My P870DM2/3 Experience (copied to highlight)

Due to the disappointment, i decided to share my experience here to leverage the awareness for new buyers.

I'm selling my Sager P870dm3 for the following reasons:

0)Fan not spinning properly, heard its Clevo firmware issue? Still not fixed, been weeks.

1)CPU temps are horrible even with CLP, guess i need to delid.

2)I agree with @D2 Ultima , one should have a working BIOS, xtu features arent even working properly, can't OC well.

3) I have to buy from certain resellers to have a properly working machine (stable bios)? I can't as my virtual proxy only allows purchases from US, oh and the price difference is generally extreme, I went with XoticPC. Would rather have a BIOS with only clock adjustment but atleast it wouldn't have serious flaw. (oh and afaik xtu support is pretty standard nowadays for minor oc e.g:MSI, Aourus, Gigabyte and others)

4)the 120hz has terrible viewing angle, pretty much worse than my p170 tn, and any tn display i own, oh and its 6bit ~16 bit colors, lame as most laptops have atleast 8, as an editor this is unacceptable.

5)fans are extremely annoying, having a single 1070, 2nd fan gpu is on, should have the option to disable. No, max fan speed isnt an option, didnt buy the thing for running 3dmark all the time.

6)Keyboard is horrible: 15 inch type, low key travel, spacebar are squeaking after certain amount of use, my p170 was much better.

7)Community not taking any of these seriously, havent seen any of these complaints on this forum before purchasing, I have only seen one user posting a similar experience. Other responses are from company representatives and/or fanboys (?) muting the issue with unrelated suggestions. (just my opinion, could be wrong) Having a fully unlocked bios as an excuse is an exaggeration, most people only want to make a minor oc adjustment, and properly working bios, this can be done on most laptops with working xtu support. (currently always resets and need to use throttlestop). Gurus here: Purchase it and TRY IT to comment serious info. (Meeting specification). Not everyone wants to OC anwyays, not everyone wants a fully fledged firmware, just asking to have a generally working bios fix, which is a must for everyone.


Ill just go with a 6820hk cpu laptop other than clevo which has minimal perofmance loss compared to the 6700k that needs to be delidded to run at stock properly.

sorry for bad english.

Cheers

Note: sorry if im sounding offensive or smth as im quite angry, it was a tedious purchase abroad, now let alone selling it. I would be glad to have any suggestion, thank you.

Also I decided to post this as a thread as a reminder, updated if issues are resolved before selling, since people who probably like me might miss certain notes in the Owner's thread just to save frustration, i hope this isn't considered as spam.

(tl;dr, as phoenix told me, this laptop doesn't work out of the box, nor in the first month of its release. ill add that expect some future replacement budget (screen) if you purchase this laptop, it might be worth to take this long route for a perfect 17inch DTR due to having a desktop cpu (after delidding) and dual gpu option, which im considering just now)

Disclaimer: I'm a semi-long time Clevo user, over 6 years now with 3 machines over the years. By loud i mean beyond audible, I can hear them from 3 walls with open doors. The machines i owned were audible aswell but barely loud as it was more like air sound with tiny motor noise, let alone that they had proper fan scaling, or even 2 EC fan presets modes...

 

I have to agree with you on the cpu thing.my temps reached 95c but after delidding and doing things like undervolting i got it to 85-88at max load. I own a 770dm btw i also had to get a premabios to get features like undervolting to keep temps down

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

 

I dropped the CPU temps aswell with CLP and undervolting and able to maintain 4.7ghz! with FN+1! tho the fan issue isnt resolved that way, even while running at 4ghz, fans dont kick up, nor the GPU.

Imagine your current fan noise/sound on your 775, now double it to get the idea...

 

Not trying to dampen your bad experience, but I want to clarify a couple things:

3 - HIDevolution would have been similar in price to XoticPC and are a Prema partner; however Prema mods are not available yet. So no matter where you bought it from, you would be having similar issues, I suppose. But since not everybody has your issues, this delegates itself to being a matter of bad Quality Control, which is something that really should be improved upon. The machines shouldn't be shipped with such odd issues.

4 - No, 99% of laptop screens are 6-bit colour. The only 8-bit colour screens RIGHT NOW that are selling for mainstream notebooks amounts to exactly one: The 4K AUO panel that's supposed to be 100% Adobe RGB (and fails to achieve that in many reviews).

5 - The single 1080 is meant to be cooled by two fans. If you disabled the second fan, you would be cutting your cooling potential quite low. However, fan control and tables should indeed be working such that they should stay slow when not stressed. I will give that to you.

 

Thanks for the insight, and sorry its 1070 with single heatsink fin, ill update the typo.

I'm pretty sure everyone has the issue but don't mind running the fan at max. its not a personal preference after all or perfection.

