*** Official Sager NP8150/Clevo P150HM Owners Lounge ***

Yes, I have been using the beta version of the 285.62 drivers since the BF3 open beta and got the final drivers as soon as they were released on the 24th. Its been smooth sailing for me on my 485m and my gpu temps while playing Battlefield 3 have been even lower than when I played Bad Company 2.

 

Thanks pepi18 for your experience with the 285.62 driver.
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Hi there!

Guys, from time to time, I'm getting a complete GUI freeze, except for the cursor.

Anyone knows what it may be?

I'm on a Clevo P150HM with BIOS v1.01.12, i7-2620M, 8GB RAM, GeForce GTX560M, and a Seagete Momentus 7200.4 hard drive.

 

Does this occur completely at random or during intensive HDD loading events, such as starting up a large application / game?

Which GPU drivers are you using?

 

My Battlefield problems are definitely NOT over.

Today I crashed twice, the first time with a "not responding" error the second time with a blue dump screen crash.

On top of it, when I took out my RAM yesterday I foolishly gently used a vacuum cleaner to clear a bit of dust in the interior of my laptop which I learned today is a really bad idea seeing as it uses static air.

My concerns are back and i'm not sure what to do next .

EDIT: Just crashed thrice more. That makes 5 in under an hour of gameplay. Its come to the point where I can't get through a single game without crashing.

If there could be something faulty or a misconfiguration in my hardware/software/OS etc could someone advise me as I don't have much experience and it will help me know where to focus my efforts. Thanks.

 

Latest ones from nVidia (285.62 I think)

It starts to be slow, non-responsive, and then nothing reltated to the GUI works anymore. Ctrl+Alt+Del does nothing, tough I can move the cursor and stuff...

No heavy disk usage or anything being heavily used at that time. First time it happened I was installing a .net 4.0 update, and on the next, I was installing the fingerprint software that comes with the notebook.

Now I noticed one thing: Google Chrome was opened in both times this happened.
30 minutes ago, it all started to get slow again, then I closed (I mean, I clicked the X button) Chrome before the freeze, and there was no freeze at all, and everything went back to normal...

 

A couple things you could try, if interested:

Reseat the RAM. Pull it out, put it back in again, sometimes this helps

Do you have an SSD or just a regular HDD? Firmware update may be needed depending on the drive.

Memtest86+ and HDTune could both help diagnose either memory or HDD.

If it went back to normal after closing Google Chrome, try reinstalling or updating

 

There are no FW updates available for my HDD, just passed twice in Memtest86+ 4.20, all temps ok, too...

I'm gonna test other stuff too... so far, gaming is OK, at least.

 

@andrebrait: Did these issues occur before updating your drivers to 285.62?

@pepi18: ASre you experiencing these issues with several games or just BF3? Check PM - if the tests i mentioned earlier reveal nothing i would attempt a format, however please download and run WhoCrashed to compile a report of your next BSOD.

 

The only other game I play is Bad Company 2 for which I also have a history of crashes although it is not as bad as now. With BC2 i get CTDs (crash to desktop) and after days troubleshooting with EA support I still haven't found a fix - it is not an entirely uncommon issue (just google 'bc2 ctd') and my research lead me to believe it was a sound card compatibility issue.

When Battlefield 3 crashes for me the screen freezes up on the current frame forcing me to Ctrl-Alt-Delete and as soon as I hit task manager I get the "Battlefield 3 has stopped working" dialog with a box labeled "close program" and on just one occasion I had a BLSOD crash.

-As for reseating RAM, when I took out the old 2gb RAM (which I had installed in the laptop first thing after I unboxed it) I also reseated all the other RAM as well.
-I also installed WhoCrashed.
-I ran HDtune and my hdd appears to be fine.
-When running B3 with the fans turned all the way up my gpu reaches ~70C, cpu reaches ~64C with room temparature 23-24.
-And, I just finished doing a clean install of my drivers as follows:

I brought out my Clevo CD and manual and identified the drivers, then uninstalled them all among many restarts. I then went ahead and uninstalled all my VGA (nVIDIA) drivers and used DriverSweeper 3.2 to clean up the left over dlls and such. [I had a problem here as every time I restarted windows would automatically update my nVIDIA drivers and it took me a lot of fiddling to finally disable it, but I did in the end]. Then I inserted my Clevo CD and one by one installed each of the drivers except for the VGA (nVIDIA) one in the order instructed with restarts after each installation that instructed a restart. It took over 3 hours but its done.

EDIT: Tested, and issue still unresolved. Played on 6 games today and crashed on 3 of them.

