Introducing The 2013 Series 7 Chronos with AMD HD8870M!

I'm thinking the most simple way may be to just clone the whole HD to the SSD... swap the drives, boot into the SSD while pressing F4 to go into recovery, and tell it to restore to factory defaults. That way the only thing different is the drive itself.

 

I think I may have messed up the screen by doing different configurations. Gonna factory restore and see what happens. Looked great earlier when I played a blu ray on it.

So say you screw up while replacing the HD with an SSD they will cover that?

 

Before i did a factory restore (as I don't know anything specifically that would fix) I would...

1. make sure scaling is set to 100%
2. Turn off adaptive brightness.
3. Make sure the resolution is set to 1920x1080
4. Make sure the refresh frequency is set to 60hz
5. Check if you have any 'accessibility' options enabled that may be zooming the screen.
6. Make sure your color depth is set to 24 or 32 bit.

Most of these are set by right clicking on the desktop in windows and selecting screen resolution.

 

This is a good concept. Have you seen how Windows 8 has the option in settings to either "Restore" or "Reset" your PC? I think that would be the best way to accomplish the swap. The restore option does not affect your files or programs, while the Reset function completely wipes everything on the drive except Windows 8.

This is a good method of thought, Alchemist! I think I will definitely do it this way second if it doesn't work from simply installing it through the BIOS.

 

Well, if you damage the notebook while taking it a part im sure your screwed. If you put it together and it doesn't work, they would probably charge you to reimage the hard drive, if i had problems though id switch back in the hd before sending it in.

Yep, those options should work too... really if you clone the drive completely you should just be able to boot. Just doing a restore using the F4 restore partition or using windows 8 restore/reset just might clean up any settings that need to be updated based on having an SSD instead of an HD. I'm guessing this will get around secure boot since you aren't installing an OS at all just swapping drives with identical contents.

 

^^^^^^^ if you f up the notebook, i'd put it back with the standard HDD, and bring it back to bestbuy for an exchange, now that you have practice taking it apart, try not to break it on the new exchange

 

Well, would Secure Boot even need to be turned off if I am just installing Windows 8? That is a verified OS, so I feel like it shouldn't complain when I try to install... and yeah the "Reset" function is something I'd say is mandatory after a drive clone. We saw what happened to that guy on YouTube who cloned...problems galore. Plus, I would want to get rid of all the bloatware

So my process would be:

1. Try to install Windows 8 normally, through the BIOS, on a clean and empty SSD. If that doesn't work:
2. Try to install Windows 8 to the SSD while it is plugged into the computer via SSD. So, essentially, install Windows 8 through Windows 8 hahaha.
If that doesn't work:
3. Clone HDD to SSD, Reset entire computer upon first boot of newly cloned SSD.

Another thing: I really don't like the "Samsung" boot logo they have. I would much rather have the sleek looking blue Windows flag. I wonder if reinstalling a storebought copy of Windows 8 on the new SSD will make that go away...

 

Lol, I thought the same thing but didn't say it. If your going to do upgrades, best to do them in the first 30 days.

Sounds like a sound plan, although I don't have a windows 8 disk to do an install (have a pro upgrade but im sure the serial number on this thing is for standard not pro) so id probably be jumping right to clone.

 

I wish I knew what yall were talking about. I know what an SSD is but installing and etc... Lost me there haha

 

Just contemplating how to swap out the HD and put in an SSD without alot of installation headaches.

 

Well I've got a Pro disc and my University provides me a free copy of Pro 64-bit...so...hahaha

 

you suck.

Anybody try to go back to Samsung with that link and see what happens?

Still waffling over the 8870, but Alchemist made a good point about the heat load and general longevity. I think this laptop is great for the occasional gaming fix I have. It plays all the videos and does everything else I want flawlessly. So I can't really lose here. I keep a good laptop, or get its upgrade if it arrives within a 30 day window and is THAT much better.

 

Would this work? Clean Install with Windows 8 Upgrade

 

Well this won't necessarily be a good thing if the BIOS prevents me from installing anything but Windows 8 "Core" or whatever it is! haha.

And yes, a few people have, but typical Samsung support everyone says something different with a different reasoning behind it. No shame in trying! It's open 24/7!

Live Chat

Honestly, I think so. I think the guy who had trouble installing a clean copy of Windows 8 was a lemon.

