Review of Clevo P150sm (i74700HQ+GTX 770m )

Hi everybody !
Her is my modest contribution , a "big" review about my Clevo P150sm
buyed 2 weeks ago
do not hesitate if you have remarks or question !

Configuration tested:
-i7 4700MQ
-GTX 770m
-8Gb RAM
-Intel 7260AC Wireless controller
-BD drive (from older notebook)
-95%gamut FHD Matte Display

I m coming from a MSI GT60 (2012 Gen) with i73610 +gtx675m, his mother board crashed

This review is for persons who already knows a bit about computer, and about this clevo. (more intended to response question you might pose)


The exterior and connection:

The clevo is faaaaar less «Jacky tuning» than the MSI, most of the parts (lid and palm rest + touch pad) are rubberized, with gray-lite brown coating, it feel great, no finger-prints, and it's nice, only complain, is that dust don't come up as easily as glossy finish! There is no bling bling parts, all is “functional”, and suit way better for an “adult”.
He is more compact, and more lightweight than the MSI, and construction feel very solid and, make no plastic crimping sound when you manipulate it, it's a pleasure!
One of my friend found the perfect adjective for the computer: DENSE, really powerful in a respectable size
The screen bezel is matte (Alleluia! ), and absolutely impossible to soil!
Connections are not phletoric, but really good: 3 USB 3,0; E-SATAp; hdmi, display port, 1 USB 2; Ethernet........ no VGA? No DVI? Quite inconvenient, because 90% of connection to video projector are made with VGA (school and office)
The keyboard look great, the feeling is good and solid, the keystroke is good, retro-light is good, but not enoughtly customizable in my opinion (the MSI keyboard manager was better for this! )
indicator led are blue, and a bit too powerful, but the led for dGPU is a good plus!
The back is made of hard plastic, there are only vents and a “bass-woofer” hole.

For a conclusion: the notebook looks solid, well constructed, grease proof, and well equipped


The interior:

the battery is removable.
HDD case is accessible with 2 screws, and allows to remove the unique screw for CD/DVD module. The mounting bracket for the HDD is made of transparent plastic , that is screwed to the HDD with two screws.

Opening the main door is easy: 4 screws, slide, done! no cheap clippers that broke in two movement, no weird sound!, only remark about a copper sheet that cover almost the half, I don't really know for what is intended, but I have made a thermal brigde between the dGPU radiator and this sheet.

The interior is well organized, dGPU on the left, CPU on the right, RAM in the bottom, CPU and GPU have both a dedicated cooler + fan

For the CPU: two massive heat-pipe starts from the copper plate, that cover CPU and VRM, but strangely, the capacitors are not in contact, I have personally putted thermal paste on it, but I don't think that's necessary.
The radiator is in aluminum, the fan is not so big, and well adjusted to the radiator, allowing a good air flow, but can still be improved, by making the aluminum foil mod.

For the GPU: the heat-sink is far more large, there are two heatpipe for the GPU, and one , connected to a big aluminum block, that cover memory module and VRM's, the three big heat pipe s are connected to a unique copper made radiator, that is filled with air by a huge fan, but this one is incorrectly placed (since 1st generation), and a part of the radiator is not supplied with air, whereas, on the other side, air flow thru nothing, I can't imagine that the engineers from clevo didn't saw that, this is ridiculous!, on this generation, they have putted some black foam, to cover this area, but this is non-sens! The should have just placed the fan correctly!, so to improve it, you can make an aluminum foil mod.

I'am quite depicted of this cooling, I hope a better engineered system, where MSI put little foam instert between radiator and fan plate, a well adjusted radiator, clevo just let the fan fall inside the case, and screwed it in no matter there are hudge air leak.
On both heat sink, there are plastic, intended to make the removal easier, but they obstruct a bit the air flow, so, instead of cutting it, i have scotched it with aluminum tape to the heat-sink.
The bass woofer is close to the GPU fan, and.....very small compared to previous version, and I think that he is “useless”.

Performance summary :

Because we have ton of information about perf on web , I will not go “in detail”
I was coming from an i7 3610QM, the changements are not noticeable at all.
The “turbo boost” work well, but I have never seen the “short power boost” in action, even if XTU say that he is enabled.
Good thing is that intel XTU allows a lot of voltage/ratio/wattage configuration, like a desktop, and it's really appreciable!

The GTX 770m, perform really well in most games, (Dirt 3 FHD +ultra settings: 60fps or more )
BUT: the base clock is 706Mhz+ boost, whereas the official nvidia page say: 811Mhz+boost, so I got a 15% performance cut from what I excepted (I used for reference the 660, that have the same number of CUDA cores), so I feel a bit abused, and I’m going to report this to my reseller, and ask explanation, this is NOT NORMAL! , I can't see anywhere on the clevo official website, or the reseller's, that the performances have been cutted like this! And I think this cheap-class manipulation is NOT worth of a high end notebook!!
I got a good P4132 ( NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4700MQ,Notebook P15SM) at 3Dmark fire strike, but this was with overclocking (+135Gpu; +500Mem); I think that with a real BIOS, I will be able to go higher!


Mic/Cam/fingerprint/touchpad :

Mic is absolutly bad, I have spent hours trying to improve it, doesn't matter, you can't hear anything+ a hudge white sound+ echo+ parasites+anything bad you could think of for a microphone, this is a shame to dare put that....thing...... in a 1500€ notebook !
EDIT : without X-Fi, it sound way better !
Camera is good, 1080p doesn't really improve over 720p, but good.
Fingerprint reader is good, recognized well my fingers, fast, easy to configure, definitively not a gadjet !
Touch pad , is quite good, even if it's rubberized, the feeling is good and responsive, I use it time to time, and no problem.


