*** Official Clevo P370EM / Sager NP9370 Owner's Lounge ***

Why not just adjust it when you get it? Lie the heatsink flat and measure them out with the card lying on it.. Have a pair of scissors ready to cut down any original pads.

 

Hello all,

I'm unsure if some of you remember me, but I'm back because my buddy finally got around to ordering a 980M for his NP9370. Some say it's as easy as dropping it in, others say you need to do a BIOS flash, a VBIOS flash, or just a quick edit to your display driver's .inf file.

I've downloaded the Eurocom P370EM BIOS that supposedly makes the laptop accommodate the 980M. I'm simply unsure where to start. I'd hate to install the card and have the PC not boot properly or just start installing BIOS after BIOS to no avail. Would greatly appreciate any help. Thanks.

 

The BIOS may simply mitigate the need for modified drivers. Step 1 flash the bios, step 2 check the heatsink fits ok, step 3 install the card and boot it.

 

Understood. Thank you for the concise reply. I simply have one more question for now, and that is to help me understand how to install this BIOS? Here is a photo showing the folder's contents. The .txt document gives no instructions, and Eurocom's website gave no instructions on how to install it either. I'm assuming it's executing step1.exe and then step2.bat. Otherwise, I'm unsure about this one as well.

 

You'll need to check with your provider of the file to be sure, we always include instructions when sending ours.

 

Makes sense. I mistakenly thought that it's very similar or identical between all of the resellers and how they go about this process. Thank you again for the help @Meaker@Sager! I will ultimately come back to share my experience on this matter.

 

It's 2AM and I'm about ready to go to bed, but before I do that I thought I'd inquire about this one bizarre issue I'm stuck at.

The i7-3840QM in here will not go past 1.2GHz any longer. There are no useful settings in the BIOS to help with this issue. Any help is greatly appreciated. I know for a fact it's running at 1.2GHz because the physics score in 3DMark Fire Strike has decreased greatly. HWiNFO is also telling me that the CPU is at 1.2GHz.

Otherwise, everything is running great now. I put the 980M in with new pads and thermal paste. Temperatures are great, and 3DMark Fire Strike scores the 980M two times faster than the 680M that was in this laptop previously. I will say, it's very picky with drivers, but NVIDIA's driver version 399.24 works perfectly. I never installed any new BIOS because the other ones will not execute properly on this version of Windows 7 for whatever reason.

Again, thanks for the help guys.

EDIT: I'd like to say that my Windows power plan is set to maximum performance. I've tried toggling the power plan to something else then back to maximum performance to no avail.

 

Typically Throttlestop can remove any throttling. You'll need an older version (<7 or 8) to work. I know it can be used to remove battery throttle (2ghz limit) if you want to run 4GHz+ on battery.

 

I just tried using ThrottleStop to no avail. The only way I can get the system back up to 3.8GHz is by shutting the system down, unplugging the power supply, plugging it back in, and then rebooting. I run Fire Strike and the system throttles the CPU to 1.2GHz every time at the last 5 seconds or so of the benchmark. The Chicony power supply is rated for 300W, and the system is only pulling 170W between the CPU and the GPU according to HWiNFO. GPU temperature peaks at 84°C, and CPU temperature peaks at 78°C. Intel XTU installs but won't launch, so I can't use Intel XTU even if I wanted to. I have no clue what to do from here on out other than recommend my friend try a new power supply, but I highly doubt the power supply has anything to do with the issue.

 

Sounds like it's a panic that you drawing too much and then it locks it until it's power cycled.

 

Wait you need to unplug the PSU? When the system is running and this issue starts, does the AC power light turn out and the system switches to battery?

I'm not getting how the CPU is reaching 78C at 1.2GHz. Also I have never seen TS not eliminate all CPU throtting if used correctly. Checking clock modulation, chipset modulation, and set multiplier, then clicking "Turn On" should restore full clocks.

XTU won't stop throttling. To overclock with it though older versions are better. I typically use 3.2 but 4s and 5s should work too.

 

Let me describe the problem again in detail.

The laptop throttles the 3840QM to 1.2GHz during Fire Strike. This is now happening after the installation of the 980M. The 980M is yielding more than double the performance of the 680M in the graphics portion of Fire Strike so I don't think something is wrong with that side of the coin.

Towards the end of Fire Strike, the CPU gets throttled to 1.2GHz and I cannot get it out of that state. Even with ThrottleStop, I cannot get the CPU to kick the multiplier past 12. I checked clock and chipset modulation, I set the multiplier, then selected "Turn On" to no avail. I disabled SpeedStep and C1E too to no avail, so I put everything back to stock. The only way bring it back to life is by turning the laptop completely off, unplugging the power supply from the laptop, plugging it back in, and then booting it up. Otherwise, the laptop will reboot at 1.2GHz if the power supply doesn't get unplugged and plugged back in.

Believe me or not, I backed up all of my buddy's information for him, installed Windows 10, and then installed Eurocom's P370EM BIOS that accommodates the 980M (using FreeDOS). Still, the laptop behaves the same way as before.

I did install an earlier version of XTU and what I'm trying to do right now is lower the wattage that the CPU can pull and go from there. Otherwise, I'd greatly appreciate other recommendations. My friend said he's willing to buy a new power supply if he has to. If you don't think that's the issue though, please offer your two cents. Thanks.

EDIT: Took the CPU wattage limit to 40W from the default 56.25W to no avail. This is making no sense.

EDIT2: I ran Userbenchmark on the laptop and noticed that the CPU throttles itself to 1.2GHz once the 980M kicks in for the graphical portion of the test. I wish I could get my hands on a VBIOS for the 980M that would allow me to undervolt it. Of course, the stock VBIOS would allow me to overvolt it but not undervolt it.

