HIDEvolution 9th Gen Razer Blade 15 RTX 2080 Fujipoly Thermal Pads and Re-paste... So far so good.

It's super early, but I just received my Razer Blade 15 from HIDEvolution and so far so good. It's quick, seems to run cool during benchmarks. Max temps were in the 70s and 80s for CPU during Port Royale, Firestrike, and TimeSpy. But for the averages they were in the 60s. Most of what I did today was get it set up for work. I haven't quite had the chance to play games on it yet to see what temps I'm getting. It'll happen though.

I was thinking this was a bad buy and was gonna return it simply because the WiFi card wasn't working. I irrationally thought it was a defective piece of hardware. It was an easy fix though, I had to get drivers to fix it.

Sadly I don't know what the temps should be stock, so I can't speak to how much the cooling mods helped. I kind of wish HIDEvolution would print out CPU and GPU temps on stock benchmarks then what they are after. Just an extra touch of white glove service they could do to give a better experience.

All in all, I think I'm happy.

***Update***

My temps increased as time went on. In about 20*C ambient my idle temps rose from acceptable numbers to about 60-80 C and during gaming I'm now thermal throttling and temps constantly hit 95-99 on all cores.

I don't know what happened but it's very frustrating. I called HIDEvolution and long story short it's going back and they're charging me 10% restock fee. Which I think is unwarranted since I believe it's their fault. Oh well, live and learn I guess.

I will stick to Best Buy, Amazon, Newegg from now on.

 

Report back temps after 15+ minutes of gaming. I imagine that cpu tell will rise quite a bit. It seems like the 15 and 17” models now have the same maximum spec options. If the cooling systems are similarly effective, I might seriously consider ditching the 17 form factor for a more manageable travel size.


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That’s nice temperature on gaming it’ll probably plus around 5 to 10 depends the titles, as i mentioned in Reddit try undervolting the cpu, most users here doing that I believe. And play around with synapse performance profile, limit the cpu wattage with balanced mode if it’s cpu demanding titles like Tomb Raider, Far cry, Assassin Creed, division etc for FPS light titles like overwatch, CSGo use gaming mode for more FPS and you’re good imo.

 

I may need to do this myself as I am not happy with the 85 degrees I see when I play Mortal Kombat 11.

 

Did you manage to undervolte? If xtu didn’t work try throttlestop, it’s better and has more features. I see 85 degrees often on gaming btw lol it’s a Blade . Isn’t my preferred temperature as well but it doesn’t melt in a year gaming usage...yet

 

85c is a pretty good temperature for a laptop....

But you can push the fans a bit to go lower.

 

I am still at work. I will go home in 1 hour and play a bit with undervolting and see the temperature change. If I can shave 10 centigrade I would be happy.

 

Is this your first gaming laptop, by chance?

Razer has done a frankly incredible job with the temps this time round.
You have to consider what these machines are packing for the size.

 

My previous 'gaming' laptop was a 15 inch Acer. Three times thicker than my Blade and sporting a super fancy 970M.
The laptop would not exceed 75 centigrade when gaming. It also had a cooling system that would benefit from my Antec Dual Fan cooling pad.

Now that thing was abused to a point where the keys have started to fall out. It has been working overtime and back in the day when I helped another forum with Folding it was doing that for days. Battery died 3 years ago and it was always connected to the wall. Having experience from this machine, I was surprised to see the Blade jump so high.

I was playing with throttle stop last night and dropped the laptop between 3200 and 3500 MHz while at the same time decreasing voltage. I also created a custom graphics preset for MK11 as the game automatically maxed out everything to a point where I did not believe it was necessary. High detail should suffice for this game as it looks amazing even this way.

Original temps with default Razer Settings with Content Creation preset : 80-85 centigrade with spikes at 90 degrees.
New temps with Throttle stop, vcore decrease and turbo changes : 70-75 degrees.

I noticed that my Antec Cooling pad is not helping the laptop and having a book which is perfectly snug between the fans when placed in portrait mode yields better temperatures than when I place it on my pad.

