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

The LED backlights are at the bottom of the LCD display so they will generate a little heat there yes.

 

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Insall prema's bios mod. You'll be thanking yourself later... Here's the link.

 

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Definitely getting this laptop, just still undecided on the processor.

Should I go with the i7-4710 or the i7-4180? I've read that the 4810 can harm battery life (which is very important for me). Is the performance difference between the two large enough that it's worth sacrificing battery life signifcantly?

Much obliged

 

I bought this laptop in Australia. I've read this thread prior to that, I've known about the lid cover's flimsiness, still I thought it was a good machine and I went for it.
I've had it for a few days, the lid flexes very easily, I've already managed to slightly damage the 1080p LCD by pressing too hard against it while trying to remove the base screws which were too tight - I have this small darker patch on the screen in the part where I pressed hardest. It's more an annoyance than a real problem, I hardly see it, but still. Pressing lightly on the outside of the lid curves the inside casing of the lid, but the display stays in the same spot (I said pressing _lightly_).
Haven't played any games on it, it's mostly for software development. Seems very fast, I have the 4810 CPU, 16 GB of RAM and 1TB mSATA. For light use the keyboard only gets a little warm, no fan heard. When installing large software packages (Visual Studio for instance) the fan kicked in abruptly, but run for short periods of time.
I'll try to find a sheet of something (aluminum, steel, carbon fiber) at DIY stores to make a stronger casing for the lid, not everybody has a sheet of titanium in their home

One thing I don't know how to handle now: when attaching an external monitor via VGA cable, the monitor image sometimes twitches, like in older analog displays. I haven't really tried anything to fix this so far, but it's really annoying.

L.E. with regard to battery life on the 4810 - today I've had the laptop on for ~2:30h and the battery dropped from ~85% to ~27%, installing Office and then browsing the web and doing tiny builds in Visual Studio. Extrapolating that leads to a figure of almost 5h for 100%-0%. The CPU is set to max out at 2.5GHz on all core variations, and Dynamic CPU Voltage Offset is -50.78 mV in Intel eXtreme Tunning Utility.
I chose this CPU for the virtualization capabilities, I might need them at some point.

 

If you're just gaming with it, no. I'd go with an i5 in that case, because with just about any game this machine will be bottlenecked by the GPU instead of the CPU. An i5 would be a perfect match for the GTX860M.
I've personally got an i5-4300M undervolted by 70mV, so battery life is great.
If you're gonna do CPU intensive tasks though, an i7 might be a good idea. The 4710 and 4810 are almost the same chip though, the only difference is that the 4810 is clocked a little higher. TDP is about the same.
If you want a lower TDP you'd have to go with the i7-4712, which is clocked a little bit lower again, but the TDP of this chip is quite a bit lower (37W vs. 47W for the 4710 and 4810).

 

Don't worry about it if it isn't even present in your current BIOS.

 

Tried going through the last few pages and then searching this thread for similar experiences but couldn't find anything so I'm gonna ask.

Has anyone else experienced the 860m reaching it's thermal ceiling and heavily throttling? I keep reaching 94 C while playing Dota 2, and getting performance drops. Initially I thought it was the game performing badly, and the card was supposed to get this hot, but I tried monitoring the clock rate during gaming and by running Furmark and turns out it's downclocking down to 500 MHz on the core after it gets over 92 C.

Could a repaste fix this?

 

Sounds like your laptop needs a repaste and some cleaning

 

Not sure whether a clean up is really needed as it's not working much and pretty much always used away from any dust. Doubt this situation could affect thermal performance within 3 months.

Trying to contact my reseller, XMG, right now to see if I could repaste this myself without voiding the warranty (feeling pretty confident about that after seeing htwingnut's video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFztLNvjchA having done more serious work on computers before).

 

Does anyone happen to have a copy of their NP7338 BIOS and EC they can provide to me?

 

Prema has stock EC/bios combos on his site.

 

Does the Sager NP7338 still have an IPS screen ? I called up Sager and Xotic PC and was told otherwise.

 

Those are Clevo though, not Sager unfortunately.

Last I knew it did, that was one of it's strong selling points. That would be a bummer if it didn't.

I'm going to sell my NP7338 though with IPS if anyone is interested.

 

Any specific reason for the sale?

 

No, but it never had one either, so ...

Really, it depends on your definition of "IPS". See, if you mean the strict legalese sense of the term then none of the three screen offerings are "IPS". Reason is those things that " Suck yourrr blooood ..." .

