***The Official MSI GT80S Titan (w/desktop 980 GPU's) Owner's Lounge***

Well I started to wonder if maybe the small increase in performance over a 980mSLI (or about on par with an overclocked 980mSLI) is not due to the limitation of the 330w supply, and thus limiting the 980 GPU power usage, but rather the small increase may be mostly due to the extra shaders of the full 980?

That leads me to believe there could be a massive amount of hidden GPU power we could be using if they let us use the full 330w adapter like every single other SLI system I've ever used. Each card has to be using less than 100w if my entire system is only using 250 with CPU being fully utilized.

I don't really have a problem with the NOS, it sucks, but if it would only work when going way past the 330w capacity of the adapter I could at least deal with it. The way it is working now is not right, its basically taking only 250ish watts from the adapter and then using NOS after that (according to a couple owners tests anyway).

I still think something is just wrong, as in broken, because my old 980mSLI used far more power than this. So I'm worried that the extra power I can not use is robbing my framerates in games. It almost seems like the desktop 980s are more efficiently getting me the same FPS, which is backwards, and does not make sense because none of us bought this machine for "efficiency" at the cost of less FPS. I want more FPS at the cost of using more power, yet they are using less power than the 980m's do, and not even fully utilizing the power available form the adapter.

 

It sounds like you all have gathered the necessary data, with suggestions as to how to fix it.

Now it's time to file a ticket with MSI through your product registration and request a fix, with the parameters desired.

The more owners that make this request the better, so MSI knows it's a problem.

Since this "feature" isn't advertised in the model specs / description - anywhere - it's even possible it's not generally well known at MSI.

At least MSI needs to allow the 330w power adapter to be fully utilized before cannibalizing the battery.

The fact that MSI didn't list this mis-feature in the specs or description, might be reasonable grounds to support a refund through MSI - even after the normal return period.

https://register.msi.com/home/login

 

Where the hell are the MSI Reps? Has anyone called MSI?

@hmscott I can't send it back because I need it lol. I wish I had another computer, buy sadly I do not and I travel too much ...

 

@MSI Myco @MSIGeno are the only reps here I know.

Owners should contact MSI Support directly, and file a complaint to start the debugging / solution process.

That would be you @Frankzro @Porter @Katiecat

The recent posts about this battery boost phenomena are the first I have seen, here or anywhere, about this behaviour.

Now that it's been confirmed, parameterized, etc - it's time to file a complaint with MSI.

If it's a bug, or an unintended side effect of a feature, then it can be fixed, and MSI might not know about it - maybe not even 1 person.

It wouldn't be the first time a major issue was found in the field by customers with a brand new product. MSI isn't alone in this.

It only take's a few minutes to file the request via the member login support link:
https://register.msi.com/home/login

 

The problem for me is, I can still return it if I do it in the next few days. I don't dare register it until I am sure I want to keep it.

I would not even mention battery boost, to me that is a completely separate issue, that likely (from past experience) they will not remove. I do wish they would at least allow us to turn it off so we're not wearing out our batteries as we game.

My only complaint, so as not to cloud up the issue, is to allow the machine to use the full 330w output of the adapter, which it does not appear to be doing.

 

I don't see how you can seperate the cause and effect, they are directly related.

The "Battery Boost" implementation parameters are causing limited power draw through the AC power, and pulling power from the DC battery at a programmed point - stopping maximum utilization of the 330w power adapter.

The "Battery Boost" is the source of your complaint.

You should always register your laptop the day you get it. There is a bonus of 3 extra months of warranty if you do it within a certain time limit.

You can return a registered laptop just the same as an unregistered one. I have done this myself.

Even if you now plan to return it, please register and file the complaint, that way the rest of us current / future owners will benefit from your findings.

Please explicitly tell MSI that the problem is why you are returning it so they get the point.

 

Thanks Hmscott

I thinking that even if I disconnect the battery, the computer would still not use the full 330w output of the adapter. That is the root of the issue as I see it.

Or another way to word it, I would be "ok" with battery boost working above the 330w level, so if you're overclocking and the system needed another 50w it would get 330w + 50w for a total of 380 watts. That is not what is happening here at all. I saw peaks around 330w(at the wall) or so, and hovering around 300w(at the wall) mostly while in a demanding game.

Again, my worry is if you bring battery boost into the picture, they will miss the part about not even using the 330w power available in the first place.

