P150SM GTX 780m unboxing photo's of the build.

Got my P150SM about 2 hours ago, she's built up and I'm download the Nvidia driver from Clevo as we speak (Nvidia don't list the GTX 780m on their website yet.... nice.... I have 311.27 from clevo and it recognizes the 780m, the 320.18 version does not recognize it.

I had to install a P150EM keyboard as they didn't have any SM keyboards yet, and the Haswell cpu's landed yesterday - I believe this is the first one they've sold in the UK to resellers or public

FYI, the 8970m's are due in stock early July

:thumbsup:

So here's the box;


Opening Pandora's Box...... aaaaa that fresh laptop smell.......


Laptop out with its protective bits, Keyboard is in the red bag, there's also the DVD bezel and the manual + drivers disk, and at the back you'll see the box that contains the battery and the power supply;


Battery and power supply as packaged;


Copper heat shielding plate covers the 122w GPU;


The new PGA946 socket, notice the torx bit (I used a number 7, but if I had a number 8 I would have gone for that as the 7 felt loose & 10 was to big);


Missing power components..... I assume these are reserved for the P170SM and it's bigger power supply?; I do worry that my 180w PSU isn't enough 122w GPU, 47w CPU leaving that leave 11w for the entire sytem, and my SSD is very thirsty using 2.5w...... Possibly solved these missing bits:
Haswell incorperates FIVR (Fully Intergrated Voltage Regulator) stripping the bios of voltage control and making some of the components on the motherboard redundant (possible the ones we see missing here)


There is one Msata under the main cover..... and a 2nd msata is hiding under the 2.5" bay! very nice;


Just the regular P15**M CPU heat sink I think?, as usual for the P15*....... it's the Aluminium CPU heatsink..... I will be getting this swapped out for a copper P17**M version ASAP;

It is also looking like the GPU heatsink is a different design (although review samples and/or lower spec graphics version seemed to have the "old" cooler see post #54), without a separate RAM sink, instead it has a much bigger GPU sink and the RAM is simply attached to a small area of this...... I'd guess it's about 30% deeper - minimum than the HM/EM gpu sink.... measurements and proper quality photo's to follow....







A few better quality pics......





As requested:

 

Ok so I get the latestest drivers from Nvida, and I get the message "not supported GPU", I install the one from the Clevo site, and it installs ok so far.....

This is sorted, I installed the SoundBlaster X-Fi3 driver but when the app launches it says it has no supported hardware.......when I try to install the other sound device Clevo gives drivers for I get the same... a fresh installation of windows, followed by installing the old drivers from the Clevo DVD, in the order they are numbered on the disk and then updating fixed it.

Sorted..... I] the hot keys install but it acutall doesnt open, it just opens a "glass" window the right size and shape with nothing in it, I just see my desktop through it......[/I]
Using the P150EM drivers seems to work and they keyboard now runs, as does the Hotkey program, Clevo have dropped Windows7, the drivers disk it came with just tells me my system doesn't meet the requirements, I had to browse the disk and run the setup.exe for various things directly. Anything that does work, I suggest you use the P150EM Win7 drivers for n

I'll continue to blunder through this installation - I'm not annoyed, I expect these sorts of issues, but it is a little more confusing that normal.....

I had my first taste of this usb issue with the 8 series chipset, the P150 went to sleep, and when it woke, no wifi..... it shows in device manager as installed and working but it wouldn't do anything, had to reboot! (it must use the USB within the PCIe - try to avoid these types of wifi card maybe ???

Nvida/Optimus Flashing sorted I hope Another annoyance is that it keeps FLASHING the screen black every 30 seconds from time to time, its incredibly annoying, it all goes black, then the screen comes back on, and re-sizes, reshuffles my tabs and then switches back to what ever i was doing as soon as i press something....... its awful, its actually giving me a headache....... physically feel a bit queezy, I'm running on battery now, but it was doing it on the AC earlier..... I'm on battery and in "balanced" performance mode with "intergrated" gpu select as the global setting in nvidia control panel .... I'll keep and eye on this I've had to disable the 780m and this has settled it down........ although the light next to my keyboard is suggesting that actually I'm running on the 780m..... I'm not![/COLOR][/COLOR] - again, reinstall of windows, followed by installing the drivers as they are numbered on the disk (and Intel before Nvida) seems to have settled her down for now.... although this was not a problem at first so I will reserve judgment, it may spring back up.

