**OFFICIAL W860CU/NP8690 Owners Lounge**

hi i was wandering how much would my clevo w860cu be worth it has 8gb of 1866 memory, i7 820qm oem, 750gb 7200 hdr, intel extreme wireless, clevo 5870m, 1080p glossy screen, windows 7 ultimate, and a dvd read and write drive.

 

Head to the marketplace and make a new thread askiing this in the "price check" section.
I would say $700 max

 

Hmm... I'm gonna try that! Thanks for the tip, I'll post an update as soon as I get it done.

 

Any issues about fan speed and noise for w860cu ? I'm too lazy for read all previous post and my notebook is extremely noisy, it's unbearable !

 

Clean your fans.

 

How long have you had your laptop?

When was the last time you used compressed air to blow the dust out of the heatsinks and fans?

What are your temps under loads? idle?

What sort of noises are your fans making? does it sound like the brushes/bearings are worn out? Are your fans just ramped up really high?

 

I have my notebook since 1 year. My temps are so normal. (In load, CPU 45°C and gpu 64°C). I think that the gpu fan do the main part of the noise. I will try to open and clean up the laptop. If this persists, I will take a look on the vBios side.

 

It worked, thanks!

 

Disaster, little brother vomited on my keyboard and now a bunch of the keys aren't working properly. If I hit R then 3r appears, if I hit 0, 8,or 6 then 086 appears and so on. I cleaned the keyboard and brushed under the keys and it's still doing it. What size screwdriver will I need to open it? Or is there another way to fix it?

 

You will need a set of those eye glass screw drivers or something around that size like a P0 phillips head screwdriver should work. A small flat head to maybe aid in prying any of the panels off as well.

Good luck, we hope nothing was critically damaged.

Post again if you have any further questions.

 

In worst case, you can buy a new keyboard or use an external one.

I googled a bit: Sager Genuine NP8690, NP8760 And Clevo W860CU, W870CU Chiclet Style Replacement Keyboard

 

Now that 8GB SODIMMs are affordable, has anyone tried putting 2x8=16GB in the W860CU ? Can it handle 16GB and is a bios update necessary? I'm about to buy 2x4GB but if 2x8 is possible I would go for that. Need it for work.

 

Hi. Wanna ask if anyone encountered this problem: my 8690 now has a habit of shutting itself down suddenly within minutes of loggin into windows. I can turn it back on immediately with no other problems. Funny part is that if it survive that few minutes, my laptop can go for hours without any incident....

 

I believe you are stuck with a limit of 8GB of RAM on your system. I have checked the specs for this particular laptop and everything is indicating that 8GB is your limit.

 

Could you give us a bit more of a description as to what is going on with your laptop?

You state that "funny part is that if it survives that few minutes" how frequently do you have to try and boot up your laptop before it stays on?

How long have you had this issue?

Are there any error messages or beeping noises? Anything else that seems out of place?

 

4-5 times of shutting down before it finally stops.

And I think I might have found the problem; a certain HotKey.exe from Clevo was constantly triggered; new instances keep popping out while the previous always seems to fail. I ended up having a whole bunch of icons from that .exe in my taskbar till my lappie shut down. So I went to safe mode, msconfig and remove it from the startup list. Then the problems just disappear...

 

While it is not officially supported by intel, 16gb ram will work.

Crucial guarantees that Eurocom's Cougar w860cu (the excact same machine) can be upgraded to 16gb ram: Computer memory upgrades for EUROCOM W860CU Cougar Laptop/Notebook from Crucial.com

 

So, after removing the hotkey.exe from the startup list under msconfig, the issue just goes away temporarily?

If that is the case, you may want to try doing a complete wipe and re-installation of your OS and drivers to see if that will resolve your issues.

 

Suddenly my laptop wont boot, it beep twice and that's it nothing happen after that
Any suggestion or idea? Thx

 

There are a couple things you can try.
Remove the battery and unplug the power, push the On button several times to discharge any residual power. Then put the battery back in, plug it back in and try to turn it on.

Reseat your RAM. If you thinks its properly installed, remove it anyway and put it back in. Remove then put back in the CMOS battery.

