Summoned an EVOC P870KM1 from HIDevolution

This afternoon I finally pulled the trigger on purchasing an EVOC/ Clevo P879KM1 from HIDevolution. I called the sales phone number and had the pleasure of conversing with @Ted@HIDevolution for almost an hour. Despite the research I had done, I still had a lot of questions I wanted his opinion on like choosing an NVMe SSD config, upgraded RAM speed, being able to use both GPU fans while only having a single GPU, and details on build/shipping times. He was incredibly patient and walked through my queries without pressuring any one option, just encouraging what may be right for my purposes.

I go into those purposes after the specs, but I wanted to cut to the chase:


EVOC High Performance Systems P870KM1 17.3" Custom Built VR Ready Gaming Laptop 1x GTX 1080
Free Game Bundles
For Honor OR Ghost Recon: Wildlands - Download through NVIDIA GeForce Experience (Must have either nVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 or nVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GPU installed)
LCD Panel
17.3" 3K QHD (2560x1440) AUO 120Hz - 5ms - LED Matte Type Display
Display Warranty
None - up to 3 lit pixels considered OK
Video Card
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB GDDR5 X 200W + Vapor Chamber GPU & CPU Heat Sink Set -w/ Unlocked Prema vBIOS - Latest Updated Version once available - Contact us for details - $175.00
Prema Custom BIOS
Prema Custom BIOS - Latest Updated Version
Processor
HIDevolution Delidded - Unlocked, Under Volted and Overclocked 7th Generation Intel Core i7-7700K Quad Core Processor, 4.2 GHz (HIDevolution Overclocked to 4.7GHz) - GUARANTEED Performance (Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra includ - $120.00
Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra + IC Diamond for Delidded CPU
Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra 100% Metal Thermal Interface + IC Diamond on CPU, IC Diamond on GPU
Memory
32GB (2 x 16GB) G.SKILL Ripjaws Series Dual Channel DDR4/2800MHz - $245.00
RAID Options
RAID 0 (striping)
M.2 SATA or PCIe SSD (for RAID configurations)
1TB (2 x 500GB) Samsung 960 EVO M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD - $580.00
1st 2.5" HDD/SSD Bay
1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s Hard Drive
2nd 2.5" HDD/SSD Bay
Empty HDD bay (with caddy/adapter)
Wireless Cards
Intel® Wireless-AC 8265 802.11 ac/a/b/g/n 2x2 NGFF w/ Bluetooth 4.2 - $20.00
Operating System
Genuine Windows® 10 Home, 64bit, English - $80.00
Operating System Reinstallation Media
OS Reinstallation + Drivers USB Flash Drive - $25.00
Office Software
None
Power Adapter
330W AC Power Adapter (supports 100-240V)
Audio
Foster Audio Speakers x 2
Back-lit Gaming Keyboard
Anti-Ghosting, Custom Macro Back-lit Gaming Keyboard
Keyboard Language
U.S. English
Branding
No Logo on LCD Cover and Bezel
Warranty and Service
1 Year HIDevolution Limited U.S. Warranty + LIFETIME HIDevolution Technical Support


I've been interested in purchasing a workstation anticipating a particularly demanding year as a VJ performing tours and festivals throughout the year while creating content and pre-rendering & simulating in CAD drawings. My main client is Chance the Rapper, and after the run he's been on, I wanted a no compromise laptop to act as a media server.

I've been using a Mid-2015 2.5 ghz Macbook with 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 and an AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2048 MB and it held up okay until I tried running multiple layers of 4k in the program I have been using the most for work, Resolume Arena.

I also plan on using Adobe Creative Cloud, Vecotrworks, D3 designer a main work purposes.

I'm a casual gamer and look forward to testing out a bunch of titles I've recently while anticipating this purchase. They include: Just Cause 3, GTAV, Saints Row 4, and I look forward to trying out Ghost Recon: Wildlands. In the end I'll end up playing much less GPU/ CPU intensive games like Rocket League, Crypt of the NecroDancer, WWE 2K16, and legacy console emulators with higher frequency.

I've been a Mac loyalist since my Mom bought a Macintosh Performa 450 in 1993. Although in December of 2015, I purchased a cheap Acer Aspire E14 because I liked the i7-6700HQ/ 2GB Nvidia 940m and wanted to try out a few windows only applications and peripherals. I can say I am annoyed by things like cortana/web search in the menu bar and frequent updates and haven't sought to fix them, but overall I've been comfortable troubleshooting other software and OS issues, so I think I'm ready for my main media server to be Windows 10 based.

