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

Hoping that fix stays with us when Windows 8.1 comes out - they usually have updated sets of drivers with each new release of Windows, but for the first time ever I'm hoping they don't this time!

 

I've just applied the solution as suggested by damouk, hope my problems are solved, although I experienced the slowing down immediately when plugging in a USB device. I haven't however paid attention to the putting to sleep of my laptop in relation to these problems, so it could very well be true. Will pay attention to slowing down in the coming days and will let you know if this solution worked in my case! Thanks for the help!

 

I like the fact that I can get 8 hours of the battery. I'm going to test it today to see if it actually can. WIll see within the next 14 or so days how much I really like it. I always have a hard time picking something that costs over $1000 because I want the perfect machine (at least in my eyes). It was a tough decision between the two as I like them both a lot. The slimness and battery life just won out in the end. I think I can handle a "not as good" graphics card for a little more portability.

I guess I should ask right now though, with overclocking the GPU, does the performance end up coming at least slightly close to the nvidia 750m? Or does it at least close the distance by a bit?

 

In the UK, the NP770 is shipping with Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 (presumably the 780 etc are too). Does anyone know if it's a trial or full licence?

 

It's probably the same as on the Ativ Book 9 Lite which has what appears to be a free Photoshop Elements Organiser but the Photoshop Elements 11 is a 90 day trial.

John

 

Does anyone have a sort of light "ring" around the screen that is a shade lighter than the rest of the screen about 1 cm thick when doing setup (this is my first W8 laptop)? I took mine back this morning and got another one, but it has the same thing on it. My guess is that it is normal?

 

I'm pretty sure this occurs when you have the brightness maxed, or high, and before the screen has warmed up. I have it too, it looks like edge lighting pushing through but only lasts less than 2 minutes or so, other than that there's no backlight bleeding or rings on my screen.

 

What is the issue with the screen?, until now i had no problems , even upgraded to 12gb ram and 512gb ssd, using the stock drivers , maybe is a driver problem?

 

HI all,

i noticed a minor problems on the notebook after a refresh format.

THe sound speaker/system aint as "good" or "loud" as before after i did a refresh my notebook. Is there anything wrong with it? Did i miss installing something after the refresh?

Let me know.

 

Thanks John. Shame it's a trial; some manufacturers are shipping with a full licence e.g. HP on some of their mid-high spec laptops.

EDIT: Just to confirm the above: I have now bought the NP770Z5E and the installed copy of Photoshop Elements is a 90-day trial. The Organiser appears to be unlimited.

 

I'm starting to regret this laptop a little bit... How many issues are there with image persistence? Is it considered a "defect" by Samsung in which I can get it fixed? This is a multimedia laptop and I doubt it should be having image persistence issues.

I was in recovery last night waiting for the copy disk function to finish transferring everything to my SSD (about 20 minutes), so the boxes in the middle stayed there until it was finished. Well, when it finished and it was restarting, I could see VERY clearly the outline of the recovery windows.

 

Check this recent post by damouk and see if it helps ease your concern a bit.

 

If I remember correctly, there should be a thread here in Notebookreview about rolling back to previous BIOS versions on Samsung notebooks, but I can't remember where. I'm on my phone now, so I can't do an extensive research, but you may check this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=8963047
Or Google this
site: www.notebookreview.com\ revert bios samsung

EDIT - Had luck with the second way, here it is:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/696197-samsung-laptops-roll-back-bios-updates.html

Sent from HTC HD2 with Tapatalk

 

Thank you for that link. I never paid much attention to any of the other ones, but this one was clear as day. 20-30 minutes in recovery, and the gray screen showed very clearly the recovery boxes and everything. It eases my concern a bit, but I'm still hesitant on keeping this. I'm curious if the Asus n550 has it as strong as this laptop. I'll have to look into it a bit more. Mine seems to take a little longer to go away completely. It may not help that I like the color gray and use it for a lot of stuff.

 

hi Dannemand,

Thanks for such a warm responce. Thanks for the advice on the ram.

I still have one problem with my system. When ever i plug in a USB 3.0 the system slows down. Is there a solution for this??

Thanks in advance

 

Hi everyone,

I got finally this magnificent laptop, but the only issue that I´m having with him is about the Brightness adjustment. I tryed the fix of the OP (reinstall intel hd drivers,and ofcourse Adaptable Brighness is desactivated too) but still to change the brighness I have to restart. I have the last drivers 13.6 beta. I dont know what can it be. Please help me with this. Thanks in advance guys.

 

Have you tried all the suggestions in the Adaptive Brightness thread?

John

 

I am on my phone now (Tapatalk) but look back a few pages and you'll see discussion of this exact problem and how to fix it. Basically, you need to enable USB S3 Wake-up in BIOS.

 

Hi all! This is my first post after some months of lurking. (I still find this forum a bit confusing, though.)

I've the 770Z5E-S02SE version. This is my first new laptop ever. I've grown old of my big self built towers. Therefor I've no idea on how much fan I should hear and how often.

The fan(s) often comes on low when I only have I few tabs in Chrome up and running. No heavy sites loaded in them. No other programs running, except the usual tray stuff. Box/Dropbox/Samsung-something. All unnecessary services and programs I know of are stopped or uninstalled. Norton was the first to go after I got the machine.

