ONLINE PETITION for BIOS updates on Clevo HM model series.

The x7200 does use a different desktop chipset... so it might be a chipset limitation. Might... although unlikely.

 

Also it's definitely not a power limitation. The P150HM has the same watt power supply as the P150EM, 180w I believe; and it can support the 7970m which is 100W just like the previous 580m and 570m that worked in the P150HM so power is not an issue; its purely a software issue aka BIOS

 

I'm going to say that it's an engineer limitation, as in: holy crap all the laptops were just released!. I'd be extremely surprised to see the 7970m non-compatible in the next 3 months. I think once things calm down and the bugs in the x7200 replacement are fixed and released, we'll see a bios update. all of this anger doesn't help us as a community much and I know all the resellers were swamped with preorders until recently. can't imagine the insanity at the sager factory over the last six weeks, much less the clevo one.

 

The problem is that Clevo announced that the P150HM is EOL : END OF LIFE: meaning they will no longer update it....

Eurocom is being kind enough to work on a BIOS update; but Clevo already said they are stopping the support for the P150HM, which is BS as they advertise the laptops they build as upgradeable and long lasting etc.

 

Really interested to upgrade my vortex II (p8170hm) from 6990m to 7970m

Another company trying .... I hope for you guys that the HM will be upgradeable.
BTW. Signed the petition yesterday and good luck!!!

p.s. I think that the Bios update will happen, but Clevo/Sager is protecting its new model (chasis) to be sold as much as possible in the beginning, then there will be enough 7970Ms and they will make further cash supporting HM. Relax.

 

They just cant come with anything useful, so they say crap things.
I still havent received any reply to my emails.

Also pls if someone knows chinese, write a good email to them. Unfortunately i dont speak chinese.

Clevo seems to not care, but we've reached 94 signatures. Which means 94 angry customers.
94 lost customers.
Lets make some maths, shall we? Lets fix a laptop price around 1100$.

94x1100= 103,400$.

See how much they lost in money "talking". Thats quite a big number if you ask me.

Also since things cant go better, dear friends, its official: ive lost my job. Ill be soon unemployed.
Thanks Clevo for the good time.

 

I am sorry to hear that King! We are feeling with you and are holding some good thoughts for you!

Life goes on and sometimes change brings something even better.

 

oh crap, sorry to hear that kingpin. hope u can find a new job soon!

 

No need man, but thank you. I cant describe how i am utterly pissed.
No job means no upgrades, or components of sort.
With what i have, i need to manage food and house bills if i want to live, until i find another job.
This wasnt expected nor needed. Without a job with the crisis that italy is facing it means basically a suicide mission.
Im am so sad that even the petition i started seems nothing compared to this.
Even if the 7970m turns to be working ill prolly cant afford one. Whatever, i will be fighting until i can.

Sorry for the OT guys.

 

Thank you mate, ill appreciate it.

We need an email like the one Aduy sent, he posted it here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...ates-clevo-hm-model-series-5.html#post8559802

We need in substance an email that tells them about our petition, and about the other threads linked in that great email Aduy made.

You can add that signatures have reached quota 94. Look above where i did some maths. They should understand what theyre loosing.
These are the TW office contacts:

CLEVO CO.
ADD: No.129, Xingde Rd., Sanchong Dist., New Taipei City 241, Taiwan (R.O.C.)
TEL: 886-2-22789696
http:// CLEVO
E-mail: [email protected]

Thats all, we can use all the help we can get. If you manage to send them an email, please let us know.
And FOR GOD SAKE i hope you new EM users will not face our same DOOM. I hope it with all my heart. Nobody deserves such POS of attitude.

 

ok, I'll translate the whole petition in chinese, and send them that. I'll post the original mail and any eventual replies here.

 

Thank you, thats great. This is another ray of light in this dark mess. Thanks a billion, and im sure i can speak of anyone whos fighting. We were just needing this latest piece of contribute. At least we can reach them in every way right now.

 

To be honest, I don't think you will get them to change their mind in regard to the HM series, but I support you since they might change their policy in regard to the EM series.

When I got my M570TU it actually came from a long line of similar laptops which fundamentally support most MXM 2.0 cards. For instance I successfully used a 9600M in my laptop although it was never officially supported.

The W series also as far as I know support most MXM 3.0 cards.

It is strange to see them change their policy now, but I don't think you will get them to change their mind, from my experience companies seldom do that.

While your petition is an important step, not everyone is as informed as we are here on this forum. You have to understand that people on this forum are generally more knowledgeable and do more research before purchasing something. That's why I don't think Clevo's sales will be noticeable affected by our discussions here.

Just think how much I protested against 16:9! Basically this is the only reason I don't want to move to a new laptop. And despite sending letters to many companies and having 3 massive threads on this matter. Nothing has changed.

