HTWingNut's Sager NP6110 / Clevo W110ER First Look & Review

Well, in 6110 it's part of the system BIOS. Prema has already done us a favor and unlocked the overclock potential, although it would be nice to see it the other direction too to minimize heat and power consumption.

 

I accidentally unplugged my computer when the battery was unhooked a couple times. Will this become a problem?

Lately, I've noticed the fan kicking in at a louder speed. Further, is there any way to safely adjust the speed of the fan (to produce a lower noise level)?

 

It won't become a problem other than losing your data. It can also potentially harm your computer with sudden power off like that. I'd leave the battery in at all times unless it's powered down and doing something inside.

There is no way to adjust the fan speed. It shouldn't kick in until CPU reaches about 65C though. If it's idling higher than that then perhaps you need to repaste your CPU and GPU.

 

Hey HT, I noticed that you said you can get the undervolt BIOS and push the GT650 to 1080GPU/1150vRAM. Can you give the actual OC numbers on that? i.e. what's the value you put in the "+" section of the MSI Afterburner to get those values?

 

+130Mhz GPU / + 250Mhz vRAM

 

What he said.

 

Just so you guys know I have an i5-3320m on the way. I plan on running some benches and gaming and report back on performance difference between quad core and dual core. Both in my NP6110 with 650m and my NP9150 with 680m.

 

great! cannot wait

 

Isn't the 3320m worse for gaming than the 3610qm?

 

for GPU I use +220Mhz with no problems! (old and newest beta) newest beta hates OpenGL apps while overclocked. I validated this overclock though for 24+ hours.

 

Surfer, benchmarks?

 

Never been validated. I'm about to.

I did it a few years back with the Core 2 Quad @ 2.00GHz vs. Core 2 Duo @ 2.8GHz with GTX 260m: http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...er-np8662-comparision-core-2-duo-vs-quad.html

To summarize, quad was on par with dual core even with quad at 800MHz (~28.6%) slower. But things have changed in 3 years. Time to try it again with newer games and significantly faster CPU's and GPU's.

 

With turbo boost, I'd think that this test would be even more skewed in the quad's favor.

 

I think so. Problem is on the W110ER the CPU doesn't boost with iGPU activated. But we can rectify that with Throttlestop. I plan on testing stock / no Throttlestop, then overclocked GPU and Throttlestop CPU just like I did with the i7-3610QM, so we should have a good comparison.

 

Sounds good, can't wait to read the results.

 

I play with the stock configuration (turbo off when 650m in use) to keep temps down and haven't had any issues with performance yet. Skyrim is clearly GPU limited at the settings I run, and BF3 rarely dips below 45 fps. With turbo on, I get a solid 60, but temps go over 90, so I'd rather not.

Sent from my Tricorder using Tapatalk

 

Hi! i´m a new user of this incredible forum and i have a question beacuse i will be a new owner of this incredible latop.

if you can change between i7 3610qm 2.3ghz (45wat) and i7 3612qm 2.1 ghz (35w)? what i7 will be the best option?

3610 is cheaper (about 40$) but 3612qm extends the battery 1 hour...

other user of this forum say this comparing the 3612qm with other i7:

"
Its not the same thing though. 920xm is 45nm ivy bridge is 22nm. His 920xm is using the same process 45nm as mine. Also you can get laptops for £600 that have a 3612qm that takes half the power of his 920xm and easily beats the 920xm. even i5 dual cores beats his 920xm.
"

Its so bad the 3612qm in performance?


sorry for my bad english

 

Get the 3610. It is cheaper and, if anything, only runs 1-2 degrees hotter than the 3612.

Sent from my Tricorder using Tapatalk

 

Is getting the 3612qm really worth it for the extra battery life?

 

There is no extra battery life. I was testing an i5-3320m, but sent it back to get 3360m for same cost, should be here sometime next week. Battery life was nearly identical to that of the i7-3610QM. That's a dual core vs quad core. Not to mention the dual core ran just as hot if not hotter and drained almost as much power at full load as the 3610QM.

My web surf test was 211 minutes i7-3610QM vs 220 minutes for i5-3320m

Also here's my prelim power and temp results. I will do again with the 3360m when I get it.

 

Hey HT, I'm considering upgrading the HDD from a seagate momentus XT 750gb to a tiny SSD and leave my storage to a 1tb external hard drive. I'm wondering if it's worth it.Prior to this computer, I hadn't cared much about any extra thing that would go around with my laptop beyond the laptop itself, but the w110ER is small enough that I'd be more than willing to carry an extra wallet-sized component with me.