When approaching this purchase initially I would going to max everything out and go crazy. I was first drawn to the MSI GT83VR TITAN. SLI graphics cards and 64 gbs of RAM, let's go. I ended up making a reddit post on /r/suggestalaptop and several words of advise led me to reconsider going SLI. Advice from users responding to that post led me to commit several weeks of research to nail down what features were the most useful and valuable to my needs and actually useful to the softwares I wanted to use. I watched countless youtube vids (shouts out to @ HTWingNut) reviewing/ tearing different laptops and updating my knowledge on the litany of technical elements involved with these custom gaming laptops. Although I consider myself a knowledgable video professional, as former Apple only buyer, my applicable knowledge to enthusiast grade computing was very dated or limited in certain areas and completely non existent on others.

After a lot of research including a building spreadsheet with mock specs from a few MSI & Clevo models quoted from Sager, Origin, Xoptic, LPC, Malibal, Pro-Star, Avadirect, Gentech, and HIDEvolution. I even threw in a maxed out Macbook Touchbar config for laughs.

I had by this point shifted my focus to purchasing a machine that's foundation was the most up-to-date parts and I/O ports but still had room to be upgraded throughout the next 2-3 years. The Clevo P870KM had to be it.

Although HIDevolution was the most expensive of the Clevo P870xx dealers, the reviews and posts here led me to put in the extra research into the perks the company provides. Knowing the build times across Clevo resellers looked to be basically the same, it was customer satisfaction reported paired with the unique upscale features like de-liding and configuration with the PREMA bios made me okay with the increased price tag. (maybe its a just a leftover mascosistic desire for the Apple tax).

Looking forward to meeting @Phoenix and hearing his advice. Can I borrow your hookah for my unboxing video?

 

Congratulations on this order. Beast of a machine.

It it was my machine, here is what I would change, instead of going with a 1TB HDD, I would go with 2x 2TB Samsung Spinpoint 5400 RPM HDDs and set them up as a single spanned drive partition for a single partition total size of approximately 4GB or storing all your videos and large files. They cost 80 USD each so it's a non brainer, get it right from the start, that's my motto. Although that is a personal choice off course, I would love to have SSDs for installing the OS, programs, and games, and a single large partition to host all my videos and data that is not affected by performance such as pics, music, documents, etc.

I also recommend you to get the dual 330W power adapter or the new 780W power adapter to ensure you never get throttling because of power limits.....

As an EVOC Gaming Team Member, you will get my special Phoenix Tweaking session to increase the performance of Windows 10, disable all spying/tracking of Windows 10, making it look like Windows 7 (if you want that is), and overclocking or undervolting although with HIDevolution, they usually do that out of the box since their quality control is very high and they ensure they send you a machine that works great out of the box

To me personally, the last thing I look at when ordering a machine is price, I want quality, I want customer service! I want after sales support/warranty......

See:

HIDevolution - The Best Company I ever dealt with

HIDevolution's Warranty!

Here are the Prema BIOS benefits in case you haven't seen them.......

Benefits of Prema BIOS:

• Fixes the biggest issue with these Clevo laptops where they would throttle the CPU as low as 2.5 GHz the moment both the CPU & GPU are under load due to current issues with the Clevo Stock BIOS/EC Firmware.
• The ability to disable other drives connected to your system without physically removing them from your laptop, this comes in handy when installing Windows as you never want to have more than one drive connected at the time you are installing Windows otherwise the Windows setup will place the boot files on the 2nd drive it sees which hurts performance and makes it a headache when creating system images or restoring since the boot files are not on the main drive.
• The ability to overclock, increase Turbo Power Limits and System IA/Core Current Limits
• The ability to enable Intel Speed Shift Technology (it is disabled in the stock BIOS)
• The ability to run RAM with speeds higher than the standard 2133 MHz. I am not talking about overclocking here, I am talking about actual RAM sticks that are rated to run at 2800 MHz for example like the G.Skill 64GB 2800 MHz kit I have. With the stock BIOS, they will not run above 2400 MHz. In the case of the P870DM3, the stock BIOS now supports up to 2666 MHz. I believe but not more, so the Prema BIOS is a must again
• Fixes the instability with the G.Skill 3000 MHz. RAM using XMP Profile 1 with timings of 16-18-18-18 where in the stock BIOS you would have constant crashes or not be able to boot altogether so you’re forced to use XMP Profile 2 which is slower with 18-18-18-18 timings.
• The ability to enable CSM for those who want to install other OSes like Windows 7
• The ability to undervolt the CPU as the stock voltage is way too high which causes the CPU to overheat much quicker and thus throttle under load.
• The ability to enable or disable CPU AES instructions or Virtualization
• The ability to disable hibernation from the BIOS
• Sets the default keyboard lights from blue to white which suits more tastes

Benefits of Prema VBIOS:

• Power throttle disabled
• Over-voltage slider enabled and adjusted (up to a maximum of 1.2v)
• Activated and adjusted thermal slider (to keep it cooler if desired)
• Core overclock slider limit raised
• Power consumption meter activated
• Fixed 3D voltage base-line in order to stabilize OCs and voltage-match both cards in SLI systems (based on average ASIC)
• Thermal protection @ 92c (once*91c are breached the system throttles volts and clocks in order to protect it)
• Protection against Furmark and Kombustor GPU burnout (AVOID those software even with stock vBIOS)!

