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

I've got similar issues with mine (Pcspecialist). If I understand correctly you got your laptop from Pcspecialist. Were they quick in fixing it? Did you have their BIOS when you sent it over? I flashed other BIOSes and I'm a bit worried about the warranty.

 

I'm sure you're right, except you say you don't think we can run full clock speeds and be cool without extra cooling. That isn't strong enough, this is absolute, we will not get full clock speeds and be cool without some major modification of the laptop. Mine is the 65W 3900 (no X) and at idle with fans set at stock settings before I undervolted I was already 65 to 70C. That's with CPU ranging from 400-800Mhz. It doesn't take much experience to see what happens from there, moving a mouse across the screen is probably enough from there to approach thermal shutdown. OK, OK, that last is exaggerated, but monitoring my temps had me nervous and using the Clevo FN + 1 keys to set fans to max almost all the time.

I was wracking my brain to come up with a better cooling solution until someone here heroically mentioned undervolting to me (seriously thanks MyHandsAreBurning!) I checked out everything I could find, people who modified and added their own homemade water cooling, Asus' one off water cooled notebook, much much more, and had a plan in mind to build external air tunnels not unlike my cars turbo and air intake to move more air volume through my system. Now I'm comfortable with temps and honestly performance is far more than I expected or need. One day that will no longer be true, and I'll revisit the issue.

 

I also suggested undervolting

It's a lot of electricity running through a small laptop. Heat is a thing. They could have given the blowers a little less resistance from the bottom plate but otherwise the design is pretty sound. So much copper

My undervolt settings are similar to yours and I have a bit of over locking as well. Some people are successfully going less than 1 volt but they are also parking or severely under clocking many cores. We shouldn't expect to get the same performance as a desktop with the same chip. Physics is a thing. They could have made this 17" and added a whole extra blower but short of that this is as good as is reasonable I think.

Like I said before, I'm not a gamer and ai want all 12 cores crunching video so my solution is different. ..I added fans to the outside and I'm happy with it.

I noticed that when I cut the holes over the blower intakes larger the stock fan noise improved even without my extra fans turned on. The case is a bit restrictive...not terrible but a small mod yields an improvement.

 

I'll know when my Samsung memory arrives hopefully Friday. If THAT doesn't work then I'll start looking into a replacement motherboard.

 

You're right NathanRN! Sorry to have missed that and you're now also officially my hero!

I can get an idea in my head and believe in it so strongly for no valid reason that I don't listen to opposing points of view, but since I realize this about myself I usually come around and check the other points of view out within a few days. Psychological studies show statistical evidence that this is one of the major reasons that we make bad decisions in a very predictable way. I find this area of study very interesting, and have followed the work and research of Dan Ariely, a professor at Duke U. who taught at MIT previous to that. If you aren't into reading, search his name at YT, I'm confident it will be worth your time.

Anyway, if you don't mind could you share details of your settings with me sometime, or a list of settings that generally work and what different settings might give particular advantages and disadvantages (yes, I'm asking you to do my research for me, lol.)

I'm with you on the 17", I looked for that before buying this one and couldn't find a model available. It would have been significantly cooler. I do want to have the CPU running at it's highest level and staying as cool as it is now, I just don't have time to start a project to cool it the way I would want with the demands on my time from my degree program and trying to manage my kids distance learning better than the half-assed way I did last semester.

 

That's a very useful piece of info, I can easily take out my power drill and enlarge holes on the bottom plate below my fans to get better airflow. Also, I was planning on making my 'turbo-like' air intake/exhaust all eternal. I took the laptop bottom plate off and added a couple SSDs when I got it, and find it pretty much as full as you would want it and like you I thought it was pretty well done.