The 780m, straight out of the P150SM.....


And the rear incorporates a heat spreader for the RAM (and more maybe)??;


The card cleaned up ready for re-installation;


A close up of the RAM chips if your interested;


THE COOLER

I've noticed review samples seem to have the "old" cooler see post #54 for further details (page 6)

So here's a close up of how the RAM sink is attached to the heat exchanger, there is just the one big heat exchanger and the GPU and RAM sinks have to be removed together as one;



The end view of the heat exchanger, you can see the width of the unit and how it is just one single piece, mainly populated by the GPU heatpipes;


View on the inside of the exchanger from the fans perspective;


They have sealed the exchanger to the fan using this foam, its pretty easy to peel back, and if your careful it seems to hold together and the glue all stays on the foam, nice and easy to reapply and adjust as required... nice touch;



Here's the other business end, the RAM nearest the heat exchanger (bottom right) didn't seem to have made a dent on the thermal pads..... as the only thing holding the ram sink in alignment with the GPU is the single little heat pipe I went ahead and leveled this out a fraction of mm (very, very gently) - you can see there is 2 screws in the middle, and one at the back, leaving that area floating high... I don't like it... I might replace the 1mm thick pad across the back (of the RAM, not the blue ones, the bllue ones are really tall, 3 or 4 mm at least) with 0.5 this should bring the other end down.... ** o and the thermal pads have been applied by a blind 1 armed moneky.... I roughly straightened & aligned them all before the photo


The GPU assembled;


Another shot of that Heat Exchanger;


The one piece cooler assembly;


The cavity where all that power lies.... - looking at the PCB it looks like the 8-Series intel is under that area.....


the CPU side of the show, with the Aluminium cooler, I've got a copper one on the way... ASAP (dont know when)


Bottom cover off;



That's it for now...... I've put a couple of better shots in the 1st post, if you want to see anything in particular let me know...

 

Can you give a shot of the heatsinks?

Very odd they are removing a phase, usually that was reserved for the 151 version, I wonder if the P157 production is missing that too.

It does not bode well for system crossflashing and ocing.

Having the torx screw is just silly.

 

O RIGHT..... so the P150HM/EM's do have the extra phase....... well thats not good news at all, I have a GPU that needs 22w more, and a CPU that needs 2w more and I've\ actually got a lower spec supply.... great.....

Yeah I've never seen a torx bit before (in a CPU socket), so I thought I'd give you a heads up........ T8 is probably better than the T7 I used....

 

BUT O FU&^ING BOY - DOES IT FLY!

boot BF3... my favourite, flicked it to 1920x1080 set everything to Ultra........ 16xAF, 4xAA (corrected I said 8, you get the picture).... HBAO the WORKS and she has without even generating much heat or noise (quieter than my W110) pinned the FPS at my set limit of 59fps...... aaaaa this is incredible.... the low noise and heat are the most supprising, I was not expecting this I have a permanent smile..... its starting to hurt

EDIT** ok its not that quiet.... as my other half just pointed out, the exhaust's point backwards (or in her words, its pointing right at me!) so the noise is less my issue, and more her's lol)

another EDIT... ok its really not quiet now..... despite the temperature dropping to 60deg... the GPU fan is still HOWLING away at full bore.. my knees are actually getting cold + there is a whole heap of landscape glitching in BF3....no doubt down to these old drivers - I can't hear myself think ** fan is now fixed

 

Well you can't just look at the number of phases, they might well be including higher quality parts now.

 

That sounds amazing!

 

Ok so issues aside

I love the rubberized effect, its something I'm used to with my W110 and it constantly looks clean and I've not cleaned it since I bought it about 9 months ago, unlike my other halfs glossy bezels which easily look a total mess of mashed finger prints and are easily scratched with the wrong cleaning cloth..