Does anyone have any experience with a good laptop stand or cooling pad which works with the Blade 15?

 

Good lord, that's impressive. Coupled with the quiet fans from balanced mode, I think I'm finally going to have to buy one of these things.

As far as stands go, this would be the obvious choice:
https://www.razer.com/gaming-accessories/laptop-stand-for-razer-blade-stealth

Stands with built-in fans are generally a gimmick.

Personally I'd love to use something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H4265LD/

But I'd worry about there being enough heat dissipation.

 

I use the Coolermaster Masterpal Pro notebook stand without the fans installed, it's just basically an aluminum platform with a grid of holes for some free air and an USB hub in the back. It works pretty well but also looks classy. But the benefit of a cooling pad is less with this laptop, the laptop feet are high enough to pull the amount of air it needs, it also pulls a lot of air through the keyboard.

 

Any idea if the volume on the 9th gen razer blade speaker is louder than previous one? I had the 8th gen cpu unit and speakers were quiet low on volume

 

Yeah, I pretty much use mine for the same thing. Basically bought it just for that, the fans really aren't much use (although upgrading them is a good option), but it was "worth" the price just for the stand itself. It's crazy how many hours I spent searching Newegg, Amazon, there are literally no simple "stands" for this form factor that check the boxes of making sense, looking good, and not being total crap quality. So I gave coolermaster my money for a laptop stand....10/10 would buy again

 

Same for me, it was so hard to find just a classy looking stand, luckily they had a good deal on amazon. Only 30 euros for the Pro edition.

 

Thanks for the recommendations.
I ordered the Coolermaster.
The Razer one is classy but too expensive in my area.
If I want a hub i need to pay for the Chroma which is 120 euros.

No gracias. I spent too much on Razer products this month

 

***Update***

My temps increased as time went on. In about 20*C ambient my idle temps rose from acceptable numbers to about 60-80 C and during gaming I'm now thermal throttling and temps constantly hit 95-99 on all cores.

I don't know what happened but it's very frustrating. I called HIDEvolution and long story short it's going back and they're charging me 10% restock fee. Which I think is unwarranted since I believe it's their fault. Oh well, live and learn I guess.

I will stick to Best Buy, Amazon, Newegg from now on.



Edit

Oh I forgot to add these newly increased temps we're with an UV of -0.145v and -0.100v. -0.100v was set by HIDEvolution and I increased (or decreased) it to 0.145v and nothing changed.

Something happened from first days to now. Not sure what, but I don't think they did enough stability checks.

 

What was their response when you called them? Considering a similar purchase.

 

Some modules of razer synapse seem to cause random trouble for people like high cpu loads for no reason and throttling due to that. I had massive issues in overwatch thanks to chroma SDK (i have a razer mouse and headset) and after uninstalling that, colossal higher minimum fps (210 instead of 150) and no more lagging when a browser is open on my second monitor.

Considering that you have a repasted, repaded and undervoltet machine, it's probably a similar issue. Can't imagine why else you'd have good temps first and then suddenly a microwave.

 

My experience with Hidevolution is also absolutely horrendous. Their customer service is very good, no doubt about it and dealing with Donald was great.

Unfortunately their thermal services are absolutely dreadful and overrated like crazy. I've a delidded 9700K from Hidevolution on my Area 51m and it ran super hot right out of the box. I paid for their premium services with LM and Fujipoly and all that jazz.
When I eventually received the system, I was told that its normal for a laptop to run at 100C within 2mins of AIDA64 stress test. The communication between their technical team and their customer team is also dreadful. I was told that my system passed all their thermal test including a "43 minutes AIDA64 run" at their store and I am doing something wrong with my "settings" and its a user error.

