*** Official Clevo P65xHS(-G), P65xHPx(-G) / Sager NP8155, NP8156, NP8157 Owner's Lounge ***

Hello guys, how are you all? I hope things are great there.
I am sorry if my question looks dump but I really new to this "Brand" of laptops and I've just got an advice from another member of this forum to buy Sager Clevo P650HS since I am looking for a "beast" with large storage and I7 7th generation with GTX 1070.

Please I really need your advice since most of you are already owners of such laptops, do you advice me to buy one? and what are the cons. and pros. of those laptops in detail if you could please.

Thank you so much in advance.

 

Is there anyway I can pay you money over Paypal to send you my Clevo P670HS-G gtx 1070 and i7-7820HK, and you take the motherboard out of the shell, and it install it in a new shell with a bigger and better heatsink? You can keep old shell or throw it away, I just want some better cooling. I prefer to keep my screen though, as it overclocks to 102hz surely the shells/heatsinks of laptops don't cost much, its just the actual cpu and gpu, etc that costs a lot of money. PLEASE !!!!! I will pay you for your labor too!

 

Hi Ameer, I've just bought my P650HS-G (EVOC from HIDevolution). So far no regrets. Have a look at some of the reviews around the Forums for some pros and cons. Feel free to ask about specifics.

 

Speaking about specifics: A question as old as time. Sleep vs hibernate: What are you guys using?

 

Thanks for your answer.
what I really want is to hear your opinions as owners not as tech reviewers, you know about the stability,sound,screen brightness and colors,heat and fan noise stuff like that

 

Don't buy the Clevo P670HS-G model. I regret it. Great screen on it, 7820HK overheats even at stock clocks and you only get 2.9ghz on all 4 cores while gaming... lol Buy something from HID, Sager, or Prostar, the other companies are scams (I bought mine from CyberpowerPC).

 

You should keep the 1 core and 2 cores the same default values they were. Underclock 3 and 4 cores. Most apps are single threaded or utilize one thread most of the time. On the other hand, most of the heat comes from the 4 cores running at max simultaneously. In fact, some people switch some cores off to overclock a single core by a lot and not overheat.

 

Hi Ameer, it is still pretty early for me to hold strong opinions (I have only received it last week), still, here are my first impressions:

1. Stability: So far it has been awesome, I haven't touched undervolting, overclocking etc. At stock settings the laptop is yet to crash on me.

2. Sound is pretty ok. Mine comes with a mid range Sound Blaster. I haven't noticed much difference in sound quality when comparing it with my previous laptop (with an on-board Realtek), still speakers are loud enough. The Sabre HiFi DAC makes a difference if you have a nice set of headphones / earphones.

3. Display is great. I'm positively surprised with colours given that I've ordered the Matte version (I've asked HIDevolution to calibre it since I'm too lazy to buy a colorimeter and do it myself). I haven't really gamed with it yet so I don't have an opinion about 120hz G-Sync. Bezels are thick but you stop noticing that after a while.

4. Heat: Well, it can certainly get warm even with fancy paste. Fans tends to kick in somewhat often even if you aren't doing much but production work (to be fair, Windows has been downloading updates in the background). I have no intention of undervolting before I get access to Prema BIOS so I think it is what it is for now. The good news is that fans are not that loud (next to a Razer Blade this is a quiet, properly cooled notebook )

That's what I have to say for now. Keep in mind that IMMV and that I haven't really optimized anything yet ( @Phoenix kindly offered to work some magic on my rig so some of the bads may go away soon). Still, all things considered I have no regrets about buying this notebook so far and would definitely recommend it over similar models.

 

ok, so you recommend that i bought it from HIDEvolution (EVOC right?) and it's better to get the one with I7 7700hq rather than I7 7820hk or what?
I know I'm asking alot of questions but believe I really have a very window to buy a new laptop or else I must wait like 3 to 6 months due to "the nature" of my work.
Thanks alot

 

Hi Ameer, I have no complains about HIDevolution. Fantastic service so far. Some people commented that you may get cheaper deals with other companies, but I am satisfied with the deal that I've got, they have delivered what I was expecting and customer service was amazing so far.

