N950KP6 From Eluktronics.com

Ordered a BYO(Build your own) N950KP6 from Eluktronics.com

Paid the extra for UPS ground shipping, total was $607. It took about 5 days to arrive, 2 of those weekend. Very satisfied with the speed, packing was excellent. Laptop arrived pristine and box undamaged.

Pre-sales support was great, they clarified very specific questions about supported modes on the m.2 sockets(2 of them). One being Sata/Pcie(x4), the other only Pcie(x4). They clarified that 6th gen intel is not officially supported, which i read as a "at your own risk", which seems to be true given some googling ive done. And that the 65W limit for the CPU is both a thermal design limitation as well as power delivery limitation. If you pull above 65W from the CPU socket they will not honor a warranty claim should your VRM's overheat or burn out.

Overall very good pre-sales. After sales was good as well, when requested they sent me drivers, as I do not have the ability to read the included disc. So far I haven't needed any further after-sales support. Everything just slotted in and booted fine. Driver installation went fine, hotkeys/fn work. Switching of GPU's for the most part work, tho some applications don't immediately recognize as needing the dedicated, but I'll save that for if I ever do a review of the device and this is about the seller.

I have read that some re-sellers ship the laptops with feature-enhanced BIOS. This makes a bit of sense, but I dont see how they have special access or if Eluktronics just doesn't care. That may be another topic for support. The included BIOS on my unit is about as simple as it can possibly get. Boot order, beep(on/off), TMP2.0 enable, that's it. Which is really a shame because the thermal solution the CPU is fantastic and full load im only hitting very low 60s on a flat surface, no additional cooling, no special fan profile. All I did was install a couple drivers to get internet, download Intel Burn Test(linpack) and run it. Granted this is with a 50W G4600 @ 3.6ghz. But still this is great for a laptop, GPU not so much, even a partial load brings the 1060 6GB to over 80c and starts to throttle. Which I will investigate the paste to see if it's possible been mis-applied or seeped from sitting or something.

With my config, G4600, ddr4 8gb 2400mhz single stick, 256gb nvme ssd. I get 5900 score in Unigine Superposition 1080p Medium preset.(over 65fps avg). Which is above avg score for mobile 1060's and actually only 8% slower than desktop systems with full fat i7's and desktop 1060s. Amazing. If I can sort the throttling and 80+ temps on the GPU this thing is going to fly.

I'll update back if I email and hear or don't hear back about about what they have to say on BIOS.

 

Sorry but this is fishy. Can you do a firestrike benchmark?
I am saying this because pascal cards are extremely sensitive to heat unlike other generations and seeing you having high temps but above average score on a pascal card makes me question your benchmark.

I would recommend going for another 8GB stick since dual channel does increase performance in some applications, other than that I rather like your build.

Also how is your stance on the audio, fan profiles, keyboard and batterylife?

Sadly I can't find many reviews on this particulair notebook but can see the use of it as a workstation notebook, but never got to recommend or not recommend it given that there is nearly no information about it out there.

Also when doing research with the while superposition benchmark I see benchmarks annihilating your score on higher presets....So i really have no idea where you get your 8% better than desktop etc. from.

 

Audio is about on par with my Nexus 6p but a bit louder maybe. Very good for a laptop but only going off the few I've owned personally. The creative software actually does make it sound better, if embellished. I don't normally like "colored" sound, but in this case with a laptop, with this laptop...I'm actually OK with it.

Fan profiles, so what profiles? The software is rubbish, there is a hotkey to put the fans to max, but from what I can tell "Max" means 80%. Which is quite loud, and at least for the CPU seems very effective. However I think the fans are also linked, as far as I can tell, if you stress the CPU both fans spin up to the same speed. The software control center only has one fan setting, so that seems to support that theory.

Keyboard is mushy but pretty okay for a laptop. It does have a bit of a click to it before you bottom out, but once you do bottom out you feel the deck flex, which is enormous. It flexes like 5mm or something after bottoming out. And that's dependent on where in the deck you press, as the middle almost seems to buckle up... There's no indicator lights for Caps lock or Num lock, there is a software OSD popup when you press those. But no indication at a glace as far as I can tell.

