What would be the implications of replacing the 6700K with a 7700K on the P870 model?

With Intel's formal announcement of the 7700K series processor and it apparent backwards compatibility with the 6700K series chip what would be the challenges in making a CPU transplant on a Clevo portable like the P870MKIII model laptops?

According to the specs the 7700K is capable of higher clocking speeds.
It uses the same socket but has a higher heat dissipation requirement.

When clocking and the performance changes to the chip come in to play it seems that there is somewhere between a 10-25% boost in CPU-intensive tasks.

Does the P870 MKIII have sufficient cooling capabilities to keep from frying the silicon?
Will there need to be another firmware update to take full advantage of its capabilities?
Can the motherboard handle a chip that pushes it all just a bit harder?

I would not expect to run out today to buy a 7700K just for the boost (but some of you performance benchmarking kamakazi will). But this might be an upgrade in a year's time when the shiny-newness rubs off of the 7700K and any sort of firmware upgrades get flushed out.

What are your feelings on this? Is someone willing to try it out?

 

from what I remember, 7700K has higher power draw at stock and you'd have to make sure the adapter has headroom first and foremost.

 

at stock the difference in power draw and heat dissipation are negligible. and in a P870 machine even overclocks are not a problem, especially since the 7700k seems to require less voltage at identical clocks when compared with the 6700k.

if say the only hurdle here is a proper Bios / EC update to make kaby lake compatible, thats it

 

The DM3 models will be getting official updates, for the average user there wont be too much reason to upgrade. For the tweaker it means higher core and memory clocks and higher sweet spots for 24/7 settings.

 

I know that there are feature-sets within the 7700K that would not be supported with the Z170 express chipset (PCI wise) but still there would be some advantages.

Even if you just clocked it at the same level that you would be getting with the 6700K there has to be some boost in processing efficiency in the architecture. That alone might make it interesting to buy a chip and to benchmark like-for-like.

Where I get concerned is in pushing the 7700K to something like 4.9-5 GHz and what power consumption would do in a limited package like a Clevo laptop. That heat needs to go somewhere.

Sometimes I wish there was a better was to boost cooling efficiency other than to use a Tragus AWES7 cooling mat that boosts air-flow in to the bottom of the laptop.

 

Wasn't the 7700K at 5GHz drawing more or less 100-120W?

 

Don't need EC update, should just need updated microcode.

 

Nope, won't boot with just microcode. Needs entire new code base (BIOS/ME/EC).
It's comparable to Sandy to Ivy Bridge upgrade path.

 

So it is not a trivial swap-out of just a chip in the socket (I thought so). There is quite a bit of accompanying work that would need to be done throughout the entire low-level software suite for a laptop.

I would expect that you would also need to do some other things to improve heat transfer (delidding), liquid metal thermal transfer compound and enhanced air flow (or that rather impractical liquid cooled laptop chiller unit hanging off the back of the machine).

It is up for grabs on if dual 330 watt supplies through the combiner box would be enough or if you would need to bump that up to the recently available 750 watt power brick (especially if you were running dual 1080's in SLI that were also overclocked). I would want to put an ammeter on the 19.5 volt supply to see if we were running up around 30-40 amps DC from the supply. Those power connectors on the back of a Clevo/Sager are good but that might be asking just a little too much of them.

Or you can just spend your days sitting around in a meat cooler at a restaurant playing Crysis or Witcher.

 

I hope you're able to get it to work. But I am not fussed either way.

Sent from my SM-N910G using Tapatalk

 

Have you applied my thermal pad layout guide?

 

Oooh! I see what you are doing there, providing a path to the heat sink for the DDR5 memory chips and what appears to be the power chokes at the top of each card.

Neat idea! Since I will be pulling off the heat sink to do some experimentation with a fully shielded SLI bridge cable (to improve frame rates) I can add those pads. I have a couple of blocks of that stuff sitting around here.

thanks for the suggestion!

 

Be aware pads were already there, the above configuration is reducing the gap between the card and the heatsink (thinner pads = closer contact) which means the thermal transfer gap between the core and the heatsink (and everything else) is reduced maximizing cooling performance.

 

I ran in to that when I was working on fixing the CPU temperatures on Panasonic toughbooks. The best material I had found for the pads was Fujipoly Ultra Extreme that has a thermal conductivity of 17 W/mK (higher than almost every paste type compound other than liquid metals). I bought an assortment and copper shim blocks to make up for the nearly 2.5 mm of clearance in the Toughbook CF-30.

Panasonic toughbook heat pipes are a "joke" and I ended up applying heat paste to the other end of the pipes, where they transfer heat to the bottom plate as well. It took the CPU temperatures down 6 C over factory specs.

