P150SM-A some issues

Hi,

I just received my new P150SM-A (Metabox) yesterday (finally!).

I ordered without an OS so spent yesterday setting it up and installing Windows 8.1. Not entirely smooth - there was some issues installing all the drivers and ran into a few issues with DPI Scaling (Chrome was blurry etc and lag in right click) but I fixed those after some research. Windows 8 (installed on my P151HM) is more stable IMO -have not ran into any issues with it.

I noticed a few issues, wondering if they are normal or if other people experienced the same?

1. The "FN" key is not backlit very well. It is very dim in comparison with the other keys. Seems like the LED under the key is not working very well. P.S Wonder why they decided to move the fn key from the left hand side to the right - going to take some getting use to!

2. Surprised to find the battery has a 2% wear level out of the box (Reported by HW Monitor). Shouldn't that be 0% - it is a brand new battery after all. Didn't have this problem with the P151HM when i purchased it back in the day.

3. The Fan is about a step quieter than the P151HM series, which runs on a constant, albeit slightly louder, speed. However, fans on P150SM tend to randomly rev up to a much louder speed for awhile before stepping back down to Step 1. Trying to figure this one out. Might be a driver problem or some program using the GPU. Could someone confirm the right side fan is the GPU on the P150SM series? CPU idles between 40-45C.

4. I noticed my OS drive (Samsung 120GB EVO msata) runs at temps of 48-52C whilst idle. Have not tested the temps of the SSD during/after gaming. Is that Normal temp for an msata - seems quite high, as my Samsung 840 128GB SSD in P151HM stays under 30C nearly all of the time. I'm not running intensive tasks either.

5. I have configured the laptop keyboard backlight to green. When I restart the OS, the backlight defaults to blue until I press FN+ / key to open the keyboard backlight software, it then changes to Green. Normal or a driver issue?

6. What is everyone's profile on the hotkey.exe? Does "Quiet" mode underclock the CPU/GPU or simply put the laptop into "Power saver" mode with wifi enabled? I noticed the "Battery Saver" mode puts the screen settings down, the laptop in power saver mode and enables airplane mode.

I have not had the chance to run any games and give the 870m run but will report back once I have the chance do some further testing

Thanks

 

1. The FN key is not as bright on my 8258-S either. I'm thinking this is a design decision for ease of identifying the FN key by just glancing down at the keyboard. The paler color does draw your attention to it after all.

2. That's a new one for me as well. I'd bring that up to your supplier and see if there's a reason for it. Mine when I received it (and even now) is, indeed, 0% wear on HWMonitor.

3. Can't say on that one. It could be the bios for the fan profile. Monitor your temperatures and see when the fans kick on. They may be set a bit lower than normal, so a bios update may help that.

4. Can't answer that one, sorry. I don't have a SSD drive in my unit.

5. That's normal, at least with the default colors. When I boot my laptop, it defaults to blue as well, and then when the laptop is fully booted and the hotkey app runs, my personal preference for keyboard colors are loaded properly. It should automatically change though once your laptop is booted.

6. I have mine on performance. I've not quite figured out the various profiles in hotkey myself yet. So good question and I'm waiting for the answer

My wife has the 870M in her 8258, and so far she's been able to play everything on ultra with zero lag. Very nice card.

I have the 880M, well, because I wanted to spoil myself

 

Many thanks for your reply Ashen-Shugar.

Glad to hear I'm not alone on the FN key, your right it could be a design decision or it could be weak LED or weak placement.

I have emailed my supplier with respect to the battery and am waiting on their reply. It is only 2% and should not make much of a difference in battery life but I did pay for a new laptop (and paid a premium ordering from an Aussie supplier rather than overseas) so I believe I should be getting a battery with no wear level. I also don't want a battery that may have been sitting in the "warehouse" for awhile and which will degrade faster than usual.

You should really get an SSD drive in your laptop I would go with the Samsung 840 Pro series - fantastic drive and super fast. I wish I had chosen the 840 Pro series over the EVO msata drive after taking a look at the temps but I wanted to avoid having my storage drive in the caddy, so msata was the logical option. I did have a choice between Plextor or Samsung but the EVO drive seemed to have better read and write speeds and past experience dictated samsung was the way to go.

When I boot the laptop, it defaults to blue and will stay blue until I press the FN + / key to load up the keyboard program. If that does not happen with you, it must be a software/driver glitch on my end. I'll try to download the latest drivers/software for the keyboard utility and test it this afternoon after work.

I agree 870m seems like the best price/performance ratio card out at the moment. I was originally considering spending extra on the 880M but I don't play enough games to justify the extra $300 or so it cost

 

sorry i cant answer your questions but may i ask, i heard 840 evo msata dosent support TRIM. is it true?
ok it is false from toms hardware. it supports TRIM

 

1) what country region keyboard is it. UK,USA,other. this is the only reason i can think of to have the Fn key in a different position.

