2013 Series 7 chronos / Ativ Book 8 15" owner's lounge (NP770Z5E / NP780Z5E / NP870Z5E / NP880Z5E)

I, like a few others, had WiFi issues using the drivers from SW Update so I rolled back to 15.6.1 from Intel. I've installed this latest release and will see if there are any problems.

 

Anyone got any advice for keeping the surface of the laptop clean, in terms of cleaning and such? My keyboard and surrounding area gets grimy real fast. This probably wouldn't have been as noticeable on the black version...

 

Just use the white tshirt and wet it a bit, or use baby wipes

 

Hi there,

i bought my 770z5e last wednesday and i am satisfied with the product. One thing is a little weird though. The silent mode doesnt work as expected. If i turn it on the fan turns off as expected and the cpu frequency is kept @1.15GHz. So far so good. However the fan kicks in after a while (maybe a minute or two) and never turns off again. No programs running except the task manager and a browser window maybe. CPU load is around 4%. If i press the silent mode button again the fan stops running and turns on after another minute or something. the CPU temperature is about 50°C. Does anybody recognize a similar behaviour? I would prefer the fan to stay off and not have to push "silent mode"-Button all over again.
Any hints how to circumvent this problem?

 

Hello hdbam, welcome to the forum. Congratulations, that's a great machine you got there.

It does sound odd if indeed Silent Mode keeps running the fan for no reason. I don't know if this applies to you, but often new users don't know if they are in Silent Mode or not (since Fn-F11 is a toggle). So that's the first thing I would point to. Read this post and this one for details.

Other threads that may help you are linked below:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/706300-samsung-easy-settings-bug-feature.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/714633-thoughts-samsung-silent-mode.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/709397-samsung-silent-mode.html

Silent Mode is such a frequently discussed subject here, I suggest you also Google site:notebookreview.com/samsung silent mode.

Note that I had to delete your post in the other thread. Forums rules (and common courtesy) do not permit cross posting or bumping questions within 24 hours. Given the large overlap between the two threads where you posted, it is very understandable. But your question really belongs more in this Owner's Lounge, so let's see if we cannot solve your problem here.

Let us know your progress

 

Pranktank, which program did you use for overclocking the 8870m GPU ?
Afterburner only allows up to 850 MHz, not the 930 you did .

Thank you !

 

Afterburner does allow you to go to 900+, check your settings!

 

Looks like I may have spoken too soon. My keyboard backlight still acts all crazy every now and then. Sometimes it does behave, but I have no idea why. I tried blocking the light sensor with a piece of electrical tape (that's how annoying the backlight gets sometimes) but that didn't seem to help. I also disabled the sensor monitoring service with no luck. Because of this, I'm almost 100% sure that this behavior is not intended but some sort of glitch that will hopefully get fixed eventually.

Still, if I manage to get some black keys that look like they might fight I'll give it a try. I think keys are inserted sideways like in macbooks (see this video for reference). Maybe last year's series 7 chronos keys will fit?

 

Have a look for the Silent Mode in Settings. In my Windows 7 Easy Settings there are two options for Silent Mode:

1. Auto - repeats spinning and stopping the system fan
2. Low - will keep the fan spinning at low speed continuously

Try changing this option if you have it. The other aspect to check is the system cooling policy in the power settings.

John

 

I currently have the Chronos 7 8770M Best Buy version, and the battery is not up to par with what was advertised. I read that the touchscreen uses a lot of power, so will disabling it save battery life? I rarely use it, and when I will I'll just re-enable it. Thanks!

 

I installed the AMD 13.5 beta 3 drivers. My Intel drivers were up-to-date according to SW Update, so I went for the simple "uninstall all AMD software - reboot - install new" combo. Everything went fine except I lost the Fn+F2-F3 brightness control... I fixed it by unintsalling the Intel HD4000 through Device Manager, and reinstall the Intel driver through SW Update. Now it's all good.

