*** Official Clevo W230SS/Sager NP7338 Owner's Lounge ***

Mine is 60-70 deg C on idle (about 10-15% CPU). I'm not sure what temperature is healthy...sometimes I open Clevo Control Center and switch to Energy Star mode (locking processor at 1.5Ghz I think) when I'm just surfing the web :x

 

It's either the high ambient temps of 30 degs+ that we have (Singapore, sigh) or Aftershock is doing something wrong. Happens even on OS X (use HWMonitor and FakeSMC plugins to check). Merely ramping up the CPU a bit (i.e. 2.5 GHz) takes temperatures to the high 80s.

I'm going to their service centre next week to check it out. They say 60-70 is too high; it should be in the low 50s.

 

Hey guys, been a while since I"ve updated, I did receive my W230SS earlier this month, and overall its pretty nice, though a few things that seriously bug me are the yellow tinted screen which I've run my spyder elite4 on and attempted diff profiles and changes as recommended but it comes off really strong. I DID however run into someone else that had the same, and theirs seemed much better, so I guess its random w/ the screens ( would make sense ) also please don't let this scare off anyone, this is just 1 person experiencing this that's all, overall its still a really sturdy netbook.

That + the really loud fans that kick up, I can't run it anywhere other then when I'm alone due to it bothering others, and or waking people up. I'm amazed at the cooling ability though. It has frozen on me a couple times when only watching videos, so attempted a reinstall and wiped drivers. As much as I love it, I'm contemplating on returning it for a 15" as I think that might be the best median for me. I'm sure if anything I might just have a defective or semi faulty unit, and many other factors may come into play here. I've only gamed on it a bit and I can see where the 860 may fall short, though that was a given when purchasing it.

Overall I think its an amazing compact unit though, and again I probably just got a bad one nothing else, I've never had an issue w/ sager in my life and something like this won't turn me into an angry customer lol, I did have it rushed so there was no time to stress test it so again that was on me. If I do return it which I have a few days left to do, this time I'll ensure that XoticPC actually receives the new unit for running tests and getting everything else taken care of. They were really helpful in working with me though and ensured I got it the day I left, which was within a 5 minute window ( amazingly ). Thankfully my flight didn't take off till the late evening so I was able to wait around.

Kinda wanted to hear some thoughts on this decision as well, if the 15 would be something I'd regret or if I'd still be fine, the only con's I can foresee is the possible cramping on the keyboard, and the lack of battery life which isn't to bad. I'm not sure if I'd get the 870 or the 880.

 

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone here went from a bigger laptop (say 15.6") down to 13.3" (NP7338)? Did it feel weird? I'm looking at this one but I might end up ordering online and I'm not sure if it'd be too small for me. Any inputs appreciated. Thanks!

 

I come from P170EM. And love the W230SS. Because the weight of the P170EM with PSU felt like a ton. :-D For me its the perfect machine with a lot power in a small size to carry around.

 

Have used everything from 17"-11" and love the 13.3" of my W230SS. It has become my daily driver.

 

It will fit that niche for a lot of people, not too big to carry round, lots of punch to get work done (or play well )

 

I upgraded from a broken 15" p150hm. Well, I can no longer play a few games like Crusader Kings (fonts are tiny and no real option to increase them), and also the screen seems not very uniformly colored. However, my ipad 3 has actually worse screen in terms of colors, and most people don't notice that at all. Also, if I put two laptops next to each other, the w230ss screen seems so much better. I guess it's just my eyes getting used to good things quickly and demand more.

Apart from that, I'm very happy. I can now carry it with me and work in cafeterias, not in my office. I don't need to carry PSU. It's twice faster than my p150hm, and costs less than I paid for it (used!) 1.5 years ago.

At home, there is always an option of getting external keyboard/display, and then, after Witcher 3 comes out, buy a desktop. I guess that you will still end up spending less than on a top gaming laptop.

 

I like using an external display at home even with my 17.3" machine.