 

From my experience one of the reasons why you're running into thermal issues could simply be bad paste job, needing a proper repaste and also your cooler plate not sitting well into components (gaps between cooling plate and cpu/gpu). Also check if the thermal pads are sitting correctly into the vrm/regulators. Some heatpipes could have bad solders on the plates or blocked due to bends. In the future I believe there will be another cooling options with thicker plates and more efficient heat pipes. If you're stuck in using it as a laptop with internal screen and need it to run heavy loads find a plastic laptop cooler with decent airflow and take the bottom cover out. Just be sure nothing touches for possible shorts. I use mine with external monitor and always upside down without the bottom cover and it has great thermal performance. The temps sit below 70°c while fully loaded gpu/cpu with low fan noise (Around half speed on cpu and gpu). Undervolting wields great results as PBO runs at unreasonable voltages for a laptop. But there you hit the silicon lottery. Some chips can have really great results with low voltage applied. My R5 3600 can do 4.2ghz at 1.15v with max 85°c under load. I run it usually at base clock all core 3.6ghz at 0.875v stable. The gpu is fairly overclockable as well both core and mem wise. Running it in adaptative mode in nvidia driver makes it run cool in idle at around 40 to 50°c

Hope it helps

 

You have some unusual and useful approaches to cooling, thanks. I'm not going to leave the bottom off and invert it right now, since I found another solution that fits my situation pretty well, but it's still good to know about as an option.

I took the bottom cover off to add SSDs and from what I could see things looked good. They might not be properly pasted, you cannot be sure without taking them off, but I believe that they are. Still, I have a tube of Arctic Silver and I regularly reapply it on all my computers so I will consider doing it when I can shutdown the computer this evening.

Thanks also for the undervolting/overclocking info. I haven't explored it enough to have a good understanding of it up to today, and I know that I haven't optimized it yet. It works, and it reduced temps by about 10C, but more can be done to improve this for sure. I need to figure out how to store and retreive various working setups, too. Most of the time I have no need even for the processing power at my current settings, and cooler is always better.

 

Be aware that clevo control center revokes your changes made with ryzen master after some time or in heavy load situations. You need to kill (FN hotkeys and osd) process or uninstall that app to adjust permanently your cpu. I use zenstates app to keep the undervolt applying at windows start up.

Just test lower voltages with fixed frequency until you find your sweet spot. Don't be affraid of damaging your cpu with low voltages as it is very less likely you can do so.

 

Keep an eye on cpu temps as I've found that while we run fixed frequencies the temps can go higher than 100°c on CPU side. The 95°c limit in PBO doesn't apply.

 

My laptop shipped without control center, and I don't really like it very well so I didnt download and install it. Good thing it's unlikely to damage, as I've probably caused 4 or 5 shutdowns during experimentation with settings

 

Another piece of excellent information, thanks.

 

I have a thermaltake cooler under the laptop, of course it has a metal cover. Right now I have 8 apps open, including zoom for a class meeting, database managements software, etc. I consider it moderate load, and temps are around 65C and lower with fans on stock settings. I don't want to max fans out because I want to hear the professor.

I've used a much more effective cooler that latches directly to the fan outputs, but I think I'll make my own solution before getting two of those and attaching them.

 

If you want there's a nice tool for fan control made by the reseller where I bought mine (Obsidian-pc). I think it's paid software for external users but it's great to manage noise level.

 

Those can really depend on the design of the machine on how effective they are.

 

I actually used the free version for a short time recently, maybe a month ago before getting the new laptop. It was ok, but I could tell that I needed to pay for it to really use it the way I wanted to, so I tried something from GitHub for a bit. It worked great after some fiddling around, then when I undervolted something happened and it wasn't reliable anymore. Instead of figuring out how to get it working again I uninstalled it.

I just don't have time to reinvent the wheel all the time right now, life is getting freaking busy, am i right? So I think I will suck it up and pay the $20 or $30 for that Obsidian software. It does the same job that the GitHub package did, but hopefully since I'm paying for it, it does it without my being all that good at programming.

I can manage simple things in programming, I am in my last semester in a computer information systems bachelor's degree program right now, but I would say that's my weakest point. I'm a very good student, with something like a 3.7 GPA since changing majors from chemistry 3 years ago, but we do quite a bit of work in business classes and really are preparing to be the IT department people who communicate with middle management and IT, so programming isn't the top priority. I can figure out how to get things to work, but it often takes me way more time than a real programmer would need.

Thanks for reminding me of Obsidian, you saved me some time trying to look it up again later this evening and saving time is something I need at the moment.