That guide even says "If your computer came preinstalled with Windows 8, the serial key is integrated into the BIOS and will be automatically entered". Essentially, this new built in CD Key feature with Windows 8 PC's is a helping hand, if anything. It says nowhere that it should't work with built in CD Keys.

We'll all be fine I bet when we try to clean install Windows 8 on our newly installed SSDs. I just wish someone who is keeping the 8770m and wants to upgrade to an SSD would confirm or deny this for us

 

The youtube guy seems to have almost all problems resolved. He reinstalls the OS. He's put up a new video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAL_weYeF6w&list=UUzQZ5dguy4vErYkAW9nJumQ&index=1

 

Here is excerpt from the Microsoft forums:

Also take a look here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...ard-oem-your-new-win8-certified-notebook.html

 

If that is what I have to end up doing, so be it. I actually had to do EXACTLY that (Upgrade to Win 8 through Windows 7) when installing Windows 8 on my Macbook Pro Retina here..

 

Test Samsung Serie 7 Chronos 770Z7E S01 DE; Notebookcheck; German:
17.3 Zoll 16:9, 1920x1080; TN, non-touch
Intel Core i7-3635QM
8192 MB, DDR3-RAM
AMD Radeon HD 8870M - 2048 MB
Samsung SpinPoint M8 HN-M101MBB, 1000 GB 5400 U/Min
Mata DVD-RAM UJ8A7AS
80 Wh Lithium-Polymer
27 x 406 x 262, 3 kg
Microsoft Windows 8 64 Bit
1249 Euro

/Edit: Sry, link was already posted in #2149

 

So it throttles, mostly because of the insufficient psu. Since it uses all of the 90W, a bigger psu might be the solution. Does anyone have experience with this?

I know that throttlestop can make your pc ignore/change the thermal limits set by the manufacturer. But what if the series 7 chronos only uses 90W not only because the psu is only 90W but samsung limited it at 90W too? Is there a way to work around that?

 

Don't know if the chronos can tap in both the PSU and battery for short heavy loads.
Maybe if there is a software throttle in addition to the psu hardware limitation throttlestop may get the chronos at full power by removing the software throttle thus allowing it to tap in the battery for extra (some laptops can do that). But there are some risks of overheating and that should be tightly monitored.

 

I hope it's possible. And I hope it's just software (or no limit) and not something in the motherboard because that would be extremely hard to work around. If I had the NP770Z5E I'd buy a 120W psu and try it right away. I am getting so tired and frustrated of waiting!!!

 

So you guys can agree that your computer screens are crisp?
Doesn't look grainy, etc?

My local best buy doesn't have any so I wonder how an exchange would work.

 

Still it's not clear which is the most powerful one between asus n56 ,asus ux51,samsung 770z5e (8870m)...
A lot of speculations, unboxing of cheaper versions, and comments about throttling affecting gpu but the only one thing ppl are interested of hasn't yet been discussed. Which is the number one in terms of performance between these 3 models?

 

Hey guys, instead of just slouching about and reading this forum, I thought of making myself useful. I translated the gist of the review of Chronos 770Z7E on notebookcheck.de for you.

____

Buid quality: great first impression, cover of the display can be flexed, some irregularities around the bezel. All in all good, but not outstanding quality.

Wireless range leaves space for improvement.

Maintenance/Upgrading: Fairly tricky, not comfortable at all – rather like in an ultrabook.

Keyboard: Good stop, nice feel and acoustic behaviour.

Touchpad: fairly large, multi-touch works flawlessly, smooth surface, good precision.

Display: All in all good to very good. Decent representation of black, sufficient brightness, first-rate contrast, more-than-average interpolation. Fair viewing angles, better in horizontal than vertical shift. The only flaw is a massive drop in brightness when on battery.

CPU: Apart from some general remarks on the processor, notebookcheck reports throttling: When both CPU and GPU are under load, one to three cores of the CPU throttle for fractions of a second. Cause is either temperature, PSU or manufacturer’s design. A 35W CPU could have been a better choice.
CPU performance is meeting the expectations: between i7-3610QM and i7-3720QM.

GPU: Notebookcheck also state that AMD’s Enduro is not up to the standard of Optimus. To be on the safe side, users can force the dGPU to run by changing settings.
Performance: HD8870M’s benchmark performance varies between Nvidia GT650M and GTX670M. In general, the older the benchmark, the better performs HD8870M, the newer the benchmark, the better performs Nvidia.

