*** XMG Apex 15 with Ryzen 3950X / Clevo NH58AF1 Owner's Lounge ***

Oh yes definitely wouldn't run a task that utilises GPU whilst running these clock speeds.
Seems my reseller isn't playing ball assisting with the locked PPT settings so I might be returning the laptop if clevo/der8aur don't get back to me regarding the beta bios with all the unlocked goodies.

Shame that such good hardware is let down by software.

 

How long will the hardware last all unlocked though is the question.

 

If they're so afraid about RMA's and bricked systems, they should at least allow us to tweak in the opposite direction. The cooling and power delivery systems are never going to allow for huge overclocks. They could address their fears about overclocks if they put a hard upper limit on BIOS overclocking (like 90w PPT or 4.2ghz, for example), but then allowed undervolting and underclocking. On my system it would be great if I could set a 1.1v max single-core voltage, and a 0.92v all-core voltage, and let PBO do its thing in the middle.

 

They will need to code that all properly of course, it's certainly something i'll push them towards.

 

Being able to set a max voltage and base all core would do wonders for the 3950x/3900x users.

The current method of undervolting and setting the all core via 3rd party software is fine... far from ideal, but fine. I have mine locked at 3575mhz 0.938v with zen states and use core parking to keep things further in check. Idle with 8 threads active / 24 parked runs about 62w. I'm happy with this but I wish the BIOS could have the functionality of zen states, obsidian fan-control, and parkcontrol (if that is even possible?).

If there is some way to allow for a max single, 2, or even 4 core voltage, that would really open things up in terms of performance for lightly threaded tasks.

 

Manual overclocking is fully unlocked anyway so people could blow their vrm up by setting too high a voltage that way.

I just think it should be down to the end user. We do own the hardware after all and if manual overclocking is enabled there's no reason for PBO to be disabled.

By the by do different resellers like yourself all use the same bios as presumably the main board etc is all the same?

If yes if Sager do open up either their version of control centre or do an updated bios I may keep hold of the laptop and flash your bios heh.

 

Leaving it down to the end user and people will blow the system up and then return it saying it's faulty.

 

I actually agree with sentiment. There a lot of unskilled users and frankly you need to protect them from themselves.

A reasonable middle ground could be an unlocked bios made available to those who need it with condition that it renders all warranty null/void. If a broken laptop is received to RMA with that bios installed, then the end user is out of luck. I suspect a number of us on this forum would be willing to make that trade-off, I know I would.

 

I would too!

 

For a P model I'd agree on that, though for a model like this the ability to undervolt and tweak the efficiency would make a lot of sense. This has been passed along.

 

Yes, this one... Please refer to the 2nd half of the Post's title, "... Clevo NH58AF1 Owner's Lounge"

(Edit: Pls ignore my response if this Post has been renamed since your OP)

 

I am planning to buy the same laptop, for me the CPU matters more than the GPU. HID has a variant with 1660TI and 120HZ can anyone please advise me on the screen colour accuracy etc for that one ? Also for 3900 with the latest BIOS is the temps manageable ? I am mostly into code compiles and using multiple docker containers etc

 

Hmmm...

...idle temperature @ 50 degree celcius... kinda high for a laptop even though we knew the heart was originally designed for desktop use.
Anybody tried the RegEdit hack yet?​

 

Yes it works fine. It is the simplest way to get rid of idle fan speed fluctuations in Windows. With the 3800X it is locked at 3.9ghz so performance and noise is great at idle and load even without undervolting.

 

Care to elaborate what that hack is? I seem to be out of the loop on this.

 

It was mentioned in this review...

... It's just that the registry ID, will it be the same across all other OEMs or not?​

And this is the regedit hack to the G5SE here.

The registry ID seems a little different from the Zephyrus G14. So... Take Note to check if it's different in directory in Clevo as well!​

 

Thanks, this is good to know. The registry ID was the same to me as in the first video.

 

Push it hard!

... Guess I will hold a little longer and not repeat the mistake of buying something (like the P7 pro) and hoping for features until they are actually shipping.

- B450 chipset should support 4000-series CPU with bios update. I guess a statement as to supporting it or not down the road is probably too early...

- Not-for-dummies Bios.... Limit the max dangerous zones, Linus aside, most of us don't care about conservative maximum settings, as we don't want to blow it up any more than you want to process RMAs

- Please, let US decide if WE want to undervolt or underclock or limit cores to maximise usage or limit throttling for timing sensitive applications, reduce noise, memory timing, etc.