 

I know that is true, I have one for use on a very old HP touchscreen that my 9 yr old son uses for his classes (and Roblox, and Minecraft) but that old thing has an Intel u class processor, like 3/4th of a step above an atom processor, and no discreet graphics, so only one fan output. When you have multiple exhaust air outputs even using two, one per output, doesn't give ideal results. If I'm not gaming, my GPU output fan hardly runs even when the CPU is on max. You can imagine them kind of competing with each other, pulling against one another, creating areas where airflow is stagnant, probably other problems too.

EDIT
Also, they look stupid and get in the way. But they work WAY better than under notebook fan coolers, at least when used on an appropriate laptop. Having a cooler under my notebook is only good for about 2 degrees cooling versus just sitting on a surface with good air clearance.

 

Some programming knowledge can really help, especially when you start getting into enterprise equipment like SANs to understand what is going on in logs.

 

I agree, I want to know more and I do have a class this semester using C# and adding ASP to that for development of web applications. I should get much better, this will be my fourth programming class so the learning curve is still steep for me and I'm motivated to learn as much as I possibly can right now.

EDIT
That's the great thing about being in my final semester, all the classes that I have right now are based on exactly what we're expected to do when we get a job. Expectations are high, professors are excellent, and material is relevant.

 

I went ahead and bought it this evening, and it does do everything the GitHub software did except with a GUI that makes sense and works exactly as expected without having to do any research to figure out. Is it worth the 30 Euros? Most likely it is, because it will add a great deal to the life of the parts in my laptop by keeping fans working as intended and therefor keeping temps down even better. It's better than stock because it's adjustable, it's better than GitHub because I don't understand exactly how to make my settings work without a better GUI and here all of that has been done for me.

EDIT
I should mention numbers and left that out. Right now I see temps on the CPU at 50C with no noise, then at 51C the fan ramps up for 5 seconds or so and temps go back below 50. I've only got Firefox with 6 tabs open and a few programs open that aren't doing anything right now, like regedit (I had to stop Windows from resetting defaults, *#$&@ing Microsoft) so load is light. I set fan controls manually and set them aggressively, so you could get a quieter setup if that's what you were going for.

 

Yep, actually I made a lot of changes to the available presets. Like gpu fan off below 40°c and also changed the temp intervals and curves so I get almost no noise when idle and moderate when I run heavy loads. Measured max 50db at 15cm since I've tuned it up and never had temps higher than those I've mentioned on previous posts. The dramatic temp peaks (>80°c) only occur on Windows startup before zenstates and fan control kick in because of stock PBO clock/voltage settings.

 

I usually hit fn + 1 during startup, default on any Clevo I've ever had uses that key combo to set fans to max. It takes 5 - 10 seconds after hitting the power button before it registers, but it keeps the notebook from ever getting out of the 60s. That's just how I am, I have to do things better everyday. I think it's from nuclear power school in the Navy, but it feels like I've always been like that.

 

To my surprise the memtest failed on the gskill 2666 64bit kit. 80+ errors in tests 5/6. I'm returning it but I really don't think it's the memory vs shotty bios support for anything 64GB. I was really hoping the prema bios would be different and offer more compatibility but it doesn't look like that's the case. It's locked down and has the same issues with 64GB kits like the rest. I think I'm going to reach out to the vendor to ask them what make/model they use since they offer 64GB 2666/3200. For now i'm back using the 1.35v ballistic memory.

 

Yes, I got it from them. Phone support has a long wait, so be patient . The actual time for the servicing was surprisingly fast (under 1 week including shipping both ways). Though initially, they said it can take up to 3-4 weeks (yes I know...). I sent it back with the Clevo BIOS. I could claim that I "updated it with a newer version from the manufacturer" if it got to that, but it wasn't an issue, they never mentioned it.
1 more thing... I ordered a 64gb Corsair from them as an upgrade to confirm that it wasn't working with that either before I sent it in. Don't know if that affected anything on their side. I returned the kit for a refund after everything was sorted.
Good luck in the process. Hope you get it working.