What was the tipping point for me was when I ran Division 2 at stock in my Area 51m at stock with FULL fan speed, the CPU reached 97C and GPU hit its threshold of 85C within 10 mins of gameplay and at that point I knew that the thermal upgrades was just a scam! Nothing more! I was told not to open the system until they check remotely and I knew the system is beyond fixing remotely. I then cut off all communications with them. I also knew about the 10% restocking fees so decided not to return the system and shipping from UAE to US is another $300!

I bought some Gelid extreme and did the thermal application myself. What I saw inside was absolutely unbelievable! I will not bother going into the details but let me just say that the screw of the back panel of the laptop was tightened so hard that ended up cracking up the panel while opening it the first time.

After my own thermal application, the CPU has never exceeded 80C and GPU is running at acceptable levels too.

It's fair to say that I'll never recommend Hidevolution to anyone else in the future. Stay away from their upgrades. I paid $170 for a generic QLC based 1TB nvme drive which runs at 1600Mbps and $120 for a out of date 16GB Kingston DDR4 ram which is the slowest DDR4 Sodimm I have ever used! And they're say its "Hidevolution approved". What a joke!



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They didn't really offer any help. They just said they'll talk to the production team and kept me waiting.

They were nice about it but I never got any assistance. It was like they were delaying on purpose so that I would get past my return window then be stuck with it.

I get people can be busy but it's not that hard to get a response in 5 business days IMO. So I initiated the return.

I ended up buying the Razer Blade Pro and the thermals were so much better. I restored from an Acronis backup and the performance on that was significantly better.

I even overvolted the RBP by +150v on accident and the results temp wise were still better than the RB15 with their mods. I undervolted the RBP -150v and it's stable and the RBP never goes past 80c in 26c ambient on load. When I was testing the RB15 we had freak snow in May and it was cold and cooler.

I just think their service is hit or miss. After talking about my experience to a lot of people from various forums there's complaints and happy customers.

At the end of the day I've given up on them.

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I never considered the Synapse to be an issue however I did consider that something in the OS may be affecting it since it seemed to happen roughly around the time I upgraded Windows to 1903. So this kind of made me think it's something there.

I went ahead and backed up my system using Acronis True Image and then reinstalled Windows 1809 from USB clearing the partition. I installed Steam and drivers and downloaded 3DMark and HWInfo and ran some test and it was still high. At this time I didn't install Synapse as it didn't occur to me.

That's when I just cleared everything and decided to return.

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Man, that is rough. Sorry for your experience. I am actually very interested in the other details of the thermal upgrade investigation. Did you uncover why their thermal upgrades were so poorly done?

My experience with HID was good regarding repaste. After the first round of battery bloating, I sent my RBP 2018 (GTX 2080) to them to get a new battery and to add in the LM/Fujipoly upgrades. I noticed a solid 10 deg drop in both CPU and GPU temperatures after the repaste. For safety, since getting the unit back, I've elected to undervolt everything and I no longer push the machine for max performance. On the most demanding of games, I'll hit 75C max on either chip. Sacrificing 5-10% performance gives me the confidence that the unit will hold out for another year or so.

The other reason I've chosen to reduce the power a bit slightly is that I never want to send this unit back to HID for repairs. Despite the fact that I knew they were simply going to forward the machine to Razer for the battery replacement, the HID portion of the turnaround time was complete ****. I know the unit sat in their facility for weeks on both ends of the Razer repair. The unit was in their hands for almost three months. Three months!!!

I felt like a broken record with my constant messages to their support team to get status updates. To their credit, they always responded, but it didn't improve turnaround time...

 

@VoodooChild I just looked at the specs for the new RBP 2019 on HID's website. Check out the storage "upgrades":



The RBP 2019 comes with a Samsung PM981 from Razer. This is a VERY fast SSD. (The 2017 version came with a PM961, also extremely fast). HID will charge you MORE for a significantly slower 860 EVO SSD. "HIDevolution Approved" doesn't carry much weight for me.

