*** Official Clevo P65xSA/SE/SG / Sager NP8650/51/52 Owner´s Lounge ***

Yea, you need to have a password setup before being able to login with the fingerprint sensor.

 

I believe you said you were a student earlier: Eurocom sells the p650se (they call it the m5 pro) for 1375 USD with IPS and IC Diamond stock. They offer a 10% student discount on their laptops which would definitely put this into your price range.

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If, like me, you live in Canada, and want to buy XoticPC you have 2 options:
1. Buy and have them ship to you. You will have to pay shipping and taxes and duties.
2. Buy and ship to CBIUSA . Once your package has arrived, drive down to the border and pick up your package. This was you do not pay shipping, taxes or duties and save ~$400. To save even more money you could also torrent Windows 8.1 Pro. Of course, this is all you choice; I am simply offering information.

As for your setup, let it come with the stock drive and try to sell it locally on Craigslist. You will get alot more $ for it than you would by removing it from customization options. Also, from XoticPC right now you have free thermal paste, free 32GB USB stick so they are your best bet right now. I would say the 45$ IPS panel is 100% worth it. It's 45$... On a laptop you will be using daily, do the upgrade!

 

You can set it with Intel Extreme Tuning utility (XTU) and it will keep the settings. You can undervolt the CPU. I do that already.

The notebookcheck probably runs default "extreme" settings which is 1600x900.

 

I also raised the cache ratio and undervolted that too by 75mV.

 

as the values are very specific to each cpu, what exactly did you change, and how do you test the system after for stability?

my actual values are:
dynamic cpu voltage offset : -60mV
dynamic cache voltage offset : -20mV

i get some little better benchmark results by undervolting, seems like the cpu can hold some higher freq. a little longer now... (+10% in Benchmark of XTU with undervolting)

 

Thanks danstar7! That would be perfect for me.

 

Also, a small tip: If you don't have a copy of windows, check out Microsoft dreamspark. Make an account with them (they'll verify that you're a student) and then you can get windows 8.1 pro for free, except with a different name. Its called Windows 8.1 industry pro embedded edition or something like that. I've been using it for half a year now and its exactly windows 8.1 pro, just without some preinstalled Microsoft metro apps. It comes with internet explorer/windows store and as far as I have seen has no issues installing drivers, updates, or software meant for windows 8. As a plus you also get pro features like RDP and (maybe) ability to join a domain. Or you could always run windows 10 preview

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Thanks a lot. That would be great. Really appreciate it.

 

That is a very good tip! Do you need to be a Us student or is it international ?

 

I'm not sure. I can double check when I get home. Also, I can't guarantee that it will work perfectly on this laptop as I haven't gotten mine yet (I bought HTWingNut's review model and will be getting it some time next week. I can install it to see if it works, but I really like windows 10, so I'll be running that)

Is anyone running Windows 10 on their p65xx? Any issues?

Also I'll be getting an MX100 512gb with the laptop. I currently have an 840 evo 500gb that I bought for this laptop on black Friday. Since I'll have two 500gb ssds, is there any reason not to RAID them besides potential data loss? What is the chance of data corruption if I do? I have an office 365 university account with unlimited onedrive storage which I plan on taking advantage of for full backups (my school has ridiculously fast upload speeds via Ethernet which no one uses). I already store all my important files in both onedrive/Google drive, so losing data would only be a temporary inconvenience. Would there be any issue since they are different brands and different sizes (500 vs 512)?

Thanks!

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No issue except the fact that the raid would be limited to the size of the smalest drive.
But one question, what is your intention of building a raid?
There is no advantage beside of large file transfers, but they are not very common in normal gameing

 

Well with raid I'll have faster boot times (load times for games?). I wasn't planning on getting raid, but now I ended up with two drives, so why not. I'll have better benchmarks which will destroy my coworkers macbook pro score (He's an Apple fan - I'm not). But if there's no issue with it and it actually makes a difference in boot/load times, then I may just keep it. Otherwise I'll probably sell one of them and get a TB HDD.

To people who are getting rid of their 9.5mm terabytes: would you be interested in doing a trade for a 500gb ssd (and some money through PayPal)? PM me, thanks!

