*** Official Clevo P37xSM-A/Sager NP9377 owner's lounge ***

We don't have a lounge for this machine yet and we should so I figured I'd start one.

I just got the machine yesterday and I'm loving it. I don't have any real issues with it other than the gimped vbios that we already know about.

Who else has this machine besides me? Planning to get it? Have questions?

 

I ordered the special edition last week and I'm hoping it'll come in sometime next week. It's my first gaming computer and needless to say i'm very excited, having subsisted on 4+ year-old Intel HD Graphics for 4 years, and on a Dell no less.

What exactly do you mean about gimped VBIOS? I'm unfamiliar with the issue.

Also, I'm pretty hyped up to do some decent benchmarking. I ended up settling on the GTX 870M SLI offered at LPC Digital, but I cannot find benchmarking data ANYWHERE for it at all whatsoever. Everyone's a sucker for the 880M SLI but I didn't quite have that much room in my budget :<

 

Congrats on your purchase! Its an awesome machine, you won't regret it!

As for the VBIOS... nVidia has been artificially limiting the performance of their GPUs for awhile now. They're still fast as all hell but I'm scoring lower on certain benches (Futuremark stuff it appears) with 880Ms than the 780Ms got.

Its not really the end of the world - and drivers are still quite young - but its something to note.

870M likely has more performance wiggle room than the 880M does but I don't think there are too many of them in the wild.

Here ya go: GeForce Mobile GPU Reviews: GTX 880M, 870M, And 860M

 

I ordered one from LPC-Digital with a single 880M in it. I'm not crazy about the idea of dealing with SLI issues, though I'll likely order another 880M at some point down the road and SLI once the single card can't keep up. Got the Samsung EVO SSD in it, and can't wait for it to get here. Fingers crossed it'll arrive by the end of next week, but the holiday on Monday may keep that from happening.

 

Honestly I am running mine in power saver mode most of the time. The fans just get too loud. I think I need to repaste everything. That benchmark I posted about the 870M had the 880M hitting 75C and my processor seems to like to hit 80s too. Just a bit too much heat.

Even with power save mode, which keeps the fans nice and low, the system is still plenty capable.

I am going to turn off SLI and run some tests to see what happens with the fan noise and the system temperature. Didn't think to do that before lol.

I am loving the machine though. The track pad really is bad but I'm getting used to hitting the button from an angle (you will see what I mean)

Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

 

What kind of thermalpaste did you order it with?

I'm not really bothered by fan noise, as I personally despise melty computers, having lost aforementioned not-very-much-missed Dell to exceptionally poor thermal management design. To me, fan noise just means that the laptop is doingni what I want it to good and proper :b

Also, I've done assistive cooling on the Dell before using a desk fan. Most ghetto solution ever.

 

I got the IC Diamond upgrade and the additional copper heatsinks and I'm still running mid 80s under load... obviously someone screwed up. The more I think about it, the less thrilled I am.

I despise melty computers too but if the temps don't come down, this one won't last long either.

I've had to do some ghetto cooling before myself. Thankfully that isn't the case with this machine but yeah, temps are hefty.

 

1 and a half month np9377 owner here, been waiting to make a lounge for sager np9377

just a heads up, prema mod for the 9377 will be released after a week im looking forward to it when released

normally i use a single 880m for not so demanding games like nba 2k14 which i play a lot and borderlands 2, but whenever i switch to metro LL and crysis 3, far cry 3 i activate SLI, on general browsing its always on powersaving and i only get 2.5 hrs on backlit off and screen brightness only 2 notches up.

 

How are your temperatures man? About in line with mine? Better? Worse?

Good to hear about the BIOS. I did some investigation into the Prema thread and there are a lot of useful options that are unlocked.

I haven't tried anything on battery yet... I was just keeping fan noise down haha.

 

Of course, part of your problem might just be that you have SLI 880M's :b Those things are ridiculous power-crunching eat-nails-for-breakfast monsters, I'll let y'all know what the thermal levels are like for 870M SLI when I get it.

Any comments on weight? I know 8.6lbs is a LOT but I'm hoping it'll be worth it. Does it work out at all for on-lap use? Anyone tested?
Also, I personally follow HTWingnut's opinion on battery life--heavy gaming on battery could injure the battery's power capacity dramatically by putting such a high power draw on it. I'll be staying tethered most of the time, personally.

 

I use my 6.5kg 570wm beast on my lap but people think I am odd.

 

The 880Ms are indeed insane -- but they're nice and fast

I would never use this thing on my lap... Good way to get the fans clogged prematurely and/or burn myself haha.