 

thx a lot for your reply....ok I've been done all that you suggest and it works again now

but I'm afraid this will happen again someday...just my bad feeling...I think something wrong with the GPU expecially the heatsink, I'm thinking about buying a 6970m heatsink from eurocom

 

fireedo - Are you overclocking your CPU of GPU? Which powersupply are you using? The standard 120W is probably not enough for the 920xm and the 6970m.

If you play BF3 and overclock the 920xm - is there a big difference in minimum fps from overclocking?

 

Definitely not OK to just be using a 120W power supply...
alienware power supply was suggested 50 pages back in this post...
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...official-w860cu-np8690-owners-lounge-502.html

 

Hi, I have a 2 year old sager np8690, and I would like to replace the cd-drive with an SSD. Can anyone tell me how to go about doing this? Is it as simple as just removing the cd-drive and plugging in the SSD? Or do I need to buy a HD caddy and stuff?

Thank you!

 

You'll need to buy a 12.7mm optical bay to SATA HDD caddy. You can find them around or contact most retailers for one. Mount your SSD inside that and then replace the optical drive with the whole assembly. It will mount just like the optical drive did. You may need to pull the front bezel off the optical drive and put it on the caddy if you want it to match the system.

Of note, your machine has SATA II ports, so SATA III SSD's are going to run slower than they would otherwise.

 

Hint: use the ssd on the main harddrive spot and place the harddrive in the caddy, because the caddy speed will only be sata 150 where the main harddrive spot has a sata 300 speed.

(If this is not true then point me to it )

 

It's not true, the controller is the same and often the dvd rom dosen't support sata2 (300mb/s). => It dosen't matter which port you will use for the ssd.

 

Ah, ok well thanks for the info then

 

I'd still recommend putting the SSD in the main spot for safety's sake. If the caddy comes loose for some reason (mine didn't have a screw hole to secure it in), it's better if the secondary drive comes loose than your nice new SSD system drive.

 

I wasn't aware of this. Good to know that my OCZ Vertex 3 will run faster in my P170EM when I get it.

 

That's your opinion. My important data are stored on the hdd. It's a good reason to let the hdd in the main spot. We don't need to discuss it, everyone has to decide for itself.

 

This is very true. I just know every now and then I overlook something that seems simple in hindsight, so I figured it was something worth mentioning for consideration's sake. It was only a recommendation on my part, not a statement of fact.

 

Now my notebook is complete. I just fitted a ATI 6990M in it. It works pretty well. Thank you guys for this great forum.

mfg
Arne

 

Mind if I ask where you picked up the card from and for how much?

 

Congratulations!

Are you overclocking your CPU?

 

Hi guys,

I bought the card at ebay germany (that is where I life ). I bought it for 315 € + some money for liquid metal cooling pads for the gpu core and some normal cooling pads for the ram. It's a used card from a p150hm, at least the bios says so.

I used the heatsink mod like it is explained for the Ati 6970m. It's nearly the same for the Ati 6990m.

And yes I overclock my cpu and the gpu. When I used furmark and TS Bench simultaneously. I got stable values at 4x2,8 GHz (limited TDP@62 W) with hyper threading, 4x3,1 GHz without hyper threading and both times 760 MHz for gpu core undervolted to 1,05 V.

In games higher values are possible, because both benchmarks use GPU and CPU up to 100% the whole time. But it is nice to know, that in games it can run stable.

Any higher values higher than taht my notebook turns off, bluescreen or ati driver restart. I always turn off hyper threading, because ARMA2 works better without it.

I use a 180 W power supply and I think my hardware is at its limit now.


I am pretty happy with the results.

 

That is very nice! I really want to get the 920xm for this system, but I am a bit worried about how much power draw the mobo can handle. After researching quite a bit it seems like 2.8GHz is a nice compromise

BTW, do you play any games such as BF3 or Civ V? I'm very eager to see if there is a noticeable effect on the minimum fps going from 4x 1.73 Ghz to 2.8 Ghz.

Good job!

 

The 920xm is a nice cpu. I am just playing ARMA2 and there was a huge differenz between my old 820qm and an overclocked 920xm. I am sorry, I just play this game, so I cannot help with battlefield or else. The improvement depends on what is your bottleneck, CPU or GPU. If the GPU is at its limit there won't be an improvement in fps... You need to monitor your system while gaming, so you can see weather it will help you to upgrade. For CPU monitoring the win Taskmanager is suffizient for GPU I use GPU-Z.