I hate the keyboard layout..... how is it, that my 11.6" W110 has a better more appropriate layout..... and is 2/3rd's the size.... poor effort

It's really nice, doesn't look like it's a powerhouse it DOESNT thankfully look like a giant tangle of LED's with a laptop inside it


& just to summarize the technical difficulties so far (that I haven't tried to hard to fix yet)

Audio didn't install properly, still hasnt.... it works but this X-Fi3 thing doesnt work.... I have an X-Fi3 sticker, am I wrong to assume I should have this feature...

Nvida drivers, didnt install (the 780m isn't listed online yet)

The GPU goes like crazy once its warmed up and wont cool down, with the GPU hovering around the 70°C mark, it makes as much noise as when the GPU is at 56°C between maps loading...... very very noisy - like really bad, strange thing is, it was fine for ages, it took a long time to heat up but once it got there, it just howled...... the CPU fan has just ramped up, its only at 47°C but it's making some fair amounts of noise about it.....

HWinfo doesnt load, it crashes when reading sensors ** NOW WORKING

I have no idea how to change the colour of my keyboard, it all just looks blue all the time.....

the hotkey drivers wont install (I presume this is why the Fn key is acting as my Win key...... and it seems my Win key which is on the right is acting as my FN key.......) Problem not solved but, sort of resolved..... the P150SM pictures I can see online show the Fn key on the right, and the Win key on the left, which is what I have happening, just the keys don't match up with the functions - obviously to do with me using a p150em keyboard i assume

We're sort of not working very well, but the one thing it does do still, is play games at ridiculous speeds with ease......... the CPU fan at idle is lower (than a few paragraphs ago) now we're at 48°C? ..... the GPU fan is still spinning audibly, despite it being turned off and using the HD graphics.... I'll check my TIM...... this is now fixed probably a combination of updates and various other stuff (reinstalled windows, running different better drivers etc.)

I'm sure I just heard a little fast triple beep then the fans came on low/medium again....

 

There is a keyboard control program you need to change the colours.

 

Ok so HWinfo reports that basically, the 4700MQ is getting its spanked well and truely.... it's constantly pinning it at 3.2(minimum!)-3.4Ghz even when idle..... no wonder than fan is spinning...... :thumbsup: I'm getting my money out it anyway lol

I can't see it on the Clevo drivers page, maybe its in with the hotkey thing I can't install?

Updated previous post
the hotkey drivers wont install (I presume this is why the Fn key is acting as my Win key...... and it seems my Win key which is on the right is acting as my FN key.......) Problem not solved but, sort of resolved..... the P150SM pictures I can see online show the Fn key on the right, and the Win key on the left, which is what I have happening, just the keys don't match up with the functions - obviously to do with me using a p150em keyboard i assume

 

It would ship from clevo with a keyboard so that seems very odd btw :/

 

yeah...... they said they where out of stock of US and UK keyboard they hadn't been delivered yet apparently.... the CPU cooler had also been used as there was a depression in it from a CPU**, I assumed that's because they tested it.....

 

So temps are down to 43 on the cpu and 42 on the GPU but the fans are still ROARING away about 60 seconds after quitting my game...........

39 CPU 37 GPU and about 2 minutes after quitting the game and those fans have finally calmed down...... I'm hoping some bios updates in the next few months will address this?8

I'll contact my supplier tomorrow about this keyboard the used cooler....... and I'll format the machine, start from fresh now I know what drivers to use from the off...... all the drivers I've been downloading are for win ) - when they do finally bring back the start bar, I'll be on windows 8 - no trouble at all, till then, it's staying in my sock draw where it belongs! =)

 

Heatsink photos plz

 

Sorry OP updated I thought I uploaded some photo's earlier when Meaker asked!

