My barebones Clevo NH58AF1 arrived!

It's trimmer and more svelt than I was expecting. All the talk of beefy and clunky Clevo desktop replacements had me somehow expecting something more cumbersome.

I'm replacing an older 17" ROG laptop. It's 17" screen plus older larger bezels and it's twice as thick as this thing.

My fiancee has a 15" HP Spectre I picked out for her that is super slim and mostly metal.

This Clevo looks like the two of them had a baby together.

I didn't realize RJ barebones version was the variant with the metal lid. I was expecting black plastic and this is a pleasant grey bonus. The screen is super stiff.

I have my 3900x ready to install. I had a few SSDs from my retiring desktop to add. But none of that matters as my memory won't be here until Wednesday and I'm not sure it will even be compatible so I might have to wait even longer to play.

There is more airspace under the hood than it looks like in pictures. I feel like a cooling pad blowing into the generous vents should be very effective, but also I'm going to add some sticky hear sinks. So much copper

Since the keyboard is a style common to many Clevos, does anyone make a protective cover for this keyboard? I'd really like to keep the dust out from between my keys and keep my new baby safe from sticky snack hands.

 

Did you have any issues installing Windows? I am working on my barebones Thicc-15 from Eluktronics and when it goes to load Windows install files it boot loops then blue screens, always with a different stop code. Anything like that happen for you? What RAM are you running?

 

Whom did you order this with?

 

The first memory I tried wasn't stable. I never got a stop code but It would go dark halfway through install and then it was a pain because the SSD was detected as a boot drive but wasn't fully loaded so it wouldn't allow me to try and load windows again until I removed the SSD and wiped it and started over a few times, so it took a couple of tries to get it right.
Then, once I hadohad Windows running the memory (2*32gb sticks of Crucial 3200 at 22cl) it would crash on heavy tasks. No error codes or blue screens, the screen just went black and never came back until I did a hard reset.

I sent that memory back and got new sticks and now it's smooth sailing.

The new memory of a weird brand from Amazon with the same specs as the Crucial but it works fine.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08B5VX8FH?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title

 

I got the barebones secondhand from a member of the forum who saw I was looking. Apparently he had too many laptops. He bought it from RJ.

The advantage for me was I saved close to $150 off the new price and he already loaded it with the XMG bios which is slightly less locked down than the stock Clevo bios saving me the trouble of doing it myself.

 

Cinebench 20 a little over 6500 before tweaks and without added cooling. Resolve scrubs 4k h265 super smoothly. I haven't done a render job yet but I have pretty high hopes.

 

Nice bonus on the lid finish, I do like the metal finish versions.

 

I mostly finished my cooling mods. 3 full sized 120mm fans are now mounted to the back of the laptop. I considered slim 15mm fans but the static pressure numbers are so much better on these fans. Other than the mounting screw holes I haven't modified the removable access panel yet. Waiting for my dust screens to arrive on slow boat from China and then I'll open up the back a bit to get less resistance. On the inside I added a bunch of little copper heat sinks and some Panasonic pyrolytic sheet to try and bridge some of the CPU side heat over to the GPU side which hardly seems to work at all even under load. Now my GPU cooling fan still mostly is at 0. My CPU fan will still ramp up to 70% during Cinebench.

I did some mild undervolting and set all cores to 4,000 in Ryzen Master.

Cinebench score 7154.

I really can't complain. I still would like the CPU fan to be even quieter because it has an annoying high pitched whine. The external fans I added have a pleasant white noise which is pretty quiet even though I have them on 12 volts constant. Like I said, the GPU internal fan doesn't even run any more but it was never loud anyway

 

Any pictures of your setup? I agree with you about the CPU fan - theres a high pitched whine that (unfortuantely) is audible to me. I'm also getting a very slight coil whine from the GPU which hopefully some reseating can fix

 

I'll try to make a little video later with a walk through.

The new memory stopped working right...system started only recognizing one stick instead of two. I did a lot of troubleshooting and trying different combos and it seems one of the two sticks just went bad somehow. Getting a replacement.

It runs pretty sweet even single channel 32gb though

 

Can't get photos to work

 

Since I can't seem to figure out how to post pictures or videos to the forum I just uploaded to Google Drive and will provide link. If anyone wants to make them so they can actually show up in the thread be my guest

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=12hXI0qdwEtxWSSYqwENrLJUjgnME1iZo