Since there is GelID GC-extreme already on the GPU's and CPU I would not want to try to one-up that. My reasons for being in there would be primarily to try out of fully shielded SLI ribbon cable.

 

How much will that config lower temps?

 

That's a good question; since the copper heat sink has a thermal conductivity of 385 W/mK and if the lid on the CPU/GPU is aluminum (205 W/mK) or steel ( 50 W/mK) (higher is better) and most thermal compounds are in the 8-12 W/mK range (the pads I found are 17 W/mK) the thickness of the pad is acting like a thermal insulator between the two metals.

The thicker the insulator, the less efficient the heat transfer between the CPU/GPU and the copper heat sink.

Ideally if the surfaces were perfectly flat the heat transfer would be only limited by the base metal on the chip and any thermal filler under the lid (reasons for de-lidding and applying new thermal compound under the caps).

If you reduce the insulating thickness you improve the ability to transfer heat. There is a big difference between the best thermal compounds (in that 12-17 W/mK range) and metal-on-metal.

Ideally the chip lid and the heat sink would me made of diamond (1000 W/mK) but even if the manufacturers changed out the chip lids to silver metal it would be much better (406 W/mK (eight times better than steel, twice better than aluminum)).

 

Most part of IHS is made of copper. What do you think would happen if it was made of aluminum and you used Liquid metal? And Intel's engineers know certainly very well that steel isn't a very good for transferring heat.

 

Further testing beyond my own has shown similar results to what I got with mine, about a rough 12C reduction in load temperatures on the GPU along with a moderate boost in core frequencies.

Note that the pads themselves are fine for the VRMs the fact that this will help them is a bonus and makes the pad quality less important, in this case it's all about how the heatsink itself sits and how it makes contact with the core.

So long as the pads are reasonable (5-6 W/mK) and are made uniformly they will get the job done. I use a set of 6W/mK and they work very nicely.

I have been working closely with Sager and all this data has been fed back to Clevo, i'm sure in some ways I am being a pain

Note the CPU lid is nickel plated copper.

 

Nice. I'll be sure and recommend that to anyone looking to repaste this model.

 

So I should expect games like Witcher 3 to be in the high 70s or Unigine Heaven to be in the high 60s? Assuming I get it right of course I'm about to give this a shot. Will let you know. Right now with Witcher 3 or GTA V, I peak at 90 on both GPUs. Uninige after multiple loops was at 80.

 

You should see the 12C reduction in the heaviest workloads with reductions being less under lighter workloads.

 

Thanks for confirming. Something didnt go as expected, so I'll have to take it apart this weekend. Temp under load is down 5-10 degrees C. Idle *appears* to be the same (mid to high 40s to low 50s) but the fan seems to be running much more often now. I'll just double check everything - something seems off.

 

Idle will act a bit differently thanks to the vapor chamber cooling.

 

Got it. About the pad between the CPU and GPU heat sink - I replaced it with a 0.5mm thermal pad (6 W/mk) - any risks there? That was the only non standard thing I did. Any reason not to use thermal paste here? What't the theory on desired heat flow from here? From the CPU I would think, but for a gaming laptop, I assume the GPUs would be hotter.

Thanks a lot for your guide and help!


Edit: All fixed. Had 2 of the 1.0 mm pads rotated 90 degrees and so half off. I also repasted using Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut for the first time, and it may be my new favorite over IC Diamond. I am seeing the 10-12 degree C drop under load, and my idle is in the low 40s (most importantly, fan is barely audible).

 

im not a sure understand, is it will fit for our 870dmg or not? i mean about cpu 7700k. anyone can explain me?

 

anyone help me please

 

Stock firmware won't boot with KBL CPU, so don't waste your money.
I have early alpha mods (POC) in testing to support KBL on original P7/P8 DM-Series, but for the time being I don't have the time to continue development...

 

It will fit, physically. It will not work without a BIOS, EC, & ME firmware update that can support it.

 

@Prema - welcome back ;-)

They will with KB update BIOS and EC 1.06.01 for DM2/3

 

can i help to you testing this alpha version of bios? can we do it together?

 

Talking about original P870DM & P7xxDM running KBL...

Spoiler

THX! I have tester, but I don't even have the time to answer mails atm...

 

Yup, only DM2/3 as per my email - as you probably know/can guess Clevo did this as a lot of companies still had stock of the DMs when the KM came out so they santed to be able to offer the KB CPUs in their last stock of the DM2/3. DM KB would be nice though, good to hear you're working on it ;-)

 

Hi, bro! i will be happy got this Mod of bios and will test your perfect mod and do overclocks my cpu. is it possible?