HTWingNut's Sager NP7330 / Clevo W230ST REVIEW

Yes. I wrote 200TB to a Samsung 840 120GB and it still works great. Read performance (not write, which is odd) reduced significantly, but it still was working great, and they say TLC is limited to 1000 write cycles, where even at 1:1 w/e (which in reality is more like 2:1) that's nearly 2000 writes and still going, but in reality probably closer to 4000 with garbage collection and wear leveling, etc.

 

i have a first gen 80gb intel ssd still working fine and its mlc. my friend got 4 intel-e 32gb slc drives when they first came out and only 1 has died, those drives are old as hell.

 

Hey HT, is soundblaster cinema useless? Do we have VIA or SB Cinema? I try to use SB Cinema but it says disable, not present, not supported etc... Should we just uninstall this since VIA seem to be in control of our audio?


One more thing HT, do you have the intel turbo boost option in the bios to enable/disable? I don't have that option in the bios hmmm

 

It's VIA with SB Cinema software I believe. Only thing SB Cinema does that's worth anything IMHO is make the audio louder. Although equalizer and effects are nice. I'll fuss with it and maybe help. If it's saying it can't find it then something is wrong.

And turbo boost is not part of the BIOS. It probably exists, just isn't in the menus. Prema is prematurely working on a BIOS mod (I suggest anyone interested make a donation here: https://biosmods.wordpress.com/)
that with luck should improve things greatly.

I just got my replacement laptop today due to screen issues. So am in the process of repasting and installing Windows 7 this time around. It may be a few days before I get into any testing again.

 

HT, I do not see an equalizer or effects option on the VIA or SB Cinema settings, do I need to update the driver?

 

Well, I redid a -100.xxx dyn & cache, ran a 15m(& 5m) stress test and got max c. 80C for 15m, 75C for 5m so it actually does help a bit. (didn't change multis left them @ 35X default for 3/4 core, no throttling, and TDP by XTU mostly stayed well below 47W with a few VERY brief forays that I noticed to 48W...)

KB area feels a bit warm, and this is with the new xslim "cooler" (fan not powered) sitting on a bed, so take it as you will. I'm happy with it, but next up will be furmark.

BTW: HTH do you tell what "profile" is active w/XTU? Does it default to your mods when you save/change them? If you don't save it goes to last saved "profile"? i.e. it's not very intuitive and even though it seems to understand the latest haswell CPUs their "benchmark" site is clueless...

...and on a more ontopic note my 7330 has switched to "final test", so hopefully I will have that next week...

Lastly I can't say how MUCH BETTER the XSLIM is than the X3 at least for overall versaility/size. Comfortable on lap, and MUCH handier to carry w/notebook, plus it's nopt a solid slab so even not using the fan(which I haven't yet) it still has good air draw from nb cooling. The thinness MIGHT be a problem in warmer weather, but time will tell, but I still think that the size/weight is just better.

(Mine came in some real plain packaging, i.e. a slightly branded plain brown cardboard box which it was shockingly shipped in and survived...)

[EDIT]
WTH does this nb have a VGA port? It's just incongruous...
[/EDIT]

 

Just to clarify, the U.S. government provides "VAT Forms" where I work, and by providing this form the German government allows the reseller to *not* collect tax at the time of sale. It's not *just* "because I'm not a citizen" -- didn't mean to get your hopes up!

They don't list the keyboard choices when configuring but I was told that I could have a US or UK keyboard if I wanted one, and I only had to specify in the instructions. It doesn't hurt to email them, or PM them here on the forums (user "hawkforce").

 

So what's the max stable OC for 765m that anyone has been able to achieve? My guess is that with a bit of extra voltage we should be able to touch 5k mark in 3dmark11

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

 

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4700HQ,ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. G750JW

Asus G750JW.

Not mine.

 

@Amal

You mentioned in the other thread that your i7-4700mq temps are under 90c when gaming/benchmarking at stock clocks without any mods or cooling, how come rlrh, htwingnut and some others are getting 99c on their cpu temps?

Remember i'm talking about the first test you did and not after when you had to put a stand or cooling or repasting or whatever, i'm talking about when you just got your w230st and you did your initial test with the 3dmark11 and you posted a screenshot and your cpu temps didn't even exceed above 89c.