Be smart....be like Phoenix...

 

Unless you have an excellent backup plan in place, I would avoid doing any spanning of your hard drives because if one goes down, you lose everything.

 

@Phoenix Speaks the truth. My EVOC is my prize possession! Phoenix helped me tweak it, and made very valuable suggestions. Runs like a dream.

Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk

 

Thanks for your input ya'll. I received a few emails early in the week notifying me of parts shipping for my build, so I called to check in. Nikki informed that the core system and coolabratory liquid had arrived, they were just waiting on my SSDs. Since those were to arrive the next day, I decided to add on a rush build to get it all built tested and shipped hopefully by the weekend. I received a call from Ted this morning to update that would be the case!

@Phoenix
Thanks, super excited to have you jump on once I receive the notebook. Considering storage, I like your idea but I'm not too concerned with needing more than the 2 TB I'll have available. Although the files I'll be dealing with will be huge, I'll be backup & circulating projects on and off to external media frequently. I'll also be eyeing out deals on additional 2.5" and M.2 drives since I have an extra slot for each.

As for power, how real is that risk in your opinion? I did elect to get the vapor chamber heatsink to get the 2nd GPU fan even though I went with a single card, which I imagine may draw more power than standard single GPU builds of this Celvo model. Needing 2 power bricks was not alluring to me, as I need to travel with this gear regularly. The concept of losing a brick or the fork adapter just get to me. I could spring for a high capacity single brick if there is a risk of me running under powered.

@saturnotaku
My backup solutions aren't quite complex, do you recommend any software or external hardware solutions.

 

for a single GPU you may be fine with one power adapter although if this was my machine. I will never run it without 2 adapters to avoid power draw issues. At least get a single 780W power adapter. This machine is a beast. Not 100% sure about single GPU setup but when I had my P870DM3, even if I disabled SLI, if I would run a benchmark like Fire Strike on a single power adapter, the power adapter would turn itself off to protect itself until I unplugged it from the wall and replugged it in. Maybe it's oke with a single GPU but I personally wouldn't run my system at the edge like that.

Be smart....be like Phoenix

 

The general rule of thumb is to keep at least 3 copies of your most important data. One would be on your PC, preferably on a separate partition so if you need to nuke your OS, you won't lose it. Another copy would go on external storage - thumb drive, hard drive, optical disc, etc. The third would go on the same media but be stored off-site like at a family or friend's house. Smaller items can be kept in the cloud as well.

I'm currently in the process of re-doing my backups, including putting my current Steam library (450 GB) onto an external hard drive. Next time I do a clean install, I'm going to do all my tweaking and such then use software to create a bootable rescue drive so that I can go back to where I started whenever I need to reinstall without having to do said tweaking.

 

Cool build. Has it arrived?

 

I was quoted a similar build by HIDevolution due to 3 previous orders that have been repeatedly defective for 2 different models and I have been tearing myself apart trying to come up with a great build for this EVOC High Performance System P870KM yet match the price for my previous orders...as well as match the previous build for the most part.

I have not had much luck in doing so...as this system is very expensive and out of my budget...especially in attempting to stay close to the previous build/pricing.

However, this is a very appealing beast of a machine...yet not a brand/model I have heard of until recently...or at least remember hearing about unfortunately.

Thus, in all honesty, I would be quite apprehensive about purchasing a system like this as it is not a name brand I am used too or hear about often such as ASUS, MSI, Dell, Alienware, Razer, etc...

I can say that as far as customer service/support goes, HIDevolution has been outstanding and very helpful...that is of course...minus their dispute concerning the manufacturer defective system I received from HIDevolution recently...which is thankfully being fully refunded. I can say I have appreciated all of the customer service and support I received thru all my business with them.

Frustrating for sure...especially after unfortunately having to return my third system with them...but most if not all of the problems/defects were the manufacturer's fault for the most part...and or due to shipping.

Bottom line...HIDevolution is a good company to do business with...just make sure you read their policies...as you should all companies.