About the CPU, I'm not the best person to give you advice about it. My logic about getting a 7700 vs 7820 was that I really never needed anything more powerful than a midrange I7, plus I have no intention of overclocking or doing anything fancy with the CPU. Still, the 7820 is a better CPU if you think that CPU is going to botteneck your rig (I've put money in a PCIe SSD, so I can't really say a word about overkill specs ). Maybe @Galm has something more useful to say about 7700 vs 7820, like the expected difference in real world performance, heat, etc.

 

You would have to step up to the desktop CPU models as they have the larger chassis.

 

First I would like to thank you all for your quick and useful support and answers, I believe that I'm going to buy one but my last question are:
1-Buy EVOC or SAGER???
2-I7 7700HQ or I7 7820HK?? or should I get 7700HQ with 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD?

 

It depends on what you want to do as far as specs, also if you intend to add anything yourself in the future. The HK gives you a bit more control and lets you get a bit more out of the CPU frequency wise. It should not impact gaming too much but can't be upgraded later.

 

Hey, you are very welcome.

About your two questions, well, you know my setup . Although I admit that I've bought the fast SSDs out of Apple envy and I don't expect a large difference in practice against SATA SSDs. I again summon @Galm to try and convince you to do exactly the opposite of what I did. Still, in all fairness both setups will keep you happy for at least 2 or 3 years. After that we never know. What I can say is that 5 years later my old p150em clevo machine is still pretty ok with its midrange I7 3630QM. Would I be able to extract a little bit more out of an I7 extreme CPU? Perhaps. But in general I think that it wouldn't buy me that much more time since the rest of my system is really showing its age. In general my advice is: Both upgrades are somewhat overkill, choose whichever gives you more satisfaction for your money.

 

That's the advantage and downside of a balanced system, no one thing is holding you back so there is no obvious way to improve it.

 

Any way I can call you directly? I am curious to see if you would let me trade in my 7820HK + gtx 1070 for Sager store credit, and then I pay rest out of pocket to get the desktop model laptop. I know it probably isn't allowed. I just want some kickass portable gaming, size to me doesn't matter, I am traveling to 6 countries soon, so once it gets set up wherever I am living, it doesn't move until I leave that country again, so this isn't really about a laptop for me, its a mini-itx but comes with monitor and keyboard so to speak DDD

 

Sata ssds are where the value is. PCIe is just a money sink. You don't feel the difference unless you're video editing or doing huge file transfers. Boot times, game load times, and general usage feel the same. The 850 Pro actually feels somewhat faster than some pcie ssds I believe for some reason in general usage ( @D2 Ultima correct?)

If you are going to overclock and can afford it get the unlocked cpu. If you 100% are never going to overclock, don't bother, at stock the difference is almost nothing.


HID is great. Sager is better if budget is a tight concern, otherwise HID. LPC-Digital is close to good enough to be recommendable along side HID (I always feel bad saying this because @Meaker@Sager is so great) but Sager really needs to offer liquid ultra if they want to go toe to toe with HID. HID also offers prema. GenTechPC offers the liquid ultra, and LPC-Digital offers Prema, but neither offer both.

Meaker you guys could steal some business from Prostar if you listed your machines on Amazon. Though I would understand if no one actually cares...

The 3630QM is still a decent cpu. The gpus just get outdated too quickly. Otherwise those specs are pretty good.

 

I can't say I've tested it against a 960 Pro or anything but it should in theory due to literally never dropping speed.

Sent from my OnePlus 1 using a coconut

 

I wouldn't go as far as saying that SATA SSDs feels faster than high end PCIes. Those juicy IOP stats and extra random mixed write / read speeds will be there for the 960 Pros, even if there is some instability in sustained speeds. Checkout some benchmarks. Yeah, I know that those benchmarks don't tell the whole story but even in real world "booting" time benchmarks I haven't heard of a 850 pro beating a 960 pro overall. Still a luxury upgrade tough.

