can also drift over time along with every sample being different.

 

Not sure why I thought this screen was an IPS.... it is a TFT panel...

 

It is AHVA which is a type of IPS belonging to AUO from what I read

http://www.panelook.com/B173ZAN01.0_AUO_17.3_LCM_overview_25358.html

 

Yes IPS itself is a trade mark so other companies have very similar spins on it named differently.

 

Then I guess that every company out there has it's own name for IPS. LG has IPS, AUO has AHVA, Samsung has PLS (from what I understand).

They should all use an umbrella term like IPS, or very good displays or something, so that we know these got better colors than TNs.

 

Well... still a TFT monitor since it is not a TN ))) the PDF from the manufacturer only mention TFT, it does not mention a single time IPS o AHVA, it probably is what they say it is, weird that the own manufacturer spec sheet does not mention it at all.

http://www.yslcd.com.tw/docs/product/B173ZAN01.0.pdf

The specs are a bit simple on that matter, I'm trying to find out the exact kind of LED backlight this monitor have since the PDF says it is a RG-Phosphor LED, a variation of the RGB LED, definitely not a White LED as the specs of the link you posted says, since white LED can't produce wide gammut colors.... reason why I'm trying to find this information, it is because Colorimeters like Spyder 4 and 5, and Spectracal C6 or any other, need a specific profile correction for each kind of backlights available, without the correct information, profiling and color calibration of the panel will be always off. This is not a problem for Spectrometers, which can measure any kind of visible light no matter what, but colorimeters, have different response curves based on the kind of color filters they have, hence the need of the calibration profile for it. Colorimeters manufacturer include most common backlights combinations, but this one seems to be not very common yet.

I have sent my report to Eurocom but I have not heard back from them yet. I will see if I have any luck with them asking for me the exact kind of backlight used on this model.