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I do not think getting in raid improves that much 4k read writes performances, which is what impact your boot/windows performance

 

Yeah, I'm still going to do it, but just for the sake of benchmarks/showing off lol. Then maybe I'll go with the HDD or just keep it. Thanks for the help!

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I am running the Windows 8.1 I downloaded from DreamSpark on my NP8651 without issue.

I also intend to set up Windows 10 on this machine, so I'm also interested to hear how it works, especially the scaling with 4K screens.

 

Great! I'll skip dreamspark and go straight to windows 10 then. I'll post the results when I get the laptop.

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Seeing as wer're talking about windows 8.1 and 10, anyone know why I can't get the estimated battery time remaining?

 

It's international. We only require a scan of the student ID, a copy of the admission acceptance, etc!

 

I have windows 10 running on mine in dualboot configuration. It runs perfectly, even the GTX 970M. There are a few unrecognized components but I'm not sure what they are exactly

 

I read some bad things about Eurocom before but I can back them here. I got the P650SE with the IPS panel, 16 GB RAM and a 128 SSD + 500 HDD for less than 1600 including tax. They even upgraded my SSD to 256 GB for free for shipping one day late.

 

Don't forget that only disappointed people usually give feedbacks ^^

 

Hi all,

I just received my NP8652 I purchased from XoticPC and it seems like the left click button on the trackpad doesn't work. At first I thought it was a driver issue, but after installing all the drivers (including the trackpad and fingerprint reader), the left click still doesn't function. Has anyone else experienced this?

Also, on another note, why do they give the drivers on a CD when they laptop doesn't have a CD bay? Is this standard practice now? I haven't purchased a laptop in 5 years so maybe I'm just behind the times.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: Looking at the synaptics icon in the system tray, it shows the left button as green, implying that it's being clicked.. Perhaps that is why tapping the trackpad to click and the left click aren't working.

 

Any body ordered from XoticPC and still in phase 3 like me, I've been there since the 19th

 

I have sent you a PM

 

Just purchased my np8651 from XoticPC today! (I also wanted to stop lurking and contribute to the forum)
I didn't go all out on the configurations and only opted for the LG IPS display over the default screen.

I was looking to purchase more RAM to bump it up to 16gb and also purchase an M.2 SSD (none PCI-E).
1. Can I buy any stick of 8gb 1600MHz RAM to go alongside the stock RAM Sager offers? Does identical brands matter?
2. Which M.2 SSD's are preferred with the users on this forum?

Thanks!

 

Congratulations on the purchase! Make sure you select the FREE ICDiamond thermal paste
The consensus on the M.2 ssd's (from what I gather anyway) is to wait it out. The ones available right now are 2x the cost of regular 2.5" ssd's however this can depend on locale. In addition, I have heard they run really hot; not something you want beside your battery. You can sell the stock hard drive and then purchase a 2,5 SSD and a 7mm HDD. However, if bang/$ is not in question, the M.2 is a great idea

 

Anyone else notice that page 340 is missing. I can get to 339 and 341, but when I click on 340 it takes me back to page 337? Very weird....

 

When did you order it? Ordered 4th Dec, shipped 23/26th ish. I didn't have any xoticpc service though.

 

I ordered the 8651 from XoticPC today and am trying to do a little research prior to receiving. I plan on installing my own copy of Windows 7 and was wondering if anybody here had already been through this. I want to use a USB stick, but with all of the ports being USB 3.0 I'm not sure how it would work since Windows 7 doesn't contain the drivers. I'm thinking that I need to find the drivers and put them on the hard drive prior to installation, unless someone knows a better way.

 

This is terrible news. I was hoping the shipments would be a lot faster than that.

 

Ah, yes. I made sure to check off anything that was FREE.
The M.2 SSD's I am looking at (Non PCI-E) are fairly cheap from what I understand. Transcend has a 256gb M.2 SSD for $119.99 and the Crucial M550 512gb is $279.99. It seems pretty affordable to me in terms of $/gb.
My plan was to keep the 1 TB HDD and boot from a 256gb M.2 SSD. However, I'm not too sure how this will work if the cards are faulty or get too hot...