I could be wrong though, and call me a pessimist, but I have little faith it will ever get "fixed". Easier for me to just return it and move on. Or just accept it and move on. If I keep it I will at least file the trouble ticket, but no way would I send it in for this.

 

The behavior isn't "bad", it's just not optimal. Tuning the settings is what you are after to get an optimal use out of the AC power.

And, truely it should be letting the maximum throughput come from the AC, at least to the levels from the previous GT80 maximum power draw on the 330w.

I really do think someone just flubbed up and didn't tune the parameters for the 330w power draw the GT80 has used in the past. They stopped short of giving us full power. That's fixable

Actually, if the tuning were right, the Battery Boost feature becomes an awesome adjunct to maximum performance. Who wants to carry around 2 330w power adapters?

Kicking in Battery Boost after maxing out the AC wall power is pretty cool

You can explain it from 2 angles to help them focus on the fix from the start.

Start with the "why is my battery depleting under heavy load?" angle.

And, then add, "why is the power drawn through the AC adapter not reaching the levels of previous GT80's?"

"It's only XXX watt's instead of XXX watts" - "it's not utilizing all the power available from the 330w AC power adapter".

You are bound to get the standard 1st tier brush off, so be sure and ask for it to be escalated to an engineer that understands the issue(s) involved

It's too bad you are finding this out at the end of your return period. You might bring it up with the seller and ask if you can have more time to work the issue with MSI, make sure you get it in writing/email if they do extend it.

I don't think it's a deal breaker for most people. Really good performance numbers have been reported by several people. Most gaming will be able to use the full power with the Battery Boost, and 6 hours is a long time.

I guess you will have to decide if the performance is good for your usage given what you know, assuming no fix.

You can't count on a fix, but I think it's worth pursuing.

 

For the most part, I love what they've done with the laptop, I really do. But the current behavior is far from "not optimal." It's worse than just "bad." While my current workload may not burn enough power to cause battery drain, who's to say that I won't need the full 330W in the future? Or whoever I might end up selling it to? Even if you only play games for a few hours at a time, keep in mind that this is with a new battery. After a year or two when the battery loses some capacity, which the constant charge/drain certainly won't help, how long will it be? Even worse, what happens if it dies completely? You're stuck running at crippled clocks until you replace it, which really raises the question of what the point even is of buying the 980s over the 980Ms.

I'm sure it's not intentionally limited so low either, but whether MSI is going to put out a fix remains to be seen. There's a limited window in which people can get a refund on the laptop, and it's closing quickly. Even if MSI promises to issue a fix, if they backpedal on the issue, everybody's going to be stuck with a laptop whose value and useful lifetime is completely tied to the battery. If they do, that's fantastic, and I'll be more than satisfied with my purchase. But until then, forgive me for being more than a little wary.

 

It's quite interesting they went that route with the current GT80. Mine does drain battery but at an almost negligible rate. Additionally, as other original Gt80 have tested, we have actually "killed" the PSU with more than 400w drawn when overclocking. It seems my current GT80 is not power locked in the same way.

 

Do you have a repeatable test I can do to push mine and see what is actually happening? The only thing I could come up with was furmark and a cpu test at the same time, but I hadn't done that on a machine in years. I think there used to be some block in place from running them both.

It could be that my measuring method, or the device itself (Killawatt EZ) is not giving a good reading, who knows.

 

Maybe the right phrase to use would be "tripped the circuit breaker in the power adapter", rather than "killed it".

"killed it" makes it sound like it was dead, not recoverable, pushing up the daisies, an Ex-Power Adapter

Also, I have noticed lower than normal battery levels on my GT80 SLI-263, but never thought that it was the GT80 on AC using the Battery for extra power.

I always attributed the differing % of charge level to the power supply recharging software that conditions the battery by varying the charge level. It sometimes charges up to 100%, but usually it is somewhere between 94% - 99%.

MSI advertised this Battery Boost feature in their other laptops, and have never mentioned it as a feature for the GT80 series. I would think MSI would want this known as it is a helpful feature for gaining instantanous power when needed.

Why would MSI not mention it?

And, if Battery Boost is a feature of the GT80 before the 980 SLI release, then it sounds more and more like MSI can / should tune the BIOS/EC toward giving more wall power like it did in previous models.

 

Just my opinion of course, but they would not mention it due to it being a horrible "feature".