Actually I found the CCC quite useful, as light loads don't need all the power from the laptop, and having a 1 click solution to switch to a less hot/loud operating mode is useful. Here comes the XMG .04 BIOS in the picture that has a different mapping for those modes

They will most probably have the Crucial or the Samsung kit on offer for 3200Mhz, maybe add Corsair and some others for 2666Mhz. What specs are you running on your Ballistix? is it a 2x32GB kit?

 

This is why there are options, then. I'm probably lucky to have one, I seldom fit into the same category as the majority of users. I want more fan performance and not less, something in between standard settings and all out max fan all day everyday. To be honest, the flexibility to set fans to ramp up at a given rate combined with temperature ranges to increase fan speed as a percentage along a sliding scale to my own liking and to save at least 6 of these with hotkeys to engage them is pretty damned impressive, and that's coming from someone in their final semester of a program that has software analysis and design as one of the greatest focuses for students. I mean I have tried everything I could find and everything else either didn't work, included packaged malware, was incredibly tedious to figure out, set up, or couldn't be depended on. Many of them were horrific combinations of these problems listed. This is intuitive like the iPod compared to a Blackberry back in 2001.

I do understand also, and largely also due to my work in this program, that the majority of users want a quiet environment over better cooling. Lucky for the both of us we each have an option that works best for our needs!

 

My C programming was annoying under done, we had not even covered all of the material by the exam but i managed to salvage it.

 

My professor was excellent. The second C# class was right before an accounting class and all the guys I knew in the program were struggling, so I missed several classes to prepare for tests with them and I was kind of felt weird about it, stopped keeping up with things and fell too far behind. My final project went wrong too, I tested it and thought it worked exactly as it was supposed to but the professor was able to break it easily. I barely passed, and this is from a student who has been on the honor roll almost every semester but that one. It was all me though, my choices and my mistakes.

I have this next 3 months to work on it, I'm not going to be a programmer, at least not at first, and I can keep working on it after finishing this program. It really depends on what jobs and opportunities I see that are most interesting, but I feel like systems analysis and design, information security, and database work are the areas best for me. Even in those, the more programming I can do the better those jobs go too, but it isn't the most important skill to have.

 

In order to have RyzenMaster settings remain with RyzenMaster closed I have to uninstall Control Center? That means I also lose keyboard color functions and fan control functions?

 

For the CPU related settings yes (at least for PBO I'm sure), all other settings are persistent.

 

Well, the CPU is the only thing I want to tweak
Manually over clocking and undervolting is what initially gave me the stable high performance situation I wanted.

I'm afraid to touch memory after maybe messing that up and almost bricking my laptop (still possible the board is just defective or the BIOS is just incompatible with all the 64gb setups I tried, hopefully I will know the answer soon)

 

I'm diving in with Azure at the moment.

 

Does anyone know if the HIDevolution version of this computer has a 90w power limit? GizmoSlipTech claims it does in this video:

Sent from my Pixel 4 using Tapatalk

 

88W is the default PPT for the 65W TDP CPUs.

 

Everything is knocked down a notch over the higher listed TDP chips.

 

Alright, my Samsung b die 64gb 3200mhz memory arrived as used by at least one OEM.

It boots....it crashes with any stress at all.

I take out one stick and run 32GB single channel....stable again (apparently stable)….that's 4 different sets of memory that DON'T work at 64GB.

Seems there is something wrong with my memory controller?

 

Possibly something funky with it, have you spoken to your reseller?

 

I had the same issue, send the laptop in for replacement/"repairs". It won't work on lower speeds either (it might be looking stable at 2400/2666 but I'm sure that it's not 100%). I cycled between Samsung, Hynix and Micron based memory modules with no luck. After a new motherboard (at least that is what I was told...) all memory modules work great, even the Hyperx ones with tighter timings.

 

Same here, I'm trying to convince PCSpecialist that is not a memory fault as I tested it in maaaaany ways. @Puski would you mind sending me maybe your ticket/return number via PM so that I could tell PCSpecialist that it looks similar to your case? Atm they somehow believe it's a memory's fault. If you could do so I would be infinitely grateful (I cannot PM you prob due to low number of posts, I think).