But my point here is not to stop fighting. In fact I encourage you to Clevo off as much as you can, since they deserve it. Just don't get your hopes high, that's all.

 

Hey Blacky, good to see you here, thank you for your input.
My hopes arent and werent that high from start tbh, but the other side of the medal is to bring to light all of this to help others in the near future.
Thats at least a good way to reward my time spent on this.
We're hitting a wall probably, but seeing how much peoples are getting an idea of the truth is worth everything i done until now.

 

signed .. this is silly I just bought this HM laptop last year expecting it be gpu upgradeable for at least another year..

 

Is this just for HM series? I thought almost all Clevo laptops could be upgraded to any compatible MXM card, barring vBios issues? Hopefully my brother's W860CU doesn't have issues.

 

Nope the W series definitely doesn't work with a ton of MXM cards. There must have been an exception with the 6970m.

You can see in this thread all the cards I tested in my w870cu WAY before they announced they were no longer updating the BIOSes of EOL laptops.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...rade-compatibility-thread-testers-wanted.html

I think the fact is, they NEED to update the BIOS in order for the cards to work because they employ some type of whitelisting in the EC. While other laptops such as MSI and Alienware can support everything more or less with only minor issues.

 

@ Blacky

I see where you are coming from but don't forget how high this forum is when ever people do Google searches, this is why people tend to take more notice.

 

Grat working being done here. Gaining a lot of attention! Hopefully Clevo gets back to someone with a difinitive stance soon.

Signed as #100.

 

nice hizzaah, good job@#100

Sent from my GT-I9001 using Tapatalk 2

 

just to add to what laptop said, clevos are also enthusiast laptops.they do not advertise and are not so well known to the general public. they are not available via normal retail, they have to be configured and purchased online. combining these factors, id say that almost all potential buyers will do some (online)research before purchase, and as long as they are able to comprehend english, chances are they will see this forum, as mentioned by 'nut, whether they post in it or not.

so i actually believe that a significant portion of clevo owners/potential buyers have posted or at least, have read thru these forums.

so what we post here could have an effect.

 

Yes. We are the rare breed of enthusiasts, who do research into the highest end laptop segment and we have every right to demand certain functionality for our purchase.

Since we pay for these things, we want our needs to be satisfied to the max.
Otherwise, the "other" companies out there will soon take over this market niche.

Just watch as more and more manufacturers offer custom configurable laptops.
And watch as Samsung, Asus, Toshiba and MSI start pressing hard with their gamer series.
Samsung will sport the 7970m this year in their machine.
MSI is leading edge with custom keyboards and stellar audio on their machines.
Asus brings their own "stealth" style machines with good ventilation (silent) and interesting design.

Clevo, get your biased bios and make it work for everybody!

 

Do not yet own a Clevo, but they are leading contender in my research, so I signed petition.,

 

I signed it. It would be nice if they supported their "user upgradability"

 

I have bought my 2400€ P150HM with the state of mind that it can be upgradable in the future ... so i signed ...

 

There's no sign of an official Clevo response yet.
If this is the way they confront customers well they're still bringing the worst upon themselves.
I applaud their way to do business. Never again. I thought HP service (along with some others) was the worst but we have a winner here.
How unprofessional is this?

 

Kingpinzero, i've signed in, of course. Cause i plan on purchasing EM-series laptop this summer and plan to do GPU upgrade in a year or so..

I think we should involve resellers in here for a petition request, they have much more influence on SAGER/Clevo than regular customers, correct? We can together compose a literate letter and ask resellers to send it to the vendor in favor of current and future customers... or Clevo will loose hundreds of potential buyers right away!

 

Ouch.
HP service for regular customers do kinda suck so being worse is not exacly something to be proud off.

 

Any news about the Perma bios fix?

 

No one with Clevo 7970M and HM model approached me yet...

 

Signed. It would be nice to see a Clevo response.

 

Ahh thats bad :/ that complicates things!

 

The funny part is you've made several posts about this.

Funny business eh?

 

Ye, but i guess its important cause he needs those 2 items to start helping us all

 

repost from the poll thread:

First, we would like to say sorry that we took so long to post in this topic. It was a long weekend, and we wanted to give time for users to make their comments.

Second, we would like to clarify why Sager has voted 'NO" on the poll. It is simply because Clevo has never supported an end user directly and they shouldn't. In the past, when they have made their base BIOS available to the public, it has caused nothing but trouble -- from simply wiping out customers’ windows activation status to bricking systems due to missing customization tweaking. Sager stands 100% behind Clevo in its decision to remove their standard base bios from their public servers.

Those of you seeking support should seek support from your point of purchase, and the retailer’s will come from their supplier and Clevo. Therefore again the poll is simply invalid as the HM model is marked EOL as it should be. This does not mean your support resources for any bug and trouble issues have been cut off. We hope that any users that voted Yes in the poll understand this.