It seems to be one of two things: either my laptop is freezing up under load or the Battlefield engine doesn't run well with the something on my machine (such as the many people who had Realtek HD sound driver problems with Bad Company 2).

 

I don't know, since I only have this notebook since 3 days ago and I installed the 265.62 right after I first installed Windows... I'll try an older driver...

 

My P150HM is running those drivers at the moment and i'm not experiencing any issues at all, so i wouldn't worry about them.

Keep an eye on your GPU and CPU temperatures using RealTemp or HWinfo32. Idle temps should remain below 40, occasionally spiking to 50.

Please see my previous post and run 1-2 passes of Memtest to eliminate memory instability. I cannot say with any certainty that this ussue may be related to your memory, but i experienced a similar issue a long time ago with a friends system which had a faulty DIMM.

 

I always let Memtest86+ perform 2 passes...

As for now, I'm suspecting I went wrong in driver installing order...

I'll reinstall Windows to see if anything changes.

Also, HDMI-out is producing a VERY strange image, like if I raised the gamma to insane levels...

I'll try the DVI out later


EDIT: temperatures are OK.


EDIT: re-installed Windows and it seems my problems are gone I'll tell if anything happens, but so far, everything is good.

 

@pepi

are you experiencing bsods even when not gaming, like you did before you too out the ram?
you live in ausi right? and it heading towards the summer season there? could you check your temps while gaming?

 

A new link to the service manual for this model....

P15xHM-SagerNP8150-8130ServiceManual.pdf
_

 

The only issue w/ the 285.62 drivers was Firefox crashing. Disabled hardware acceleration in the option menu, and no more crashes.

 

No, I haven't had a BSOD since I took out the old RAM. Yes, its heading towards summer now, my room temp is between 22-24C now. But I clean the dust from the fans thoroughly periodically and I have Zalman 2000 cooler which the laptop never leaves - so no I don't I don't think I have overheating problems:
-While playing Battlefield 3, with fans maxed out: gpu 67-75C, cpu 60-65C.
-With one browser window open as I type this post: gpu ~37C, highest cpu core stays around 50C, 51C tops, other cores ~45C

I have been writing to my reseller and he said to send it in for repairs. But then I spoke to EA support and they said many people (a minority perhaps but a significant number of people) have been having crash issues with B3 and that they are aware and working on fixes. The largest "Battlefield 3 crashing" thread on the Battlefield 3 Battlelog forums is up to 3010 posts as of today making it the third largest thread behind the "B3 wishlist" and "B3 bug reports" thread. I also discovered some other things which gave me hope that my hardware is fine:
-I found this one server that I have played on for over 5hours with only a single crash so far.
-I recently just remembered that during the 2 weeks or so I played the open beta build of B3 I can't remember having a single crash (I should have thought of this before).

These are possible indications that the game is at fault not my machine. The obvious smart thing to do would be to wait for the first patches to come out. In the meantime there are quite a few people who are lowering the core clock speeds on their gpu to 840-800mhz to stop crashes. Apparently many gpus are overclocked from the factory or something? Anyway, I don't want to try this without a say so from my reseller as I don't know what I'm doing.

I'm going to wait it out with fingers crossed. I have this one server that doesn't crash for now so I can enjoy the game now.

 

@pepi

well good thing taking out the ram helped and yes your temps are very much ok.
what worries me is not bf3 which is a buggy mess right now, but your crashing in bfbc2. that game has high system specs but even my sager from last gen could ran that without crashing.
best thing to do is maybe test your system with other games.
good luck.

 

I might have forgotten to mention it before, but I had long deduced that my BFBC2 problems came down to a conflict with the program and my in-built Realtek sound card. Its a widely known issue that BC2 has sound-loop crashes with Realtek sound cards and many have had to replace their sound cards or else use an external one. While its not a proven fact that a sound card conflict was the issue for me after discovering the known issue I began to notice that my crashes appeared to be triggered by sounds, and every now and then I would get a sound stutter or a short sound-loop before as the game froze for a second and then crashed to desktop. This sound card issue remained unfixed for BC2.

In fact after reading the through many Battlefield 3 crash discussions many are starting to mention sound card issues here too.

When I started crashing with Battlefield 3 as well I started to doubt my machine. I'm going to wait for patches and perhaps look into the sound card issue a little more before taking further action.