2) download battery care or battery bar from my sig below which will give a much better reading than hw monitor.

3) heard of this happen on a couple of other models in the past but not everyone is affected by it. it could be a driver issue but just not sure as never had this problem. only thing i have with my EM is after gaming fan stays on full. opening nvidia monitor and shutting it sets the fan back to normal cycle.
the SM has the full fan option of Fn + F1 give it a burst on and off and then see if the rev ups continue.

4) me not even sure what my ssd temp is so cant advise on this.

5) backlight is default blue. after boot cycle and desktop opens it should auto switch to your prefered settings of green without any keys being touched. another driver issue maybe.

once you are fully up and running you can find all the futuremark benchmar software in my sig below to see if you compare scores to others.

 

Thanks for your reply MrDJ. I believe the keyboard region is USA.

I had a quick look at the link in your signature. Quite a comprehensive thread. Thanks for bringing that to my attention - many good apps there to download.
At the moment I'm going through the drivers on Clevo's website and ensuring I have the latest version installed.

My laptop is a metabox in Australia - it appears they have outdated drivers on their website. Metabox Driver Downloads

 

your welcome.
the drivers on clevo's website dont get updated much after the model is released so might be worth also looking at the drivers on the sager website but make sure you pick the right model as each company has its own model numbers which does get a bit confusing custom gaming laptops - Welcome to Sager Notebooks

 

The fan control is set through the EC, which is what we edit to produce our EC versions in order to reduce, amongst other things, random jumps in fan speed.

On a more general point however, the reason for these fan jumps with stock EC versions can be for many reasons. For example if your CPU is running a little hotter then it will more often reach the next speed step - this could be for multiple reasons including a not quite perfect heatsink-CPU die contact, higher ambient temperatures, dust in the cooling system/blockages in the heatsink fins and so on. Another issue, which is actually quite prominant, is that Windows Defender tends to push the CPU to 20% usage every now and again. This can be enough to trigger a 4C-5C temperature increase which could also cause the next fan speed step to come into play. If you open rescource monitor you may well be able to tie in CPU load increases from specific services or programs that then directly correlate to a fan speed increase.

 

Thanks mySN, it could very well be the problem. I suspect the fans rev up once they hit a certain temperature and remain at a higher rpm until temps return to low points, then the cycle repeats. I'll monitor the temps and fan behavior and will report back.

On a side note, I was experiencing right mouse click lag on desktop so I did a clean install of Windows 8.1 and re installed the latest drivers. If anyone else is experiencing a similar issue, the culprit is the latest Intel graphics driver. I uninstalled that and let windows update install the drivers itself (it installed an older more stable version) this fixed the issue.

The issue with the backlight has been fixed by updating the hotkey driver. Now mine behaves the same as Ashen-Shugar's and MrDJ's laptop which is great. The dim "FN" key doesn't bother me much since Ashen-Shugar has reported his key is the same.

I havn't heard back from my reseller with respect to the msata idle temperatures (at one point under load I saw temps reach 60C) or the battery wear but will report back when I do.

I'm running the latest beta version for the 870m with no problems. Had a quick session with CSGO but forgot to monitor temps. I'll run some benchmarks and a few games when I've got some time to spare over the next few days. Still in the process of backup up the P151HM and moving files across to this laptop.

A quick question, has anyone installed Intel's Rapid Storage driver? It was on the Driver CD that came with the laptop, I didn't install it as I was not sure what it was for.

 

It's an alternative to the native Windows SATA driver. You don't really need it, but it's safe to install. Some people prefer it, some don't.

 

Thanks Prostar. I decided not to install it as after some research it appears it's only useful for RAID.

My reseller got back to me yesterday. The battery wear is normal-luck of the draw.

Fan behaviour apparently normal. Intel gpu is hitting a certain temp. Fans spin up to cool it down and the process repeats. I'll monitor temps over the weekend to determine at what temp this occurs.

According to the reseller temps of 0-70C are normal for the msata drive. My msata temp yesterday was at 57c whilst idle. I'm concerned at running the drive at such high Temps for a long period of time. Doesn't seem normal to me



Sent from my LG-D802T using Tapatalk

 

57c should not significantly increase the wear of the nand. They are hardier than mechanical HDDS.

 

Hi djevoultion,

first of all congrats to your new device!

Regarding the temps respectively fan noise under low load:
Did you try to underclock the CPU for work/office/web browsing tasks? For lower load tasks a clockspeed of maybe 1.5 - 2.0 ghz could be enough and therefore you could undervolt the CPU quite far (using XTU). Gigabyte drops the CPU speed on its laptops (P34G v2 for example) even to 1.2 GHz when choosing their "silent" fan profile. So that could be a solid way here as well...?

Could you test some gaming (min, max, avg fps) on your notebook and maybe post your 3DMark 11 P Score (overall and graphics score) as well as Firestrike Standard graphics score?

