Two Clevo laptops later (never again?) and a short review of NP8454

I had my first clevo laptop from mythlogic, it was a used laptop bought through the forum here, it was only 6 months old when i bought it, within three weeks it crapped on me, power led started blinking, fan spun up and display went black, i chronicled my rma experience with myth here. The problem was happening randomly enough that it took myth more than a month to fix.

Two weeks ago I bought a clevo laptop from gentech Np8454 with 2070 oled, and last week it gave me the same thing, power led blinking, fan spinup and then it shutdown. It happened intermittently, once on monday and the other two times on saturday.

So maybe it's because clevo is cheaper than other brands that the quality is lower? or maybe it's just me LOL

but a few things i notice about the NP8454 oled

1. The oled screen on the clevo i believe is of lower quality than the one in aero, or maybe i just got a bad one The left side is brighter, i noticed this when opening a private tab in firefox (in a well lit room), the solid purple was not uniform and when i set a solid black color on the screen and turned off the light i could see the "backlight bleed" (well it's a oled glow) on the left and right edges only the middle portion is really black
2. And speaking of oled screen, the behaviour is quite odd, going from 90% brightness to 100 not only the brightness changes but also the colors especially the darker ones. Gray for example will be darker at 100% brightness compared to 90% initially i thought it has to do with PWM but now i'm not sure
   
3. The fan was aggressively quiet even in performance mode, so the laptop ran really hot i had to put a 25% offset and the temperature went down around 10 degrees or so
   
4. The keyboard gets really hot especially the part over the gpu even when the gpu is only 60 70 degree
   
5. It seems like the nvdia gpu is always on everytime i opened the fan control it always shows the temperature of the gpu even though it has optimus, in my old laptop with optimus it won't show the gpu temp if it's not on.
6. The gpu fan won't spin up right after boot and it scared me, i thought there's something wrong with the fan but i think the temperature is low enough that it didn't need to spin (and also because the heatsink of the cpu and gpu is connected so i believe when the temperature is low enough the cpu fan is enough to dispose the heat of both)
   
7. The battery wear level went up from 1 to 5 percent within a week and i only used the laptop on battery twice, and in both times the battery only went as low as 80%
   
8. I couldn't start my app that uses nvidia gpu on battery the app will launch and then close itself
9. and lastly the problem i mentioned above, the first time the power led was blinking green and it was right after windows update, i ran unstream app the window didn't show so i opened task manager and it froze then i got a blue screen and then it shutdown by itself, the other two times it was blinking yellow or ornge, the first time was when i opened virtual box but it didn't start so i opened task manager and it froze then the blinking and fan spinup so i pressed the power button to shut it down, the last time it was right after power up i started vlc to watch a video suddenly i heard the fan spin then i noticed the power led blinking then it shutdown by itself
10. (minor?) freezes, a day after i received the laptop, i safely ejected my usb and so windows gave the notification of usb is safe to be unplugged, i wanted to clear that notification so i pressed the new notification button on the bottom right of the screen and it froze, the second time i just opened task manager after starting virtual box and it froze

so hopefully my experience can better inform other poeple considering to buy clevo or if people have similar experiences they can tell me how to fix it or what I'm doing wrong

UPDATE: 10/2/19 it happened again last night after turning off fast start up but this time i had my phone with me so i took a video of it. This time during shutdown it froze power led blinking orange fan spinup and then bluescreen with driver power state failure and shutdown by itself. I opened the minidump and it says acpi and pci sys which is very generic (both dumps have the same thing).
And as I was about to ship the laptop back it happened again, first the mouse froze i couldn't move it or press the mouse buttons then i press alt f4 to shutdown and it froze (but keyboard was still functioning) during shutdown (this time it was on battery) and then the blinking fan bluescreen and shutdown so i think the first freeze i saw when pressing the new notification is the same thing it's just that i shut it down immediately.
So it's been 5 times now, 3 with blue screens two without. Since the symptom is exactly like my old clevo i believe this is a hardware issue, the time between failures get shorter and shorter so I decided to return it to gentech and maybe change to aero.
The only unpleasant thing is that i have to pay shipping even though it's a defect and i think i'm done with clevo

 

Did you ever try to update their BIOS and EC and see if the problem was solved?
There is no perfect brand anywhere.. Not defending Clevo but I've had my share of problems with Asus and MSI and they are better known brand with crappy post services.. In my opinion..

 

i've dealt with msi warranty service and like you said it was crappy and i had to pay one way shipping let me check if they have a new bios thanks for the suggestion

 

Ask them to send ya the BIOS and EC

 

thanks i couldn't find it on the website

 

You can force programs to open on the IGPU in the nvidia control panel (make sure the fan app is) and monitor what is lighting up the GPU using the usage indicator.