 

I had a similar problem with HIDEVOLUTION. I had the Zephyrus S get the liquid netal treatment with the fuji pads. Well after a few benchmarks the cpu was hitting 95 degrees. And some people were getting about 10 degrees cooler on stock machines. I tried getting an answer for HID but they were pretty persistent on how 95 degrees was totally within the cpu's operating temps I returned it. So what I learned is do thermal upgrades yourself. Razer makes very popular laptops and there are plenty of guides to show you how to open it up. Plus once you do it a few times you might findnit fun.

 

I would stay far away from them really. Buy a stock system if you need to, (if your country doesn't have that brand stores) but I don't see any point of their Hidevolution upgrades and thermal modes because it seems highly overrated and quite frankly a cash-grab policy.

Sent from a Galaxy S9+

 

My Hidevolution treated Area 51m is now dead and I waiting on a replacement system from Dell directly. I'm actually happy that my Hidevolution system died because if you had seen the paste job of liquid metal on this laptop, you would've gouged your eyes out. The thermal pad application was so bad that the heatsink was not making proper contact with the die at some points. It looked as if it was out together by a technician who was in a hurry to go home. Having liquid metal running around the components is a bad idea and could be one of the reasons why my system didn't wake up after doing some simple RAM upgrades.

Sent from a Galaxy S9+

 

That's a real shame to hear as Hidevolution was pretty highly recommended here on the forums. I was told that they have a certain procedure that they follow to ensure they have good results. But, hell mine was bad out of the box and with your story I can say they don't do a good job doing QC. Glad to hear you're getting a replacement. Think you'll do liquid metal yourself or will you stick to normal compounds?

 

May be people have different experiences with Hidevolution but mine was this: great consumer service with sales, Donald is a Gem! The service and the actual quality of the product delivered is unbelievably bad, worst than a Dell stock machine. And don't get me started with their "Hidevolution Approved Upgrades ", absolute cash grab!


No more liquid metal for me, I've tried it twice and quite frankly, it wasn't anything life changing... it worked better than my long time favorite Arctic MX4 no doubt but I don't think the hassle is worth it for 2-3C difference. I would rather undervolt the CPU and GPU on my Area 51M than risk short circuit using LM. I'm a big fan of Gelid GC Extreme so I'll use those instead. Also, Fujipoly thermal pads are also highly overrated as far as I'm concerned. They break so easily and cannot be reapplied. And is crazy expensive especially for overseas buyers like me. I have some of these and they work just like Fujipoly and can be applied many times over:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UYTTLI4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_bvCbDbKAVG05A

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Honestly ditto on everything you said. Especially the comment on Donald. Hell he wanted to know the back story of my user name. You don't get more laid back than that. Great guy to deal with. If I ever bought from HID again it would be an unmodified laptop with a warranty extension.

And anytime someone says "Don't get me started" I always want to know. Lol. You can Pm me if you care to elaborate. If not I won't press.

You're an MX-4 user too? I thought I was the only one! Everyone talks about IC Diamond or Thermal Grizzly. MX-4 has always served me well and it's affordable. I'll definitely try those pads you linked as I've never tried using after market pads. For my next project I'll give them a go.

 

Well since you asked, here it goes, I "upgraded" my primary m2 drive for $170 and I got a QLC based 1TB Crucial P1 which is going at below $100 for the last 2 months.
The RAM "upgrade" to 16GB(8*2 sticks) was Kingston generic ram modules which I cannot find anywhere else on the internet. Like quite literally! I cannot find the exact 8GBs sticks anywhere else so I'm not being able to upgrade to 32GB RAM unless I discard the ones I "upgraded" from Hidevolution and get a separate kit. So, I'm stuck there as well.

The machine ran at 99C within 2 mins of Aida64 with FULL fan speed and I was told that these was acceptable and should be "ok for the system". Earlier, I was told that the machine had passed a 43 minutes stress testing session which max temps never crossing 85C for the CPU and the GPU and the "user" was operating on the wrong "settings" I was told... this was after paying for a delidded CPU and LM paste and Gelid Extreme and the Fujipoly non sense and all that jazz... wrong settings they say... as it I cannot change the fans speed from Balanced to Full Speed after paying $4000 for a damned computer!