Yes. That definitely makes you odd, I won't go against what people think

So... I'm noticing a lot of flex in the display. Just how hard is it to break one? Just a bit of pressure on the lid and the screen bubbles. It doesn't inspire a lot of confidence as to whether it would survive in a laptop bag but as I've never broken a laptop panel before, I'm unsure of how much or how little it takes to break the panel. I'm babying this thing but I'm leery about taking it anywhere. I wish there was a way to reinforce it a bit.

 

I'm aware the thing would get pretty toasty on one's lap--perhaps I should rephrase xD I meant that I have a tri-fan cooling stand which I put my laptop on top of, and then propped the cooling stand on my lap such that the fans were getting airflow. I was more asking if the weight of the machine (read: humongous footprint, yikes) makes this arrangement inconvenient.

 

Its not that heavy to me... the power brick is heavy... but this machine is nothing compared to the Alienware and I used to use that in my lap all the time (have a lap desk that is meant for drawing, writing, etc., that worked just fine until the weight of the Alienware cracked it lol).

 

HECH YEAHHHHH I checked it at 2AM and status changed to "Shipped and Complete!" It'll be here by Friday

 

temps are good, when gaming at SLI i only reach a lowly 70C, that being said for Metro LL and crysis 3. but i keep a cooler at the bottom, and an electric fan for direct ventilation. i live in the trophics so its required for me to keep the air circulating, im not really in to letting the laptop at gaming be on the laptop cooler alone, its a no no for me.

also us being from aw m18x or m18, its not really an issue if we put out our rigs when gaming outside, the weight is more than tolerable since im used to lugging my m18x around back then.

just being busy in borderlands 2 ultimate vault hunter pack man im getting owned so much in fps, haven't been in the thread lately, still looking out for better drivers (although 880m stock driver are okay for now)

 

70C? Man that would be sweet haha.

Well I get to open this thing today. Nervous and excited at the same time. I have to figure out why the SD reader isn't working (I'm assuming its not connected).

 

Prema just pointed out something interesting.

My chip is supposed to have a 31x multiplier for a clock rate of 3.1GHz but its actually factory set to 33x - take a look.



It would appear that for whatever reason, my chip is indeed overclocked out of the box.

If I go in the BIOS, the multiplier is 33x as well but as soon as I make any changes, it drops to 31x. It appears to be some sort of a bug, I'm assuming with the processor itself?

I'm not complaining at all by the way, I love it. Its just an interesting observation.

 

Have you turned off turbo and tested it?

 

Processor locks at 3.09GHz but still shows a 33x multi. I don't get it. Must be a glitch. *shrug*

Temps are a nice and cool 65-67C under load though. Maybe I'll keep turbo off for a bit and see what I think about it, it still feels plenty fast at 3.1 to be honest.

Bioshock Infinite just turned in 107.32FPS average, 10.7FPS min, and 405.72 max on the Ultra + DDOF 1080p benchmark and the system stayed nice and quiet plus much cooler - CPU maxed at 61C core, GPUs maxed at 72C

Keeping the CPU turbo turned off doesn't seem to impact Bioshock much in terms of performance but in temperatures, its HUGE!

Catzilla went to 14146 from 14157 - thermals: CPU max 67C, GPU max 85C

Firestrike went to 8841 from 9099 - CPU max 68C, GPU max 72C (really surprised me that the GPU didn't go as high with fire strike as with Catzilla)

I think it might be worth keeping it like this for awhile. Its certainly far cooler.

Just to see, since Catzilla pushed the GPU harder than Fire Strike, I ran Catzilla with fans on max. CPU max 65C, GPU 74C.

The sound is unbearable with the fans on max of course.

 

The other thing you could do is decrease both "turbo boost short power max" and "turbo boost power max" both by 10W so the TDP is in line with the rest of the MQ chips. That should decrease temps somewhat, and of course the speed will go down but if you're considering disabling turbo then that's probably not a problem.

 

Good suggestion.

You're not going to believe this but with the TDP at 47W combined with my -110mV undervolt, the chip is running between 3.39GHz, 3.49GHz, and 3.59GHz under load (3.49 and 3.59GHz seeming to be pretty much equal as far as average) with a max temp of 84C. So I lost 100MHz but also lost 7-10C in temp.

Dropping TDP to 40W it alternates between 3.29GHz, 3.39GHz, and 3.49GHz, staying mostly at 3.39GHz - max temp of 75C

Dropping TDP to 35W, it alternates between 3.19GHz and 3.29GHz but seems to mostly be at 3.19GHz - max temp of 70C

I also noticed that my chip seems to have its stock TDP wrong as well which is why my temps were so high. Something is causing the defaults on this chip to read improperly in XTU. The default TDP is 67W according to XTU along with an 83.75W TDP for short boost. However, the chip is supposed to be 57W with a 71.25W boost. Whenever I take things too far with the undervolting and the watchdog kicks in, it was resetting the values to their proper ones and I was seeing in XTU that the defaults were higher so I was raising them.