I noticed a good improvement in performance (at least in GTA IV), which I'm obviously very happy about I also installed MSI Afterburner in order to monitor and/or overclock the 8800M, but I can't see any temperature information Neither does it show up in HWiNFO64, even though both programs are running with "High performance" setting in commutable graphics settings. I think I'm missing something here.

 

You have to enable unofficial overclocking. There are tutorials on the internet. When I have time I'll post one myself.

EDIT:

Really? I had to edit the config file and registry to be able to go above 850. How did you do it?

 

After reading and searching... None of the models have an mSATA port for SSD? :/

 

You have already had answers, but I have a slightly different take.

As stupid as it is, Samsung claim that changing the HDD does void the warranty. The points the other poster makes goes to whether Samsung will ever found out. If you are careful and replace the HDD before any servicing then you will might get away with it.

I have had no problem with signal strength, but I have had the disconnect issue. This is not confined to this laptop, but is an issue with the intel card. With the latest driver I found the problem intolerable. I was disconnected frequently and it took ages to reconnect. I wound back to an older driver. Now it disconnects about once an hour or two and I can reconnect quickly. If I were an online gamer I probably couldn't cope, but I connect to surf and sync files, so the occasional reconnect isn't too much hassle. I'd love a better solution.

I have sent one message to samsung, a couple of weeks ago, and not yet had a response.

 

After playing with some settings, I could change the clocks and save the profiles. However, I decided to reset everything to default values and avoid using overclocking, after a system crash.. So I'm not so sure about it

 

I doubt if the touch system is a significant power drain but you can do your own research: Install a program such as Battery Bar then see the difference in the power drain with the touch screen enabled / disabled.

I suspect that the under-performance of your battery is more to do with insufficient tweaking to minimise power consumption. To get 10 hours from the battery you need an average power drain of less than 9W. Samsung will have done their tests with the display at minimum brightness running nothing computationally demanding. Even Flash or other animations running on a web page can be a significant power drain while WiFi and Bluetooth also use power.

Samsung's warranty is for the hardware provided by Samsung. Don't damage anything while doing the swap and restore the computer to the as-supplied condition and there will be no problems with warranty service. Plenty of people have done it.

Have you tried the latest 15.8 driver from Intel which someone posted yesterday?

John

 

Pranktank,

I enabled the unofficial Overclocking with pasting the EULA sentence in the cfg File and setting UnofficialOverclockingMode to 1, but now the sliders are at 0 in afterburner and not moving at all.
You wrote something about registry changing.
What exactly did you change in the registry ?

 

Yep that seemed odd to me too. I have no problems to figure out if i am in silent mode or not. I just have a look at the settings with fn+F1

I read through all of those posts and i think i was able to digest all the information

I tried both options with similar (means no) success. I also made sure that the cooling policy in windows 8 is passive. Still no luck :-(
I would also be happy if some other owners of the 770z5e could tell a little bit about their experiences with the silent mode. Does it really remain silent even with a little more CPU load? Does it turn off completely after a while again?
Btw the limiting of the CPU to 1.15GHz works well so i can be quite sure silent mode is activated. Its just that the fan starts working and never quits anymore :-/

 

~Neizvestno

That's good to know, thank you. I wonder if there's a lot of seals inside the laptop and if so, where they are located so they can be circumvented. Would be a shame to run into trouble if warranty was voided because of changing a HDD even though you did not break anything. Maybe in time somebody more knowledgable than me can post a step by step tutorial of how to carefully change the hard drive in an Ativ book 8 15"?

 

Samsung don't claim that the fan doesn't run, but should not exceed its slowest speed. You might either have a relatively noisy fan or are using the computer in a quiet room. In general, Samsung's notebooks have good cooling systems. I can hear my NP900X4C's fan when it gets under load but yesterday I was reminded how quiet it really is: I started up my Lenovo T420s and when that warmed up it started to emulate a jet engine.

There are no seals inside. However, getting the base off the computer can be a little challenging. I'm sure there's at least one guide in this or the other threads discussing this model.