I'm just going through my post's editing out utter nonsense and injecting clarity........ sorry guys I haven't eaten or slept, its just been project P150SM for the last 9 hours straight

I'll try to tidy up the threads later and upload some better photo's once I've stopped rushing about and gaming

 

Thnx dude can see them now
Interesting the Aluminium cooler for CPU and the GPU does the ram cooler and GPU have separate grills like P170HM or is it one whole part? See this link for comparo -> http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...er-np8170-clevo-p170hm-owners-lounge-491.html

 

I can't see from those photo's but I think I know what you mean, I'll get some close up pictures of the sink tonight,

but no, it does not spilt, all the heatpipes connect to one big copper heat exchanger (about 30-40% deeper than the EM/HM) and it looks like it all comes off in one piece! (hence the single giant tab to pull the lot off together)

Can someone post some pictures of their HM or EM gpu sink removed from the card and machine for comparison.

 

Thnx buddy.
Yeah interesting one piece design. I wonder which of the two designs is preferable and which more importantly has the larger surface area???
Have fun with the new beast(very envious). Can you run some benchmarks like 3dmark'11 and any games you have (Crysis 3, metro LL)?

Cheers

 

Once I've got the drivers smoothed out I'll see what I can do, seems unfair to bench it on old drivers... I'm a bit out of touch with the latest games so the most demanding I have is BF3, given the recent purchase of this machine..... it might be a month before I've got the cash for Crysis3.......

I'll see about 3dmark'11 - is it free? (I think I've got a few licences for 3dmarkVantage from some years back if that will do?)

I will strip and rebuild the machine tonight, changing the TIM all round, so I'll measure the cooler in depth, and we can compare??... I expect it to be much better cooler for the GPU (+25% maybe), slightly less effective at cooling the RAM (maybe half), which is a balance I prefer to be honest with you.

 

After the rebuild can you tell us how the fan control works and how loud the fans get under load?
I kow my older P150HM was a little too much fan, either on full blast or off and not much in between, kept the laptop cool but the noise was a bit too much, just wondering if the new heatsink design helped with any of that.

 

@ Calibre41 "Just the regular P15**M CPU heat sink I think?, as usual for the P15*....... it's the Aluminium CPU heatsink..... I will be getting this swapped out for a copper P17**M version ASAP;"

If you do this when you get caught up, I would be interested if you post your temp difference. Looking at the size it looks about a 10 lb difference

 

Thanks for the pics there Looks good.

 

+1!

also extremely interested in that new gpu cooler...and that huge copper plate fixed on the back cover,dayum!

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Ok LOADS of new hi-res macro images, check the 2nd post (and 2 more on the end of the first.....)

I have very detailed measurements of the whole cooler, fin gaps thickness, overall size everything, I'll calculate the exact surface area and air resistance and give a comparison with a 2 piece design if I can get my hands on one?

 

The backlight is now working...... problems solved by just using the older P170EM drivers for everything.

Clevo have basically completely dropped Windows7 drivers and it's causing me issues, downloading the Win7 drivers from the P150EM seems to fix each issue I come across....

 

It's cool that they listened about the gap between the fan and heatsink needing something.

Cheers for the photos, very interesting.

 

Yeah it's cool they followed, maybe they will even support Win7 one day lol

My GPU is still switching constantly and flashing the display, I tried to run BF3 earlier and it just BSOD on me, I'm going to have to install 8 tomorrow....... What a piece of sh!t windows 8 is...... It's the touch pad gestures that cannot be disabled that led me to uninstall it, I just about reserved enough anger to stop my setting fire to the installation disks.... Apparently this "feature" still cannot be disabled
(Swipe in from off the pad and it loads the charms bar, swipe in from somewhere else and you settings, my god, it drove me crazy.... A registry fix did solve it but only for a short while...... I hate it

 

for a experienced heatsink modder, i estimate the new gpu hs will load temp will drop 5~10c from the 2 years old hs:thumbsup:
resellers can import a batch of these new gpu hs from clevo and offer a gpu hs upgrade!!

 

that is some pretty nice info there DG! whats ur estimate on the aluminum vs. copper cpu hs?

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Hey did you brought it from SCAN.co.uk? I'm planing to buy one of these from them.

 

That's a nice idea, if the new heatsink fits the HM/EM shell.