What hit the hammer on the head for me was playing Divison 2 on this machine. The CPU was reaching 96C and GPU 85C within 5 mins of gameplay and the FPS was throttling down to 20fps every 2 minutes as soon as the GPU hits its 85C thermal limit. I knew that I was duped badly. So, I broke all communications with them and did my own service on the laptop. The temps dropped by 8-12C on average while using a simple Gelic Extreme repaste.

One last thing, I had asked them to transfer my warranty to the UAE one week ago, got a email saying "someone will get back to you" and nothing has happened ever since.
This is the exact content of that email:

Hello,

I have informed the person who takes care of the warranty transfer to process your request.

Best,
Juan C.


With best regards,
Zoltan S - Tech Support (+1-562-485-6541 ext 200)



Now, my laptop is dead and when I claim my warranty with Dell, I am being told that I'll have to wait for the transfer of warranty first before any servicing can take place. I'm currently waiting for the transfer of warranty before a system swap takes place.

So, ya, they are good in taking your money, not very good in respecting your customer relationship. And "Hidevolution Lifetime Tech Support Guarantee" seems like a distant dream now...

Sent from a Galaxy S9+

 

Warranty transfer will also take up some time with dell itself. For my past refurbished AW17 R4 it took more than two weeks after I have raised the request...ask HID if the request has been raised first.

 

I would like to add that they "forgot" about my refund and when I called them they put me on hold for 20 mins then told me they'd call me back in an hour. Never received that call but did get an email saying they're processing it that day.

I just think they're a "new products must go out" but "avoid returns if any kind" type of shop.

When they warranty a product for life they essentially lose money and there's no incentive for them to do that. I don't know how many repeat customers they get but I would think that would be their goal.

But I make laptop purchases regularly and I could have been that guy for them but I'll stick with big box retailers.

Literally I had $8,300 against my savings account for three laptop at one point. Lost $300 for my restock fee at HID ($3300) and my Razer Blade Pro failed on me from Razer ($2500) so I went NewEgg and got an Asus GX502 ($2500). Once my Razer is refunded then I'll kind of recoup.

I'm not rich but I save. This just happen to come from my desire to get a Tesla. So repurposing of funds when I decided to not get a Tesla.

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Damn really bad luck on Razer Blades.. I think I saw your post over at Reddit when your new RBP crapped out. Was deciding between the refreshed GX501 and the RB15. Almost went with the Asus but the ROG branding and very short battery life put me off. Good luck with the Asus.

Agree, dont have to be rich to buy something nice, just have some sense in spending then you can buy anything. Tesla owner here btw, any questions just shoot me a dm ;p

 

The Asus ROG GX502 seems very similar to the RBP for battery, probably still in favor of the RBP, but not so far off it's a deal breaker, at least for me. But what is potentially a deal breaker is the fan noise. This thing screams and not in a good way. It's at least 60 to 70 decibels. It's easily the loudest laptop I've ever owned. When doing day to day stuff, it's fine, but gaming or number crunching stuff it's out of control. Almost embarrassing. I work from home, but meet in the office to collaborate at times or travel and I'm genuinely concerned it's gonna be a head turner when I'm doing stuff haha. Not sure I like that about it.

***Edit***

It's too loud, it went back and I ended up buying the MW RB15 2070 from Best Buy.

Nice, I'll definitely have to keep you in mind when/if I get one.

 

Personally I do not believe in resellers, I try to buy the machine I want at the lowest possible price from either the manufacturer directly, or a brick and mortar store where I can take the laptop back immediately with no restocking fee if something goes wrong. Manage thermals yourself, it is nerve-wracking the first time around but you'll save yourself money and know you did the proper job. I was debating getting a RBP with gtx 2080 inside and give it the liquid ultra treatment.

 

Same, even though it can be great for people with no experience. It is hard to evaluate if the job is done well and I rather buy from a larger shop for less risk when it comes to returning an item or warranty support.