 

thanks for the reply

 

Battery wear is also a guestimate that settles after a while, if it changes rapidly from now it's worth keeping an eye on.

 

ok learning so much just from being on the forum
what's sager policy if they can't reproduce the issue? i'm afraid sager would just ship back the laptop saying cannot reproduce issue
it's so intermiten i'm confused what the actual problem is, yesterday i used the laptop almost 10 hours straight with no problem but the day before it gave me the blinking led and shutdown twice
i'm debating whether i should return the laptop

 

1) I agree with checking for updated BIOS and EC.

2) Consider trying Obsidian-PC's Fan Control application. You can use their profiles' logic instead of EC's to keep temps regulated. (Not free but you can install for free to test to see if it works)

3) If you haven't backed up yet, do so, and try a fresh install of Windows. Sometimes the image they use to set things up with is less than stable. Gather up the drivers you will need first. Obsidian-PC's Driver app makes that super simple if the model is supported. (Not free tho)

4) I had to repaste my Clevo after 3 months. Perhaps you system has a marginal paste job and needs to be redone.

 

Your best bet is to find the easiest way to reproduce an issue and hand that over.

It's also worth double checking you are not getting surges on the house AC.

 

Thanks all for the advice
i will check obsidian's pc thing
well it was repasted by gentech a week ago so ...

i couldn't reproduce yesterday either, actually i called sager and talked to Allen he said that if they couldn't reproduce the issue the motherboard will be replaced so i asked if they replace motherboard for unreproducible issues and he said "we do other things"

how do i check for power surge?

if it's really really random i'll just use the laptop since then it doesn't make any difference

 

I've got the same rig (albeit, 9980HK and 1080p144hz panel instead) so I'll weigh in:

I think this is actually a design limitation of the current crop of OLED screens. The jump from 90% brightness -> 100% brightness causes the entire display to dim down because it generates too much heat or uses too much power. From memory, LinusTechTips mentions this problem in a review of the Razer Blade 15 with OLED panel

Mine is quite the opposite. I'm guessing this is purely a BIOS/EC issue that was fixed (or maybe over-compensated for if my BIOS revision is newer). Fortunately it still runs silently for day-to-day desktop use. I use Throttlestop with an underclock+undervolt for desktop duties though.

The Clevo fan control app is GPU accelerated for some odd reason. It might be something to do with the shift to Windows Apps.

This is pretty normal. The battery wear indicator is fairly unreliable.

This will be purely a driver or OS issue. DDU and perhaps a clean windows install might be worth investigating before looking into hardware issues.

Blinking usually indicates the machine is asleep or hibernated. I highly recommend going into your Power Options, go into "what the power buttons do" and turn off Fast-Startup. Fast-Startup doesn't actually shutdown your computer, but closes all programs and hibernates instead. With how fast machines boot these days with SSDs or NVME drives, it's almost useless.

I can only speak from experience here, but this sounds suspiciously like what I encountered with my rig.

My BIOS shipped with a default -100mv core undervolt and -100mv cache undervolt.

The core undervolt is fine, but it turns out the -100mv cache undervolt was way too low, but not low enough to cause immediate crashes. I set it to -50mv cache undervolt in throttlestop (or you can use XTU) and it all cleared up with no problems.

 

thanks very much for the reply
i tried disableing fast startup but it was grayed out, the first time it was blinking green and green usually says sleep according to the manual and the blue screen says invalid power state so i thought it was confused between sleep and wake, but the second and third time it was orange and it's the usb power thing so i was really scared because the last time it happened to my other clevo laptop it was a motherboard issue
how do you know that it was undervolt out of the box? just run xtu?

 

You'll need to click the "link" on that window that says "Change settings that are currently unavailable". Then you can un-check Fast Startup.

Hmm, I know mine also has an annoying BIOS/EC issue where it doesn't fully shutdown with my USB-C dock plugged in (HP Elite Dock). Basically everything but the power button light goes off.

XTU is one way. You can just change the Cache undervolt and test. -50mv is safe on mine, but you may need to experiment.

I prefer Throttlestop and set it to autostart.

 

Thanks
i turned off fast start up rebooted the pc and now i see the spinning dots during bootup
used the pc for a few hours and it happened again during shutdown LOL good thing is that i had my phone with me so i took a video of it
so at this point i'm returning the laptop to gentech and i think i'm done with clevo

 

i don't think it's surge the last time it happened it was on battery

 

That might point to a component issue on the board then, power draw is limited on the battery by the system.

 

only the bright colors became brighter and dark colors became darker

i received my aero yesterday as a replacement and it didn't have that problem and no oled glow "backlight bleed" my theory is that clevo uses a cheaper panel same model but those who do not qualify for other brands just my theory