AVADirect P775 order

AVA reviews are scant but I ordered from them anyways due to configuration options they had.

Due to budget I wanted an i5-8400 and as barebones as possible due to me bringing in ram and drives from my dead P670RP6. My eyes were set on the i5 and 1070 combo as the best for my use but also thermally due to others experience and only two places offered it: HID and AVA. HID allows CPUless units which would have been great but even cpuless it was same cost as AVAs roughly with 8400 so i went with them.

Ordered unit on 2/13/18
Payment was authorized on 2/14/18
Unit went into parts allocation 2/16/18
Unit went into building 3/03/18
Unit went into testing 3/05/18
Unit shipped 3/07/18
Unit arrived 3/10/18

So...yeah it took nearly a month but with clevo its expected unless they have the chassis on hand and everything you want...Which AVA did not since orig box had a fedex label that says they shipped the unit to them couple days after my order. The laptop came nestled in clevos usual double box-ception packaging and then was put into a huge avadirect box with huge amounts of giant bubbles on every side of the packaging so very good on their end and the laptop is in perfect working order so A+ on that!



So even though AVA was great to me one major drawback is lack of prema but with my non K series cpu and light use thats ok. If your aiming to play with alot of useful things go with HID or another prema partner..yes its more expensive and yes its worth it everyone will agree but its not world ending just a very nice useful bonus.

The second drawback was wait time, I feel like HID or Xotic would of gotten it to me sooner however i also think i shot myself in foot asking for 4gb of ram on a p775 so maybe that was hold up.

The third drawback is inability to get de-badged units. I love going full stealth...unless you buy quickship you dont get that luxury...I asked and put in notes and nada. Evoc badging is much nicer than the interior lids foil sticker AVA has and its giving me ocd.

So...as a company they are good. You wont have issue with order it may just take awhile as per usual. The interior badging is notably cheap and its bare clevo everything asides. Cant speak for after sales support yet but if I do I shall add it.


Unit died 3/26/18. Shall update with how AVA handles this

3/28/18 - RMA Setup to go back to Pro Star
3/29/18 - Emailed Pro Star to ask about eDP cable installation
3/29/18 - Recieved email off the record (not in account anymore!) from AVA stating PS contacted them about my email and said they could do the cable install (Thank you pro star!)
3/29/18 - Told for liability doing things like changing components (so ram, wifi, cpu, drives?) can void warranty with AVA unless AVA gives permission...I really need permission to change non soldered components accessed from main bay? thanks AVA.

4/02/18 - Shipped Laptop to Prostar (UPS ground, insured $132) contacted AVA about reimbursement and was told after a few hours they usually will return rma shipping cost but because I swapped CPUs outright instead of contacting them I dont get such treatment even though its a brand new unit...scummy as all heck allowing warranty but voiding shipping cost over cpu swap on a new unit.

4/09/18 - ProStar Received Laptop - motherboard fixed (Woo!)
4/17/18 - ProStar Ships RMA back (Woo!)
4/23/18 - Receive laptop back from ProStar (one issues still unfixed)
4/25/18 - Removed AVADirect badging! now its stealth. thanks AVA for using super cruddy stickers.
5/01/18 - Got RMA setup to ProStar for RMA #2 for the unfixed issue (Shipping $77)
5/03/18 - Shipped RMA back to ProStar.
5/15/18 - Received laptop back! shes all good again



This turned into a freaking nightmare on the part of AVA with how they handled it and communicated...buy from @Donald@HIDevolution spend the extra dough! or ProStar DIRECTLY they will take care of their own and properly...AVA using them has been the one saving grace in all of this.

As of 5/18 besides a chassis clip being missed in rma that should be fixable on my end with permission this has all come to a close~

 

It's not that unusual that people rebrand notebooks. For instance sharkggaming(danish) rebranded XMG(germany) notebooks, which why my P157SM has both an LED XMG logo on the touchpad and some ingraved Sharkgaming things on the casing.

As for your setup, 8400 non K is way more than enoug for anything you throw at it. Keep the system cool and all is well, however I think 4GB ram was a terrible mistake, you'll very likely notice very quickly that it will backfire on you, so I expect you to order at least another 4GB.

 

I don't know what the relationship is with AVA, if any, but as explained below it's not uncommon at all. The larger companies (direct Clevo customers) usually purchase direct from Clevo, the smaller ones usually purchase unbranded chassis from larger direc Clevo customers. It's a matter of availability, price, minimum order quantity and so on. Sometimes, a larger direct Clevo customer might even buy chassis from another becasue they are a little low on stock at that point in time.

That's a Shark Gaming edition XMG laptop then That actually is a little unusual, I think we're the only company that has really done that (like we also did officially with MSI and Gigabyte in he past). Usually a company will purchase unbraded chassis from us and then they put their own logo on it to sell (or we laser their logo on it for them).

 

I had 32GB from old laptop 4GB was basically the cheapest throw-away option in the builder. I only noticed a no ram option from HID. Silly!

Thats actually really neat!~

 

Then id say all gucci. Overall nice purchase. You probably wont have heat issues.

Id be interested in thermals of benchmarks if you could provide em

Maybe either long session of something demanding such as witcher 3, crysis 3, mafia 3 or just prime coupled with heaven or so

 

Sure will do~ I think they did awful paste job because it peaked 70c just downloading lots of games with teamviewer open (friend was setting up some things I was lazy to) but my room was also 29~32c that entire time. My delidder will be here tomorrow and I will also be adding Rockits custom IHS that adds 15% more coverage and putting kryonaut on gpu and top of cpu so I will be doing lots of before/after baselines and temp stuff to see if that $15 custom IHS was even worth it since every -C counts esp for i7 users!

I will note though at that temp the laptop was not ramping fans up and it was very quiet so it was a decent trade off I flashed XMG EC & BIOS right away too since they are who I trust when there is no access to Prema.

 

I was about to say that, the temps are normal because clevo tends to have a rather bad fan profile.

 

Would AIDA64 SST & Heaven be good for you? because I checked my steam and dont own any of those games I can use any from this list though

Ah and here is the interior sticker thats giving me ocd.

The lid is so much better...

 

You're quite the gamer.

The games that are most demanding in your library are:
PubG
Ark
GTA 5
Back Desert
Witcher 2
Ashes of the benchmark
DOOM


God damit you only played like 1/5th of your games, the rest is just there for being there haha.

I think Witcher 2 is the most demanding game you have. Pretty sure once yo turn supersampling on it will rek your notebook, that's perfekt.

 

For now I am calling AVA a no-buy for DTRs. Post updated with more info as this progresses