The screen is still very terrible in viewing angles and ghosting (at 60hz, 30 hz looks ok) , feels like 2007 all over again, some will learn it the hardware after seeing it with their own eyes. (owner of tn panels)

Also its pretty lame that the owner's thread suggestions were speculations, most of them don't own the machine and do not know how actually loud the thing at fn+1.

 

The 2nd fan is used to draw air over the SSDs/ram under the keyboard, unless you are running really intensive I/O applications that will hammer it over extended periods of time feel free to unplug it.

The BIOS should be stable, what issues are you having in regards to that?

Can you do some side to side shots of your TN panel in comparison? It would help double check if maybe your panel is defective.

Check for background processes loading up your CPU. I have been trying to replicate people's fan issues but had no luck so far trying just the control center or different versions of XTU.

EDIT: I triple checked and yes the 2nd fan is not considered critical to the EC and it wont shut down if you unplug it.

 

To be honest, a P775DM2 would've done you best if a single 1070 was what you wanted, methinks. But it doesn't discount your woes, not one bit.

What screen do you actually have? Can you download & run MonInfo and tell us? Because while all the current 1080p IPS panels are 25ms to 35ms (not enough for 60Hz, far less 120Hz), you should have good viewing angles on that.

The fan noise being an issue is dependent a lot more on each users' situation and personal tolerance. Personally, I can tell you I *REALLY* won't care unless it constantly triggers my desk mic or headset mic in teamspeak 24/7, as I wear a headset and have two big lasko fans 24/7 on max speed blowing at me because my room is so flipping hot. And it is unlikely to do so. But yes, many users don't own the machine.

 

I think the screen is known to have this issue, even in reviews hope im wrong here is the pic, the model is : B173HAN01.2




I know you want to help thanks for that, but its pretty obvious its not a cpu load issue, its at 0 now. I hope you get your hands on this laptop model soon to understand the issue.
The fan stays at 2k (hwinfo64) when cpu is at 98c, and gpu at 90 aswell. unless i kick in fn+1.

thanks a bunch for the help, hope Clevo recognizes this issue and read it.

 

You are right wish I thought twice, especially since there was no hands on, except a german website i didnt know about. You can't trust any brand even on the most essential obvious stuff nowadays

And yeah, the fans are not white noise, they actually whine, they will defiantly trigger ur headset mic (let alone laptop's mic, they should remove them )
I'm a 3 times Clevo fan owner, all of them were P series, so i guess u now know what i mean by loud, as i didnt consider the other as whiny even at fn+1, altho it was still audible but acceptable.

 

The laptop MIC is for conference calls, not so useful for gaming (not that they ever really are).

 

The AUO panels needs very specific parameters for proper calibration. And a lot of reviews haven't even tried to properly calibrate it. Sure I agree it should come calibrated out of the box, but it does use different backlighting that needs longer calibration.

 

umm that was a joke come on now

 

I don't think color calibration would fix these terrible viewing angles, or pixel response. Colors are ok as an editor, not perfect, tho thats a very minor thing to consider with all the odds.

 

I don't think the 2nd fan is served as to cool down passive components and i/o, first the fan will most likely pull air from the exhaust and grills and cycle it, instead of push/pull, which is obvious.
P775 doesn't have a 2nd fan, mind explaining reasonably why the 2nd fan is important. My speculation: Clevo EC engineers didn't bother to make a second ECs/BIOS for single card/single fan.
Thanks for the reply.

 

The P870DM2/3 has 3 fans, the middle one intakes through the keyboard. This is not pushing through air on the single 1070 DM2 through a heatsink (just a spacer to stop things getting into the vent). This is the 2nd GPU fan.

 

Yes thats what im referring to Iv already took a look inside to install my ssd.

 

Did you notice it is turned around compared to the other two and there was a hole under one of the M.2 slots? That's where the air draw is and what cools the M.2/top ram slots.

 

I understand, but it still doesn't make sense aswell, why would it run at the same speed as the master gpu fan, thats asking for more unacceptable noise, i hope future ECs has the option to lock the fan speed at something very low or even disable.

Plus it looks like when the fan is blowing air through something stiff like a sponge, it becomes quieter, the first fan is blowing through heatsink and its almost 2x more silent than the second fan, i tried it by stopping each, will see if it helps.

Thank you for your insight!

 

Fans running at different speeds can cause odd harmonics and there is no good universal way to get temperature readings from NVME M.2 drives or ram sticks. So the only thing you can do is guess based on the load of the rest of the system and have them running at the same rate.

Unless you are doing some heavy video editing feel free to unplug the second fan, just be aware if you do start to pile the work on an m.2 drive or ram under the keyboard they could get a bit warmer than normal.

 

Welp, try saving your reputation more, u said in the beginning second fan triggers EC to shutdown this is not a working solution future buyers.

 

I even went and physically checked for you.

 

Sorry I meant the 4k AUO panel. Not the 120hz TN.

 

Hello, have u fixed the issue? I'm having the same problem.
Thank you.

 

I unplugged the 2nd fan, laptop beeped 5 times then shutdown.