There's very low CPU percentages in use and lots of available RAM. (Exact numbers can be provided.)

The machine stands on a flat, hard surface with no openings covered.

I know that asking what's normal can be a bit like asking how long a fish is, but I guess you see what I mean. Any input on if this is "normal" are appreciated. and what on earth can be tipping the fans off in this way?

 

Anyone installed the PX Profile List via the SWUpdate? I've tried two machines one with it installed and one without it installed, can't seem to reproduce what it actually does... Hmm...

 

Even light usage is probably enough to warm the CPU to 61C (which is the usual trigger temperature for the fan to start on Samsung notebooks). Once the fan comes on then it keeps running until the temperature has dropped several degrees.

Samsung offer a "Silent Mode" (Fn + F11) which reduces the fan activity but be forewarned that this mode locks the CPU down to minimum speed so responsiveness can be impaired. However, there may be some further Silent Mode settings in either the Settings program and/or the BIOS. One option that may exist is the provision to keep the fan running continuously but slowly rather than switching on and off. Check your computer and report back on what you find.

John

 

I have similar problem with fan noise. All the time I boot or restart laptop fan noise is very audible and power consumption reaches 30W. Silent mode is not helping. I set all the values in bios to default and after doing that fan noise occurs very often. I´d be very greatful if someone can look up in bios in order to find something responsible for that. Thanks in advance.

 

Hi guys, I recently bought a Samsung NP880Z5E, it's a great laptop, but I have some questions.
In the lower and upper corners on the black background, I noticed the backlight bleeding, it is the norm for LED backlit displays?
The temperature in the games or Fire Strike cpu 76-82 degrees, gpu 70-74 and the top of the laptop gets very hot, is it safe?

 

Those are safe temps, it helps if you keep the back of the laptop lifted a bit.


BTW, 13.8 beta 2 is out, testing now. It can be downloaded here: AMD Catalyst 13.8 BETA2 (13.200.11.0 August 14) Download

EDIT: I have a great feeling about this driver: everything stock: P3502 on 3Dmark11!!!! http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/7039088

EDIT2: Guess who finally broke 4K? http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/7039118

 

Actually the AMD 8870 in the Samsung is faster than the 750m in the Asus.
You can check notebookcheck.net for such stuff.
You can also have a look at the 3dmark11 results with the new 13.8 beta drivers (more than 3500 poitns compared to typically 2500 for the 750m). In my opinion Samsung is the better laptop in every aspect.

 

Well I don't know if it's already widely known but apparently the EVO SSDs are now available ( at least in Germany). Before I buy anything I need to know what kind of tool(s) I shoud get/have. I don't have any screwdrivers with me at all so I might as well order it at the same time. Any suggestions regarding an USB enclosure are also welcomed.

 

What about the backlight bleeding?
By 70-100% brightness a bit annoying. Someone else is experiencing the same thing or is it the norm?

 

Hi guys, maybe you can help. I'm running Windows 8 on an NP770Z5E-S01. Whenever I boot up the computer, the speaker volume is always set to 42. When I adjust the volume slider, I get a pop-up message reading: "To prevent possible hearing damage, do not listen at high volume levels for long periods." After a while the slider automatically resets itself to 42. It doesn't seem to be in response to anything I'm doing as far as I can tell - it seemingly just happens by itself after a few hours, although it's hard to be certain. The problem occurred on a clean install. I've checked under Sound > Communications and made sure Windows is set to "do nothing" when it detects communications activity, and I've checked the speaker properties and made sure SoundAlive was disabled. I can't find any other likely suspects, although I have only passable knowledge of computers so I may well be overlooking something obvious. Can anyone help? It's driving me nutty.

 

In mine it is the 8770m radeon, and the 750m with ddr3 was a bit better from what I read on gpu boss (I may have looked at the wrong thing though. It wouldn't have been the first time)

 

Is your over clocking of 925 core, 1375 memory stable for all games you've played?

Currently I'm only over clocking at 850 core, 1250 memory which is so far stable for every games I've played, and without having to use a third party power adaptor.

 

Only game I've had trouble with is BF3. 900/1350 is flawless for me though.

 

I've tried the news 13.8 beta 2 drivers with factory GPU frequencies, only getting 3400 in 3DMark2011

 

Actually your is the first report I've seen about back light bleeding since when it came out in late March!

Sent from HTC HD2 with Tapatalk

 

I tried getting some photos from an SD card today but it turns out my cardreader doesn't work properly. Whenever I try copying over some files the SD card disconnects after one or sometimes a few files. It then sometimes reconnects again automaitcally one or two times but will disconnect again on copying. After that it wont come back again without disabling and enabling the card reader in the device manager. I've tried different SD cards and drivers directly from Realtek instead of Samsung but it makes no difference. Is my device defect or do others have the same problem?

 

There is a windows update to address card reader problems (it is an optional update). That might fix your problem.

 

Even I had the sd-card problem with stock w8 installation. Whenever I inserted a sd-card it automatically mounted and unmounted itself all the time, ie it was impossible to use it.