Hard drive: Notebookcheck tested the configuration with 1TB spinner. They say its performance is more than decent for a spinner, but recommend upgrading to an SSD for power users.

System performance: Strangely, PCMark 7 results showed great variation, ranging from a score of 2,900 to as much as 4,400.

Gaming: As with benchmarks, gaming performance is different from title to title, sometimes way better than GTX660, sometimes behind GT650M.
Notebookcheck suppose this is not only caused by throttling, but also by immature drivers. In the current state, they say HD8870M is scarcely behing GTX660M, 10% faster than GT650M, 20% slower than GTX670M. If throttling issues could be overcome and appropriate drivers provided, it should surpass GTX660M.

Noise: Comfortably silent in idle, absolutely acceptable under load. Comparably powerful laptops tend to be noisier.

Temperature: Quite cool in idle, but it gets fairly hot under stress (50°C on the upper side, 44°C around the bottom). However, such temperatures are not to be expected during normal use.
The components, however, do get very hot: 95°C for the CPU, 87°C for the GPU.

Sound: Not quite a reference value, but easily outstanding.

Battery: >10 hours in idle, >5 hours surfing via Wifi, 2h42 for watching a DVD, 1h06 for the battery eater.

CONCLUSION: The strengths of the laptop more than outweigh its weaknesses. Without throttling, some minor flaws in build quality and better access via bottom lid it would be virtually perfect and thus in current state only marginally fails the “very good”-verdict.
____

Okay, please note that none of this is my opinion or experience, but what notebookcheck.de says.
Hope it helps.

 

mine is crispy.

 

I thought Lenovo y500 could be a good replacement, a quick search reveal why y500 is a no go.

Battery life for y500 sucks big time - 1.5 to 3 hours only!
Review Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

 

For Canadians ...

Canada Computers have this: http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=710_577_369&item_id=057625
Model: NP760Z5E-U01CA
Ref Item Code: LPSS000188

I called them and apparently the back order they have is going to be available between April and June!
Bestbuy and Futureshop seem to have the old Chronos on sale till March 17th. So I guess they will get it past that date, maybe April too.

Canada's electronics availability is still horrible!

 

They also have a 780z5e which should be available soon, as they told me that they had already ordered it from Samsung.
Our electronic availability is pretty equal to the US', maybe a few weeks behind.
The 760z5e is not the chronos from CES

 

Yea, if you want raw processing and GPU power then the y500 is a solution but its dual 650m sli setup precludes the use of the hd4000 and switchable displays. It also has a normal 50000mwh battery in it instead of the 91000mwh battery in the chronos.

The screen is excellent, I'm picky about my screens to and this is one of the best ive used on a notebook.

 

Thanks. I wonder how soon is soon. But regardless its the high-end as that one is 1,699$ and has 16GB (8+8) of mem. Its not the same as the best-buy from the US.
These extra 8GB are a waste of money I guess. All I want is a great work touch laptop 15.6" that would also play games decently. At around the 1,300cad$

 

http://www.amazon.de/Samsung-NP770Z...=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1362162289&sr=8-3

Has anyone seen this yet? It's an np770Z5E (so no touchscreen) with windows 8 PRO. The surprising thing is that the description says it's black (and its crazy price of €1800 which does not even give you an ssd).

I don't think it's about a black bezel because it has no touchscreen.

 

In the description is written titanium silver, but it seems that could be some typo:
http://www.amazon.de/Samsung-770Z5E...ers&ie=UTF8&qid=1362164559&sr=1-1

Inviato dal mio GT-I9100 con Tapatalk 2

 

They must've put the wrong thumbnail up because it sure looks like a touchscreen. Crazy price, too.

 

I am from France, and you know, prices of electronic stuffs in europe (consumer electronic in general, but it's true for computers too) are way higher than the ones you get here in North America. The best examples are Apple computers.