I am also a little worried about my mobo, but it works yet...

 

Update fyi:
After some time off gaming I got random bluescreens or my noteboke simply turned off. The reason was, that I used to much energy. For the first hour the battery could deliver some, but after a while it was empty. I reduced the values for GPU to stock clocks and removed the battery. That did the trick. By having no battery in I never had any bluescreens or else. Using the same values with battery my notebook will fail after a while.

happy easter holidays everyone
Arne

 

Hi im new here, i was reading about the bios update that kizwan did. Its downloaded in a .rar file. Can anybody give me a walk through on how to flash the bios with it?

 

Instructions should be found here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/416916-clevo-bios-thread.html

Let the community know if this helps.

 

The bios that kizwan modded, is not an update, all it does is unhide settings in the bios, advanced chipset controll etc.

With it you can turn off hyper threading and other features like increasing max power usage of the cpu and increase cpu multiplier if you have an 920/940xm.

But if you want to overclock its better to use throttlestop because it doesnt require bios flashing wich could fail ofcourse.

 

Thanks guys, that thread was very useful and it worked. I know that it just unlocks some random features but its another thing for me to go through and learn more about now. Will check out throttle stop next.

 

Dear Oan, and other forum members

Once again i would request your help.
My long journey of torture with my w860cu is continuing.
seel before: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...0cu-np8690-owners-lounge-544.html#post8318608

Now today after a long wait I got my 6970m card, it is from a clevo machine (as the seller sais), it has a blue pcb color, but it does not give a screen when put in to the machine. Only the leds come up but the screen is blank.
We tried with an external monitor as well, the result is the same.
The guy whom I bought the card from sais that he tried this card in an older acer model and worked, so the card is most probably not dead.

The guy whom I bought the card from got a dell nVidia quattro 4000m with him.
We tried in and it gave the proper booting screen.
with it it started to boot up the os, but after the same amount of time the beeping sound came up again. (see previous post linked in)
Because we did not have a proper heatsink we used it without it, but monitored the temperature with hand to avoid overheating.

so in brief:
we tried a 4870 in it, it boots up, the bios is reachable, the os starts to boot, but the screen is funny like if it is in 8 or 16 colors. The beeping sound comes then shuts down itself.
my old 5870 is dead.
we tried an nvidia quattro 4000, it boots up, the bios reachable, the os starts to boot, the colors and the screen are ok, the beeping comes, but we did not waited for shutdown because we did not have a heatsink on.
the 6970m does not give a screen.

Does anybody have any clue what could be wrong?
Or do you think I should try to find a service with custom repair and analysis capabilities, such as to find an electronic problem at the motherboard (probably).
I am now thinking to try selling this notebook as parts and find another brand which have support in my country.
Do anybody have any thoughts what should I try further more?

Thanks in advance to the community.

 

perhaps you have a power problem. have you tried taking out the battery, holding down power button, plugging in laptop, and trying to boot?
problems with the screen are very annoying you have to troubleshoot a lot of things so i think maybe you do that and also see if anything on the motherboard is obviously burnt/ any wires unplugged.
there are some obvious monitor problems on this website; rather helpful. http://www.daniweb.com/hardware-and...-screen-not-working-any-help-much-appreciated
Good luck, dude!

 

Hi!

Figured this is probably the right place to post this, I have a Clevo w860cu currently with 4GBs of RAM and I'm looking to upgrade this aspect. Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure of the specifics in terms of how much and what RAM I can use, so any information that can be passed on would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

 

W860CU can take 16 GB RAM (2 x 8 GB sticks).

 

I just did a scan on Crucial's website and it said my machine can only support up to 8GB, 4GB per slot - is this incorrect then?

 

Yeah. The model only officially supports 8GB, but plenty here have put in 16GB without issue. 8GB sticks didn't exist when the model was released.

 

I'm not sure if you need a quad core i7 to get the 16 GB, but my R2 only officially supports 8 GB, but I installed 16 GB with no issues. Biggest thing is if the BIOS allows for the memory, as lots of PM55 chipsets support 16/32 GB sticks depending if you have 2 or 4 RAM slots on your motherboard. Also my R2 POSTs noticeably slower with 16 GB vs 8 GB.