John

 

Ok, now I kind of remember how I managed to change the clock speeds of my VGA, you just need to run afterburner after launching a demanding app (eg game) and then you will be able to change the values. Otherwise it'll still show the ATI GPU on the top of the window, but the values can't be changed. Hope it helps

 

Forget it, I simply launched Afterburner and HWiNFO64 while running a game and it works properly

 

Got it. I can hear you do too

All I can say is really what John mentioned: Silent Mode doesn't guarantee that the fan never runs, it merely keeps the CPU slower (and hence cooler) and switches to Passive system cooling policy. But if temps get too high and the CPU is already throttled, the fan WILL kick in. As you already gathered.

But it is puzzling if this happens when the temps are still relatively low. What is the ambient temperature there?

And you ARE sure that system cooling policy is Passive when this happens? Sorry, just checking...

We'll have to see if other owners of the same model can report their observations.

 

That works but you won't be able to overclock past 850/1250.

I found this on various websites so I don't really know who to give credit. Speedway from overclockersclub.com was the most helpful.

Here's a litlle tutorial:

1. Download MSI afterburner, install and search for MSIAfterburner.cfg. Open it with notepad.

2. Set these values from 0 to 1:
UnofficialOverclockingEULA = 1
UnofficialOverclockingMode = 1

3. Save and close the file.

4. Search and run regedit. This is the registry editor. If you fail to find it it should be in this folder: C:\Windows

5. Do a backup of your registry in case something goes wrong. You can do this with regedit. Click file>export and save it where you'd like to save it.

6. Go to this folder: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

7. You should see a few folders with the names 0000,0001,0002 (maybe some more).

8. Open the first folder of these and look for EnableUIps. If it's there, double click it and set its value to 0. If it's not there go to the next folder. Repeat the steps to change EnableUIps's value to 0 in each folder until you have gone through all folders with 4 digits within the {4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} folder.

9. Close regedit and Reboot without opening msi afterburner.

10. Remember that overclocking is at your own risk and that it can damage your parts if not done cautiously.

I'd recommend to slowly build up the clocks and do tests like 3Dmark11 and games to check for stability. Also remember to monitor your temps. It's best to keep the back of your laptop lifted a bit to prevent overheating.

Have fun!

 

The ambient temperature is about 23°C. I checked the cpu temperature as well which is slightly below 50°C. Still the fan kicks in. What is odd as well is the fact that i can disable the fan by pressing fn+F11 twice (meaning disabling and enabling the silent mode) or by just repressing low or auto in the samsung settings menu. If the cpu temperature would be too high i would guess that reenabling the silent mode wouldnt turn off the fan to prevent the CPU from being damaged. But still the fan goes off (since little less than 50°C isnt too hot), but is being turned on a while after.

System cooling policy is passive, i just rechecked it and made sure it was it is in the energy saving scheme (sorry i dont know the correct translation for that. In german it is called Energiesparmodus).

 

@hdbam: Yeah, I understand enough German to get Energiesparmodus

Only other thing I can think of is whether you have settings in BIOS (or UEFI) that affect energy savings or fan speed. My older Series 7 does have one performance/energy option there (I forget which one) although it never occurred to me to test whether it affects the fan.

I am out of suggestions. I hope others with a 2013 model will come forward with some insight.

 

I checked the bios already as well. Unfortunately there is no option to tinker with energy settings or fan control. If there are any other users out there with a 770z5e i would appreciate a lot if you share your experiences with silent mode with me.

 

You may want to do a bit more research on that. (I THINK) that there are more than one way to preserve the Samsung Restore software, and one of them is creating a bootable USB thumb drive through the F4 interface.

You will need to take the cover off the back of it as well to perform the SSD upgrade. It requires something that won't scratch the surface of the laptop around the edges where you are prying the bottom off. I used one of those membership cards you get from joining a points program at local restaurant.

