1610ftw

I think it started with the G5 generation which was the first chassis with the new more edgy design - very high build quality and great looks. I had a nice fan curve and undervolt for the Zbook 17 G5 and then came an update and HP destroyed it all - it is hard to not have very negative feelings about a company crippling their product like that. From what I know all subsequent iterations of their flagship workstation have the same "works as intended" annoying fan cycling and undervolting is blocked, too. The only option that I have found to tame those CPUs a bit was to set lower power limits with Throttle Stop which helps them not to ramp the clocks to unsustainable levels but that is far from ideal. I forgot that my last Precision was the 7760 that by comparison had a very low powered CPU (ca. 130W max) which certainly helped. The best workstation I have tested is the MSI CreatorPro X18 HX. It is quite magnificent with regard to fan noise and sustainable performance, too bad that it only comes with a monstrous price tag. I am mainly interested in the new generation of laptops for TB5 and to get more drives so if the CPUs are a sideway move that might be good enough for me. For people who do not need that this is probably a generation they can skip unless they finally want a proper 18" workstation that wasn't available before from Dell and HP.

As a baseline and to see what is happening when you change things you may want to check power uptake when you start a game - if that causes a power consumption spike to 450W I would expect the laptop to shut down but I somehow doubt that is happening. In any case getting a good meter to measure power draw is recommended. Then the first thing I would try is to reset the bios - all kinds of obscure settings could have been fiddled with in a prema bios and you may never get to the bottom of it. That is unless others advise against it but it would be the first thing to do for me with all these settings being exposed. As for running fine on battery this is no surprise at all as total power uptake from the battery is likely less than 100W - not a surprise that this would work.

Uniwill / Tongfang are always interesting and would have warranted a closer look for me if they had gone 18" but sadly they are stuck at 16". Still, if 2+2 memory and drive slots plus 16" are sufficient it would be my choice - love the liquid cooling concept and the split boards. Shame about the HP as their non-defeatable AI Cooling crap together with the rather modest power limit is something that I won't risk buying again. I currently use a Zbook 17 G6 on the side and the stupidity of their "intelligent" fan adjustment that I have also encountered in the 16" Zbook Fury is infuriating for people who have substantial power demands. The up and down of the fans and the throttling is a no-go. Not being able to use third party fan control or undervolt is just the icing on the poo cake for me, so overall very disappointing to see great hardware being sabotaged by bad software and a system that is locked down excessively. But hey, maybe they change their ways, the hardware surely looks tempting including an Asus-style third fan: Still the most interesting 18" cooling concept in this generation is the Aorus Master 18 from Gigabyte with a vapor chamber, 270W TDP and proper internal cooling that cools everything else and not just the CPU and GPU: As you know there are many parts that can get very hot in our laptops these days and temperatures way above 80 degrees for the memory or the chipset are bad news and should be addressed by all manufacturers. Asus was the first company to do that and now HP and Gigabyte are following but with more memory and drive slots. Unfortunately I have not heard that many great things about their laptops nor do I find their design to be very understated but I really would like to see how well this one performs, especially in CPU-heavy loads.

That is indeed a bit of a costly approach 🙂 I switch laptops more often so I have a data and backup drive that I move from device to device and I can even move its Macrium backup routine with it which makes life a lot easier as I do not have to start from scratch each time I move my data. In any case I guess you can splurge a little bit once every five years 🤜 By the way: In case you want / need something external that is very fast then I can recommend this one: https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Enclosure-Anti-Drop-Compatible-Thunderbolt/dp/B0CLV3D3H6/ref=sr_1_1? It does not get very hot as it has a fan but also not very loud and it has a silicone protector that is very welcome as it prevents you from accidentally bumping into your laptop and causing nasty scratches. It also helps to make it stay put. I am using it with a TB4 cable and get sustained writes beyond 2 GB/s - at least as long as the SSDs allow for it which sadly is not very long in most cases. They also have a 20G box that is relatively cheap and I got two of those, too as they hardly cost more than the 10G variant but I expect to get to use supported 20G connectors in the future so that will be nice.

Haha, yes you cannot expect a decent quality picture for a $5K + laptop - that would be too much to ask 😄

Great it has arrived! Why did you not just order the Lenovo with one SSD and then reuse the Kioxia as a second drive? I always try to order as little memory and storage as possible unless there is some kind of sale of course that is too good to pass on so I am curious about your reason(s).

How can it be the same when clearly it has less and smaller buttons in the numpad area? The Titan 18 keyboard actually has 3 physical buttons more so not sure if we are talking about the same laptops here ???

When all 8 cores are semi active you may need still need to allow something like 4.4 all core in order to allow the higher clocks in gaming while limiting power via for example Throttle Stop, best to experiment a bit. When my son was using the P870TM for gaming we settled on 4.6 GHz all core as otherwise clocks would go down in gaming even when the game was only using 6 or less cores and in the end the goal was just to stay below 85C for most of the time with even short bursts never exceeding 95C. You could start off with something like 75 or 80W and 4.4 GHz all core clock and see how it goes but I think that even 90W should not be an issue if you do not run it non-stop.

Well the Titan 18 keyboard has a 4 row numpad so it is actually quite different, including the combined Home/End/PG Up and Down keys: https://www.msi.com/Laptop/Titan-18-HX-AI-A2XWX/Gallery#lg=1&slide=3 Clevo still has the edge as it does not "waste" keys for power and copilot. And nobody can say that Clevo is not consistent - looks like the same layout as my P775TM from many years ago 😄

Hmmm - wasn't that the GT77 HX? Anyway, I was really annoyed by the small three row numpad and luckily the new generation has a 4 row version with combined home/end and page up/down keys which is different. Unfortunately it also has a wasted key that now is dedicated to Copilot. Have not yet seen the keyboard of the Clevo but if it has single function keys for all the 5 functions you mention I would be very surprised.

True, the fans were never that great and this is obviously because initially both CPUs and GPUs were not intended to consume that much power. Also the CPU heatsink just wasn't in the same class as the GPU heatsink(s) even though the later CPUs could easily consume as much power as the 1080 or the 2080.

Do you have a pic of the cooling section? All cores have similar temps? Also try a more regular cache like 40.

That is pretty impressive! The CPU of the P870 always suffered from its stock heatsink that was an afterthought compared to the massive cooling that was available for the GPUs. With a decent 9900K I would figure about 110 to 125W at 4.5GHz which in everyday use is pretty sustainable from my experience with the P870TM even when it is not the greatest heat sink.

Are you sure you won't destroy the vapor chamber by doing that?

Yes, sadly this is what it looks like, just be careful not to fry your motherboard. Regarding how far you can go I just remembered that @runix18 had the P870DM-G with the 9700K and he may be able to chime in regarding what he found to be a sustainable power uptake with the DM motherboard.