 

@pepi

i have not played bc2 on my present sager but i did play it on my older sager8690 with no problems. im not quite sure if the old sager has the same soundcard as ours though.

your best bet would be to try you laptop with other , more stable , games and see if the problem persists. alternatively, you may also try to run benchamrks like 3dmark11 to see if any graphical anomalies exist.

one more thing about the soundcard- i have not seen any complaints/threads on sound issues with bf3 in these forums; and afaik the realtek card is used across many models. so i highly doubt that it is that or we would have seen some posts/threads. maybe, you have forgotten to activate your thx and thats causing issues?

 

guys my core 0 usage always stays between 13%-18% when my laptop is idle.why that happened?i have a friend with a same laptop and all cpu cores are at 0 load.why that happened??thx

 

Johnny, looks like you've got quite a few programs in your task bar. Are any of those passively using a single core for some process in the background? Might try closing out as many as possible to see which one (if any) are causing it.

 

i tried closing them all but nothing it still the same.processes was 47 after closing all the programms.before its was 55 but this makes no difference.its still the same.any other thoughts???thx.

 

Hit Ctrl + Shift + Esc to bring up task manager, click on Processes, sort by CPU column, and see if there is a certain program using CPU.

 

I am thinking about purchasing a Clevo P150HM with a GTX 560M. My question is: would it be a waste of money to buy the Core i7-2960XM given this graphics card for the purposes of gaming? In other words, is there gaming benchmark data to show that for the GTX 560M, there is a leveling out in graphics improvement with more powerful cpu's? Or in other words, would something like the Core i7-2760QM be the smarter choice for the GTX 560M?

 

I'd definitely suggest sticking with either the 2670QM or the 2760QM. You won't experience any CPU bottlenecks in games, only GPU. You could save that money spent from upgrading to an XM model and invest in an SSD instead Then you'd see a much better performance boost.

 

Thanks J.P.
I suspected that the SSD was a better option.

 

For the 560M and even the fastest cards (580m, 6990m), you'll be GPU bound even with the 2630QM in games. The 2960XM is extreme overkill for gaming, but not a bad idea if you plan to do encoding or other highly threaded apps.

The 580m is only about equivalent to the midrange desktop 560ti, though slower clocked.The 2960XM however can compete with even some of the fastest desktop processors, hence the bottleneck.

 

Unless you work with high-end CPU intensive programs...like video encoding large files and such, you do not need the 2960XM.

Many get this CPU for bragging rights...which is ok if ones budget allows...
_

 

pls look at the first process.its says cpu 99.what is it??




edit:first process translate from greek to english is "System Idle Process"

edit:how i that possible all processes are 0 and the core 0 usage is 14%?

 

Just in case ones have missed the announcement...

SAGER has announced that the AMD 6990M is only $145.00 upgrade now for this model.

(Approved by NBR Lead Moderator Charles)
_

 

@johnny

Hard to say, although the system idle process should be at 99% if no other processes are consuming any power. I really don't know why your computer shows the first thread at 13%, unless it was just due to some regular Windows 7 background processes. Has this affected your performance at all? If not I wouldn't worry too much about it.

 

i think it doesnt affect the performamce but i think it affects cpu temp a little..very strange...

edit:i install windows 7 home premium again in another hard drive i have.with 35 processes only running and clean windows install i have the same problem.core 0 is again 15% used.....

 

dumb question but.. i just received my np8150 today from xoticpc (my second fantastic notebook from them!), however, i'd like to know if this discount counts retroactively? would be nice to save $100.

also.. if someone could explain to me whether i'm installing the ati graphics drivers correctly.

1.) download this
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Page/radeonmob_win7-64.aspx
2.) open device manager
3.) uninstall amd radeon 6990m
4.) restart w7 in safe mode and uninstall registry with driver cleaner
5.) restart w7 again
6.) install the catalyst software suite
7.) restart again. good?

 

I almost pulled the trigger on this with the 6990m price drop, but I'm having some last minute hesitations.
Has anyone with a 6990m tried GTA IV? It's completely unplayable on my desktop because I have an ATI card (I can't remember which one, but an equivalent NVidia would have no troubles). I've heard that powerful ATI cards should be able to handle it adequately but I'm still hesitant.

 

Hey iiqae, thanks for your continued business. You can read more about our price protection on our website, under the FAQ section of the "Company" link.

Also it appears that you have installed the drivers correctly. Usually you can simply install right over them without any issues, your method just ensures that you get a completely clean driver install

I don't think you will have problems with GTA IV, but I've checked on this website: Computer Games on Laptop Graphic Cards - Notebookcheck.net Tech

For some reason they don't have FPS up but current ATI drivers should be able to handle the game with no sweat.