Why are the others after running just 3dmark11 or several minutes of the game, the cpu shoots up to 99c and with rlrh at 100c and yours stays a lot cooler in the 80s?




Another thing for all w230st owners including HT, does your fan make a noise like a grating/grinding noise the same kind of sound like a mechanical drives does? I only have an SSD inside so the only moving part inside my w230st is the fan and I hear this grating noise.






HTwingnut, Did your replacement get better cpu stock temps this time HT and is your screen much better with no bleeding and deadpixels or bruising?

 

I'm also getting CPU temps up to 99C, even with 100mv undervolting. GPU into the high 80's. Oddly, the temp of the air coming off the heatsink is quite cool. Prior to this, I had an Acer with an i5-460m/ATI 5650 - and when it got up to the 90's, the temp of the air coming out was so high that it would actually hurt to hold your hand there for more than a few moments. This made me suspect that, perhaps, not enough of the heat coming off the CPU/GPU is getting transferred to the heatsink/fan. Which implies that either the TIM isn't applied (or the heatsink isn't strapped down) correctly.

I got so concerned that I went out to get some IC Diamond TIM just now. After I apply it, I'll report back to let you know if it helped. I'll also see if, perhaps, there isn't sufficient contact pressure on the sinks.

I just seems very odd that the CPU is 99C and yet the air blowing out feels lukewarm at best.

 

FWIW, I repasted my np7330 with MX2 yesterday and haven't seen a temp above 85c on the CPU. I haven't gamed for 30minutes at a time or anything, just stress testing & 3DMark11. Averaging somewhere between 4300-4400 with 3DMark, btw. I have a U2 pad for keeping the temps down even further during gaming sessions, but I haven't used it yet.

Diablo 3 was always a killer with temps on my old laptop, GPU mostly tho, so I look forward to testing it.

 

not "read"....."see" here:thumbsup:

 

If the air is not hot/warm the the heatsink is not seated, heatpipe is broken, or thermal paste applied incorrectly or not at all. Definitely pull it off and clean thoroughly and apply the new paste. I only saw such high temps with BF3 and Prime95. Everything else was low 90's max.

That's not damaged, a dent is needed in order to make that tight bend. Damaged would be a crack. Plus that one leads to the GPU and it runs super cool.

 

Mine is damaged on my w110er and it looks just like that.
Doesn't prevent the gpu from staying cool either..

 

Ok, it worked (reapplying TIM). My GPU never goes above 82C (was 90C) now and the CPU now maxes at 95c on Core 0 (was 99C). The other cores hit from 93c to 89C. It really takes something insane (like Prime95 + ARMA2 in a window) with 100% CPU and GPU simultaneously to get these levels. In Wargame ALB (which also can give you 100% load on both CPU and GPU), I see ~68C GPU and ~90C CPU. But BF3 really seems to be the most stressful on the CPU for some reason. It was the only thing that drove CPU temps into the 90's.

I used IC Diamond 7, making sure I cleaned the sinks thoroughly.

I'm quite pleased at the moment, but I may go back in and re-do the CPU. I have a feeling the TIM didn't get spread as well due to my inability to "wiggle" the CPU sink nearly as much as the GPU. Or perhaps I should just be happy

 

when you are surfing the web and watching youtube, is the laptop near silent? i dont mind a loud fan when gaming but when im just surfing it really annoys me.

 

Completely silent.

 

guess im ordering one then, sold my desktop today and playing dota on my old laptop is laggy as hell.

 

No grating or grinding noise.

Replacement screen has no dead pixels and some minor bleed at the bottom.

Point being that each heatpipe is a separate closed system, and that one runs to the GPU, has nothing to do with CPU.

 

I'm a bit disappointed with the rather rough finish on the sinks. You'd likely never see this on a desktop heatsink.

 

That is really beat up. Look at the image of mine and it is nowhere near as bad as yours. That thing is gouged. I would ask fo replacement, perhaps they will send you just a heatsink.

 

Among the joys of the Modern World is...Chinese Quality Control.

Something of an oxymoron, I'm afraid...the replacement is likely to be just as bad.

 

Neither 326.19 nor 320.49 nVidia drivers will install ("Could not find compatible graphics...).