On the GT70 I had, it allowed more power to be used than the stock 180w adapter could supply. It wore down your battery by constantly discharging and recharging the battery. I think it discharged in a couple hours or so then your performance botttomed out for the remainder of your play session.

A much better solution would have been to use a 220w/240w/330w power supply and not have any battery boost at all.

The only time I see it could be a good feature is if they used a 330w supply which is the max normal one available for notebooks, and needed a little boost above it. Even then, a better solution would be to just make a 380w or 400w supply for the machine, even make it optional and only supply the 330w by default.

Another thing, whether you like it or not, they should most definitely allow you to turn the feature off if you want to.

My opinion, is battery boost needs to go away and never come back.

 

No, I think if the GT80S 980 SLI did indeed have the Battery Boost feature MSI would have mentioned it, and MSI clearly hasn't mentioned it in any published information.

Like you said Battery Boost + AC Power was an advertised feature in other MSI models.

And, now that I think about it, my GT80 SLI-263 isn't exhibiting this behavior.

I run batch jobs on my GT80 for hours - overnight, way longer than 6 hours, with 100% CPU and 100% x 2 GPU on a single 330w power supply. And, my battery level never goes below 94%.

So I am still not sure what is going on with the MSI GT80S 980 SLI, if it really is supposed offer the Battery Boost feature, or if there is actually something else going on that just looks like the Battery Boost feature.

I know that on other laptops, on Mac's for example, if I am issued the wrong wattage power adapter at a client site, it will stop charging while I am doing heavy workloads - the little charging icon goes out - after swapping in a higher wattage power adapter it starts charging again while the heavy workloads are running.

It's possible there is some bug / design misfeature that is causing this as a side-effect of reaching the edge of power delivery, and it just looks like the Battery Boost feature on other MSI laptops.

You all really need to open a support ticket with MSI right away, and start getting to the bottom of this.

 

just take the rear cover off and disconnect the battery, run a test to see if it will operate at full speed. You should know pretty quick your results.

 

The easiest I can think for me, is overclocking both of my GPUs at +230 core and +400 memory, run my CPU at max intel XTU allowed, while running the FF14 benchmark maxed out with unlocked fps. I am sure I had it shut down on me about 3 times testing that.

And definitely this. It is normal to have a % of your battery drain out of no use, but to really test the PSU, it is best to disconnect the battery and use the machine to see if it power throttles more than with the battery enabled. Bench scores with and without battery for debugging!

 

You can run 3d Mark tests in a loop just like other benchmarks such as eugene valley or heaven. That would be enough stress and safer than some others.

Sent from my LG-H901 using Tapatalk

 

as negative as it sounds, there are pros/cons come with it.
you have listed out pretty much out of the cons and I think it easily out weight the pros but nevertheless, battery life tends to shrink if you dont use it once awhile, its always better to use it to say 20% then keep it at 80%, from my understanding is if u dont use it and keep it 100% charged, it's life shortens faster than if u were to constantly using them, such as your cellphone. battery is not good to keep it at a certain state, which is very unfortunate.

but yea power restriction is uncalled for though

 

I'm glad you can see the glass as half full.

 

I don't mind they implement the use of the battery, I mind that we can't use a higher PSU! Although the "good" thing here is that my GT60 has only 10% wear, despite the years of use

Man, we need unlocked power for our machines. Let's push MSI so that they can add it.

 

Windows 10 install disk wont see my raid 0 drive pretty sure i need to put the drivers on a usb disk but cant find the proper drives anyone have a dl link by chance?

 

MSI will not be unlocking this machine any time soon. And they will take your ideas and use them against you if you are not careful.

 

sounds like corporate control we know all too well.

 

"Working as intended."

Time to start a chargeback, I suppose.

 

Agreed, send it back and let them sink. It almost feels like a trick on ones intelligence.

Sent from my LG-H901 using Tapatalk

 

Maybe their scared you'll break something using too much power, bad for PR.

It's not unusual to have some margin on adapter supplies over the max power expected. IOW just because you have a 330W adapter doesn't mean you should expect to use all 330W.

Would you put 220VAC on a 110VAC blender to make it run faster?

 

It simply does not make sense if the slightly weaker and more energy efficient 980m model uses the full 330w and even a tad more, yet the slightly stronger and less energy efficient desktop 980 model uses less energy. Something seems fishy if that is indeed true.