Would a 1tb portable external hdd with a small SSD hard drive be worth the cost in terms of an upgrade?

It would be quite a hassle to reformat the external hard drive from FAT32 to NTFS, but if it's worth it, I'd do it. As someone with a great deal more experience, I'd appreciate your input.

 

As an aside, may I also ask you for some advice on what would be the minimum SSD size you'd recommend if I do go with that type of setup?

 

@LaptopUserExtreme, yes to SSD. I have a 256GB SSD with an external 500 GB HDD for storage. Windows boot times with SSD is extremely fast and once you've experienced it you wouldn't want to go back to conventional HDDs as your OS drive anymore.

Depending on what you mainly use your main drive for, you may want to get AT LEAST a 120GB-128GB SSD because anything smaller the OS itself would've taken up most of the storage space. I myself use a 256GB and I find it to be insufficient.

 

@ordinator - I see, a 60gb would be definitely a no-no then. Are you feeling constrained even when you store most big-ticket files in the external drive?

 

Absolutely. I've only installed games and I've only about 20 GB space left. Granted, some games like Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 3 and Dragon Age have like millions of mods taking up a lot more space and what not. Limited music, no movies whatsoever. Purely just storing games, drivers and OS it's already reaching my limit

 

Thanks. I'm going to shop over the next few months in the range of a ~$150 for a 250gb or a ~$350 for a 500gb ssd. Hopefully I can catch one on a sale, at the latest by black Friday.

 

IMHO, go with a decent sized SSD. Largest you can afford. With the sales lately, 256GB Crucial M4 are decently affordable, actually cheapest through Crucial's own online store. Right now it's $211. If that's too much then at least get a 128GB. I hate lugging around extra stuff, only thing I ever take with me is a mouse, otherwise it defeats the purpose of a laptop IMHO. 128GB is ~ $106 if you use the 5% off coupon: Crucial® Coupons, Coupon Codes, Promo Code

Best damn SSD especially for cost/performance/reliability. Samsung 830 is best overall IMHO, but it's much more expensive. But I have a 256GB Samsung in mine only because I managed to snag it for $220.

 

oo, the v4 is $188, when amazon has it at $204! That's pretty good, should be even cheaper with the 5% discount. Why should I go for m4 instead of v4? :/ I mean, they do say 7x vs 21x regular hdd speed, but is it that noticeable? I'm really not too sure.

 

The v4 is ok, it's a SATA II drive and overall performance isn't nearly up to par with any current generation offerings. For the minor price difference, the M4 offers a lot better performance.

Crucial v4 256GB vs. OCZ Agility 4 256GB SSD Shootout - TechSpot Reviews

 

True, but I really wonder if one would make the difference without benching, in an ordinary environment !

 

I'm sure for average use, it would be fine. Bottom line is it's using a controller normally meant for USB flash drives or memory card readers. Access time is slow, 4k is slow. Those are the two most important aspects of an SSD really. Sequential read/writes are usually published because they're higher, but it doesn't matter much unless you do lots of large file transfers. Regular Windows use is in the 4k to 16k range.

Notice the 256GB M4 is $199.99 at Amazon right now.
Amazon.com: Crucial 256 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT256M4SSD2: Electronics

I'd honestly consider the M4 over the V4 for the minor price difference. Not worth only $20 savings, considering the significant (over double) performance advantage of the M4. It's like the difference between buying an Intel i3 dual core vs an i7 quad for $20 more.

 

Agreed.
Still, I wouldn't say access time is "slow"
Even if it's twice (or 3x) the M4's access time, it's still almost instant, especially when coming from a mechanical drive !
Once you deal with SSD they're not the bottleneck anymore, and will often wait for the cpu to access them.

 

Anyone else get some serious electrical whine from their machines? (Sounds like processor whine, and it does go away when running Prime95)

 

yaeh they reduced the HD4000 idle frequency with the latest update....mine whines now on idle , too.

 

Hi NP6110 / Clevo W110ER owners, how about DC/DC converter coils hiss, buzz or twitter in idle and under different CPU load? Is it there any, like on almost every notebook? And how about sound output? Is there the same problem with hiss, buzz or twitter when you use good-quality headphones? I had to return lots of notebooks until I found usable one. Even Lenovo Y570 was unusable for me, I don't understand how somebody can use it with this buzz or twitter depending on CPU load...