Has anyone found a solution?

 

quality control is not the manufacturers fault. manufacturers standards is set by the company hiring them. learn how captialism works

 

GTX 765m vRAM is Samsung K4G20325FD-FC04 which assuming it's 1.5V and not 1.35V (because that would only be 900MHz), it's 1250MHz vRAM so if you crank the vRAM clocks up +500MHz (effectively +250MHz for the RAM), it should be running at STOCK speed. So +600 or +700 in nVidiaInspector or MSI Afterburner should be easily achievable.

 

The customers too. Keep buying crap they'll keep selling you crap.

 

He didn't say so.... learn english ?

 

Just wondering, can you game on battery?, is there throttling on battery?, thanks

 

Yes the CPU idles at 800MHz and boosts to 1200MHz I believe. But GPU can be run at full speed I think. I'll have to try to tune the laptop to play on battery. If you can run 1GHz CPU and limit fps to like 30FPS you should get reasonable battery life, well probably 60-90 minutes, actually.

 

Learn how to spell "Capitalism" and I'll learn how to spell "Communist/Crony-Capitalist Totalitarian Regime".

Sorry - no one wants a Chinese-made watch, car, violin, aircraft - basically anything which requires an element of perfectionism. Fortunately, Consumer Electronics simply need to be "good enough". And such is decidedly the case with my rather agricultural-looking heatsink. I have a hard time imagining a German, Japanese or Swiss company letting a heatsink like that out the door. Just my opinion, of course.

And if quality control isn't the fault of the Manufacturer - then exactly whose fault is it? I was under the impression that a Manufacturer builds things. I suppose that, in China, quality control is left to...the customer perhaps?

And don't misconstrue this as some kind of anti-Chinese bias. I'm just trying to be completely honest. Perhaps some people would be interested in a Chinese-made car or aircraft. It just seems like there aren't too many...outside of China, of course

 

Yep, the CPU throttles down to 1.5ghz on my 4700mq. GPU still goes to 910. Pretty much kills DCS World and anything else that's highly CPU-bound.

You know, I wish they made a 9-cell extended battery that doubled as a rear prop. I had that for my little Acer 4820TG and got both incredible battery life (8+hrs) and a nifty way to get the notebook off the ground for better breathing.

This little laptop continues to surpass my expectations in every respect, with the possible exception of its rather short battery life. I think I got spoiled by the 4820TG, which could 3D game - even overclocked - for a solid 2.5 hours at least. Oh well - damn physics. You gotta hate it.

 

So I've never double checked my repasting for IC Diamond 7. Am I supposed to put on enough paste that when I reinstall the heatsink, the paste is supposed to spread all the way across the entire chip/die? Or just across that shiny silvery/chrome surface?

His sn is "aintz" Just kitten

I'm hoping that Haswell is at least similar to Sandy Bridge, and the GPU is something like previous generations, where you should at least be able to run not-so-hardcore games like PCSX2, Dolphin emulator, or League of Legends just fine, if you put it on High Performance plan I think that was one of the things I loved about my Alienware, haha. The CPU (i7-2720QM), and GPU (ATI/AMD 6970M would run almost at full clocks even on battery). Oh yea, I was able to run PCSX2 on the IGP as well (Intel HD 4000?), if on High Performance plan.

 

On battery, will the CPU throttle down even when the GPU is not activated ?
If so, this laptop is seriously limited on battery, that sucks.

 

Yes, throttled. Every laptop does.
And reason so, can you imagine drawing 100W off the battery? It would overheat and explode if it could even provide that level of power.

4820TG had a dual core CPU and Radeon 5650 graphics. You can get that level of performance from just the IGP and CPU running at 1GHz. The HD 4600 is actually a good 720p GPU. Plus have you tried to game on battery? Limit your FPS to 30, run at 720p, and downclock your GPU? With a little tuning you can probably still get 2+ hours gaming.

I don't recall any Intel based laptop with dGPU that can run full speed on battery, at least not a higher end one. ULV CPU + 630m yeah, but much more than that then you're stressing the limits of a battery. Even the Sandy Bridge i7-2720QM and 6970m spoken of it's not possible. That's still 150W+ of power draw. There's no way it ran "near full speed".

edit: I'm a bit disappointed I just tried to run on integrated GPU on battery and it wouldn't run past 400MHz. It should be able to run at 1.3GHz when taxed. There's got to be a way to remove that limitation.