 

It's a bug. No fish required

Did you report the bug to MSI yet? They can't fix it if they don't know about it. You can't assume they know about it and are hiding it.

@Katiecat The comment "Working as intended.", where did it come from?

Would you please give us a little more context and background. Was it a response from the Tier 1 support via a ticket you opened? A phone call? With who / what department?

Working as intended is a statement that is meant to give you the brush off, don't let it affect you, keep asking for escalation.

 

IMHO if it's a hardware limitation it will not get fixed, if it's a bug/mistake then it will get fixed. But as hmscott says, you need to bring up the issue with MSI in the first place.

 

It would make sense for me considering that it seems your CPU is unlocked right? I think they just got scared of trying to power two full 980s even if gimped, with a powerful unlocked cpu I guess.

 

No, but I'd certainly like to put 110VAC on it? Especially when last year's blender used the same motor and worked fine with it.

After contacting support several times, finally got someone to check, and it's designed to be capped a bit over 300W.

So the solution to higher power demands is... to lower the total available power? I'm afraid I don't follow on this one. Not to mention if they're afraid of the user using over 330W, why not just disable the battery and let it all come from the adapter?

 

The adapter side input to the notebook will be spec'd for a maximum current but you can use more current than that if you also take some current from the battery circuit without exceeding the adapter input circuit maximum.

Not saying that's how it is but how it could be.

 

I'm not saying there might not be a hardware reason for it with this iteration of the motherboard, but no matter what, it's incredibly disingenuous to not to mention it anywhere in the specs or official literature, especially given how older models, or even the review unit which was pulling 400W from the wall don't suffer from the same problem. If it's simply an EC firmware change that MSI is willing to do, I'd be more than satisfied with the machine. But if for some reason they decided to use a weaker power delivery system on a model that nobody with any sense would expect to consume less than 330W under full load, then fail to disclose that fact, that's a huge red flag for me.

 

That's an excellent summation, and I hope you told MSI that as directly as you just did, as I think that is what they need to hear.

If you still have an open ticket with MSI, please do forward that on to them.

After some reflection, that summation also focuses my reaction to the situation.

These are only my guesses, I don't know for sure what requirements MSI faced to come up with the resulting behavior of the MSI GT80S SLI 980.

What else can MSI do?

If unchecked the components may draw more power than is safe through AC, so MSI needed to limit the AC power,

Or, in an effort to provide more performance by adding battery power the AC power needs to be moderated below it's maxium to add the battery boost.

Before now MSI didn't need to set this limit because they didn't add battery boost.

That is why previous models are only limited for power supply protection which allows more power to be drawn from AC.

Maybe at the power supply protection limit the new CPU / GPU components at the edge of maximum AC power delivery are already in a power usage condition that can't be caught and protected quickly enough to provide a reasonable margin for safety.

So an additional power limit in front of the power supply protection limit needed to be put in place to give the circuit enough time to react, protecting the components as well as the power supply.

Or, maybe to give more performance by using the battery for additional power at load requires the power supply to be in a particular state to switch in the battery power, and that is at a lower AC power draw than absolute maximum.

How would MSI put those details into the consumer specifications?

There had to be a limit to what the GT80S 980 SLI could do on one 330w power supply. And, this is how it played out.

The GT80S SLI 980 performance numbers I have seen are awesome, and way above the 980m SLI numbers. I am sure gaming is also much better.

I don't know if 6 hours battery boost is enough or not, but it seems higher than I would have expected for sustained boost.

I guess it's a matter of whether the performance is enough for each of us individually to decide.

 

well theres always clevo laptop, able to use dual psu if u ever need em with unlocked bios n stuff. though 17 inch really turns me down so im afraid im going desktop with water cooling next lol.

 

Yup! Pretty much just got a "tough luck, that's how it works" response.

Of course, any machine that uses variable amounts of power is going to have to set a fixed current limit, unless the PSU has one built in. Nobody's arguing that (although it certainly would be nice if MSI gave you the option to increase that limit, with the caveat that any resulting damages wouldn't be covered under warranty). But it makes zero sense that they would change this solely to make battery boost work, especially seeing how after adding in battery power they're right back where they started.

I'm not a power engineer, so I can't really comment too much on this one. But if the GT80 could handle 330W, why not this model? Regardless, if this is the case, then either inform the consumer or sell it with dual adapters and/or use power delivery components which can actually handle what the rest of the machine seems to be designed for.

