*** Official Clevo W230ST/Sager NP7330 Owner's Lounge ***

All of my USB ports work fine for me, at least when running three usb 3.0 HDDs and a Wacom tablet.

 

I think that you can just download a Win 8 image free from the internet.
Here's a guide Download Windows 8 ISO (x86 / x64) File Directly From Microsoft | Redmond Pie
You just need to provide your Win 8 key

 

Hi,

I have been owner of w110er, but decided to switch to w230st.''
The prvious one was just to small for regular work and i could not get use to writing to such a small keyboard + it was to 'floaty' for me and to soft. Once i tested w230st i knew it was a lap for me.

So i ordered one for xoticpc. However having experience from w110er with bad pixels i ordered warranty for 35 bucks.
I got w230st on last thursday however it did have stuck pixel (blue one on black background) in the middle (right in the center) and some strange white burnout mark on the side (2cm x 2cm size )which i see for first time on LCD (attached)

I have already send this out on warranty back on friday.
Do you know if they will accept this on the extended waranty for 1month with zero bad pixels ?
What is this white burnout mark, it's rlly visible on black background ?

Thanks!

 

One more question. I got a CoolerMaster ThermalFusion 400 paste on my desk.
Is this any good paste to repaste gpu or i should use something else ?
Could you advice ?

 

Prema Mod v1.1 for this model released today!

ENJOY!

 

You truly are the man Prema!

[EDIT] To everyone: I tested Premas Mod for two weeks now. With it Airplane Mode finally works on Win 8.1 and (this goes straight to lastnikita ) it eliminates the fan bursts whatsoever. (Library tested - HT off)

 

a video guide pleeease?

 

-60mV, because I haven't seen much of a difference between -60mV and -80mV.

Sounds like a good config. You can get it from any number of resellers or builders. If you're paying more for the 4702, then don't, just get the 4700. You get can get more performance, and won't make a difference as far as quietness. If you look through this thread there are a number of suggestions for reducing or eliminating the fan bursts.

They should provide the OS media, there's no reason not to. I would look for a different reseller if that's the case. There are other ways to get ISO's of the OS, will post if I find them.

And if Turbo is not enabled it will not go faster than 2.4GHz. The CPU will drop down to lowest level when idle, yes. Manual clock settings won't affect it.

 

edit: HOW-TO: - Connect your Power Supply, boot from USB, type "update" and hit "Enter".
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
(The system may beep during the flashing process, this is normal)
- After the system has completed & auto-shutdown, remove the PSU for 30s.
- Be Happy, Enjoy & make a Donation

it's this simple?? do i have to make a bootable USB drive?

edit: http://biosmods.wordpress.com/flashing-guide/ hmm it seems I don´t have an option to boot from usb in BIOS...

 

Detailed Bios Flashing guide with pictures for paranoid dummies like me: http://forum.notebookreview.com/sag...ger-np7330-owners-lounge-246.html#post9400991

 

Don't use RAID, keep the HDD external.

Finger crossed

 

Well I've updated the Bios, it didn't brick anything so that's good. However I didn't really have a lot of issues with fan spurts on idle before using the first Prema version. I did experience it a couple of times a heavy gaming session, when CPU didn't cool off in time after my girlfriend stole my cooler. I think the fans activated after CPU broke 60C.

So far on this Prema version during browsing and watching movies the laptop remained completely silent. The idle temps without a cooler are 51-55C though, so I'm not sure how to effectively test the improvement over last version.

 

nvm figured it out

 

Thanks. Just curious why you recommend keeping the spindle external?

Im ordering from Mythlogic in the morning.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 using Tapatalk Pro

 

About latest 1.03.02 EC (I assume Prema didn't modify this one yet ?):
Can't say for the fan burst yet, but at least it's still "pulsing" (when on a quite low rotation, it goes up a bit once every ~10/15s)

In your case, for battery life, as you stated it was for backup and iso purpose, I figured it wouldn't hurt to not run it all the time.
In my case, for silence and hdd health, it's the most sensible part in a moving system, and without mechanical hdd I can move along with my laptop without worrying.
Same goes for throwing it onto bed, or having it running while on a road trip, or anything "bumpy" (hope I make myself clear, I'm not native).

 

Yea you see the problem is that nowdays they dont give you your serial key on a COA sticker, but embedded in the BIOS. I have no way of knowing the serial key and thus unable to download the ISO in the first place...

 

Key is not in BIOS on Clevos. Some vendor use a volume license to activate it before shipping it out.
To read the key, just use a tool like this:

KeyFinder | Magical Jelly Bean

 

hi guys,

Could you help me with issues I had above ?

Thanks!

 

Hi guys, how's AC4 running with this laptop? settings?fps?

thanks.