I have not tested battery life yet. But I can tell you maybe 3h, maybe. Would you like to see a specific benchmark for the battery? It would vary incredibly with workload as this is desktop hardware(kinda). Laptop CPU's tend to be highly optimized for power. I have also not yet drained it completely. I can say that the performance is capped, or should I say the power is capped while on battery power alone. It seems like the CPU will not draw more than 16W or so, don't know about the GPU. That meant for me 2Ghz or so on the CPU, which is pretty crippling actually for this dual core.

It took me a sec to find the download for Firestrike, but I think I got it. It seemed like it wasn't free but I dug around a bit and got the free version.

I said 8% slower than desktop 1060's. And the scores vary with different presets and aren't comparable to other presets. I can run different presets if you would like and record the scores.

 

On par... with a phone????? Mhkay... that kinda caught me off guard there.

??? I'm confused, you're using hotkey? Isn't that system using clevo control center?? Can you make a screen of the software just to be sure we're on the same page here??

normally the build quailty is good but keyboard is mediocre, seems like your model has rather meh build quality and a medciore keyboard. Mh... odd..

Nah specific benchmark isn't needed that much, just wanted an estimate, 3 hours isn't half bad all things considered. yeah performance being capped when on battery is normal, nothing to worry there.
Firestrike has a free demo version, no worries there.

Well I would prefer if you just run firestrike, since superposition really isn't popular and it's as you already said, hard to find anything to compare really. hence I suggested firestrike, which is very popular.

 

The nexus 6p stands out among phones with loud and dynamic sound from dual front stereo speakers. I didn't compare it to another laptop because its miles better than my other laptops and its very similar to my daily phone the 6p.

The control center software is pretty garbage, you can set a few profiles which basically does the same stuff the built in windows software does. Only difference is direct fan control really. And if you change parts of the profile they don't save on reboot.

The overall build quality is above average with little screen flex and a solid hinge that is very confident but not too stiff. Typing will not wobble it. But the typing experience will take getting used to, I have made quite a few miss strokes.

I plan to fully drain the battery and while doing so quantify the performance hit vs on AC. Once back fully charged I can think about some kind of battery test that is standardized to compare against.

 

It says more about the notebook you had previously than the current one to be honest. Trust me there is no phone in existance that beats the sound of many good notebooks out there.
I'm awaiting your firestrike result!

 

At the moment I'm stuck with fire strike. It sits at "Collecting System Info" indefinitely. Not sure how long this should take.

 

It's a common bug, just restart firestrike. Normally it takes around 30 seconds. Sometimes it can get stuck.

 

Something is up with the system info, and it is invalidating my score?

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/27086520

 

Your GTX 1060 performs pretty much on average, however I'm really not sure what is causing that error, never seen it before.

This is the answer of one of the developers:

So I'm really not sure what to make of that.

 

Try disabling your Antivirus or windows defender when starting up Firestrike. Sometimes they cause problems. I had problems getting my "valid" key to work because my AV was blocking it.

 

No luck, sits forever then gives an error after finally running that the score is invalid.

 

Have you tried uninstalling the system info and reinstalling it again? I've had to do this before too when I had problems.

You will see it in control panel/Uninstall, Change Programs/3DMark System Information.

EDIT...What you could do is, delete system info under the control panel option, then open Firestrike and it will automatically install the latest version of system info. Hopefully this will work. I can't remember exactly how I did it but this might've been it.

 

I may try that but it seems pretty janky and I've already proven the point with a score. I dont particularity care about 'validity'. Nor do I really want to keep an automatically starting service that serves only to collect system info. Like I said I may revisit it. For now I'll just live with not being able to get that particular service to play nice.

 

I'm also satisfied, but I would probably try to fix it regardles if I were you, since this obviously indicates that something is going wrong on your system, I would advise to fix it before it might become an actual problem in the future.

This is obviously not normal so there is clearly something going on.

 

As you suggested it may be interference from monitoring software. Which the clevo control panel has built in, you have to uninstall you can just stop it.

 

As you said, it may be. it's your call tho.

 

I made an image from fresh install of w10 ltsb after driver install to my network. And use steam cache server on my network. A fresh start takes only a few minutes. Should it come to it I can restore to that and get a valid score than back to an image with games and settings.

 

CPU temp was low 50s high 40s, <50% utilization.

Tried out some online games and world of warships, etc. All maxed out settings, WoWs I used 2x MSAA and was getting over 70fps.