Sager has always and will continue to give our users our 100% attention to any issues reported to Sager, and give it our best efforts to resolve issues. If we can’t do that in house, we pass the issue to Clevo and in return Clevo will give Sager their upmost support to reach the goal of satisfying our customers’ needs so long as the issues can be resolved without any limitations or unacceptable side effects to the user experience.

Now we come to the main topic -- AMD 7970m support on the p1x0HM series. Many of you may have received a reply from Clevo the last few days saying that the 7970m is not supported on the HM series due to a chipset / design limitation. This is true. If you reread the Sager news thread you can see that the HM series (Sager NP81x0) was originally released with the NVIDIA cards, then later added the AMD lineup.

At the time of release there were limitations that forced us to create an alternate internal model number due to an inability to swap between NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. This limitation was caused by the LCD panel as well with the way the motherboard was designed to double validate for standard and 3D panel. The AMD GPU thus requires special non universal timing to the LCD panel that caused significant side effects if GPUs were swapped (e.g., GPU running at full speed all the time, no power management, flickering or fuzzy output) without matching SW / HW tweaks.

The tweaking requirements are different depending on mother board revision and LCD panel. With so many combination of the HM series hardware, we simply cannot give an answer quickly until we are able to get the card tested on as many main board and panel revision and combinations as we can. After that we will be able to determine if an upgrade package can be offered. Just a couple of simple examples of what might be needed which includes LCD EDID firmware updates (which require the unit to be sent in for support because special HW tools are needed) or mother board revisions.

Also you should be aware at this time there are open issues with the second batch of AMD 7970m cards. Both Clevo and Sager are swamped using most of our resources on getting the 7970m back on track Once that is accomplished we will be able to begin our research and testing of the HM series in regards to the 7970m.

The good news is that there are no quality concerns with the first batch of AMD 7970M cards. Many of you should already know, but we just want to stress once again that the first batch of the AMD 7970m received and shipped by Clevo has passed all Clevo and Sager QC with less than 1% fail rate. Please take comfort in the fact the unit has proven to be remarkably stable and enjoy your AMD 7970m. Obviously, with the rigorous tests the unit has passed, there is no recall planned.

The second batch received by Clevo was different and extensive Clevo QC revealed a 20% fail rate. The remaining 80% of cards passed without any issues on standard QC as well as extended QC.

In the case of the AMD 7970m card, Clevo has chosen an extremely careful approach to deal with this new batch of cards that has displayed a failure rate that is both high and strange. That is why they took their quality control process to another level. It's also why they have been working closely with AMD to find a solution to this problem. Clevo could very easily have shipped out the 80% of cards that passed through their QC testing, but instead they chose to hold back all of the cards until they can get to the bottom of this problem with this new batch. The bottom line is that shipments will not resume until Clevo can give customers complete confidence in the product they purchase. While it may be an inconvenience to some users, the decision was made with the best of intentions and with the goal of delivering the best product possible. We applaud Clevo for taking this issue so very seriously and for working so hard to make certain our customers receive the kind of quality product they deserve.


Thanks again for your patience.

 

.. well that cleared it up

 

mmmyeah, thats gonna be a tough combo to get actually.... whos gonna be brave enough to see his or her 7970M order through after what weve heard about the HM series incompatibility?

 

Thanks for the update, maybe this should be stickied so it doesn't get lost in this lengthy thread.

 

Pretty helpful! Does that mean todays EM model customers face the same upgrade problems with future GPU's?

 

considering Clevo is not gonna their BIOS, yes.

 

guys, doesn´t it make u curious as to WHY they would have to subdivide the HM series in order to support both AMD and Nvidia? its not like AMD SUDDENLY decided to come up with the 6970M out of NOWHERE, i mean, cmon, it shouldve been clear from the start that they would come up with an answer to the 485M besides, what about the HM models that were designed to WORK with AMD cards? shouldnt they at least support the 7970M, both BIOS AND chipset wise? all of this doesnt make any sense to me, seriously...

cheers

 

So... correct me if I'm wrong here, but what I got from this is that it should be theoretically possible for AMD P150HMs to upgrade to a 7970M and that Nvidia P150HMs are completely SOL and need to wait for the GTX680M to come out to figure out if they can upgrade or not. Is this accurate?

 

i remember something mentioned earlier about how in the p170hm that you couldnt switch between an nvidia and amd, but i thought that it was ok in the p150hm. or maybe it was the x7200 im not really sure. regardless they should give us the knowledge necessary to perform this swap at our own risk.

 

So us who has a Clevo P170HM which was made for AMD cards, will work with 7970M (P170HM AMD edition ^^) ?

 

Thank you for your time into explaining whats happening.

But its not enough, and ill explain why.

