New Laptop Ordered. P770DM-G W/ 6700K

Well I hope you all will welcome me to the Clevo world. I've had AW, MSI and ASUS, but since my current MSI GT70-Dominator died I've decided to bite the bullet and order a new laptop while its being RMA'd and I'll just sell it when it comes back.

So I ordered a P770DM-G from Pro-Star. Talked with Chris there, and they dropped everything to take my order as well as complete the build yesterday so it could ship it out today, for delivery tomorrow.

Hows that for service. they are the only builder that said they could do that for me and I called 5-6 different ones.

Specs:
i7-6700K
GTX 980M 8GB from @woodzstack
Two Samsung 950 Pro 512 in RAID 0
My original 1TB Travelstar 7200
My original Crucial M500 512
Kingston HyperX Impact 16GB 2400MHz DDR4

What say ye?

 

I did the exact same thing as you. My GT70's motherboard died so I bought a P770DM-G.

You will definitely be happy with your new machine.

 

Huh? They can do NVMe in raid 0 now? When did that happen?

 

I'm hoping I can, is says so in the specs and I found a review on Toms that benchmarked those drives in RAID. Guess we'll see

Is there a known issue or something. I looked before I popped for the second card and didn't find anything except that its not always Bootable, depends on the BIOS

Been done on an ASUS with with the Intel® Z170 Express Chipset.

Here how it should be done.. Configure RAID0, install OS on newly created RAID0 volume, but its not detected, so you need to add the Intel Rapid Storage Drivers (Browse to the inf file in the X64 folder (iaStorAC.inf), after that its a normal install.

 

Well I don't know about any issues. But what are you gonna do with SSDs at that speed? I need high speed scratch drives for my simulations, but using flash with finite write cycles didn't make sense for me. Ended up using 64 of the 192 Gigs in my workstation as a RAM disk.

 

check my sig bro, you can do that with even with the stock BIOS, all you have to do is load the IRST Driver when you are at the Windows Partition wizard in the setup. Before loading the driver, the NVMe RAID volume wouldn't appear.

 

The reason I do RAID 0 is not only for the speed as we know that sequential read/write speeds don't really affect the snappiness of the OS unless one's workflow deals with large amounts of data. What's most important is the 4K Random Read/Write speeds which is surprisingly good with the NVMe drives whereas with SATA III SSDs the 4K Random Read takes a slight hit so it's actually slower.

Here is my latest benchmark of my two 950 PRO 512GB NVMe SSDs:

AS SSD Benchmark with IRST v14.8.0.1042 RDx2 (W10)

 

Is that a software raid or a controller raid? I remember trying to set up a pair of Intel DC P3500s as scratch with an LSI controller. Was at it for almost 3 days before me and the IT guy gave up. Good times at the office.

EDIT: Wasn't an LSI controller, that was for for the SATA RAID volume we tried to replace. No dice on the pair of P3500s though.

 

Faster boot, disk intensive games, because I can?

Truthfully, I'm not completely sold on it. The benchmarks I've found don't show any increase in performance in real work scenarios, only in synthetic benchmarks.

 

You cannot have Hardware RAID on a laptop since they don't have a dedicated RAID Card but it's a Hybrid RAID, meaning, you set it up from the BIOS just like you would if you have an actual RAID card but it uses a bit of CPU to perform the RAID operations. With that said though, today's CPUs are very fast that you won't notice a difference in performance. I benchmarked using wPRIME with RAID 0 and on a single drive setup, the scores were the same.

 

The reason I do RAID is not for speed really, it is simply to have both drives as one big array so I can partition Windows as a C: partition of 100 GB and 700 GB for D: and the rest for over provisioning.

Same thing with my HDDs, I RAID 0 them to get a 4TB approximate partition to put all my large video database on it rather than splitting them into two.

I know I can set the NVMe drives as a spanned volume and not have to deal with RAID 0 but you lose TRIM if you do that so the performance will take a big hit.

 

I should probably clarify, all of my playing with NVMe SSDs were done on workstation and enterprise gear. Don't have spare CPU cycles when you're running 80 threads of computational workload at 100% CPU load, it'll crash.

Also, despite giant heat sinks on DC P3500s, they over heat after about 2 days of scratch duty, and then you gotta let them cool down. Never got the RAID 0 to work, which is why I'm surprised that tiny M.2 SSDs work in RAID 0, in a notebook no less.

 

ahh ok, I see your workload is super heavy compared to mine, all I do is surf the web and maybe watch a movie now and then or play a game for an hour so no heavy SSD usage

 

That was some of my thinking, as Samsung does not yet have a 1TB drive out yet. just have to keep a good backup ALL the time.

 

@Phoenix Have you notice any issues with Video throughput? Seems that using 2 NMVe drives causes your Video to drop from PCie x16 to x8..

Thoughts?

 

@Plur You done any mods or upgrades yet? I do like to Overclock, but seems @Prema does not have a Bios done for this model yet. Guess its a touch too new, and not as popular as its bigger SLI brother.

 

oh snap, didn't realize that, can you guide me how to check bro?

 

@randyre

I have a single 980 GTX (desktop class)

does this mean that my GPU is running at half the rated PCIe speed?

 

Apparently the 6700K only has 20 PCIe lanes. Your GPU ideally should have 16 lanes, which leaves room for one 4 lane PCIe SSD.

It also looks like you're running @ 2.5GT/s out of the nominal 8GT/s, which is 31.25% of optimal throughput.

 

oh darn! thanks for drawing this to my attention.