My particular use case is IntelliJ IDEA + SQL Developer + a gazillion chrome and ssh tabs plus 3 or 4 docker containers running app servers, databases, etc. Not really heavy CPU wise, but deployment times supposedly adds up to a lot over the course of one year... Or at least ZeroTurnaround claims that a JRebel license worth $475 per year can still save employers a lot of money .

Anyway, I'm with @Galm that for most users savy enough to overclock, a 10% to 20% increase in CPU speed beats a one second differences in boot / deployment time for their $$$. Still, as previously stated we live for overkill (if you have the money why not buying both )

 

Wait what?

No for boot times pcie usually literally loses. Most motherboards take longer to post because of nvme vs a sata so it should be slower. My Dell Precision is slow with a pcie to boot vs my sata laptops.

And I'm also serious about the 850 Pro thing. Like messing around with windows things were at least as snappy if not more compared to pcie for whatever reason. I find most decent Sata ssds all feel the same, the 850 Pro just feels slightly better.

And I'm serious about the game load times too. Literally no difference. Not there is one but it's small. No difference, something else is the bottleneck in that.

Those benchmarks are honestly pretty useless. Those conditions don't really exist in real usage scenarios except in file transfers which I noted pcie feels faster in. I've used both side by side before on the same machine. It's really almost a placebo affect in most tasks.

 

Humm.. That's weird, I'm sure that I've found some boot / application loading time benchmarks where even a PM961 (akin to 960 EVO) would constantly outperform a 850 PRO (in a 200ms to 1.5 sec range). Will try to find it again.

@Phoenix, care to defend the honour of your 960 PRO (My life is all about balancing conflicts and missinformation that I have started )?

 

It's possible it may win on some application boot times. I was more referring to boot and game load times where pcie loses.

The application load times are quite close, not sure I've seen any particularly conclusive evidence. I was more saying Sata and pcie feel about the same to me, but an 850 Pro was just a tad faster. Wasn't even scientific so I suppose I could be wrong, but the difference is so small it doesn't affect anything really.

Edit: it's interesting, I just saw a video that had Civ 5 booting was faster on a pcie ssd. Well, I tried it using the same machines (two P650s) one with a pcie and one with a sata and I didn't get results like that...

(source: http://www.techspot.com/news/67222-storage-real-world-performance-nvme-vs-sata-vs-hdd.html)

My results were more along the lines of this video:

 

I recommend EVOC. 7700HQ and 512GB Samsung 960 evo anyday. I know everyone here likes to pay an extra $50-100 for the pro series of samsung ssd but IMO huge waste of money. Unless you are storing 24/7 camera feed (bad idea on ssd) or video-editing, you won't reach 5TB per year (equivalent to filling and wiping 512GB ssd 10 times). In this case, 850evo will last at least 15 years and 960evo will last at least 20 years. You would have replaced the notebook and the ssd 3-4 times by then. Paying the extra $50-100 for double number of years and the little extra read/write speed is not worth it.

I would say for the usual user in importance 16GB ram > 960 evo > extra ram (only if needed) >7820HK > 2666MHz ram > samsung pro ssd. Even though storage and ram can be replaced/upgraded and the CPU is probably there for life, I would still get 960 evo and at least 16GB ram. For RAM, you get 3.5GB taken away in win10 when you are in optimus mode before using anything. You can't install a PCIe ssd with a SATA m2 ssd at the same time. So you will have to throw away or use the old one as external in the future. That is unless you want to use a 2.5inch ssd and install a PCIe ssd in the future when they are cheaper.

I would also recommend getting the 120Hz panel. There was a huge backlight bleeding fiasco with the default 1080p IPS panel. Not sure if they changed or fixed it.

 

Galm is correct, NVMe takes 3-5 seconds longer during the boot process as the NVMe controller is being initialized. Also, in Windows, they have almost the same Random read speed as regular SATA SSDs thust the perceived speed is the same. Where they shine is in sequential read/write speeds (copying large amounts of data like video files) which isn't the normal usage workflow of most users. I only went for the 2TB 960 PRO because it's 2TB, I want the max space, not because it's faster. synthetic benchmarks are one thing and the actual speed benefit is another. ALL SSDs are fast, period, you can never tell which system has which SSD just by using them if you were not to benchmark them.