 

Is there anything running in the background using a heap of resources that might explain the high temps even at idle? My apartment is usually at around 76F / 24C year round (central heating/cooling) so that would account for some difference next to your ambient 86F / 30C, but I'm looking right now and it's idling at 46-48C (that's undervolted by 60mV and boost turned down to 3.0GHz). I repasted with MX-4 a while ago.

FWIW, when I installed the o/s fresh on a new mSATA, I never installed Clevo Control Center.

Hmm.. check your HD temps too.

 

I came from 17.3".
It's a bit weird the first few hours, but you get used to it pretty quickly. I love the sharpness of the panel, but I wouldn't go any higher than 1080P, as things are already pretty small, and stuff gets blurry when you use scaling...

 

i have the WQHD Panel (2560x1440) and for me it looks pretty good with a 1600x900 resolution. But i cannot compare how 1600x900 would look on the standard 1080p panel.

 

HD temps average around 40~45 degs Celsius. There's nothing really resource-intensive running in the background -- Steam, XTU, Samsung Magician, Hotkey Centre, Sound Blaster, the works. Total CPU usage is about 10~15%.

 

I would personally downscale to 720P then, as that means every 4 pixels make up a single pixel. 1600x900 will be weirdly scaled and I can't stand scaled images, but that's just personal preference...

 

the QHD display scales really really well to 900p and 1080p. absolutely no jagged effect what-so-ever. i am very happy with it as it gives me tremendous flexibility as far as resolution is concerned.

only thing i dislike is the semi-glossy finish. would have loved to have a matt screen.....

on a different note, would like to ask FMs as to which is the monitoring utility good for this laptop?

 

Yes i know that - but i need the desktop space
Thats why i wanted the QHD+ panel at first. But the manufracturing time would have taken 6 weeks longer with the QHD+ so i was asked by tronic5 if want to change my configuration and get the WQHD instead. I prefered the non glare one and was the first one to get it in Germany (mabe even Europe)

 

Loving the laptop, but honestly its trackpad is one of the worst I've used - very glitchy and inconsistent.

Are there any suggestions on how to improve trackpad performance? Like others who have posted similar complaints, I'm having a number of very frustrating issues, including occasional unresponsiveness (glide does not move the pointer for a few seconds at a time) and erratic tap sensitivity (often triggers when not intended, other times won't trigger despite forceful taps).

I have the latest drivers from Sager installed and I've tried several settings changes. Right now the best performance seems to be with all multi-touch gestures turned off, palmcheck set to minimum, and touch sensitivity set all the way to "light touch", but I'm still seeing issues.

Any tips are appreciated.

 

I don't like it either, but for other reasons.
It's consisten and not glitchy here, but I hate the fact it doesn't have any support for gestures or a scrollpad...

 

Could not agree more, this is the flimsiest display bezel I've ever seen and am hesitant to place anything atop or even put it in a bag with its assorted cables and adapters ...

... because that's the inevitable result.

This will not do. It is merely a matter of time before something bumps the bag or you place tools on the closed lid (am used to a laptop's dual function as a carry tray ... ) and permanently damage the lcd. Have a discarded 1mm titanium sheet somewhere, will trim it to fit the raised part of the lid and glue it on; that way any force placed on top will at least distribute to the sides, averting pressure on the lcd itself.

Secondly, and this applies to almost every laptop, glue furniture felt or the like on the top-left and -right inside corners of the display bezel. For aesthetics reasons most manufacturers opt for very slim margins between the keyboard/palmrest and the lcd surface. Have seen too many damaged displays to ignore this, even saw an imprint of an embossed logo on the outside of the lid imprinted on the lcd (backlight forced against the lcd's crystals). It's like someone stamped * logo here* inside the center of the display ...

Grrr, extra work ... wth happened to aluminium? Stuff ain't that much more expensive than plastic ....... 3D printer/scanner, we need you ... to 3D scan plastic > 3D print aluminium.