I'll format today then and install in AHCI mode

 

Not really sure how to check, except maybe run a benchmark like one of the 3DMarks with one installed, then install the second and see if there's a difference.

I just found a thread somewhere that everyone was talking about the Z170 having 20 direct lanes to the CPU and with 4 used for USB and SATA, leaves 16, but then you use 4 each for NVMe, leaves 8 for video.

At least that's the way I understood it.

 

@Look_a_bird__

Over here it says only 16 lances for the 6700K, http://ark.intel.com/products/88195/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz

what gives?

 

I don't think is the RAID that's the issue, it's the TWO NVMe devices each using 4 lanes. So dropping to one NVMe device I think would still force the video to x8 with four lanes sitting idle.

My assumption is that you would need to have none installed to get your x16 back. But also not sure that even at x8 we are saturating the pipeline. Would be worth a test or two.

 

16 direct lanes direct from PCIE to the CPU, the other 4 go to the PCH controller I think.

 

If I recall correctly, 4 of the 20 lanes are for DMI, effectively leaving only 16 lanes. Not sure if M.2 NVMe goes through DMI though.

 

ahh ok thanks for the clarification, then no point wasting my day on formatting and recopying all my data back.

There isn't much GPU performance difference though between 16X and 8X according to LinusTech

 

Thanks you two, I have learned a lot from you today.

 

@randyre

Please edit your signature with your new laptop / specs in anticipation for your new laptop

Feel free to copy/paste my signature format as many here use it then edit the specs to your own

 

Will do. Thanks !!

 

Unless you have a heavy computational load with high vRAM usage, you won't really see the difference. You'll start seeing it when you have 12 Gigs or more of VRAM and you have to load it with data. Which is incidentally how we figured out that someone plugged our M6000 24GB into a x4 slot. /facepalm

 

That's what I've always heard as well. In fact it would seem to be true, otherwise SLI with x8x8 would have no benefit in reality.

 

Here is my latest benchmark bro:

3DMark11 - GTX 980 (368.39) CPU 4.6 GHz-GPU OC 100-200 [W10]

 

haha, 4GHz stock, only if that'd come in 20 core versions, i'd be able to chop my computational run times to half. lol

 

WOW ---- Better than 94% of all results

Thats smokin, LAPTOP my ASS ... I can't wait.... Still waiting on my tracking number.

 

indeed, the 980M SLI setup I had before only had a slightly better 18K score but sucked at most games I threw at it and I could notice micro stuttering.

Single 980 GTX desktop class FTW

 

I have flashed my GPU with a prema vBIOS though the results weren't too good. Reached a silicon limit at +250Mhz. Could not go any higher even at 1.2v....

The stock BIOS should allow up to 4.5Ghz OC which I haven't breached yet.
I just run 4.3Ghz on an undervolt of 120mV when I need to.

 

The 6700K does only have 16 lanes but the z170 chipset has 20 lanes of its own which controls the PCIe SSD's.

So the GPU has full PCIe 16x and the SSD's have full 4x/4x from the chipset.

 

Ahhh. That makes sense.. Good info. Thanks..

 

Got tracking number. Says it will be here before 4:30 tomorrow.

 

Eh, that was mediocre. I got 95%, 17,720 on only 4.4Ghz

17720 @ 4.4

 

Run GPU-Z and run the PCI/e render test in windowed mode. If your bus speed doesn't bump up to "PCI/e 3.0 x16 @ x16 3.0" then it's eating your CPU lanes for some reason. When at idle, it's normal for it to reduce the "connection speed".

Here is idle. Note the Bus Interface.
Here is running the render test (windowed mode). Again, note the Bus Interface.

I get x8 because SLI, but you should have x16, unless the chipset is somehow badly designed to only provide x8 since it also works for SLI, instead of defaulting to x16 when single GPU is attached.

 

@Prema

Here is the test:

IDLE:




Render test running:



Why is it still running @ 8x?

 

This would interest me too... I wonder if Clevo were simply negligent again? They really do suck at anything regarding software. I wouldn't be surprised if they forgot to make the MXM slot 1 that the 980 goes into capable of PCI/e 3.0 x16 because the machine is at the end of the day designed to do SLI.

@Prema your wisdom please, BIOS GUY?

 

Hmmm. I'll check mine when it gets here, or someone else with a P770DM can give it a try, since our machines don't do SLI, the BUS may be setup different.

 

Old Article, but interesting read on the i7-6700k, and Z170 chipset.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skylake-intel-core-i7-6700k-core-i5-6600k,4252.html

 

yeah, that basically sums it up. Since only two SATA III ports and four USB ports are used up, that should leave easily 14 slots for three PCI/e x4 (two M.2 drives and one wifi card) and an extra two PCI/e lanes leftover.

 

@D2 Ultima I suggest checking the schematic to see if the MXM slots are even wired for 16x.

 

When my internet is working better and I can reliably find a service manual I'll check. With the desktop chipset, however, it SHOULD be able to handle x16 single or x8/x8 dual.

 

I hope so, never thought to look farther than the Desktop CPU itself. And since Motherboard specifications aren't published for laptops the way they do for desktop components, who knows what trickery they try and pull to save a few bucks...

But my guess is that its x16, but the real question we still need answered is once you "LOAD" the system with "ALL" the goodies and fill all the possible slots, does it have an impact or is there more than enough bandwidth left.

But then again, as long as there is still at least a full x8 pipeline to the GPU there should be no problem, at least not yet. Now the future GPU, who knows.