 

Pranktank,

thanky you very much, it worked.
Now I can go up to 1010 MHz
On friday my Thermaltake Toughpower 120 W Gaming Charger arrives which can go up to 152 W on Load.
Then Ill test the machine and post some 3D Mark results ^^

 

We just had another member (Al Jimbo Jones) in the thread linked below, who managed to fix a similar problem on his Series 9: His fans simply wouldn't come on no matter how hot the PC got. After trying all kinds of things, he flashed an earlier BIOS release, which solved it. Even after re-flashing the latest BIOS release, it's still working.

I am speculating that either the BIOS itself or the DSDT tables (which program a bunch of ACPI parameters, incuding fan speeds) got corrupted. A solid flash solved it. I suggest you check it out.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/717955-problem-samsung-series-9-fans-not-working.html

 

Isn't there an easier way to override amd limits of overclocking? Right click on the afterburner shortcut, add "-xcl" to the target pathway, double-click on afterburner shortcut, restart the computer, and then delete the -xcl parameter, start afterburner and voila! your limits will be increased.

 

I believe this have been ask a lot of time, but I still gotta ask, is it worth to wait for Haswell for this laptop?

The reason I ask is because Haswell is around is around the corner, Intel is announcing it at the 3rd of June. Laptop with Haswell will definitely be announce at the somewhere after that a s well.

Normally, once a new processor generation is announce, how long it takes until it starts to roll out on new laptop? I afraid the Ativ Book 8 will get the refresh very late (August/September), then it may not worth the wait.

Also, does Haswell offer significant improvement over the battery life of the laptop? I care less about the performance, as 10%+ of performance upgrade is not a big deal to me, what's matter to me is the battery life upgrade. Can any current owners able to provide the power consumption of the current processor in this laptop? Is there any way to measure it? If we can measure it and estimate at how much watt Haswell will using, then we will able to gauge the extra battery life it will provide.

Thanks everybody.

 

It seems that only Thermaltake and Cooler master supply an universal 120W PSU for notebook (I'm talking about brands of PSU universally recognized).
Cooler Master solutions it's much lighter (0.268Kg / 0.592 lbs vs 0.725Kg, 1.6lbs) and less bulky than Thermaltake model, also it has 2 powerful USB ports to recharge devices up to 30%~50% faster than PC USB.
Same range price both start from 60€.

USNA 120 - Cooler Master

Thermaltake - - Toughpower 120W - ADP120W0006

 

The furthest I could go for 3Dmark11 was 925/1375. Please let me know how far you can push it on stock voltage.

 

In some field Haswell is slightly under Ivy Bridge, so 10% better it's not true at least generally speaking.
The significant news in Haswell are relative to dual core version that integrate chipset and in some version even memory for GPU (GT3e version), but this version it's not interesting for who is interested in notebook like Chonos/ATIV book 8, also the version with GT3e will come out on September.
The Quad core versions of Haswell have a TDP higher than respective Ivy Bridge version, so I don't think that under load there will be a significant gain in battery life.

There tons of battery life test in thread about new Chronos in this forum...

If ATIV/Chronos refresh will come out late then Samsung will loose a lot of customer because I think that many others brand are ready to launch their Haswell model in June.
I have already seen pictures of new Alienware series for example.

 

I've done it also. As you say, done carefully there is no reason why anyone should be able to tell you have done it. There are no seals to break. I was just making the distinction between the question of whether it voids the warranty according to Samsung and whether in practice it is likely to cause you problems with the warranty. Of course, if you are asked then you may have to lie.

Thanks John, I had missed that. I have installed the new drivers now. However, the problem was always an intermittent one so I won't know if it helps until I have had a chance to run it for a while.

Given that it is a problem experienced across laptops and experienced differently by different users, I was getting suspicious that it might be a hardware issue with the intel card. Or maybe I was just convincing myself of that as a justification for upgrading to the new card series.