 

You are part of Msi? How much for you to take my 7820HK and gtx 1070 laptop motherboard, with those soldered in, and put them in a nice Msi shell with the heatsinks, etc just like yours? I don't mind keeping the same screen I have now if possible... I would pay for labor and parts and shipping both ways... I can't stand Clevo terrible cooling system... would love to have Msi's design... please ; ; im at 35 all 4 cores and even then it overheats sometimes, and your at 42 all 4 cores... sigh...

 

I'm not part of MSI, where did you get that from?

MSI's Cooler Boost Titan is one of the best if not the best cooling solutions on a laptop:



All I had to do to get to 4.2 GHz on all cores with no throttling is to raise the ICC Cache from 75A to 100A, increase the Turbo Short Power Max and Turbo Power max from 200W to 230W and undervolt the COU by -100mV

Try undervolting your CPU by -80 to -100mV and see if your temps get better.

Also, I highly recommend you repaste your CPU using IC diamond with the X Cross method:

The X Cross method is the best in my experience as once the heatsink is fitted, it provides the maximum coverage with the least air bubbles

 

Then I stand corrected. I may have dreamed about evidence that states otherwise trying to justify my SM961 . Other than that I'm with @topenzz, that's exactly how I prioritized my setup: Started with 16GB RAM and a 960 EVO, ended up with 24GB RAM and a SM961 (OEM chip between the 960 evo and 960 PRO), gave up on the 7820hk and 2666Mhz ram.

U-turn to a different subject (smoke bomb). Am I the only one going OCD about the amount of Icons in the notification area by default?

• NVIDIA stuff → Will probably launch GeForce Experience every once in a while to update drivers and maybe "optimize games" (as in... Please set everything to Ultra on my behalf). Don't know if I really need the latest and greatest driver all of the time. Is it worth keeping it here?
• Bluetooth Icon → Yeah, will probably go away with that one too, everything's currently wired
• Realkek HD → Any reason to keep this one?
• Flexikey → Any reason to keep this one? Will Fn + Backspace and Fn + / still work if I remove it?
• Discrete vs MSHybrid → Any reason to keep this one?
• CPU Memory Overclocking → Locked CPU, no reason to Overclock memory, can get to it through Control Center. Any reason to keep it?
• GPU Overclock → Probably not going to touch it. Any reason to keep it?
  
• Control Center → May use it every once in a blue moon... Do I need to keep it? Will Fn + Esc still work if I remove it?

 

Be careful there. The 850 Evo is almost a good value. The 960 Evo is ridiculously expensive in comparison. The Pros of both series are just price hikes from the Evo versions (they have longevity benefits too).

I'm a big believer in storage capacity over speed for ssds at the moment. So I'd recommend an 850 Evo or even better like an X400 or Ultra II or something at a way larger capacity.

Phoenix went for the 2TB so it makes some sense, but he also is always willing to pay whatever for the best. Not everyone has the funds to do that.

 

If you're considering OS start booting to desktop (not considering BIOS startup time etc) then you're going to see NVMe beat SATA because windows is essentially a sequential boot situation.

But the vast majority of functions in windows will not ever touch anything remotely sequential. You can even see it here reported that Intel said the same thing:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/19/optane_ssd_released/

Unfortunately, one of the links they had (where I found the data from the horse's mouth themselves) seems to have gone missing. I guess the industry didn't like them telling users that sequential numbers is smoke and mirrors for the majority of stuff...

You want a strong, reliable, well-working, long-lasting, unbeatable 10-year-warranty-possessing SSD? You want SATA, and you want the 850 Pro.

As for TLC drives, sorry @Galm but I won't touch or recommend non-3D V-NAND SSDs if they're TLC. They don't last long enough or hold their performance under loads well enough to be worth a damn, in my eyes. Crucial MX300 is super cheap sometimes, and uses a mix of MLC and TLC with 3D V-NAND tech. 850 EVO is flat out 3D V-NAND TLC through and through; not as good as a full MLC like Sandisk's Extreme Pro, but it's top of the line stuff, and if one REALLY cannot afford MLC, then I'd take that instead easily. But no plain TLC drives.