Don't all these laptops come with a standard 7mm 1 TB HDD?

 

It will detect... I installed my os from USB just fine

 

There's another option. IIRC, you can create a bootable disc using Windows usb/dvd download tool.

 

Then again, the ETA was 19th and Sager got in on 18th. Not much you can do anyway. I know, ordering on holiday season sucks.

 

I have the stock 8gb stick of ram from XOTIC that I replaced with 2x gskill I'd be willing to sell you

 

Same day the 4th but I did get some services thermal paste and heat sinks with Rush service and 2 day shipping

but I still would've thought it would've shipped to XoticPC by now from Sager (I think they're in California to and XoticPC is in Nebraska)

 

I'm trying to figure out how to private message you. I'd be (somewhat) interested

 

Remember the heat is only an issue for the Samsung xp941 and (but here I'm not 100% sure, need to check) the plextor m6e. These two are the only m.2 ssd with a pcie 4x controller, and that's the source of the heat.

 

As a gamer... and someone who will be using the P650SG for multimedia and work.. (more so multimedia).. which screen does everyone recommend?

I'd like to have a 4K.. but the whole 'glossy' aspect of it with reflection/glare kind of scares me.. Could someone give me a more in depth understanding of what it is really like to own a 4k?

 

Has anyone confirmed that you cannot use a PCIe M.2 with a Sata M.2? There was a discussion about this around page 33, but has anyone actually tested this? Thanks!

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Interesting. Which license of Windows 7 did you use? Also, was SP1 preloaded?

The Windows tool doesn't fix the problem from what I've read.

 

You are correct, however it is still a bit over exaggerated. They work fine, and unless you do a lot of frequent large file transfers, it will run cool. The M.2 SATA SSD's (not PCI-e kind like the XP941 and M6e) will run cooler, but also have a slower overall performance. Granted that performance difference to the user is likely to be minimal considering everything is so fast to begin with.

It's really hard to say. For Multimedia do you mean videos? Unless you plan on using it for 4k videos I don't see much reason for it. Also, for work the extra screen real estate sounds good, but you need to scale 150-200% otherwise it is impossible to see the tiny fonts, which effectively makes the LCD like a 1080p screen. For me personally, I don't see the appeal of 4k other than they are high quality screens, but the headaches associated with scaling and gaming to me isn't worth it.

 

Thanks for the input!

Yes - I did mean videos.. but I guess there aren't many out there in 4k either.

I indeed do save by not investing in the 4k - do you think it's an "investment" for the future or would the IPS 1920x1080 sufficient for gaming for the next 3-4 years?

 

Yeah I agree with all the points HT said about 4k. Your screen size/GPU power won't increase over then next 3-4 years with this laptop either. It's not much an investment unless in 3 years you plan to buy a big 4k monitor to hook with the laptop.

 

Gaming on 4k will not be feasible for a while. Stick with the 1080 panel. You also have to remeber there is very little content in 4k. You are spending another 300$ on a screen that looks better but when scaled, looks like 1920*1080. Like someone else mentioned, it's also a headache to have to switch resolutions EVERY time you want to play a modern game. I could see the appeal for 4k, but I just can't justify it yet.

 

I'm thinking about ordering an NP8651 with a 1080p IPS Screen, and I already have a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. Is there any reason to go with 8.1 over 7 (driver issues, etc.)?

 

Nothing upset me more as a MCP than when Microsoft yanked TechNet last year, which was the best way to get an "updated" re-installation media, with things like SP1 that included various driver updates.

Spoiler

It's ironic because they first made the TechNet media "compatible" with OEM keys for Vista, 7 and 2008, then just yanked the entire product. It's like they listened to us MCPs, only to turn around and spurn us.

It was worth $250/year just to be able to re-install the valid key on any PC, especially when a drive went or Windows toasted itself. A recovery disk set doesn't do that well, especially if you have a multi-boot setup, where the recovery just wipes everything. They claimed it was over piracy, but it literally cut off most MCPs who couldn't afford thousands of dollars a year for MSDN, just to use the software bundled with a PC on that PC.