 

@Pranktank

Sure ill post my maximum overclock @stock voltage (wont touch it ever).
I can tell you now, that with the stock PSU it goes up to about 950 / 1400 without crashing in Furmark and 3D Mark.
But 3D Mark 11 shows some stuttering in the scenes due to the PSU i think.
Because of that I scored only about 3450 Points.
With the stronger PSU it might be around 4000 or little bit more.

@Mac

The Coolermaster is lighter, but the Thermaltake seems to me more capable of spending power (up to 152 W) - it was designed especiallly for gamers.
Also it has a thick powercable like for Desktop Computers, which I find better quality.

 

does any one know, Can I HDMI output to a 2560X1440 display device with just fit 2560X1440 pixel?

 

Thx for the hint. I really appreciate your help. I still have to figure out if i can find a bios file for my 770z5e somewhere (i browsed http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/696197-samsung-laptops-roll-back-bios-updates.html already) and i am kind of puzzled how to manipulate DSDT settings.

Thx for the hint. I went over to the thread and went over to the http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/696197-samsung-laptops-roll-back-bios-updates.html thread. Still i have to find out if and where there is a bios file for my 770z5e (couldnt find one yet).
Also i am kinda puzzled about manipulating dsdt settings. Any help about this is very much appreciated

 

152W is peak power, max power is always 120W even for Thermaltake.
The possibilities that a notebook like Chronos/Ativ can go over 120W without overvolt are very few.

Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 con Tapatalk 2

 

@Dannemand I did everything like you said to avoid kernel latencies but I'm still having visual c++ problems. Would a system restore help? If so,, would I lose my programs and such?

 

Hi,
I've installed the latest drivers 15.8.0.5 for my NP770Z5E-IT01. So far, they seem to work perfectly. I've used my computer for the last 4 hours doing lots of large files download, heavy youtube streaming and torrent without any drops or limited connectivity. I had previously tried the version 15.6.1.20 from Intel and the ones from Samsung and had limited connectivity after normal streaming or when downloading files larger than about 50mo.

After reporting that back on the following thread: Sporadic but recurring connection dropouts on an Intel 6235 wireless adapter, I rolled the drivers back to version 15.5.6 and didn't have any more drops or limited connectivity issues but had random signal quality. With 15.8.0.5, I have full signal quality as I used to have with my previous Dell M1530 laptop.

I'll update that post if I get any issues using version 15.8.0.5.

EDIT: I had several drops today with the router at work. I rolled back to version 15.5.6.48 that is for me the most stable one so far.

 

Please keep us updated with the situation as I personally would like to install them. Thanks

 

Same here - thought after finally getting a stable set of original Windows 8 drivers I'm wary to try anything from Intel again

 

Does anyone know what the estimated price for the 770Z5E will be when it's released in the US?

 

I am sorry it took all day to get around to answering this.

Kernel latencies can be a real problem nowadays. It seems like no programmers are able to write even a small Hello World program without adding a ton of code that loads on startup and runs in the background.

I assume you were referring to what I posted here:

To your question, I wouldn't suggest a Factory Restore, since that will just bring all the Samsung bloat back. But you could try Win8's Refresh feature.



I haven't tried it myself, but I understand it gets you back to a clean Win8 install. Depending on how clean it is, you could then proceed with just adding the most necessary drivers, as described in this post

Other items you must consider losing in order to eliminate latencies:

Samsung SW Update: The problem is that pesky s Agent that runs in the background. In the latest versions of SW Update, they actually switched away from s Agent -- but forgot to uninstall it, you have to do that manually. Unfortunately, a similar high latency function is now baked in as a service which is more difficult to disable. If you want to be lean, you really have to uninstall SW Update when you don't use it.

Samsung Settings/Easy Settings: That was a big part of the topic in the original latencies thread, including a tweaked installation of Easy Settings. Settings (for Win8) is completely different, and Easy Settings 2.x (for Win7) is quite different too -- both of them for the better. Still, they DO increase latencies.

Samsung Recovery Solution: NOT the Recovery Partition, just the Windows software.