 

I did see some posts about sound card conflicts in the "Battlefield 3 Crashing" thread and I remember seeing some other mentions around. What do you mean by activating my THX? When I clean installed all my drivers 2 days ago I removed the THX driver and I didn't reinstall it. I now have the Realtek HD and nVIDIA HD drivers sound drivers installed.

Maybe it would be a good idea to buy Crysis 2 to troubleshoot haha... Its a game I have wanted to buy although I was so into the Battlefield series that I new I would never play it.

I'll run 3dMark just in case, cheers.

 

problem solved!!core 0 usage was 15% cuz of hwinfo 3.88.if i use hwinfo 3.82 or everest(aida64) core 0 usage is 0% baack to normal!!!!

 

guy its safe to update with latest bios and EC?now i have BIOS V 1.01.06 and EC/KBC V 1.00.11.i ll see any difference if i update?my laptop is clevo not sager!!thxx

 

I have played Battlefield 3 since the launch day, set to 1280x800 low settings. able to get average 50fps

 

Two questions. (These may have already been addressed on this forum, but the search function on this forum doesn't work, at least not for me. For example, even if I type in "Clevo" I get "Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms." - which is bull crap.

1) If I get an Intel 320 series SSD, which supposedly automatically encrypts and decrypts all data, (I guess that means we're dealing with full disk encryption), and use it as my primary drive for the OS and games - does that mean that a game will take a performance hit?

I anticipate an answer like, "Yes, but it's very negligible and it still vastly out performs using as HDD instead."


2) Does the P150HM allow the user to set ATA user password (drive password) for the SSD in the P150HM BIOS? (I know that sounds stupid to ask, but Intel does say to check with the computer manufacturer, I am asking you guys instead.)

 

Hey guys I had a couple questions cause I'm thinking about buying one of these.

How're the trackpad\buttons\keyboard? Are you happy with them?

Are you happy with the noise\heat?

And finally, what ports does this have by default? I'm planning to plug in 2 external displays and xotic has these options for multi-monitor. Does it not have a dvi\vga\hdmi port without one of these options?

 

Hi, I finally received my laptop

I have only one question. I asked for the cd drive to be removed and a hard drive caddy to be installed instead.

What I think is "strange" is that there is an actual hole on the side of my laptop. Is this normal?

Those are the changes I asked from xotic:
Optical Drive Bay Hard Drive Caddy No Extra Optical Bay Hard Drive Caddy
Optical Drive Bay Remove DVDRW Drive and Install Optical Bay Hard Drive Caddy Only (SKU - S7R951)

Thanks,
Andrea

 

Yes most hard drive caddies do not come with a bezel to cover the front end of it.

One usually takes the bezel off an existing drive and snaps it on the caddy.

-

 

Guys, is there anything wrong with Engineering Sample processors?

Just asking because I just found out mine is...

 

There is nothing wrong per-se, but did you get the proc in a machine from a company? If so, you might want to contact them as they shouldn't be selling ES processors.

 

I will contact them, sure.

CPU-Z tells me it's an ES, revision D2, whereas AIDA64 reports revision J1 (final production) but also states it's an ES...

I never noticed this until today, when I found a bit weird I couldn't hit top Turbo frequency no matter what I did... (Max I can reach is 3.1GHz. Max for 2 cores should be 3.2GHz and for one core, 3.4GHz)

 

But I can actually see the inside of my pc, it's not like only a cover is missing.
It looks like there is nothing in there, just a hole in the laptop frame.

Wasn't I supposed to receive this piece too?

 

This article might help:

SSDs and built-in encryption–and how to enable it | The Silicon Underground

There shouldn't be a performance hit at all with AES enabled. Now if you ran Bitlocker on top of that, there probably would be. You can set a supervisor password, but I don't believe it restricts drive access.

ES generally means it's a test part for Intel and comes without a warranty. It can be a part running at different settings or with different levels of quality control. I'd contact your reseller to find out though

You should have received a separate caddy like the one in your picture, either installed or separate from the main machine. If you know you ordered one, check with your retailer.

 

Thanks for the info Malibal #2

Here's my intention:
To purchase a P150HM with an Intel 320 series SSD as my primary drive. With that, I get a Blu-ray /dvd combo drive in the 2nd slot, and Windows 7 Home premium.

How does the system arrive at my home?

If Windows is preloaded onto the SSD, and the SSD is automatically a FDE type, then the P150HM reseller that I bought it from must provide me with the ATA password (drive password) correct? Otherwise, I'll be locked out of the SSD and the OS. Or is the OS simply not preloaded onto this type of FDE SSD?

Scratching head.