 

I wonder if the flimsiness contributes to the screen being so ... disappointing, almost. When there is something colorful on the screen it looks great, but on a full black display the bleed and a ... slightly bluey region is evident.

Unfortunately, I got ahead of myself in my excitement and installed the SSD already, plus I'm not sure I want to deal with an RMA and the time/shipping if it's a common thing.

Oh well, could be worse. Rest of the system is nice so far!

 

It definitely does contribute at least to backlight bleed, as I wrote earlier somewhere above.

I have a bluey region on bottom right (but not exactly at the corner). It is visible under some combinations of external light and the image. I had the same problem with my ipad 3 (i tried a few samples in fact, and all had the same issue). I made myself comfortable with that when I found a research result that text is better understood if read from a slightly uneven background rather than perfectly even.

 

Interestingly, it's not the trackpad itself that is terrible, but the Synaptics driver on Windows. With RehabMan's implementation of VoodooPS2 on OS X, you actually get inertial scrolling, up to four-finger gestures, and in the future, edge swipes. And all these are as smooth as on a real MacBook Pro, so much so that it's almost not discernible.

 

Do you think if there is there a chance to get a custom windows driver? I'm pretty satisfied with the touchpad, and also think that right edge swipe works under windows, but getting a mbp-level performance would be exciting.

 

I just got my 7338 like 2 weeks ago and I have a few questions:

I use SpeedFan for temps btw if that matters.
1) What are normal mSATA temps for this laptop? Currently residing at 60C in slot 2. Was 65C in slot 1 though I'm uncomfortable with both of those temps regardless.
2) Does anyone experience choppiness? Using the default screen so it might just be that I'm not used to how IPS runs compared to TN. Compared it side-by-side to my friends 60Hz TN though and there's is indeed smoother. Can't tell if it's ghosting or anything. This happens in League.
3) On the topic of League (if anyone plays) what FPS do you get and at what settings? I currently have everything on Very High with shadows off at 1920x1080 and I seem to occasionally dip below 60 FPS whereas my friends Y50 gets a consistent 90~100 with shadows on.

Edit: Just retested with Vertical Sync on and it is a LOT smoother than with it off, but I get pretty big input lag (feels like ~100ms).

 

Hey guys, what does the camera shortcut (fn + f10) exactly do?

Is it supposed to open the camera software?

Or does it just disable the physical camera so that it can't be turned on?

 

No, it enables and disables it, just in case it's still on

 

Ah okay, thanks for the answer.


I tried pressing the camera shortcut again with the webcam software opened, and it literally just turns it off without closing the software.

That's pretty nifty.

 

1) depends on the mSATA drive.
2) Two 60hz displays should look pretty identical assuming identical frame rates/vsync.
3) Check your temperatures/load leves/vsync status.

 

A few updates on my thermals.

On Windows 8.1 x64, Skyrim, X-Plane 10.30, Civilisation V, CoD BO and BO2 all run the CPU at between 30-40% usage (X-Plane jumps higher occasionally, but is always around 35%), and I'm using an undervolt of -70 mV. My core clocks are set to 30,29,28,27 for 1,2,3,4 cores respectively; both cache and memory have also been undervolted to -70 mV.

On the GPU side, I've got a core and memory overclock of +200 MHz and +400 MHz respectively, and an overvolt of +175 mV (these settings are only applied when playing games).

My CPU (i7-4710 MQ) temperature, no matter the underclock/undervolt/load, is at 95 degrees Celsius, except at idle or near idle, when it's at about 65-70 degrees. Temperatures are similar in OS X 10.9.5. Even with the bottom cover removed and in an air-conditioned room set to 24 degrees, there isn't much improvement - perhaps 1-2 degrees.

The GPU, on the other hand, is at a comfortable 60-63 degrees even with the above overclocks and on very high settings in X-Plane 10.30(which is very CPU and GPU intensive).

Other relevant temperatures are those of my two Samsung 840 EVO mSATA drives, which are at about 40-45 degrees each. My hard disk drive in the SATA bay is at about 50-55 degrees (might be because of its proximity to the hot CPU).