Anti-virus: Particularly anything Norton (seriously). Of course I cannot in good faith recommend people to run without AV. But if minimal latencies are a priority, you cannot have AV churning up every time a file is accessed. Win8's built-in Defender/Antimalware Service seems to be one of the better behaved, though.

Windows System Restore: I was surprised to discover this when I did my research for the latencies thread, but I was not able to fully eliminate latencies without disabling System Restore. I guess it makes sense: System Restore has to monitor all drive activity in order saves file versions before a write occurs.

As mentioned previously, check this old post for general bloat advice. Much of it is still relevant.

On the specific subject of Visual C++ redistributable packages: My experience with these is not quite as bad, though I prefer to avoid them. If I notice that an app installs them, I'll look for alternatives.

In my opinion .NET and its updates from hell, are some of the worst. I was reminded of this just today: I gave in last night and accepted the new Windows Updates from Microsoft, including the optional .NET updates (I have a trading platform that needs .NET). That was the end of the smoothly humming Win8 I've had since I switched from Win7 a few months ago: I went through my post-update procedures (disk cleaning, defragging, ExpressCache bootopt) and let it simmer all night to finish whatever it wanted to do. But after an hour today, I simply could not get it to stop churning and running high CPU. I had to restore an image from last week. I don't know for sure (yet) but I'll wager that the .NET updates were the culprits.

I understand fully why programmers like .NET (once they master it: the learning curve is steep). But it is a massive drag on the system. And it's almost unavoidable nowadays: You CAN uninstall it (using Windows Programs and Features and various framework uninstallers) but so many apps use it. Catalyst Control Center, just to mention one that's hard to avoid.

Enough of my .NET rant

I hope you work it out. Let me know if you have other questions, I'll do my best to help.

 

One thing came to my mind...BLE is a Windows setting, right? What if I have the laptop turned off and I plug it in to charge it? Will it charge until 100% or will it stop at 80% ? (Note I do want it to stop at 80% )

I also have some more questions that are still without an answer, and they're about system restore on a SSD keeping full working F4 Recovery:
1. Is it possible to make the recovery image on an external HDD instead of a USB stick?
2. Would this require a 32 GB (or less, i.e. 20GB) partition or is it a single file I can easily move between different hard drives as a backup?
3. After succesfully restoring the system on a SSD I'd like to use the 1TB drive for storage: I would format only the C partition on it (leaving untouched all the other ones), and fill it with data. If I do this, and one day I need Samsung's warranty, I'll put the HDD back in the laptop, but will I still be able to boot it with F4 and restore the factory image on the C drive again (of course after having moved the data somewhere else)?

Thank you all for any answer, these should be my last doubts about the procedure.

 

The BLE control is in (Easy) Settings but the actual BLE setting is stored in the BIOS or other system firmware and it still applies when the computer is turned off.

This should be possible (but I haven't tried it).

The image is probably stored as a large file.

I would personally shrink C and create a new extended partition for the data. Saving 20GB or so out of 1TB isn't significant and you then don't rely on SRS working properly if you need to boot off the HDD.

John

 

Wow, one post, four major doubts solved Too bad I must spread some reputation around before giving it to you again! Thank you very much!!

 

This new driver has been an utter disaster for me. However, it is clear that people are having a range of different experiences with this card.

The wifi connection is bad to the point of making it unusable. The signal strength dances around like it is on hot coals and the connection appears to be constantly dropping away or reducing to a crawl. Appears, because nothing tells me it has dropped except for my inability to access the net.

The reason I say utter disaster is that rolling it back to the driver I had functioning before has not fixed the problem. The wifi is still in this unusable state.

I know is it the laptop's adapter because I am now connecting fine using one of those wifi to ethernet adapters. So same network right down to the same wifi, but avoiding the inbuilt adapter, and I have no problems.

I need to explore ways to delete the driver altogether and reinstall an earlier one, but this has come at a bad time for me as I am neck deep in work. I'll let you know if and when I find a solution (other than the external adapter).