Questions relate to P370sm fan noise, speaker, and keyboard

Hi all, I am interested in getting a p370sm and retire my faithful IBM t410i.
I post a thread in the p370 owners lounge, but no reply.
So I think it is better to post a new thread.
I know that these points are general the "weak points" of clevo laptop, but how bad is it?
I saw the review on NBC, no matter 765sli, 8970m sli, it seems the fan is very noisy under full load. Is it a problem in real gaming?
Thanks

 

The fans are going to be louder then your typical notebook but is on par on what you should expect out of a top end gaming rig. As you probably know the lower the temps the better and the louder fans are a side effect of that. As long as you're getting it for a gaming machine and not using it in a library or something similar you should be ok with them.

 

Thanks Hutsady. How about speaker and keyboard, still can't beat msi 1763?

 

Speakers on the MSI/Force are better with the DynaAudio, that just cant be beat unless you get some external speakers that have built in sound processing or USB sound card.
I do prefer to type on a chiclet style, but the island style Sager uses has gotten much better compared to when they first came out on last years models.

 

Yeah the Dynaudio is more or less unparalleled by the competition. The Steelseries keyboards are quite nice and robust as well. In Clevo's defense, their keyboards have improved over time (as Hutsady mentioned). The fan(s) can be loud as well, but dB measurements are subjective.

Said weak points may be noticeable to many users, but just don't let that fool you into thinking they're inferior laptops. They're quite stable and worthy of consideration.

 

If I may hijack this thread...

I'm not bothered by loud fan noise (my current laptop blows out around 40 dB even when idling), but I read that Clevo laptops sometimes have issues with the fans cycling on and off? Has this been fixed in the new models?

 

All gaming laptops have noisy fans when gaming. When not gaming it is not so much a issue. To deal with the noise, I think most use headphones. I use headphones even on my quiet desktop, as I can pick out sounds better. This of course by passes the speakers.

I have not heard bad things about the current keyboards. The reviews say they are OK. Most don't like that the FN key has moved or the zero key is half sized, but other wise they seem OK. In fact I don't like chiclet type keys that seem to be popular now. But I am more of a touch typist, so maybe that matters.

As for the fan cycling, no way to fix that unless you make the fan run at high all the time. In other words, if say the cpu is cool, then you want the fan to run slower than if the cpu is hot. And after it is hot, you want the fan to slow down again. As I understand it the fan has three modes, low, medium, and high. So it switches between those.

 

This was an issue with some units until the BIOS was updated. We haven't experienced any problems since nor had any feedback. It was a nuance in the fan profile.