Clevo supposedly had a good time frame to create, test and certify the EM series months before the official Announcement. Pay attention, its only a wild guess.

In that time frame, the engineers had to build a machine capable to run the HD7970m, even if the cards were ES/QS. They had time to test those cards in HM models, but they didnt.
Now i dont want to listed to excuses like "those cards werent final products" because if thats the case, it wasnt even possible to build a new laptop line around the same product.
So assuming that the card was going to differ a bit, but not completely, it was good even for HM models.
Also i doubt that clevo had 1 engineer or tester working on the EM line. I guess there was a huge team of engineers and testers behind it - which still enforces the theory that it was possible to give a sample card to at least someone like an engineer to see if it was working in the HM.

For god sake, the HM isnt that old. It doesnt differ that much from the EM. Based on what you wrote, the very same could happen with the next GTX 680m. What if nvidia comes out with a card that requires some "special tweaks/features" that current EM models cant suit, like it happened with HM?
You create another internal model number? So what, it will be all the same story as well?
EM users could face the possibility to have a machine not compatible with the newer gpu after a few months?
So current EM users should be worried because this model is build around AMD, but not "universal" ?

Do you know how complicated this turns out to be? Other brands doesnt have all these "complicated problems" that clevo has. Look at MSI. Or they are much better builders than Clevo, or they are much more smarter. Or maybe more "open", speaking of the general attitude towards end users.

And please dont underline the fact that Sager or Clevo or whatever does support HM users that have problems with their machine. Its not the point here, dont run around the issue.
Its normal that im expecting them to resolve any issue i have with my laptop.
Im expecting them to do something because i want to upgrade my laptop, because they advetised it in that way. Ive bought this thing knowing that i could count on Sager or Clevo for future upgrades.

If i had to buy a new laptop each year, ill get a known brand. Because it would be easier to sell a known brand laptop to someone, lets say over ebay, than something no one knows. Also if thats the case, i wouldnt be that crazy to spend a truck of money on something that turns to be useless 12 months later.

Also, on the HD7970m batch issues. Even this is just plain wrong. The first batch was a good possibility to get the a card tested into the HM models to smash any doubts. It was needed a single card only. Regardless no one either in Clevo or Sager even bothered to do it.
As far as i know, by reading your post, all i get is that "we didnt even cared about HM users, because theyre not important anymore".

Dear Sager, you have one last shoot here.
As soon as you get the green light about the second batch, is better to put your team of peoples to work on this "HD7970m on HM series line" fastly.
And you can do this while dispatching the cards needed to fullfill EM orders that are frozen right now, because it takes only 1 card to do so.
You can do this in parallel with the other "big project" as it doesnt take the whole headquarter to do so.

The first time we were completely ignored. This time it doesnt have to happen, no matter the excuse. For once and for all, clear this doubt, and put the final nail on the HM-issue coffin.

Also you seem to forget something, because maybe its not clear that peoples who voted, signed and posted against clevo, still make a good number. A number of peoples that already confessed to ditch this brand and switch to something else.

Lets recap shall we?

- 114 signatures
- 7,254 views in the Online petition thread
- 12,216 views in the "no more clevo for me..." thread

Assuming 100 peoples out of those 114 signatures were about to spend 1100$ on a laptop, it would mean that 110,000$ has been lost forever.
And these peoples will keep on warning others interested customers on the base of whats happening here. Probably these threads will be used as a reference in the future as well.

I wouldnt take this issue that lightly. Its imperative for Sager and Clevo to get to HM users and restore some faith in them.
Also please forgive me if i used a rude tone, but my intention is not to offend anyone work. Im trying to state my opinion and most importantly how sad is to be an HM user right now.
Since i do care about other fellow gamers/laptop owners, i dont want this to happen to them as well. If anything i did up this point ensured a way for EM users to sleep safe and sound about future upgrades, then this time wasnt wasted.
I did this for them as well, i dont care about anything else anymore.
I dont expect peoples to agree with what i wrote. But there are points that lack "reason" and "logic" in what you posted. And some sentences sounds fishy because it seems that youre trying to run around the problem by brainstorming us with informations WE DONT NEED or want.

The question is: we want Sager or Clevo to fix this issue, or give us a final CONCRETE proof that the HD7970m doesnt work. Proof. We want them to use their resources to accomplish this. We want to be not on the lower priority list, but we want to receive the attention we should have since we're not different from the peoples who bought the EM laptops. You got our money already.

Everything else, technical aspects, marketing stunts, decisions, excuses, arent important.

Thank you and sorry for the rant, im done here.

 

agreed. +rep as soon as im allowed to

 

+1. It's not just about this single issue, but the brand value and reliability of Sager and Clevo, over the years, is seriously being questioned here. If this won't affect your sales, what could !?

 

+ rep from me too!!

 

+rep for what?

Ish is getting kinda immature at this point.