 

For owners of Best Buy 8770m

Thought I'd include a directions that will disable the touchscreen keyboard (it's not straight forward). My daughter found the keyboard intrusive and useless. The following worked to disable the touchscreen keyboard

Go to the Start Screen, and then to Control Panel. In the search box for Control Panel, type Administrative Tools, or click it if you see it already. Scroll down to the Services shortcut and select that. If you scroll down in the list of services to the 'T' area, you should see Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Service, or words to that effect. It is running, and on Automatic start type. Stop the service, then go into Properties and switch the startup type to Disabled

 

Awesome, I was looking for that. Thanks!

 

I was the one. I took it back for a refund.


Sent from my New iPad using Tapatalk HD

FAR from the best.


Sent from my New iPad using Tapatalk HD

I have looked at 3 so far and all are grainy. This is because of the layer that is touchscreen. It's a bad design and ruins this laptop. All have it. Depends on the person if they see it or not.


Sent from my New iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

I see it--similar to the effect of a screen protector on a phone. Even though I do a lot of design (and sometimes color work), it doesn't really bother me that much. I can see that if you're a photographer, it might be a problem because you might think there's noise in the image when it's really just the screen. For me, having the ability to test touch interfaces is more important to me than it's visual effect.

 

It's was great then after a while I noticed it. My OCD was going crazy lol

 

Now I have to go check out my screen again I suppose. I haven't seen it yet though, and didn't notice it on the best buy demo today at lunch.

 

to the owners of the Chronos 7 bought from bestbuy: do you guys know if it has an mSata port? I'm kinda hesitating between this guy and a MBP Retina (I would use this laptop most for Windows, but would like to hackintosh it for some program (Aabel in particular) that only run on MacOsX).

 

It doesn't

 

Screen Grain - My Take On It.

I see what the other poster is talking about... if you look really really really close you can see grainy-ness. This is more evident in patches of solid color.

That said, I don't see it as a negative at all, in fact it probably contributes to the rich colors and blacks that the screen produces, and I would much rather have this screens color and viewing angles than your typical TN display.

Also, Im writing this on a 1080p external montior made by LG with LED backlighting, I've used it for about a year now but if I look real close this screen has more of the grainy / screen door effect than the chronos does.

I code for a living and do 3d modeling and animation in my spare time, I probably live on a screen at least 12hrs a day.... and I consider the chronos screen a joy to use, so for me at least its a non issue.

Well, I had a 50gb ssd laying around and picked up a sata to usb3 cable tonight and thought I would do an experiment using recovery. I tried to do a disk copy with recovery of a 'factory new' system to the 50gb drive. It rebooted and started the copy find and got to 6% complete before saying 'copy failed'. No details as to why it failed, just 'copy failed'. I don't know if the drive wasn't big enough or if there is some other problem. So really didn't learn much from this test... im considering swapping the HD for an SSD and thought of using this method to get the OS and recovery partition on the SSD.

 

Just try one of the things we discussed yesterday

 

I wrote this some pages back but it got lost between the pages of recent news, so I'll repost it just in case...
What do you think about switching off the battery with the button on the bottom of the laptop when using it with AC adapter plugged? In this way it should be possible to save a lot of charge/discharge cycles and thus to increase the life of the battery. What do you think?

Sent from HTC HD2 with Tapatalk

 

If it can supply the whole system without a "battery buffer"..

 

Don't think it'll work, as the battery gets reenabled when you push the power button

 

I don't think this will really work out the way they have the battery disconnect button setup. How it works is you press the little reset button and it disconnects power from the unit... its kind of a kill switch so the unit doesn't receive any power, and it only works if you do it with unit off and unplugged. From then on the unit will not turn on... the switch is reset and power is once again available when you plug in the AC adapter. So I don't think there is a way to run off AC adapter and not use the battery.

Thats what I was doing... trying to use Recovery to copy the disk image to an SSD. I just used a 50gb ssd I had available instead of dropping $200-$300 for the 250gb or 500gb drive Id likely go with 'for real'. I just wish it gave better error messages about why it failed.

 

If you want to use the Chronos stationary the Battery Life Extender is the right thing for you.
Once activated the machine won't charge the battery more than 80%. which means the Chronos uses the AC unit only.
I'm using this function for my 17 inch stationary device and I'm glad that Samsung offers this function.

Greetings

 

You should try using MACRIUM REFLECT sector to sector copy to image the samsung disk to your SSD, macrium allows to shrink empty partitions too so it should fit on the SSD. And then try booting on the SSD via USB recognized by the bios. If this works its granted that it will work like stock after a swap.