 

Phoenix has an open budget . I don't think everyone can afford an ssd with capacity more than 512GB.

I have both 850 evo and 960 evo. I use the 850 evo for ubuntu. I am pretty sure the 960 evo has a slightly faster random read compared to the 850 evo. Not as big as sequential (400-500%) but around 20-30% faster.

Yeah it is ridiculous that Clevo Control Center has 5 notification icons (CC+CPU OC+GPU OC+FlexiKey+GPU switch). You can't even right click on most of them (and the ones that have a right click don't have anything useful). It should be 1 notification icon with right click giving you quick access to each one.

 

CLEVO could add everything in a System tray menu, right click main icon and then inside it would have the other options.
I will send that recommendation, wont hurt trying, i also don´t like the amount of icons...

 

Thanks, while we can prevent autostart processess as a workaround, the definitive fix has to be done by them anyway.

Disabling CCC also means that we lose the mentioned keyboard shorcuts (there are ways to register global shorctus if they are interested). For now I'm just disabling everything. If you are going to do the same make sure to create some icons for the settings application in your desktop or start menu. Some of the applications have less than intuitive names and paths.

I've found the executables with Task Manager. Just open the desired tool (say CCC), right click on its name under Task Manager's Processes tab and choose "Open File Location". Then create a shortcut with a proper name and feel free to disable auto start of the tray icons (at least nothing bad happened for me).

 

Since they are not the same executable I won't be setting my hopes too high.

Truth is, the CC should be started from scratch or even be completely replaced by some other app

 

Hi everyone,

I installed the touchpad drivers with the Obsidian Tool and I can't find the synaptics options within Mouse under Control Panel? Changing sensitivity on "Mouse" does nothing also, could anyone help please?

Also, my battery life isnt great. I don't have CCC installed as I think thats quite crappy piece of software. I do have MSHYBRID on UEFI. Balanced power plan but changed all settings for when on battery to be like "Max battery savings" including the iGPU settings etc. I seem to get like 2 hours and a half... is that normal?

My laptop is a PCSpecialist Defiance III (P650HP6G)

Cheers

 

Windows strikes back! My start button and cortana no longer responds. Never seen this issue before! Tried reparing the issue using the powershell solution online- cortana search bar works but when I click anything in the start menu, no response.

Sent from my SPH-L720 using Tapatalk

 

Hello! Bought myself p651hp6-g, overall experience is great, but I can't find a way for fingerprint scanner to work!
Windows 10 fresh install, got driver through Obsidian Tools. Option for Fingerprint Sign-in is there, but no option to add fingerprint.
Windows Hello says "Sorry something went wrong" and that's just it.
Tried installing drivers from Clevo, Acer. Seems like all over the internet there is only one version (3.5.1.0) of the driver for es603 scanner in WIndows 10.
Also I have found in updates 3.5.1.7 cab, but it's not working either. Enabled Biometrics in gpedit, still nothing.
Does yours work fine?

 

Hi, mine worked fine after I've registered my fingerprints. Still, my experience with fingerprint hardware in clevo computers has been crappy in general. The fingerprint scanner in my old p150em broke in like 3 months... Let's see how long the new one lasts.

Minor annoyance: The chassis finish is gorgeous, but it is actually better at reading and storing my fingerprints than the dedicated hardware. I bet that windows will say hello to anyone with a picture of my case .

 

It's a secret forensic storage device

 

Worst murder weapon ever.

 

Guys, what version are you all using for the touchpad? I used to have a version that had the extra tab on Mouse under Control Panel and it worked great, really responsive. After upgrading through Obsidian Tools to the latest, that tab is fully gone and all I have is 2-3 finger functionality under Touchpad in Windows10 Settings, it's not as responsive and in some windows 2 finger scrolling seems to have a delay... Anyone finding the same thing?