Would be also very appreciated if you could compare your fan noise while gaming with this video a guy made to demonstrate the different fan noise levels, although he has got a 770m, which is only 75 W TDP. (According to the guy you have to turn the volume up that way, so that you can hear the clock and the mouseclicks quite loud; it's described in the comments.)
In comparision to the video which fan noise level do you get with very intensive games like crysis 3, metro LL, farcry 3 or hitman absolution?

Thanks in advance and have fun with your laptop

 

almost impossible to compare fan noise using video as no two cameras or room layouts are the same. you can even hear a wall clock in the background so the mic is very sensitive so will pick up a lot more than another persons camera.

 

Nope, my micro is not as sensivitve as you might think. This IKEA watch (maybe someone knows it) is very loud compared to normal clocks. But enough offtopic

 

Thanks for your replies. I've created a separate thread in the Hardware section for the msata temps. It reached 71C today after running CrystalMarkDisk on it, needless to say I am quite concerned.

@Chris_laptop fan

Thanks. I'll try to get those tests run over the next few days. I havn't done much gaming (CSGO, Wow, GW2), fans are quite good when gaming, havn't reached max fan speed setting. Laptop handles those at maximum settings with ease.

For office tasks, word, browsing I do set it on quiet mode using hotkey.exe and also on "power saver" from the battery icon in the taskbar. I have also gone into the advanced power options and set the max CPU frequency to 50% so CPU frequency is locked at 0.77Ghz. This helps keep things cool and is plenty fast for my work needs.

I havn't tried underclocking any lower than that or undervolting the CPU via XTU yet. Not very familiar with XTU nor with undervolting.


@MrDJ

Yep your right with that one. Very hard to compare using a youtube video. guess I could compare using the fan speed "steps" as an indicator as they should be identical to my laptop.

I finally figured out what was causing the fan cycling. I've been monitoring temps using HWMonitor and found that the right fan (GPU fan) kicks in when the TZ0_ sensor (I believe this is the integrated GPU sensor) reaches 55C exactly. It will then cool itself until the temp reaches 40C at which point the right fan will turn off and laptop will be silent again. It will remain like that until TZ0_ temps creep back up to 55C and the fan will kick in again, process repeats.

Would it be possible to underclock and undervolt the iGPU hopefully in order to prevent the iGPU from reaching temps of 55C when just running Microsoft word.

Cheers

 

My Plextor I believe usually runs around 52 degrees C, but my Samsung 840 pro sticks around 37-39 degrees C and my HDD sticks at ~32 degrees C. The OS drive seems to just be a little hotter no matter what in my case, but it's been fine so far.

The fans I have heard boost themselves to max for a very short amount of time and then reverts it to normal on all the EM series, so the SM series may have had it carry over in some of the machines. If you force them to max with Fn + 1, it won't ramp up/down, though it'll obviously be constant at max. Up to you to decide XD.

If the machine is shut off then turned back on later (not simply restarted) the backlight always comes up blue until the hotkey driver is properly loaded, then it resets itself to whatever you previously had it set to. This is normal.

Also, protip, Windows Defender can use up to 50-60% of the CPU or even more (80% was my max at one point) when scanning SSDs. It only tops out between 10-20% on a HDD, where it must check files slower due to the slower speed of the drive.

My Fn key is dull too.

My profile is "user defined". I custom-do everything =D.

 

Hi djevoultion,

thanks for your reply.

Here is another video and there the fan speed levels are quite different depending on the game.

This second video is not ideal because of the game audio, but i think the fan stages can be clearly compared to LoopNBj's video (the first video from my previous post).
I guess 1:50 of 1st video is the same fan stage like on 2nd video's Skyrim and 2:49 on 1st video is full blast and so it seems on 2nd video's Far Cry 3 (starting at 2:23) as well.

Would be very appreciated, if you could test 1 or 2 very demanding games (like crysis 3, metro, farcry 3, hitman, BF4 or Watch dogs or similar, if you own one of them of course ) for fan noise as they are stressing the gpu far more than GW2, CS:Go or WoW for sure and therefore probably resulting in higher fan noise levels.
If you have none of the aforementioned demanding games, maybe you could run Firestrike benchmark instead, as that seems to be quite comparable to demanding games...

Thanks in advance.
-----

Regarding XTU: That's an official tool from Intel, which is for tweaking and tuning your CPU. And one of the features is changing the voltage on the CPU. With overvolting i would be quite careful. But mostly it's used the other way around for undervolting to achieve lower temperatures and therefore lower fan noise. Especially in the "MSI GS60 Ghost (Pro)"-Thread it's used quite often to get the high temps in the slim chassis under control...
With a built-in benchmark in XTU you can test if the CPU runs stable on lower voltage. If not, just bump the voltage up by a bit until it works fine. Just for clarification