But swapping out the 1 TB hdd for a samsung 840 pro 512 GB ssd and new w7 installation with all the updates and also let the 'sw-update' software utility download and install the necessary drivers, that solved my problem. Now I dont have any issues with the card-reader, and the machine itself and the os and all the ports, viz. usb, hdmi etc. everything works as expected.


Imho w8 is a pain to use as desktop os, not that w7 is perfect but w8 belongs to the garbage.

I have a Samsung smartphone, a samsung memory-card, samsung ssd drives, a samsung computer, and in future there will be a samsung tv and a samsung car if they will make one .

 

Hi,

Have anyone had problems with Battlefield 3?

The graphics run great with my Samsung drivers, it runs 1920x1080 with auto adjustments. I can play perfectly in single player but when I play multiplayer I have all the time a lag that can be up to 10 to 15 seconds which is really wierd since I'm playing in servers in my country and I have 30ms of latency so I don't know what is going on.

Anyone else had this problems?

Wifi Maybe?

 

So only me was so "lucky". What to do now, return to the store?

 

Did you buy it online or at a "physical" shop? Do you have the possibility to check other machines and see if they have the same problem? It might be a flawed machine, or you can be over sensitive

Sent from HTC HD2 with Tapatalk

 

That's it, the update fixed it for me. You'll have to restart even after windows update has restarted the laptop though, but after that it works without any problems.

 

Was the UEFI issue fixed with the NP780Z5E-S01UB model so that ubuntu can be installed? Been away from the scene for a while and don't know.

 

At least we have not received any reports of UEFI bricking on 2013 models. Given the amount of activity, one would think it would have surfaced if they were prone to it. Also check the UEFI bricking sticky thread.

 

I would also love to know that.

 

We get the question regularly, and I meant to say I think it IS safe on the 2013 models, given that we have not heard a single problem report with those models. We also have several positive reports of successful installations (including earlier in this thread).

But of course I cannot provide any guarantees. On those 2012 models that DID brick, Samsung replaced the motherboards under warranty.

You can always disable UEFI in BIOS before installing Linux -- although you will have to re-install Windows as well if you do.

 

Well I can tell you that I've disabled uefi and secure-boot and so far haven't met with any problems.

I also successfully booted Ubuntu 12.04 from a usb memory but have not installed it yet, I'm waiting for 12.04.3, which should be released tomorrow.

 

All UEFI bricking reports were, well, with UEFI installations

There are all kinds of other problems that users can run into, even with UEFI disabled. But certainly I would not expect this kind of issue with UEFI disabled. Not on the 2013 models nor or earlier models. I have often booted my PartedMagic LiveCD on my 2012 model, no problems there.

Again, my point was that EVEN with UEFI enabled (which does provide some benefits) we have not heard any bricking reports on 2013 models. And we have several successful reports -- ie NO bricking, even installing Linux with UEFI enabled. For example, check the posts here and here. Also check the threads linked below:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/723676-linux-series-7-2013-a.html
http://forum.notebookreview.com/samsung/706510-samsung-laptops-bricked-using-uefi.html

 

Waiting for Samsung Unpacked, september 4th do you guys think that Samsung will say anything regarding a Haswell refresh? If not I am going to pull the plug and pick one of these up at best buy.

Also has anyone had any luck with getting a regular US qwerty keyboard on the Canada HD8870M version?

 

Thanks. When I get my new HDD with SSD cache I will try to install it.

 

Well I had a unique problem with mine when I tried to install ubuntu. I have the NP780Z5E-S01UB with UEFI on and secure boot off. And it installed fine, but I chose to uninstall to get 13.04. Upon uninstalling, grub and ubuntu stayed on my computer. Ubuntu was stuck on the boot menu for choosing which os I wanted. When I tried to boot, I got to grub and it displayed an error. I had a long and tedious process of finding the bios updater tool.

But I SHOULD be okay to go ahead and create the partition and install Ubuntu 13.04, correct? And could someone link me to a page with instructions?

 

Well, first of all: Hello/Hällo/Hola/Konichiwa/Mari Mari/etc. guys

I've been lurking this thread for about half a year aaaaand I finally got this beautiful machine like 2 weeks ago.
So far everything's been fine while following the tutorials in the OP (thank you to all of you who collaborated on it), yet I have one doubt/issue/question:

I do not play much outside of Emus and Fighting Games, so I got Super Street Fighter IV AE to play on the notebook. I thought that with such a powerful laptop I'd get like incredibly high FPS yet the built-in benchmark reports the use of the HD4000 to render the game, even though I've changed the laptop to High Performance in both the power plan and the switchable graphics settings. I have tried updating the Raedon drivers to the latest beta I could find in the AMD website (13.8) yet nothing has changed. Have any of you experienced such strange behavior on your laptops? How did you managed to work around it? I hope any of you can address my questions.

PD: Sorry about my English, it is not my mother tongue

Edit: I forgot to mention previously that I have tried following the OP tutorial to update the HD 4000 drivers, only to lose the brightness control (latest HD 4000 drivers, downloaded from the Intel website) therefore I kept the stock HD 4000 graphics driver.