 

Hi Sptz, unfortunately I can't provide much help as I haven't managed to find synaptic settings as well. With speed and sensitivity settings at maximum the trackpad experience is pretty decent, but just like you, I'm also trying to find a way to customize it. If you figure it out let me know.

 

Splitting the mouse&touchpad tab into mouse tab and touchpad tab is a Windows 10 Creator's update. It has nothing to do with your touchpad's driver version.

Also you can't see any Synaptics settings because Synaptics stopped developing a settings software on their newer touchpad models. Microsoft decided to support Touchpad natively on Windows 10. Synaptics most likely stopped developing the software to cut costs.

Downside we lose on couple of the extra features until Microsoft develop them (or they might not ). Upside is we get new features when they are implemented (most manufacturers don't release newer driver unless there is a bug). Also we get the same default settings irrespective of brand. For example, My old HP notebook had the up/down scrolling inverted by default. I had scrolling issues when using someone else's notebook

 

Hey guys. If anyone recently had the same problem. (1) the only solution that worked needed a set up for a new administrator user account on Windows (2) yesterday's Windows 10 cumulative update repaired this issue completely!

Sent from my SPH-L720 using Tapatalk

 

I'm so glad that @Phoenix and uninstalled 99% of the live tiles and Windows 10 crapware. Now my start menu actually works .

@ John@OBSIDIAN-PC, this may not be the best thread to ask about it, but since I'm a huge fan of OBSIDIAN-PC TOOLS, I would like to hear your opinion on something. What's your take on the optional drivers for the p65xxx line? Obsidian tools is suggesting Sound Blaster (couldn't care less for the sound effects but I do care about sound quality), Intel Rapid Storage and Killer Wifi. Will any of those actually make a difference compared to the standard Microsoft drivers? I really would like to avoid adding new useless software to my ever increasing collection of System tray icons if possible, still, if they improve Sound Quality / Performance / Wifi speed and range by a significant margin I would be tempted to install the drivers.

 

The Killer Suite will only kill your connections randomly. It's a buggy pile of garbage that has been the same since years. Additionally, it decides what apps get high bandwidth and which ones don't. no thank you. we live in an age with super fast internet so no matter how much one app is sucking bandwidth it is NOT going to severely impact the connection speeds for other apps. Heck, I could be downloading gigantic files and still be able to do everything that needs internet the same way. I prefer to give all apps the highest priority which is what is the default. Additionally, Windows has built in QoS anyway which limits the download speed of an app to 80% should it detect that another app is trying to get some internet bandwidth.

 

That's good to know. So, no killer new features for me. Any strong opinions for good or bad about Sound Blaster or Intel Rapid Storage?

 

We need to offer what the client wants, to some clients a non working SBX is a broken unit that they will request RMA...
To me SBX is something I would never install, rapid storage is pointless you can just download the latest Intel inf files for ahci drivers. Killer is just like Phoenix explained.
So yeah you can keep drivers to a minimal and that's the way our app will slowly progress too, minimal driver only.

 

The base level latency on the killer is very good without the software which I think is the main thing.

 

Thanks for the honest opinion John. To be honest I have nice memories of a time where Sound Blaster + Diamond Monster Fusion was a dream combo. Nowadays cheap Realteks have come a long way and I'm not that sure if a SB will really make a noticeable different to the average user. Enthusiasts have also long moved to external components. Well, @Phoenix has told me that he can hear the difference in sound quality so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. Having said that I'm afraid that the software will put me off soon enough.
One last question if I may: What about the Sabre Hifi Dac? I assume that Clevo is probably doing the same as MSI and using it only for headphone output right? Do I need any drivers or special software to make it work?

Yeah, that was my line of thought as well. I went back and forth between Intel and Killer. There is a lot of love and hate for killer in the internet, but range and latency are pretty respectable

 

New owner here. Recently ordered a Sager NP8157(Clevo P650HS-G). Looking forward till my new toy...um computer arrives. Also new to PC gaming as I currently game on a PS4 pro.

Lots of good information on this forum. Thank you everyone!