Here's the thing: all the W230SS screens offer IPS-effect-like technology, they're just termed differently. Now, your Sager (and thus XOTIC) option is the FHD/1080p, which is a Chi Mei/Innolux and these people have brainstormed the weirdest term of all; " Azimuthal Anchoring Switching". Since the azimuth is an aspect of the plane (the surface) and the electrodes are anchored (instead of ... floating?) between those planes ... guess what ... the result is identical; a parallel field instead of perpendicular (as in a TN). When in doubt check the viewing angles (all three have 80°+ angles), limited/distorted view was the primary reason for IPS's development, after all.

To summarize; although the term is patented, the technology is not. So what you really want to ask is " Does screen xyz have wide-viewing angle LCD technology?". Better practice that line a few times ...

 

That makes a lot of sense. If it were an IPS display, they would've advertised it as such.

I am planning to go back to one as I am "bored to death" with my MacBook and want to have a standard reliable laptop to play game son. Worried about the touchpad.

 

So I solved my issue with the stupid, flexible lid on the laptop. According to user t456's recommendation, I bought a sheet of metal (Aluminum, in my case) and cut it out to the size of the flat part of the laptop lid. Here is a sheet with the dimensions of the lid cutout, courtesy of t456.

For my version, I got a 1ft x 2ft of 6061 T6 aluminum sheet .063" thick. About $25 off eBay. Pretty nice stuff. I had already 3M carbon DiNoc wrapped my laptop lid, so I had a little extra to wrap my aluminum reinforcement as well. I had to make a small adjustment though, visible on the reinforcement as the line to the right. I just didn't want to order more carbon wrap and wait another week. Once I had the reinforcement wrapped on one side, I put some crazy strong 3M its-stuck-forever double sided tape around the edge of the unwrapped side, which left a small gap between the lid and aluminum, but let it distribute the load just fine. The results!



The lid has a much, much more solid feel to it, and makes a satisfying "thump" when it shuts. No longer am I concerned about my LCD getting damaged by my textbooks! It happened once, but is only noticable with a black backlight at full brightness. This should prevent another incident. I'd recommend you do this if you throw your laptop in a bag with other things; otherwise, it's very permanent and requires several powertools!

 

Because I bought the NP8651/P650SE.

 

Aluminium flimsy lid work around is going to be amazing time to order some thin metal and get to work ( possibly led it up and get the sager logo to light up



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Well here is a summarisation of what can be done with this laptop for lower temps and better performance.
/* Disclaimer, I only recommend undervolt for this laptop, going up in frequencies is up to the user following this guide, whereas the steps here worked perfectly well for me I'm not responsible for any damage caused if something fails */

1.- Download Prema Bios (but don't flash it yet)
2.- Prepare bootable usb drive with Rufus and put all Prema Bios Contents in there.
3.- Backup Original VBIOS with GPUZ (Windows) or boot into DOS with the bootable usb drive created above, then use NVFLASH dos (nvflash -b vbiosbac.rom).
4.- Boot into DOS with the bootable usb drive created above to backup the original vendor bios, once in DOS use "afudos biosback.rom /0"

//Now that everything is backed up flash prema bios.

5.- being already in DOS type step1 then press enter, computer will reboot automatically, boot again into DOS, type step2 plus enter and prema bios will be installed, computer will turn off, remove AC adapter by 30 seconds, then plug it back.

//Congratulations, Prema bios is installed, now you can mess with the settings on the bios, please do so only if you know what are you doing.

6.- Undervolt Processor with Intel XTU (mine is graphics/cache/cores with a -117mv offset, that's a lot of heat shaved down but every processor is different), use the stress test given on the same program to test stability, usually at least 1 hour. Watch out for the temps produced with "memory stress test" as they can easily reach 95 °C... it heats a lot in that test, if memory stability is a concern, better to use memtest86+ (DOS).
7.- Do a backup of prema bios vbios installed using the same procedure as in (3).
8.- Open premabios backup using Maxwell Tweaker 1.36 (lower versions will said "unsupported device" and will do nothing). There are simply a lot of settings here and very un-intuitive GUI... hence I really recommend to follow more complex guides found in google (mostly for overclock, but it is easy to see what to do for undervolting).
9.- Save the modified vbios as another file, e.g vbiosmod.rom just in case you want to go back, then boot into DOS and flash it using "nvflash -5 -6 vbiosmod.rom".
10.- Use someting as MSI Kombustor to check stability on GPU, I was able to go into constant boost frequency with an undervolt of 0.1v, which again, saves a lot of heat.

//Congratulations, both CPU and GPU are undervolted and should help quite a bit in temps, playing METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE, only made my laptop go to 61° tops, barely hearing the fan working... although this is not exactly a demanding game.