- Let US be able to do weird stuff with the M.2 sockets, mount EGPUs and hack away at it without locked M.2 slots and hidden timing settings, I want to see it all and that's what saved my P7 pro: M.2 RTX eGPU and Prema Bios. Went from useless brick to Rock solid machine.

16-core beasts are workstations AND grown up toys, let us play with them

I'm sure there are a lot of people lurking here thinking the same thing for Bios and future support, if/once its out, that awesome hardware will be very hard to resist!

 

Completely agree with the sentiment of this post, this is a serious piece of kit not a £300 laptop from pc world. It's rediculous that I can set voltage to what I want in ryzen master and run ram and infinity fabric out of spec but I can't go into bios and set a fan curve? Or set a voltage offset to reduce temperature or even just disabled the full screen splash page so I can see the boot sequence checks!



Furthermore but some what unrelated can someone else confirmheatsink mounting pressure is inadequate?

I.e pressing down on the heatsink during load reduces temperatures.

First noticed after I added some copper MOSFET heatsinks all over the heat spreader ( which required me pushing them down to adhere fully) that cpu cpu temps were below 50c for first time at idle and load temps in cinebench did not exceed 75! Yes the copper heatsinks do make a difference I reccomend it as a non destructive upgrade. Only makes sense if you have a laptop cooling pad mind you.

But over the course of an hour temperatures crept up to 60 + idle and 82-83 in cinebench runs.

Playing games the CPU gets into the 90s :/

 

Yeah those ramsinks will work IF you have airflow.

 

Just have a cheap Kodak laptop cooling pad. Think it's 25cfm or something like that. Pretty basic but allows enough airflow on those heatsinks to make a difference.

need better quality thermal tape though as the heatspreader gets so hot the stock tape started to melt a little bit...

So for now they've been removed as I don't want a heatsink causing a short and messing up my whole laptop.

 

Yes the metal above the VRM will get toasty since they will be hotter than the die.

 

Anyone know if a 3900x works as well as the non-x version? I ask because 3900x has gotten cheap. 3950x has also become less expensive.

 

I have the 3900x processor. Not sure how to answer "works as well" as this is my first Ryzen CPU (and I don't have any other processors to compare with)

 

No bios issues? Can be set for the 65w TDP as Clevo does for the 3900 in this laptop?

 

Ah, maybe I should have mentioned that I'm not running the XMG bios but the default bios by clevo. There are no options to set anything re: memory timings or TDP or the like. It looks like they already set the timings themselves to work with the 3900x and just removed the ability to access them.

 

Thank you. That makes perfect sense and answers my question.

 

It will work fine. I have the 3800X in mine, and had the 3950X before, both which are 105W TDP processors. Keep in mind that the 3900X and 3950X are performance limited by the Clevo bios. Oh, and here is a polish review (Hyperbook NH5 Zen) where they used the 3900X:

https://www.purepc.pl/test-hyperbook-nh5-zen-notebook-z-procesorem-ryzen-9-3900x

 

I think the most effective way At The Moment is still the registry hack to limit the CPU boost performance function... If there's more hack that can lower the idle TDP lower than 20w... ... ... ... PERFECT!

 

They all have a 65W mode which is what the BIOS tells them to follow.

 

Oh, interesting. Does that mean there is no difference between the 3900 and 3900X? It is odd, because the 3900 seems to cost about $580 which is a bit higher than the retail 3900X @ $499. Usually OEM chips are a little less, at least on the Intel side.

 

I'm not really interested in limiting, more interested in pushing what I can put of it. I plan to augment cooling with extra fans and the battery is just a UPS for me. I'm not a gamer and single thread optimization is mostly irrelevant to me. I want the 12 cores and 24 threads (or 16 but decided the extra price at this time wasn't worth it, right now). Trying to keep the price close to 2k. I mostly will use it for video editing in Resolve and ocassionally for photo editing. The 2070 max P will be my limiting factor, as well as SSD throughput.
The biggest drawback of this laptop, all Ryzen's right now, is no TB3, which would give me a lot more storage potential and also an option for eGPU which would extend my use well into the future. Resolve LOVES lot's of CUDA cores and video memory but it's really expensive to get past 8gb.
It's also really good at using multiple CPU cores. Some processes are GPU dependant sadly, but some of the heavy lifting like noise reduction plug-in can be assigned to CPU.