I've deduced that the reason for such high CPU temperatures, whether idle or under load, is because of either a bad paste job, the heatsinks are not properly aligned or are bent, or the CPU itself is a dud. I'm really hoping it's not the latter two as I don't really want to deal with hardware replacements, even if it's my reseller doing the job and not me.

Has anyone else experienced similar temperature ranges, and have you fixed them to reach lower temperatures, say 75-85 degrees under full load? If so, how?

 

Why not just test your #1 hypothesis and repast the damn thing?

 

I would re paste, the other option is the heatpipe for the cpu is damaged internally.

 

All right, a little problem just surfaced: I'm suddenly not getting any more sound from my headphones... (They worked perfectly before)
It's not the headphones themselves, because it's the same problem with my other set. It's showing there's sound being produced in the volume mixer, I'm just not hearing anything.
Internal speakers work fine.
Anyone having this problem too/knows a solution?

 

Check your audio settings (number of channels etc) and default audio device.

 

Did you do the registry tweak to enable the HIPM+DIPM mode? This made a huge difference with my msata temps...

TIP: how to enable DIPM for SSDs on Windows 7 - ABXZone Computer Forums

 

This was discussed a earlier in the thread, shut down your laptop and do a cold start (i..e not restart) and your headphones should start working again. The laptop has an issue where the headphone jack stops working after resuming from sleep. If you install the Clevo HotKeys utility it re-inits the headphone when resuming from sleep to workaround the issue.

 

Hi All,

I have been following this thread with great interest ever since I purchased my QHD W230SS a few months ago. Since then I have made it my mission to try and install OSX on a separate SSD, but it seems like everyone is having significantly better luck than me! Thanks to Rlandor, Prema, SRSR333 and everyone else who has contributed to the various OSX posts, they have been super helpful.

I have tried rlandor's DVMT tutorial to enable QHD and QE/CI which works well but seems really unstable. I can never consistently get it to boot without either a grey screen or glitchy graphics. I originally thought disconnecting the PSU during a full shutdown fixed the issue, but its not consistent. When I can get in, it looks AMAZING on the QHD screen, but changing the scaling option often results in the same glitchy graphics / grey screen. Then i'm stuck trying to boot all over again. Is anyone else experiencing this, or do you guys all have fully working systems.

I managed to enable QHD support using chameleon instead of clover, but cannot get QE/CI to work. Can you even apply the DVMT method to chameleon?

That's before we even get to sound, ACPI, Power management etc. (I have working Wifi and Ethernet BTW - small saving grace).

I know this is a big ask, but can anyone share any DSDT's, Kexts or Config.plists that might help all of us interested in getting our hardware working under OSX on this machine?

Thanks again!

 

My laptop loses a significant amount of battery overnight when it's sleeping. From 75% to 43% just 13 hours later. And it is a tiny bit warm too on the bottom - as if it was turned on or something. It's been like this since I got it, so I'm not sure if this is normal?

 

Not normal. Check your sleep/hibernation settings.

That much battery drop overnight sounds like it is just sitting idle without any power saving features kicking in.

 

Send it back or talk to your supplier - its definitely hardware related overheating . If I repaste my CPU/GPU I void the warranty.

 

Great to have someone new on the hackintosh scene once in a while. First of all, yes, I get a grey screen as well, like this: or sometimes it's better, but still very glitchy, like this: . Still not very good, although mine is just FHD 1920x1080p, and generally should work. I don't know why exactly this happens and I intend to solve this issue completely, later. As for now, I get some respite from the fact that sleeping and waking the machine gets rid of 90% of the glitches. Logging in, logging out and logging back into any user account gets rid of the rest of the issues, such as the words on the top grey menu bar not appearing.

I'm sure Chameleon/Chimera can solve problems with the screen glitching, only that you need to patch the extensions and framebuffers manually instead of Clover automatically doing it for you (I don't like Clover's 'on-the-fly patches' so I use Chimera).