 

Hi bud, no I didn't scan won't have the Haswell mobile chips in stock for about another 10 days...... I'll reserve judgement and recommendations on my supplier until they've responded to my emails as I have issues that I've contacted them about and they've not responded to yet.

THE MISSING POWER PHASE - Update

I'll update the OP, I discussed the missing phase (the missing power components!) earlier...


..... for those who are familiar with Haswell (I am still learning) the reason is obvious....... Haswell incorperates "FIVR" or Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator.... this raises the TDP of the processor over IvyBridge and strips some of the voltage options from the motherboard, also making some of the components redundant (Voltage Regulators)... I think this probably why we are seeing some of the components stripped back..... and would certainly say NO cross flashing of the bios is available as this must be a very different board to the 6/7 series and no doubt why the CPU socket is now also a different size/shape.


... the Haswell supplies itself with the most finely tuned power supply ever with near perfect zero ripple ** apparently, better than any high end desktop motherboard solution.......... by the looks of it Haswell is very much a Tock for the mobile market, high end desktop users benefit little from this years offerings although the "K" series looks like it has many more OCing features, but maybe less voltage control..... and the non K series are totally locked, the base and multipliers cannot be changed at all......... or so they say for now....

 

Hmm thanx. I just configured P150SM from scan and price is around £1595 (4800MQ/780M GTX/256GB Samsung 840Pro/Blu-ray Combo/2Yr Warranty). Same config in mysn costs £1844.

 

Don't forget PCSpecialist........... & PwnPCS

 

The touch pad behaviour is all in synaptics driver, you can disable it from there

 

I tried every option it had............... :cry: - apart from smashing it to bits with a 10lb hammer I couldn't think of a way to stop it

 

the crossflashing wasnt referring to different chipset gens but rather crossflashing a p17xsm bios onto a p15xsm model in order to activate intel xtu functionality

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Both of them are expensive compared to scan. In the past I had very good experience with scan, so i might go with them once they have AMD graphics option.

 

AAAAAAA right I see thanks!

...... XTU is on my drivers disk........ I decided not to install it as I'm having stability issues without throwing anything else in to the mix, should I give it a go do you think?? - is it already know that these 150's don't have it??.....

Another update (in post 2)

I seem to have a much better setup now.......... I re-installed windows and used only the drivers on the disk, and installed in the order they are numbered in.... (intel display before nvidia) and things seem to be running much smoother...... no display or optimus switching so far, X-fi now works and things are on the up (I havent tried any gaming yet...)

I had to get the Series 8 USB3.0 drivers from online as I did with the W110

 

the 8970m's are expect to start shipping from the 1st of July onwards give or take a week....... I can't fault Scan, I've always got all my hardware from them over the years, and that's a lot of hardware!, had a dodgy i7 & GB mobo a while back and they sorted me out replacements really quickly. I've got some problamatic RAM at the moment from Kikatec and I'm being threatened with charges if I RMA and there's nothing wrong with it..... not very nice since the problem is intermittent....

 

Haswell's changes to the PWM should be nigh on invisible to the user who even knows about it. The 2 voltages the CPU require still require just as much regulation.

However there is no reason that two properly designed phases cannot cope with all CPUs at stock.

 

Do more phases not reduce noise (ripple) and would there for be redundant as the Haswell regulates itself? - as you say, maybe fewer higher capacity phases are all that's required.



FAN ISSUE & OPTIMUS UPDATE:
I'm just keeping a log of this incase others get the P150SM or just the GTX780m and have similar issues.....

So its just gone 8am and its pretty cool in my house, my Nvidia GPU is off (and thanks to the re install, it's not flashing the screen like crazy), but the machine has decided that 100% GPU fan speed is appropriate.......... its sitting at 24°C and my leg is cold...... now it was silent before.... what I did was I FN+1'd to put the fans on, and when I turned them off again the GPU decided not to listen and just held 100%. This is also the level it was earlier when I was complaining, the overall noise level does drop after a game, but only because the CPU fan turns off, a quick FN+1 /on /off /on /off confirms the GPU fan doesn't spin up or down, it just remains at this speed.