This is less a laptop for me and more an easily moved editing studio so plugging in a bunch of peripherals and having external cooling is fine.

 

I've heard of a bios updates which corrects a voltage issue that causes higher than expected temperatures.

Has anyone had a chance to use this bios yet and what the the effects.


Many thanks

( Currently my system gets to hot to play a lot of 3d games as the combined thermal output overwhelms the cooling system)

 

No difference in a board designed to limit the clocks.

 

What sort of external cooling are you planning to use? I'd be interested in hearing about your solution

 

wrong choice of opponent chosen
in this review to compete with XMG Apex15

With it's slim profile, heat certainly build up in the Zephyrus G14
Causing it to throttle and affecting it's performance.
A fair battle should be with the slightly thicker
Tuf A15 which reviewed 2months ago.​

 

I have a number of fans from the desktop I'm retiring. My plan is to first apply extra fans to the bottom with an aluminum cage I'll build from 14g perf sheet I already bought and run the fans off 5v DC from a regular brick plugged into he wall. Also apply some small copper heat sinks to the copper plates over the vrm and other board chips hoping to take advantage of the extra airflow down there away from the built in fans. That should run the big fans a little slow and quiet. Then I'll see how it performs. If that's not enough I'll try 9v to the fans. If that's not enough I will cut a square hole in the plastic back panel and apply a large copper heat sink where the massive heat pipes converge and arrange the fans around that.

 

This is my stand that I made

 

Nicely done!
I like the polished metal on the fan grill part. My perf aluminum is bare machined finish which is good enough for me but now I might want to take it to the shop and polish is a bit.

The temp sensor is a nice touch. My plan was just to manually set the fans and leave them.

I feel like this style is better than some others because the plastic case does of course get a bit hot and the metal grill should act like a little bit of a heat sink for the plastic it's broadly in contact with. It's a small thing, but technically an improvement over setups where the laptop suspends above the surface on little feet.

If you really want to go cyberpunk all out it seems you could leave your back cover off and the laptop would be essentially resting on it's heat pipes on a metal grill that has air blowing through it.

 

Been searching with no luck:

Is there a list of compatible memory somewhere?

I have a barebones NH58AF1 on the way. I plan to reuse some decent SSDs I have for now and upgrade them next year.

I plan to buy a $419 3900x, saving over $100 off the packaged 3900 price.

So what's left is to shop my best deal on memory and I'm not sure where to buy it or what to get.

I want 32 or 64gb depending on how much bang for my buck I can get.

There are some apparent bargains on Amazon on brands I've never heard of. No idea which is any would work.

 

You can find a list here https://www.reddit.com/r/XMG_gg/comments/fsbsr0/megathread_xmg_apex_15_with_amd_ryzen_desktop_cpu/

 

Thank you.

 

Yeah that would probably lower temps more but it does make it tricky to pick up and go

 

Yeah. Like I said, more of a semi-portable studio for me. Not much "pick up and go" except ocassionally to use at an event I'm shooting or when I take trips. If I wanted really portable I would buy something else.

 

How is your performance after moving to the 3800X? Major difference from the 3950X in day to day use or not?

(asking for a friend )

 

The 3800X is significantly better with noise and heat. With general use it actually feels faster, because the base clock is 3.9ghz.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I've been loading this system down with VMs, effectively using it as an ESXi box, and I have only ever used about 2/3 of the threads so far (before anyone chimes in, yes, the 3900 would have probably been the ideal choice here). For most use cases, 8 core cpus like your 3800x are looking like the best choice. Still debating here, but I may change over to a 8/12 core, especially if the 4000 series become an upgrade option for us.

Based on my experiences so far, I will run out of memory or disk I/O to feed heavy VMs before I run out of headroom on the 3950x. Now if we had a 17" system that had an additional drive bay (2.5 or m.2) and 4 ram slots...

 

2.5" slots really are dying now, is it more capacity or bandwidth you are looking at?

 

It's probably the low pricing of the form factor... Look at the price of mechanical drives, of same storage capacity same form factor, price can be far apart.

 

I'm debating what to put in my bay long term. Right now it's getting a 500gb SSD from my old system but in the future I might replace it with a high capacity HDD instead of an updated SSD. The price of 2.5 SSDs doesn't seem worth it with the limits of SATA.