 

Spam F7 at bootup.

 

Thanks for responding, sorry it took so long to notice! The thing is, I *think* I installed Rapid Start under 8.0. I had both "Rapid Storage" and "Rapid Start", and I think both worked at the time. Anyway, probably just imaging the startup difference; everything seems pretty much fine so I'll probably drop it.

I had widi installed before the upgrade, and don't have any broken/missing devices in device manager. I don't actually have an adapter to try it with, so I don't know if it's actually *working* or not :-/

 

Now that I've had my W230ST for a few days, I thought I would post my thoughts/comments.

First off, I'm coming from an Acer 3830TG which had an i5-2540M CPU and a GT540M dedicated card using optimus on a 1366x768 13.3" panel.

The Positives:
Screen: Obviously, the biggest difference is the display. The screen on the W230ST is fantastic. Colour is bright and vibrant, contrast is great, viewing angles are great, and overall brightness is bright. I haven't had a lot of opportunity to use it in a sunlit environment, but the matte screen seems pretty good at being non-reflective. I find laptops in general suck in bright sunlight, but I can imagine that the W230ST sucks a little less than others, my old 3830TG included.

Performance: I haven't done a whole lot of real comparisons, but in general, the W230ST feels significantly faster than the 3830TG. It shouldn't be too surprising that the haswell based i7 outperforms the sandy bridge i5. Both laptops have 8GB of RAM, although the 3830TG is 1333MHz vs the 1600MHz of the W230ST. The GTX765M beats the crap out of the GT540M. Interesting thing, the performance of the 765M running at 1920x1080 isn't much better than the 540M at 1366x768. It looks a whole lot better though. I'm also running the OS's off an mSATA drive, where the 3830TG was entirely spindle based.

The Negative:
Battery Life: This is really the only thing I miss about the 3830TG. I could easily get 6 hours out of it, and if I really tried hard to manage power, I could get to almost 8 hours. There is just no way the W230ST is going to achieve that without some kind of auxiliary battery. I'm not too sure I would like additional battery though, because:

Weight: Supposedly, the weight difference is only 100 grams, but the W230ST just feels significantly heavier than the Acer. I've never actually weighed them to confirm the 100 grams.

Tied:
Temperature: For all the concerns expressed over temperature, it just hasn't been an issue for me. I haven't repasted anything, and I didn't order anything special in terms of paste, it's whatever prostar put on there, however they put it on there. I've never seen the temperature above 90°C. It generally stays in the high 80s, which is pretty much exactly where the 3830TG was.

Linux Support: I'm primarily a Linux user, so I'm happy to say, the W230ST pretty much just works right out of the box. I've got Arch on it, and other than one little grub tweak to get the backlight adjustable, everything just works ... just like the 3830TG.


Obviously, there are other major differences between the two laptops, this was really meant to be a list of the things that really stood out for me with the W230ST, and the things that stood out were obviously influenced by the laptop I was coming from.

Did I mention that the screen is fantastic? Oh, and I love having a backlit keyboard too

 

Huh, yes it is =)
It's even much better than a GT650M @768p ! Well, there's obviously less difference in that case, but I can assure you the 540M is left far, far behind

 

You missed the point. I'm not making a direct comparison between the two, I'm including native resolutions. In my limited testing the 765M @1920x1080 is around 10% faster than the 540M @1366x768.

Meaning, in a direct comparison, the 765 is way, way faster than the 540M. Playing the same game on each laptop at said laptops native resolution winds up playing about the same. It just looks a whole lot better on the W230ST.

 

I really can´t access to the boot from usb option in bios (F2 or F7). even turning uefi off didn't help..

nevermind! the problem was that I didn t labeled the usb disk and the system gave it the name "5.0"

i've instaled the bios. i feel such an hacker! lol

anyway first thing i've noticed: when i launch football manager 2014 the fan doesn t burst for no reason like it used to

i've noticed more options in BIOS. what you guys recomend me to do now?

thank you

 

I did not
As I said, it's even better than a 650M@768p (which means @1366x768)
And of course, the 650M was already much better than a 540M... I did own both.
But I could only check this on few games since as time passed, games I played changed eventually.
It was really (really) clear with GTA4 as an example, which I played on the 3 of them.
In this game (and few others) 650M was a big improvement over the 540M, and 765M is also a big improvement even with the increased res.
Maybe you didn't test using the same video settings, AA & stuff.

 

Fair enough.

I didn't tested the two extensively, and I've now sold the Acer, so I can't really revisit it. Off the top of my head the only things I'm certain I compared were Dirt 3 and a couple of Unigine benchmarks in Linux. There were others, but I can't remember what all they were.