EDIT3: It's late again, but tomorrow I'm going to extract the existing VBIOS off of the 980M that's in the laptop, edit the .rom file with the Maxwell II BIOS Tweaker tool, and then flash the card with the edited .rom file. I'm simply going to edit it to allow for undervolting. If I can get by with this trick then I should be good to go. Otherwise, my last resort is recommending my buddy get a stronger power supply.

 

You can't directly undervolt with Maxwell II Bios tweaker. What you can do is offset the boost table, then select a lower boost bin as default. This should get you an effective undervolt at the same clocks.

 

Thank God I finally figured it all out. A 980M is definitely possible on a P370EM / NP9370. This was a full two day's worth of a challenge because there are no guides on doing it and there is little information on to how go about it step by step.

I undervolted the 980M core voltage to 950mV. 975mV was slightly too much and caused the CPU to hard throttle at 1.2GHz. 962mV seemed to work fine for the little time of testing I did on it, but I went with 950mV for assurance because this is not my laptop and I don't have a whole lot of time to spend experimenting with it. The system does not throttle and behaves very normal now while running Fire Strike. Yes, performance was lost due to capping the 980M's core voltage at 950mV, but all performance loss can be regained by simply cranking up the core speed slider to the max (+135) in NVIDIA Inspector. Editing the boost table did not work as expected when using Maxwell II BIOS Tweaker. The yellow portion would not shift, but the clock speeds within the fixed yellow portion would change. So, that's why I resorted to decreasing the two values in the attached image to 950mV. Otherwise, I flashed the system BIOS with Eurocom's BIOS which is made to accommodate the 980M. Ironically, it states it's powered by premamod.com. The only way to flash the BIOS was to make a FreeDOS USB and execute the two parts of the BIOS installer through FreeDOS itself. The system will now take any driver version from NVIDIA, but the system did take the trusty v399.24 NVIDIA driver with the stock system BIOS though.

I will be making a detailed guide to the best of my ability soon. Thanks for all the help previously though.


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Happy new year everyone.

Please tell me.
Will the Quadro P5000 or P5200 work with the P370EM?

 

The P5X00 quadro cards that fit are HP models which lack a vbios chip. If you flash and add a vbios chip they work after a driver .inf mod. I am unaware of P5X00 cards which do not require modification.

 

I bought this laptop back around January/February 2013. It was a really great laptop and I loved it. I was planning on watching some 3D movies on it but never got around to that. I did have a couple of minor issues that popped up occasionally which was the screen would turn black (off?) for about 5 seconds and then come back and I got a pop up that the system recovered from a video card (driver?) error. It stopped doing that the last 3 or so years. The other issue I had was sometimes when I was playing a bluray (and sometimes on a DVD) the power would cut on the laptop and I had to turn it back on. I checked HWMonitor and could see that it was the video card was overheating and that's why it would turn off. This happened a few times. Eventually, I was able to blow air through the fans and I saw dust coming out, so I believe that was the problem as it stopped overheating.

It was a great laptop, had great features and built like a tank. The only thing was that over the years, the 2 hard drives got full and I was running out of space. At the end of September 2020, I turned it on and after about 45 minutes of use, the screen went black (off?) although the keyboard was still lit and so were the power and battery leds. I turned it off and then back on and the screen's backlight was on but the screen was still blank (black). No post beep and it didn't boot up. Keyboard would light up and the power and battery leds were on but that's it, just nothing. It looks like it died unexpectingly after about 7.5 years. I went to buy another laptop, took a look at Sager and other companies and was shocked that they don't make them like the this anymore. I don't know if this can be fixed or not, I just put it away in storage. I did buy the extended warranty on it but that's passed. I removed the 2 hard drives and placed them in external enclosures and copied the data off of them. RIP Sager NP9370, I miss you.

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My story: I am helping my friend with his used Eurocom Clevo P370EM. Instead of a faulty 680m (single though, not SLI) we installed my old MSI GTX 675MX 4GB, i guess installed one of first Prema's BIOSes or V2 - not sure about which one exactly. We did this in order to get the MSI's videocard be recognized by the OS (WIN 10, not in UEFI mode) or at least what we thought it would do. So the laptop started to give BSODs: "driver irql not less or equal", "kmode exception not handled", etc. I tried to install fresher drivers, the system got more stable. vBIOS was changed to CLEVO's and back. But the remaining issues were: occasional several attempts to boot from a cold start or even after a restart, battery not charging properly (0% as per Win10). I installed the official Eurocom BIOS from their website (Prema's as per boot screen - the one that supports 900 series) - it managed to be more or less stable for a week. I installed ThrottleStop to disable Turbo, the temps are ok. Quick Start is disabled. Recently it started to freeze after several minutes it booted. After a hard reset - it even freezes when entering and being in the BIOS for a minute or two. In order to eliminate faulty RAM - we added another 8GB to the existing 4GB and tried to boot without this 4GB, detached the SSD - attempts to boot several times and and if it boots it freezes after 1-2 min. Nothing in dump files. It does not even create the dump files. It reacts to FN+9 (fans) during this frozen state though.
I am planning to install my 980m in order to see if it is 675MX that gives these problems.
I am wondering if there is any solution to these issues - either updated BIOS/EC or... Please advise. Thank you.

 

Just an update to my previous message. The freezes were fixed by a fresh CMOS battery.

 

That's interesting, I'm glad it's working now.

 

Where can I source a p377sma motherboard ?
I have this laptop collecting dust, just want to replace mobo and bring it back to life.
Thanks for any help

 

For spares on ebay, you could try asking resellers but it is pretty old now.

 

I tried eBay but couldn’t find any, I’ll ask around.
Thank you

 

There is the members market on here worth checking.