Screen and Sound :

Screen is really good ( 95% gamut), colors are vivid, latency is not noticeable , retrolight is dammmm powerful , viewving angles are really good the mat finish is good, and less grainy than my previous MSI.
Sound is a joke, “sub woofer “ useless, speakers bad, only good thing is sound power , rest is sh*t
tried to optimize with X-fi, but can't make it acceptable.Again, not what we can except from a high end notebook, with “superior ultra mega cool sound”.


Temperature and Noise:


I have repasted CPU and GPU ( ICdiamond) , and made a aluminum foil mod for radiators
Temperatures are really good, in gaming condition ( Dirt 3 , about 45min )
CPU max : 75°C
GPU : 67°C ( was with overclocking )
PCH: 83°C

In game , ventilation is not really earable with in game sound (even if not very loud )
BUT in office condition the noise are not so good, yeah ,temps are good, the GPU fan is okay , because it don't run when gpu is not used, and in game I don't really care, but CPU fan is boring: instead of a continuous low flow, it alternate between zero and 1st speed , wich is already really audible/disturbing (imo ) in office use condition, I would prefer a continous , but less higher flow instead of that. (like MSI and others made), I think this laptop is relativly noisy, compared to Asus/MSI/other.

The BIG problem , is the “random” fan full throttle that occur after some gaming time (40min most of the time), even if temperatures are good, and this is annoying !!
So right now i'm considering buying a latop cooler, just to make this stop, even if normally it's good.........

On battery:

On battery, it's good and bad surprises, first, I’m glad to see that CPU perf are untouched, and gpu perf almost uncuted (600mhz max on batt), my old gtx 675m was down-clocked to 75mhz (instead of 620), so I can still play in good conditions, and that is pleasant!
BUT : my old MSI had a 80 Wh, my clevo have 78Wh (real) , so I thought that the battery time (without GPU ^^) would be almost the same, error, I lasted less than 3h30 on battery, making word text +wifi + headphones, were my MSI lasted almost 5h , so I am a bit depicted, it's still good, but I hoped more.


In conclusion :

Good product, good construction, good performance ,but some things like these have to be considered :
770m frequency BIG -BIGJOKE (i'm not going to let this pass )
Sound : MEGA-JOKE (“superior sound”-my **s)
Mic : ULTRA-JOKE ( good thing that they not tried to advertise it “ crisp clear microphone” )
fan alignment : IGO-JOKE (serioulsy ! Cmon guys !)
battery life : not good
no DVI or VGA

 

The CPU is a 4700MQ not an HQ.

If you adjust the thermal pads on the VRM side of things the VRM heatsink sits much better.

As far as I can tell the design engineers had thinner thermal pads while the production engineers made them thicker to ensure contact on every unit (would be my guess).

 

I don't think your drive thermal bridge is a good idea. You are just adding to the heat burden. The cap one might just be adding heat to the caps. I don't know though.

The mic issue sounds like Sound Blaster is affecting it, try killing SB.

The 770M should be better with the svl7 vbios on the Tech Infernal forum. On that same forum Prema should have a bios and ec, which may help with the fan, may.

Sound on my P175SM is OK, actually seems good for a laptop, but no bass. So the sub-woofer doesn't do much.

I am surprised your battery on the MSI lasted longer. Haswell should give better battery life. If you were gaming, then all bets are off, but if using the intel gpu then under apples to apples I would expect better battery life with Haswell.

For dvi and vga you can buy adaptors. It is getting rarer and rarer to find these on laptops, even desktops.

 

For low resolution applications the adapters are fairly cheap too. It's only if you want to connect a display above 1920x1080 that they get expensive.

 

Hi all ! thanks for you return, so , here are the news :

- i have ordered a minidisplay port to VGA, but it's still annoying, and it's not because it's less putted by standard it mean that is a good idea ( i don't think this will be understoodable, forgive me , i'm french ^^) , in my school, and all the schools i made, VGA is the only option, and i think it should stay as a standart port for notebook !
-thermal bridge unmounted, no temperatures differences
-thermal past for capictor cleaned

but i'm going to have a talk with my reseller about the 770m, even if i can flash a bios ( or make mine with svet), i don't want to loose my warranty for things, imo, i shouldn't have to do !
i will talk about my EC and fan issue too, maybe they have BIOS maj for me ^^

today i have format , gone to W8.1, and this time i didn't installed X-Fi utilities, and yes ! my mic work way better ( no i can understand what i say......),and the sound w/o X-Fi is not that bad (but still lack compared to the excellent dynaudio in MSI )!

 

VGA takes up a lot of space on the PCB and lower models designed specifically for office and legacy work do have it, but as shown you can use an adapter which means it can work.

If you have VGA you can't then convert that to another type of display so you would be stuck with it.

 

Glad the mic is working OK now. As for the bios and vbios, the other forum will have more info should you decide to do it. The other option for the fan is to undervolt/underclock, etc, to reduce heat and reduce the fan coming on. Overall I am OK with the fan, but I wish it was quieter.

 

Hi all ! Today I had a speech with my reseller, he changed my screen (i was with a 60 gamut, and I have paid for 95),directly, and he made BIOS update too, I hope it will help for fan issues *crossing fingers *, I talked about the frequency of the gtx770m, he explained me that they don't modify BIOS, so apparently it's from Clevo, I think I will email them about this