11.- Optional, go into premamod bios, memory settings, custom profile and change memory timmings, I was able to go from 1600 mhz 11-11-11-32 2T to 9-9-9-24 1T with missmatched sticks (kingston 4gb + crucial 4gb), which gave a 200+ bump score in 3dmark11 physics. Or perhaps better luck and memory frequency can be increased too, from 1600 to 1866 and that would be a win win, but also note the timmings, if they are too low, sometimes the computer will restart and will revert them to normal, meaning that those timmings were not good. To check which timmings are applied CPU-Z can be used.

12.- Screen has yelowish tint, this can be changed using intel utility, under display options, colour. Settings for me are:
Red - Brightness = -15, Contrast = 50, Gamma = 0.8.
Green - Brightness = -15, Contrast = 50, Gamma = 0.8.
Blue - Brightness = 4, Contrast = 50, Gamma = 0.8.
Try them and change them according to personal preference. White with this settings should be easily noticeable from factory defaults.

13.- Enjoy a powerfull compact 13 inch laptop

 

Ohh that sounds fun. I removed my logo because it kept peeling off.

 

Yeah, Xmas give me the Schenker XMG P304 with even better Parts. It has the 750 GB HDD and the 250 GB SSD in it.

But my questions relating to Upgrades are still unanswered.

Anybody an idea about upgrading the notebook?

ATM I have Problems Player my favorite game World of Tanks. I have MSI Afterburner installed. The 860M clocks 540 Mhz und runs 99%. I think it should clock higher...

Are there any Solutions?

 

There's plenty on eBay, cheap too. But have you checked the card yet? Chances are the antenna's wire is there, only unconnected and taped down to the mb. See, the wires are routed under the lcd to end up at the top of the screen lid where the actual antenna's located. This entails removing/replacing the lcd itself. Since this is lot of hassle and the cost of the antenna is next to nothing chances are all configurations have 2 antennas, regardless the wifi card chosen (mine came without wifi, yet had 2 antennas).

No, and you probably mean 6-cell, since that's how many of these thingies are inside the casing. On larger laptops the casing's bigger and different capacities may be available, but then the only difference is that a section of the casing is empty. There's no such leftover space in the W230SS battery; check the shape and you can deduct where all 6 are located.

Yes and yes.

Sure, it's possible, but since they'll have to be very tiny (lack of space) the benefit won't be that of the W370ST.

Yes, but you need the right cable; "6-43- W23S1- 010-K" for the QHD and "6-43- W23S1- 020-K" for WQHD ("6-43- W2301- 010-K" for FHD). And would estimate someone's about to post about this upgrade .

 

Thank you very much for for your answers.

I have luck, my P304 has the Intel AC 7260 Wlan Chip allready installed. So there must be two antenna for this module. The only remaining question will be the UMTS Chip. I will see if I can find the antenna cable for this device.

Regarding the battery Problem:

Hm, the Internet Shop said it is a cell battery. But regarding the size a 6 cell battery is more logical. My idea for a bigger battery is from my smaller older Netbook. On some models there are large batterys aviable that are bigger then the Netbook Slot for the battery. So the battery emerge from the notbook case and lift the Netbook up for better colling.

Like this Picture:

Greets from Germany

TCC

 

The machine is already a bit thicker than other machines, doing that would make you start questioning the form factor.

 

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Talk to your reseller and send photos. If it's quite bad it needs replacing anyway.

 

I've just bought the Chillblast Defiant 2 Mini. So glad I bought this instead of spending the same amount of money on a new Macbook.

Is there any way you can add 3/4G to the laptop internally?

 

There is a sim slot but it needs the right modem card and antennae to go with it. I'm not sure if it uses a different slot electrically depending on the option from the factory however.

 

Hey, I was hoping you people could shed some light on this problem (?) I have, or at least confirm if it's a problem or not.
As you can see in the graph, my i5-4300M hardly downclocks from the base frequency and the GPU always stays at the exact same frequency.
Do any of you experience the same? Can this be fixed?

 

What's your current power plan and what's keeping your gpu awake ? (enable icon in the nvidia control panel from the tabs at the top).

 

Thanks for pointing out the fact that I am an absolute moron. The power plan thing fixed everything.

 

I have the 17 inch version of this - does anyone else find the keyboard to be absolutely terrible? Like, I will be typing and the keys will just not show up on the screen.