With that in mind, I changed the settings to what they are actually supposed to be and ran the test. 3.69GHz with the highest temperature being 94C.

Based on this testing, I think that the most optimum setting for me would be probably somewhere around 45W TDP.

The only thing I'm curious about is if there are longterm consequences to constant clock speed changes. The 57W TDP was high temperature but it had the most stable speed.

Here's the graph

TDP testing

 

I don't think there are any consequences to constantly changing clock speed. Don't have any hard proof but my 3 year old 740QM Toshiba and 9 year old Turion ML-30 Compaq are still working after all these years.

And yeah does sound like the default TDP is screwed up. Normal TDP should've been 57W, with turbo short max 67W. No wonder your chip was running so hot. Even my 4900MQ @ 4.2 GHz only draws about 85-90W when running CineBench which loads the CPU to 100% on all 4 cores.

If you're ok with losing 100-200 MHz, then yeah set turbo max to 47W and turbo short max to 57W with the undervolt and enjoy the much cooler temps.

 

Cool. I've got it at 45W right now. I'm not noticing any performance hit (and I'm looking for it). This chip is just so fast that it doesn't bog down. I'm really enjoying the quietness of it all.

And yeah, the TDP was stupid. You can even see in the picture I posted that it says the default TDP is 67W for the chip. *shrug*

 

Thanks to Prema's wonderful BIOS mod, I was able to get some testing done today.

Unfortunately, the heat of Haswell is proving to be a big problem.

I can get 4.4GHz on 1 core to be XTU stress test stable with no throttling (82C). 4.5GHz causes an insta-freeze and a reboot, even with a small voltage increase.

2 cores throttles at 4.2GHz and attempting to undervolt causes a lovely WHEA BSOD.

These were all with hyperthreading turned off to keep temperatures down as well.

Bottom line is that this chip won't pass 4.4GHz no matter what and 4.2GHz would be stable on 2 cores if we had better cooling.

3 cores had a weird instability... wouldn't do 4.1GHz so I'm guessing that one of those 3 cores is the worst in the CPU.

 

Higher frequencies would simply require better cooling. You can obtain them with the right settings but they won't be able to be sustained.

 

Well with Prema's help (internal PLL overvoltage enabled) and an 81mV overvolt, I got 4.5GHz with pretty much the same temperatures, low 80s.

Trying for 4.6GHz seems like it isn't going to happen though. The processor doesn't seem to like the kind of voltage it would require. I set the BIOS to +125 and Windows wouldn't boot (after +120 WHEA BSOD''d) but luckily it still POST so I was able to reset it without pulling the battery.

Still, pretty impressive for a laptop chip.

 

It's going to be a struggle to get that to benchmark properly though 3.9-4ghz should be sustainable.

 

Liquid Ultra, P370EM heatsink, foil tape, max fans, back cover off. Ready for action.

 

Not difficult at all.

XTU @ 4.5GHz, 1 core, no HT

3DMark, 1 core, 4.5GHz, no HT

Its pretty obvious that the CPU plays a huge part in that benchmark though. I would need something that doesn't benefit from multiple cores.

EDIT: Oh my, I didn't realize that with my undervolt, the CPU is running @ 4GHz for 3DMark...

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/3132226

It would appear that there is still some wiggle room here... Back to tweaking... 9146 Fire Strike.

EDIT2: Nahhhh, it looks like I found the sweet spot. Tweaking in either direction causes performance loss. I appear to have hit a wall at 3.99GHz where I've got the best performance overall. Its a lower total overclock but the chip is cool, stable, and my benchmarks are at their optimal points. The chip runs at 3.99GHz unless it is absolutely pushed to the limit which is when it drops to 3.79/3.69GHz.

 

just saw on my gefore experience notification, 337.88 driver now available guys

 

Hopefully it fixes Watch Dogs...

 

Well, Watch Dogs is fixed.

Here's a taste - Ultra, 8x TSAA

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
27227, 192562, 41, 219, 141.393

 

Heh told you lol.

 

I found out real quick that an undervolt that is stable with all the tools in the world can be brought to its knees by a video game. I was playing it, the screen went black and I thought it was the video card since everything else kept going but when I held down the power button to shut it off then went to turn it back on, it wouldn't POST. Turned it off and unplugged the power for a minute and plugged it back in and it POST and watchdog had reset it to stock. I put it to -50mV now and everything is fine but I'm not going to run an O/C with this game. It would appear its another BF4 as far as stability is concerned. :\

 

Like I said for 24/7 you give an undervolt some headroom. Eventually people will listen *looks off dreamily*

 

Yeah I've always advocated that people test their undervolt with the workload that they're going to use it for. I can run a -100mV undervolt on my 4900MQ and it would pass all the synthetics in the world, but I would still see artifacts during intense fight scenes in Sleeping Dogs (probably messed up physics calculations). So now I run -80mV for 24/7 use and haven't had an issue since.