As for sharing DSDTs, that's a no-no. As someone else on a hackintosh forum said, sharing DSDTs is like sharing underwear. It could potentially screw up your install/your computer. It's better to extract your own and patch them yourself; it's pretty easy. I'll talk about this later (look at A Note below), so let's get back to the issue.

I recommend you try working with a temporary solution: get sleep, power management, sound and perhaps Ethernet working (you mentioned that WiFi already works -- I suppose you changed your WiFi card). As for sleep and power management, if you're going the Chameleon/Chimera route like me, you need a patched SSDT, which is like a DSDT file but more specific and hence smaller and shorter. For this, Google 'Pike R. Alpha ssdtPRGen.sh script' and the first hit should be a GitHub link; click on it and read the instructions there. After that, you need a SMBIOS.plist file. You should use Clover Configurator to generate an SMBIOS of MacBookPro11,2 which has the most similar specs to the W230SS. Don't use anything else.

Once you've got sleep working, all you need to do is sleep and wake your laptop (use Fn+F3; sleep on closing the lid is yet another story; once again, refer to Note below) when you see glitches, and voilá, they're mostly gone. It's a bit cumbersome, but it's better than nothing.

 

Hello guys. So I bought this laptop and it came at friday. Installed OS, Drivers from CD and everything was going well. In the evening of first day I got first "blue screen of death". Next day I updated drivers, and it started to fall a lot more (graphic card error but not with hard restart now). So I downgraded the drivers and it was better again. But after maybe 2 hours of BF4 i got second bsod and it was the end for the graphic card. Now with any drivers, 3x reinstalling OS I still get "Error code 43" in device manager at nvidia card. Please does it mean card is gone or is there any possibility with bios upgrade or something? Thank you very much !!!!!

 

You could always try the Prema bios thumbsup
If that doesn't fix anything, flash it back and send it to the store as DOA.

 

That's really hot, my unit tops out at 80 degrees for the core with 32,32,28,28 multipliers while the GPU tops out at 70 degrees with Unigine Heaven. I'd recommend getting your hands on some Phobya Hegrease Extreme (aka GELID Extreme) and see how much improvement you get. I'm thinking the most likely culprit is a bad cooling unit, your's might be slightly warped in some way.

 

Thanks for all the tips. I'm not going to do the re-paste myself yet -- I'll send it in to my reseller tomorrow, ask them to check it up, and see what's wrong first. If that doesn't do anything to improve temps, I'll see what needs to be done. I don't want to end up with a dead CPU barely six months into buying my laptop.

 

Thumbs up - the magnet trick worked fine. No more "HDD like" noise from my fan when in low/medium rpms. Thanks a lot for sharing this with the community.

 

If you are not happy doing it yourself then that's the best option.

 

Not that I'm not happy -- I don't want to void the warranty, and if they can fix it for free, then why not?

 

The regular shutdown did indeed fix the headphone problem (weird, because windows 8.1 shutdown is less deep than a restart...), thanks for the help.
I still have a few more questions:
1. Can I set the laptop to remember my keyboard settings (backlight and trackpad off for example, I have to redo that every time I boot up the laptop).
2. Can I disable DPI scaling for every application ever? I gotta do it with 9/10 applications because it's blurry, and it's getting tedious to do it seperately for every app...

 

Does the magnet trick change the actual vibration levels? They are noticable on some low rpms, and also on some high. But, weirdly, not on max rpm which you get by fn+1.

 

My laptop is getting pretty loud when sitting on a desk doing basic browsing/word documents.

Using HW monitor, my CPU's are sitting around 60' degrees when it activates. Notebook 'temp' is ~ 65' degrees.

I've gone to FN+ESC and turned it to quiet mode, didn't work

Pressing FN+1 makes it extremely loud, but when I turn it off the fan stops.

Is it normal for the fan to activate so loud at low temps (like 60-70')?