 

Hi everyone

I'm about to purshase a w230ss

I'm currently thinking about the maximum storage capacity of this laptop. When I'll have the money for, I entend to put a 1 to msata in both msata location. My question is :

if I use this adaptator in the 2,5" HDD location :

StarTech.com 25SAT22MSAT Carte Convertisseur RAID 2 x mSATA SSD vers SATA 2,5": Amazon.fr: Informatique

with two other msata ssd of 1 to

is this gonna work ?

will I have a 4 to storage capacity ?

Thanks.

 

I've had the opposite effect. This is probably one of the best if not the best laptop keyboard I've ever typed on and I've used Thinkpads before too. Maybe you're having issues with your particular model. Have you researched or checked with your vendor to see if it's unique to your model or unit?

 

Yes, it'll work. Though unnecessary if all you're after is 4TB storage space.

Certainly, you could use 2x 1TB mSATA in the single 2.5" SATA slot (use an identical adapter on my W870CU). But this will still be limited to the maximum bandwidth of the SATA slot (600 MB/s). Since the two regular/native mSATA slots can be set up in RAID 0 as well, you can get max. ~1100 MB/s from these. This, and a 2TB regular HDD will also make 4TB total.

Of course, performance of the M9T is ... acceptable ... at best ... but that's what the striped-mSATA's are for. The HDD is just ample storage for cheap; a 2TB HDD is $110, whereas 2TB using 2x mSATA + adapter will set you back $855. A year from now that same setup will be available for half the cost (or twice the capacity).

 

thanks for your answer

Actually, as I was going to keep this laptop at least 4 or 5 years, I was wondering what are its limits.

For the moment, I just intend to buy a 512 GB msata ssd and install my 1 TB HDD in the 2,5" location.

Of course, as you noticed it, in this laptop, the 2 TB HDD is the better solution to reach 4 TB of storage space. Anyway, I was curious to know, if the adaptator would work with two msata ssd.

Glad to hear the answer, especially with all bandwitch details. This might be a good news for Alienware 13 future's owners, where there is only 1 storage location.

 

Hi,

I have managed to get my hackintosh (yosemite on w230st) running on prema bios working pretty well with clover bootloader and functional wifi.

However, I am facing a problem where I can't get my HDMI port to work; the laptop restarts on its own when i plug in the hdmi cable.

I read about DSDT and SSDT patching but I encountered errors on Maciasl trying to patch them.

Does anyone happen to know the way it should be done?

Thanks! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Nice work SolarEklipze! Looks awesome, I'm getting my w230ss in the next few days (still being built) and will definitely need to do this shortly after I get it.

Just looking at the aluminium, does that thickness add much to the weight, and do you think it would be possible to go thinner without sacrificing durability? I guess when I go to the hardware shop I will be able to find out by feeling it.

Looking to wrap mine over the aluminium, not sure what that's going to mean for the wrap cutout size and template.

I'm also looking at adding an extra stick of ram, as I figured I could get another stick cheaper than I was going to be charged. However, i'm unsure of voltage, should I be going 1.5v or 1.35v?

 

A friend of mine said he will give me his w230ss for $800. It's not under warranty and its full of fingerprints. It's standard with a basic 750gb hdd. Worth it?
Also would I be able to install my own 512 gb crucial mx ssd? Or is only msata compatible?

 

anyone else notice that with the latest drivers you cannot overclock the GPU at all anymore?

 

I was just going to post that here - after the 347.09 Elite: Dangerous Game Ready Driver update, I'm unable to OC my GPU. I use Prema Mod as well.

 

Are you sure you're patching your DSDTs correctly? Use RW-Everything and extract ALL your SSDT and DSDT tables, decompile them together. Get the latest version of IASL from the ACPICA website, and run this command: iasl -da SSDT* DSDT* . Then proceed with patching. You need RehabMan's list of patches (Google it).

 

347.09 is a test driver which does not have oc support for any (maxwell) based GPU on any system.

 

Thanks a lot! I finally got it working. My backlight SSDT patch works perfectly. Do you happen to know what is the patch I need to allow hdmi port to work? I can't seem to find a hdmi patch.

 

It should work automatically once you've gotten the necessary Haswell graphics patches, i.e. renaming GFX0 to IGPU and the backlight patch. That's how I remember it...

 

Hmm, what do you mean by Haswell graphics patches. I have only done config.plist patching and a terminal patch. Is there any haswell graphics patch I need to apply for dsdt or ssdt?

Thanks a lot!

 

Refer to links below:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/yosemite-laptop-support/152573-guide-patching-laptop-dsdt-ssdts.html

http://www.tonymacx86.com/yosemite-...-fix-intel-hd4400-hd4600-mobile-yosemite.html

http://www.tonymacx86.com/yosemite-...ching-dsdt-ssdt-laptop-backlight-control.html