 

Thanks Prema. I'm not sure whether I should be glad mine is not special, or sad because they all do it.

 

Most machines I have used in the last few months do this. I only recently noticed it on the W110er, but now that I have, I can't get it out of my head. The only machine I've used recently that did not have ANY of this noise was a Macbook Pro. Others I have tried and heard it in: M11x, Vaio Z11, Probook 4530s, Samsung NP700Z3AH, Y570, Y480, Vaio S13A, X54C, and 4830T.

My P150em is pretty quiet. It does stay on my desk with the lid closed most of the time running external monitors, but I haven't heard it make the noise yet...though the headphone output is complete rubbish and I don't use it at all...using an Audioengine D1 for headphone output instead.

I'm a little disappointed in the W110er now. I know this probably doesn't matter to a lot of you, but for those of us that have hyper aware hearing its annoying. Sorry for the rant / tangent.

 

what are you guys talking about, a noise that one can hear via the minijack output only, or is it something else ?
I never use jack output, only bluetooth :-/

 

The crap audio quality that comes out of the headphone jack is different from the processor whine noise. The processor whine noise is audible when the computer is in idle mode, not doing anything--especially when the fan is off. It sounds like an alien morse code.

 

mmmh, but this is only with the last bios, and not with other computers as discussed above... unless you really have incredible hearing indeed

 

I can hear it with either bios. Turning off speedstep seems to fix it.

 

Yep... Apple is the only company I've seen that actually acknowledged and attempted to address the issue:

ACOUSTIC NOISE REDUCTION IN POWER SUPPLY INDUCTORS

I retired a Toshiba Satellite many years ago specifically of this coil whine issue. I replaced it with a new Toshiba Satellite that never exhibited any coil whine and served me well for many years (perfect silence with fans off and SDD). I also had a Sony Vaio F series that whined too loud for my taste. My P170HM has been reasonably quiet w.r.t. coil whine so far (as well the power brick).

If you can find the specs of the coils that whine, and given that it's not just a result of overstress due to failing capacitors, it should be possible to source better quality replacement coils. In the last few years, if I buy a product that whines too much for my needs, it goes right back to the store. I've had it with the cheapsht. I really miss "Made in Japan".

 

Coil whine issue is problem of motherboard converters, AC power source is almost always silent. I think, it can't handle well the huge fluctuation of power consumption from CPU or GPU. Now I'm using Lenovo Thinkpad Edge E420 with SSD and TPfan, it's totally silent on AC and light load, I accept some whine under full load (prime+furmark on 6630m graphics), but it's totally changed on battery even in idle, it's nearly whining beast... OK, in 99% of time I use it on table with external monitor, so it's not so big problem and next advantage is usable audio output jack with insensible whine, but still I can hear how big is the CPU load on whine intensity on it... But I want to change this machine for something more powerful and more compact, Sager NP6110 / Clevo W110ER (or Goldmax Monster 1.0 in our country) seems to be ideal, but with this whine issue it's unusable for me like other 99% of notebooks...

 

The whining noise is from the switching circuits to step down the voltage. However usually you pick a very high switching frequency so that your ears can't pick it up. Maybe some of y'all just have sensitive ears or they decided to be get some cheap switcher that operates at lower switching frequencies.

 

It's the reason - together with no downgrading - why I am wary of upgrading to the v4 bios. Cause with the v3 I hear no coil noise on battery or plugged in (and I used to have a keen ear for it when I used silenced desktops).

 

Anyone have success with booting UEFI? The BIOS option seems to be non-functioning. Given the BIOS manufacturer, these notebooks should be UEFI capable at this point...

Anyone have success booting UEFI or even running UEFI?

 

I believe the BIOS is EFI, just no fancy graphical interface.

 

HTWingNut, any notable differences between the i5-3320 and 3360, other than what's expected given the frequency difference?

 

Well I returned the 3320m I think it was defective, so now have the 3360m which I am going to test and compare with 3610QM.

 

Good day to you all, Knowers of Things!

So, I contacted the only Norwegian online store (mulitcom.no) that has the clevo to ask them if they could get it with a matte screen. They didn't even know that was an option and then proceeded to get them without a price premium!
Wohoo! So I'm getting mine (i7 3612QM, 8GB 1600MHz, Intel SSD 330 180 GB) in about two weeks if all goes well and I wanted to ask you all if there's a readily available "to-do list" with updates and what not that I should get immediately to optimize performance?

Thank you!