 

Just to give you an idea, from notebookreview benchmarks (they don't quote the resolution used though, it's a bit strange), Dirt 3 on high settings :

Aspire 3830TG-2628G12nbb - 17.6 fps
Intel Core i7 2620M 2.7GHz, GeForce GT 540M (672MHz), 2048MB (900MHz) DDR3, DirectX 11, Nvidia Optimus, ForceWare 267.21, 8192MB RAM

C-Klasse 5 i7 17FHD - 130.4 fps
Intel Core i7 4900MQ 2.8GHz, GeForce GTX 765M (850-902MHz), 2048MB (1000MHz) , ForceWare 311.27, 24576MB RAM

 

It runs quite well. FPS hovers around 25-35FPS at high settings, but the game is fluid and not lagging like in AC3. Just forget the FPS and enjoy the game.

btw, can anyone help me with this please ?

 

You'll have to uninstall Clevo Control Centre if I do remember correctly

 

Mind sharing the Arch tweaks you've applied? I found my screen was black after boot and was unable to solve the issue...

 

I have the Metabox W230ST running BIOS and EC version 1.00.05
Can I update straight to Premas latest bios version.

 

Yes you can.

 

Okay Thanks

 

The only thing I did was to add:

Code:

acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux

to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line in /etc/default/grub before running grub-mkconfig

The whole line in /etc/default/grub looks like:

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="acpi_backlight=vendor acpi_osi=Linux"

I didn't have a problem with a black screen though, I just couldn't change the backlight. It was stuck at maximum brightness.

 

So I've been testing my laptop a bit.

Updated Prema Bios Mod + EC: in my experience it has been great, eliminated random fan bursts completely and has so far performed brilliantly. I use a notebook cooler most of the time, my temps after gaming don't break 80C CPU and 67C GPU (Witcher 2, modded Skyrim, Bioshock Infinite, Far Cry 3). I run -80mv underclock on CPU and some modifier changes.

Nvidia Drivers: I've updated to 331.82 WHQL driver. Didn't seem to have a great impact for me, but I don't play the games it supposedly optimized.

Overclocking GTX 765M: After the driver update I pushed my GPU a bit further to +150Mhz Core and +560Mhz vRAM. The updated 3dMark11 score is in the signature. It consistently crashes at +155Mhz clock at the same vRAM and even as low as 200Mhz.

So I scaled it down to +145Mhz core and +560Mhz vRAM to be safe. The difference over stock is around 7 fps in Bioshock Infinite benchmark Ultra + ddof at Full HD (29.8 fps vs 36.6 fps). That's around 20% performance boost over stock, and I'm pretty happy with it. Will play some more games over the holidays to see if I run into artifacts and crashes to make sure it's actually stable.

 

What is Clevo Control Center ? Is this the program integrated with Hotkey driver ?

 

Yes. You can either uninstall it or stop hotkey.exe from running at startup to run at higher clocks on battery.

 

Is there any way to disable wake from sleep when lid is opened, I have already set close lid to do nothing but that hasn't helped.

 

Why would you open it if it's not to use it

 

On my old laptop I had to press the power button to wake it from sleep, the clevo wakes automatically when I open the lid.
I want it to only wake from sleep when I press the power button

 

You already said that, but it doesn't answer the question, why would you open it if it's not to use it ?

 

I just want it like that and am used to it like that.
Sometimes i will just open my laptop but not turn it on immediately, simple as that.
What I don't what is when I open it slightly but decide not to use it it will still turn on and drain the battery when not in use, as only lifting the screen a little bit will turns it on.

 

Its' a simple Windows option, same for each Laptop:

Power Options > Change Plan Settings > Advanced > Power Buttons and LID

 

I have got Lid Close Action set to 'Do Nothing' but it still wakes from sleep when I open the screen

 

No, there is no such option, I guess you would have to disconnect a cable or sensor inside.
Humans are capable of adaptation, so your best bet is to use some kind of logic and only open it when you actually need it.

 

Guess there is no way to change it.
Thanks for the help

 

Oh, sorry, yeah. There is usually a small magnet in the LID frame which triggers the signal, just pop it out...

 

It would be a nice option to have, especially if your laptop gets jostled in your backpack or something and the lid pops open real quick and turns it on. Your other option is to set it to hibernate on lid close because I don't believe the system powers on when opening the lid then.

 

I had problems with this months ago, but it was kind of intermittent and I couldn't rule out having an iffy cable. I'd plug in my phone to charge, and hear the plug/unplug sounds from Windows over and over, every 2-3 seconds; sometimes switching to a different port would help.

I haven't experienced it lately, but then I haven't used the ports very much lately either, so maybe it's still an issue in limited circumstances? I've definitely used all 4 ports for *something* in the last few months, without having any disconnects / failures.