True. But many XHCI designs in notebooks today are actually able to fall back to compatible EHCI device (the generic, Windows 7 "ehci" driver works with it), in addition to High Speed (2.0) mode, for Windows 7. It also helps to use only an USB 2.0 High-Speed device, to force EHCI modes (so it works with that generic "ehci" driver), to prevent any chance the hardware will negotiate 3.0 SuperSpeed (which requires an "xhci" driver to support). Also remember the biggest issue is whether the ports are integrated with the platform. E.g., on my Dell Precision m4600, the 2 XHCI ports are from an off-chipset controller, that does not have boot support in the firmware.

BTW, as far as USB tools ...

Spoiler

All I use is Rufus which, unlike the Windows USB Installer tool, always sets up the media correctly for various installation options. E.g., the Windows 7 installer doesn't seem to like being on an USB formatted NTFS and with a MBR disk label when one is installing native uEFI and using GPT. Rufus sets up a proper USB with FAT32 using GPT, so one can install in native 64-bit uEFI, such as when multi-booting. This is not just for a "clean" Windows and Linux separation, but a pre-installed OEM Windows 8 that has been installed via uEFI with a GPT disk label, which cannot simply be switched back to legacy BIOS and MBR disk label.

Ironically 100% of the limitation is completely NT-side. In reality, in every PC today, the firmware is capable of "seeing" and "emulating" any storage on any device. E.g., that's why, in Linux, when you "dd" an ISO9660 format (.iso file) -- largely an optical (DVD) format -- block-by-block to the "raw" USB block device device, the PC firmware is able to boot the media, like it was an optical device. This includes dealing with the far-from-disk-like 2KiB sectors of the ISO format, even though the USB is emulating 512B sectors (and likely 64-512KiB NAND blocking underneath). The PC firmware just sees the underlying bits, not the type, and accommodates, whether it's a "single-grove" -R optical media or a "random-access block" disk or NAND device.

But because Microsoft's developers have never done a very good job at building a real bootloader, even though NT6 BOOTMGR is far better than NT3-5 NTLDR (e.g., can finally load more than one block device driver, and on the enterprise-end, finally has at least, basic multipath support), you cannot merely "dd" a Windows .iso block-by-block. The registry tie-ins also make booting a PITA in general for any installed OS, something Microsoft finally addressed with the Pre-installation Environment (WinPE), although Linux (like most OSes) doesn't require such a distinction.

So one has to use the "tool" to format the USB a specific way, put the bootstrap in a specific area, etc... Which is where the problem comes from, because NT6 -- the first Windows version to support 64-bit uEFI other than the largely 32-bit incompatible Windows XP / Server 2003 x64 versions (which required uEFI, no BIOS option for their x64 releases, and virtually OEM-only) -- because it differs between BIOS/MBR and uEFI/GPT boot. Whereas if they had just made their kernel and installer flexible intelligent enough, let alone not tied to specific, static registry tie-ins (or rigid, inflexible emulation of them in the PE version), it could be the same. But ... as always ... any time you can move a disk between systems and get it to boot Windows, that's must be only what "pirate" does, so sometimes I think the technical limitations are intentional.

Even if it screws with MCPs trying to legitimately deploy Windows. But I won't go into that long list I've had since 1993 on NT, including "Core" still requiring the Graphical Display Interface (GDI) in NT, despite it being based on OS/2, the CMD shell, etc... which didn't require such.

 

Anyways new 3D Mark 11 with +135 core +300 memory on 970M + 3940XM with 4.2GHz on 4 cores: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3940XM,Alienware M17xR4
+135 core +400 memory on 970M: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3940XM,Alienware M17xR4

Need unlocked vBIOS now.. Firestrike Graphics score of 8400 is the limit for me unless I get the unlocked vBIOS... I can easily thrash HT's score.. I've got an excellent chip here... Damm NVIDIA and them locking down everything..

 

Huh? Since when do Windows games not do this for you ... automatically?

I say "1920x1080" in the game, and regardless of what resolution my desktop is, it switches to 1080p when I launch the game.

So I don't understand this comment at all.