 

Well it was stable with Bioshock... I will just have to change it to -50mV for the purposes of Watch Dogs.

Well I have good news. The new nVidia drivers improved performance a good bit:



Here's the comparison link: Result

I set the undervolt to the same -110mV I was using on the previous tests to make sure the results were as accurate as possible.

 

Erm, I would consider a <2% improvement in graphics score/FPS within margin of error, but if it's a consistent 2% that would be improvement.

 

Its consistent. My 3DMark scores are actually much more consistent than they were, they used to jump about wildly. I haven't tested it yet but its probably throttling less.

Metro 2033 maxed out + advanced PhysX running -

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
12733, 213203, 33, 82, 59.722

With PhysX running, the second card (the one I have assigned to PhysX work) was 10C hotter than the primary (75C for the main, 85C for the secondary).

I only have the demo so I can't run the official benchmark for it.

http://www.catzilla.com/toplist?pag...multi=all&ven=all&ctype=l&manual=&submit=Show

4th in the laptop ranking. Significantly behind john and Fox with their 780s but their 780s are also overclocked and they have much higher CPU core speeds and RAM speeds

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...18-prema-bios-mod-review-149.html#post9673456

 

You're the best! Thank you for releasing this.

My NP9377S is coming tomorrow, I'm super psyched!

 

Would be interesting if you would do us some benchmarks with your 870m sli ...
There is a total black out on this GPU ... No ones want to post results of it ...
Maybe game benching and other stuff ... Temp etc .
Keep us updated.

 

I've been doing some goofing around in BF3 and heavily shaders-doped Minecraft. High fps and I haven't had cpu or gpu temperatures climb above 70 yet, although I AM using a cooling stand.

The main problem is that I'd love to benchmark, but I don't own a lot of AAA heavy-hitting games that most people bench :c I only even have BF3 because Origin made it free atm

Still, I'll see what I can do.

 

(EDIT: Mobile Chrome done goofed. Ignore this duplicate post please.)

 

The free edition of 3DMark11 is a good tool for GPU benchmarking. As for games, nothing makes the GPUs cry more than Crysis 3 on Ultra + AA.

 

Whelp... That was nice while it lasted. I just fried both video cards (system won't POST). Going to have to RMA it and suck it up since it was my fault. I wonder how much this is going to cost me.

Fastest that I've ever blown through a machine. It figures that I would be the one to have the bad luck of frying my video cards with a vBIOS that is known to work.

Cautionary tale - even when you're careful, unforeseen things happen. I'm not mad at anyone but myself, I'm just going to be out of a machine for awhile and however much cash it costs me to get it repaired.

I tried putting one of the video cards in my M17x to try to reflash it (the Sager won't POST but that may well be because it has no video option since the iGPU is disabled on the 120hz panel) and unfortunately, there isn't enough room with the heat spreader on the back and it didn't want to come off. To avoid further damage to the card, I gave up the project and put it back in the machine and put it back together. Really not looking forward to this... Its not so much the cost as it is the embarrassment. In all of my years with computers, I've never had such terrible luck before. Never even had a hard drive fail. Big bummer.

 

Sorry for what happened to you ethrem ,
Which vbios you was attempting to flash your 880s with .....
Hope it all get sorted out soon for you
Your accidental demage doesn't cover this ?
Throw laptop from a high place
J/K , trying to ease it up....
Things will be okay mate.

 

It was an unreleased unlocked vBIOS meant to allow overclocking and stop the throttling.

Its my own damn fault. Accidental damage is for breaking the LCD screen, something I likely would have needed at some point. We will see if they will be willing to work with me on a replacement. It sucks but it is what it is.

There is one last thing I'm going to try - I'm going to pull one of the cards and try booting with just one. It would be really weird for both of them to have fried. I would prefer that neither did, of course, but one is better than two.

If it ends up being too costly, I'll likely sell the machine for parts to try to recoup some of the cost and get a low end laptop for every day usage (or even just keep using my Inspiron 17R) and build a desktop for gaming. I was trying to avoid having a desktop machine but the 880Ms are not working to their full potential out of the box and the solution to that problem obviously carries a big risk with it (much bigger than I imagined).

What really sucks though is how fast I killed this machine. I got it Wednesday the 21st and its a brick on Saturday the 31st, just 10 days later :\