I have this indicator light on my machine (showing me iGPU or dGPU) and it's still flashing away, so I'm not sure if Optimus is still playing up.... here's a GPUZ screen shot, it seems to be indicating the GPU is on and flashes off for a 1/10th of a second every 2 or 3 seconds......... this is what my GPUz screenshot's - you can see there is no load on the GPU, it is effectively doing nothing despite the dGPU light been on and everytime it flashes the memory clock seems to have a 0 gap in it........


and for a comparison, here's the HD4600 screenshot, it seems to be the one taking the load of 2 or 3% all the time


As I'm typing I have just realized what's is causing this, (and maybe what was causing the display to flash before?) it IS GPUz.......... when I flick it to monitor the HD4600 the dGPU light goes out and stays out........ I'll keep and eye on this.... HWinfo picks up no sensor information so the nvidia card is off for sure.. even when I boot HWinfo, while GPUz is watching the 780m and the dGPU light is illuminated....

 

now it just doesn't work properly at all.....Rebooted....... even with settings on minimum the frames struggle to get past 30fps......... it was maxing out my 59fps limit before on Ultra....... what a fu&^ing mess......... why don't thing just work!

Update, 2 minutes later, without rebooting, just closed the game and reopened......... its running now bang up to the 59fps limit again and looks smooth and nice, so I went ahead and hit "Ultra everything" and yep, still bang up to the 59fps,.........?????????

aaaaaaaaaaaaa RELIEF




** and NO, I still can't believe this card is capable of playing BF3 on ultra everything including AA, AF and HBAO at my set limit of 59fps without even dropping at the toughest times..... but it does - I love it, it's the fastest computer I've ever had.... and it fits on my lap :thumbsup:

 

Sounds amazing Calibre. But is it still as megaloud as you were experiencing on the first page of this thread?

 

Every so often, the GPU fan sticks on 100%, sometimes it stops after a few minutes but sometimes it just continues to blast chill itself- restarting the computer doesn't help. It must be shut down completely left for a second or 2 for the fan to stop, then switched back on!

One thing that most certainly causes it, is pressing Fn+1 key and putting the fans to 100%, after that the GPU sticks at 100% - otherwise it seems a bit random. I think the reapplication of my thermal paste has helped.

When it is working, and I'm pushing BF3 out at max everything 1080p, it is pretty dam loud but naturally this is to be expected, it does return to a sensible state after a minute or 2.

**check back in half an hour and I'll post some graphs of temps etc... (sadly it doesn't read the fan speed)

tops of about 83°C

 

For example on a desktop 4 properly designed and controlled phases will outperform 16 poorly designed ones while consuming less power and reducing the chances of coil whine.

Any gpu monitoring app will trigger the gpu awake.

 

Gah. I'm dying to buy one of these, but am afraid of the fan noise.
I have a Asus G73sw at the moment, and it's all I've ever known.

I need a system I can use on my lap (stable table) while wifey watches TV next to me.

Here in Aus, Clevo ( Metabox Laptops Australia) is such incredible value for gaming laptops, it's really very difficult to resist. But having never seen nor heard a Clevo in action before, and having read a few negative reviews (regarding emissions), it's difficult to know what to do.

Asus and Alienware are just so expensive over here that I might just have to bite the bullet..

 

so the Fn and 1 combination to put fans on full pelt has been put back on the SM model.
it was on the HM and then removed from the EM and now back on again.

sounds like the continuous fans after gaming problem as continued then.
the way i get round that after a game is to open nvidia insector and then close it and the fans calm down.
it was a known issue that had been reported to clevo.

your certainly doing a grand job on this thread Calibre41 and coudos to you sir.keep up the great work. +rep

 

calibre! indicator light for igpu vs. dgpu?!?!?! um hellooooo, am i the only one not missing that comment? about time clevo implemented an indicator!

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

they used to have a indicator light on the first optimus lappys that clevo released (think it was the B5100M/NP5125) but they never seemed to work properly changing from yellow to green so i guessed they dumped the idea.