 

I can't speak from experience, but based on your comparison video (thanks a lot for that!), the W110ER (which is still being sold by mySN, thankfully) seems like a much better compromise. This W230ST looks and feels almost like 15 incher but with a so-so GPU and an HD res which is hardly needed.

What do you think? Is the W230ST mobile enough to be playable on the plane? And how about the fan noise while gaming, is there any difference between the two?

 

W230ST does not look and feel like a 15 incher, it's 2 inches less wide, 2 inches less deep, 0.5 inch thinner, and 3 lbs lighter. The W110ER is 1.5" less wide, almost as deep, thicker, and only 0.5lbs less than the W230ST.

And so-so GPU? It can run all current games at 1080p high to ultra settings. You can run at 1280x720 or 1366x768 if you want to, and it's difficult to tell the difference to be honest. It's nice to have a high resolution desktop if you want it.

Fan noise is going to be audible while gaming regardless. The W110ER is a nice machine, no doubt, but it can't hold a candle to the performance of this machine. Neither one is going to be able to game at full power while on battery either.

 

The 765M crushes the 650M, so the step up in size has more than been made up with graphics grunt really.

Also that screen res will make a huge difference to content consumption.

 

When dGPU is not activated, which was part of my question, I don't see why it would draw 100W.
And no, every laptop does not throttle the cpu on battery, of course not.. no reason for that.
At worst turbo boost is disabled, that's all.

 

It's a gaming machine, so rather than throttle the graphics, they throttled the CPU instead. True a more complex EC could maybe load balance but that could get a lot more expensive.

 

Laptop is drawing 80-100W from the wall when CPU is fully taxed.

 

No doubt, but I was talking about compromise due to mobility.

HTWingNut, that's very good to hear, but after having the Sony Vaio Z 13.1" for a few years, I can say that although this is very light machine (3.04 pounds), being cramped into the seats of modern aviation, I could really learn to appreciate every inch less. I'm still looking for that near perfect compromise between mobility and power. I initially thought the Razer Edge might be it, but we're still not quite there.

 

Razer Edge is wider and deeper, it's just thinner.

 

I'm talking about the so-called 'gaming tablet' of theirs, but its performance is less than satisfactory and even worse, the touch screen for windows is just not ready since games without native support still require a mouse, instead of the tablet (adequately) simulating the mouse clicks with touch.

 

I recommend anyone that wants more out of the W230ST, like more battery life, lower temperatures, more configuration, to donate to Prema at biosmods.wordpress.com and let him know you're interested in improvements for the w230st. There's no guarantees, but I'm sure he can at least undervolt the GPU, unlock GPU multipliers and offer settings like turning CPU boost on or off.

 

thanks to your detailed review bought one of these yesterday. hope i get it soon and it doesnt get stuck at customs for whatever reason.

 

What the hell.... well it shouldn't, but that explains the short battery life.
Chipset is supposed to be "low-consumption", the screen shouldn't take more than 6W max..
How do you explain that ?

Also, the undervolt one drawing more than the stock one at encoding x264 is rather strange !

 

No, that's because undervolted it is actually running faster (because it stays under TDP), and the performance results show a decent improvement in performance... and runs cooler too.

 

I'm doing an install with Windows 7 and so far everything is doing fine except two things:

Intel MEI drivers fail and SB Cinema keeps blue screening on install. I also am using a single 256GB Plextor M5M SSD instead of RAID this time.

Wi-Fi card Intel 7260 won't work either. It detects it but it can't connect to anything. Everything was working great in Windows 8. I think I may go with Windows 8 until Sager and/or Clevo can offer better drivers for Windows 7.

 

Hey, I just watched this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL4OYxSg8Og
At 10:01 you can see a black piece of plastic (?) or something like that that sits ontop of the space between the fins and the fan. When I take a look at your pictures, your unit seems to lack this. Or did you forget to include it in the picture after removing the heatsink? I'm interested in this because from my understanding this seems similar to a tape mod to enchance the airflow and if you tested the temperatures without it we could hope for lower temperatures by installing it ourselves.