How about... "Under heavy usage, the battery is used to supplement the adapter. When it drains, the laptop will have reduced performance. Battery lasts for around 6 hours for typical gaming, 3 hours under full load."

The issue isn't that the 980s are more power hungry, it's that the adapter is artificially limited lower than before. Yes, they wouldn't reach their full potential with 330W either, but that should be plenty to run at stock settings.

I was seeing numbers closer to 2-3, and that was with the CPU only using 25W. And again, batteries degrade. Is 1 hour of full performance enough for you in a few years?

Already shopping around.

 

And here I am selling my mini gaming desktop (5820 water cooled, 980TI SLI) for this thing I will miss it a bit but I got tired of either always sitting at my desk, or having to haul it around the house and of course I was never able to take it with me out of town.

Unfortunately this super high end notebook marked is very limited, especially if you want SLI, so there aren't many(any?) choices yet. The good thing is the 980m are very overclockable and competitive, so you have more options if you are open to those.

You could also go the route of the desktop CPU and single desktop GPU, but if you are like me, I never play any games limited by CPU, mine are always GPU limited.

 

CyberpowerPC has a new "GT80S SLI 980" model, only $3809 (6920HQ) / $3529 (6820HK)

FANGBOOK 4 XTREME SX-L 500 Gaming Laptop
https://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Fangbook_4_XTREME_SX-L_500_Gaming_Laptop

FANGBOOK 4 XTREME SX-L 400 Gaming Laptop
https://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Fangbook_4_XTREME_SX-L_400_Gaming_Laptop

Spoiler

Update: After going through the Expanded option list, I found both of these models only come with a 150w power adapter... so before buying I would talk with Fangbook and let them know it needs the 330w to run - don't get it with only a 150w power adapter, it won't perform

 

Nice. Wish they would have had that a couple weeks ago, would have saved me some cash. I ditched the stock SSDs and HD anyway lol. Never heard of fangbook, but since it looks like an MSI would that mean it has the same EC limitation?

 

My thoughts exactly, maybe they might be helpful tuning the EC/BIOS for *more power*

IDK...I guess call them? Chat? Tech support Email?

 

MSI battery calibration got back my 8.3% wear it had when new, to 0%. The full capacity is more than the design capacity now, nice

 

what i am chasing after though are cpu bound, games i can go 900p or 1080p at 40-60 fps im happy on just high settings lol but I do need to run 6-8 games at once on 6 different display so I need 1 single GPU with say 16+ gb vram and a powerful cpu to run that many games at once. a 10-12 cores desktop E cpu would work but at high clock, only water cooling would suffice and only desktop can help with enough space.

aside from cpu, i am a storage maniac so i'd like to have SAS SSD for regular back up, if mobo doesnt support them i'd need to have pcie cards that convert into SAS, in addition need those HHHL PCIE SSD that can run at 3-5GB/s lol.

laptop would never have those, unless i win lottery and pay to design one myself.

 

The battery drainage thing is a kind of a problem. If I have my laptop plugged in all the time, then I unplug it, I expect to have full battery regardless of what I was doing.

Does everyone with the desktop 980s have the battery drain while gaming? Is it the same rate for everyone?

Can people please do a quick test to measure the rate?

Are there any benchmarks at 10%, 20% and 30% capacity?

Does the battery drain to zero? If it stops at a certain point (say 20%), does it just hold that level indefinitely?

 

So I assume MSI doesn't make that notebook/chassis. There is some ODM as is the case with Clevo/Sager and all the other boutique PC makers that resell those? Will there be others that have the GT80 chassis?

 

I believe its MSI that acts as an ODM in many cases in the past.

 

MSI or not. That's about $1000 for a slightly lesser CPU and half the RAM. Not worried about the CPU as much, the RAM and SDDs can always be upgraded later.

Their config page for the m.2 drive puzzles me though. It's as though there are 2x m.2 SATA slots and 1x m.2 PCI slot.

 

All three slots work with M.2 SATA drives.

 

Do any work with M.2 PCI?

 

But, only the two m.2 sata slots on the left are PCie x4.

I believe the m.2 slot between the two drives and the 2.5 is not x4 PCie.

 

Correct. I was able to get the same m2 sata drive to work in all three slots. The pcie only worked on the left two.