 

The best solution would be the one that I did. Order 64GB corsair from PCS (you can choose an upgrade option for your order, or you can confirm with them over the phone), that won't work in the laptop either. And you can send it back with their own "validated" memory kit. That way they can't blame the memory. You most probably can crash the system under a prime blend test (not small/large FFT!) with a background load (in my case just playing a vid in the background). You can send back the 64GB kit from them for refund after all is resolved and just go with what you want to use after that.

 

I mean that is one way to prove it, they should also be able to test that config?

 

You want ZenStates. Ryzen Master RAM settings are persistent but as you know it's CPU settings revert to default upon reboot. Use ZenStates to "set it and forget it". ZenStates will auto run at log in and set the manual or auto overclock you specify.

As far as getting around the CCC throttle limits of 88W and/or 81°C while retaining fan and keyboard lights control with the free Clevo apps, there are a couple of options.

1) Uninstall, disable, or otherwise prevent Fnkey.exe from running (FN Key and OSD). This stops CCC from working and removes the throttle limit while fans and keyboard app still work, but you also lose use of the power profiles. Reinstall FN Keys and OSD from the Microsoft Store and you have CCC profiles and limits again.

2) Remove CCC completely except for "the hook" and use the Fan and LED apps from the Microsoft Store. The hook is the system driver for device ACPI\VEN CLV&DEV 0002 that shows up as ACPI Bridge 1 in Windows Device Manager. You can delete everything else Clevo out of the DriverStore as long as you have ACPI0002.inf and ACPI0002.cat present at C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\acpi0002inf_amd_RandomCharacterString then the Microsoft Store Clevo Fan, Keyboard, Flexikey, FN Keys and OSD apps will run. You don't need DCHUservice, LaunchFnkey.exe, Hot Key Service none of that.

Sorry to hear about your troubles getting 64GB running. Are you going to make due with 32GB or try and get a new motherboard?

 

I got the barebones second hand and the warranty is not transferable.

Also having modified the case to add fans and adding some heat sinks that might be enough to void anyway...
So my question then is how much does a new motherboard cost me?
I'll probably contact RJtech after my current travel and see what my options are.

 

The motherboard has the GPU soldered on so it wont be especially cheap most likely.

 

Maybe you could be ok with a 32GB kit? It sounds like a better option in your case if you don't specifically need the 64GB.

 

That does depend on if you need the 64GB but at the moment that use case is usually quite specific.

 

Take 2 on my memory issues. I returned the gskill memory since the system wouldn't boot with it. I tried HyperX 64GB 3200 cl20 and I've been stable (no memory issues but see below) all weekend. I haven't run a mem test on it yet but I've used it almost all quite a bit this weekend and I haven't had an issue. I was able to even undervolt my cpu a bit more to .969v at 35x stable. My temps are finally under control.

I am having a weird issue where my keyboard stops working. It's infrequent and always in a game when I'm using the keyboard the most. If I connect an external keyboard I can keep going. However, Obsidian-PC Fan control can no longer read the cpu/gpu temps and reports that a critical service has stopped. It asks for admin right to fix but it's never successful in fixing. Has anyone seen this before? Bug in Obsidian-PC fan control? Rebooting the PC fixes the issue. I have to hard power it off because Windows never restarts properly.

 

I would suggest doing a proper memtest run to validate stable memory operation.
Also, try to see if the problem still occurs if you reset the CPU parameters to default.

 

Yeah memtest is on my radar. At some point this week I'll do one. The keyboard issue has been a problem since I've had it so I can say for certain it's not a memory issue. The reseller has offered to replace the keyboard but I just wanted to see if anyone else experienced this because it seems more of a software issue.

Resetting CPU parameters to default is like a catch 22. I have a 3950x and The PC pretty much does not operate under normal parameters. Not in a game for sure. I tried reducing my undervolt all the way up to 1.0v @ 3.5. Anymore and the CPU starts hitting scary temps. Problem persisted though at 1.0v.
Does anyone know what critcal service the Obsidian-PC fan control relies on?

 

Could be a poor connection in the layers of the keyboard so a replacement is not a bad call.

 

Malkaven: Tried changing paste? Could be uneven contact with cooler.