1610ftw

M18 is hard to cool from below as CPU and GPU are on the other side of the mainboard. It is a stupid for a number of reasons and this is one of them.

The 2080 MXM in MSI laptops will only consume about 155W and therefore performance will be limited compared to full-fledged 200W cards. So unless you manage to get a 200W vbios running with both the card and your laptop the real world increase in raster performance will be around 35 to 40% and you will get some first gen ray-tracing capabilities on top and also have the added benefit of lower power consumption. With that being said if it was a drop-in and given that you can sell the old card for a certain sum I would say go for it. It does not look like a drop-in though and I am unaware of anybody who has made that upgrade. Which does not mean it won't work of course but there may be the need for some added effort to get everything up and running and you may want to figure all of that in and proceed carefully.

See above - while I had no issues with memory speed there still was no proper contact with the heatsink. Together with a Noctua powered cooling pad and an open bottom max temps are about 60 degrees with 200W power consumption and I also achieved slightly below 70 degrees without a cooling pad and a closed bottom. That is both excellent and I am very happy with that but somehow I cannot quite crack 8000 in Time Spy - it always is 79xx points. I have an MSI here that also has 200W TDP with its GTX1080 in SLI and it does up to 16400 which makes 8200 per card. Obviously 8200 for a single card should be possible, too and I am wondering what is holding me back. Of course this make very little difference in actual gaming so it does not really matter that much. Long term steady operation is much more important and for that I am very happy that the temps went down!

Indeed I have redone the pads again and now used slightly softer pads with 1mm - I could push a piece of paper between the pads and the heatsink which is NOT good 🙂

OK, first tries to get this to work with Linux have been disappointing. Generally speaking and from my limited experience and trying to solve a few issues/looking them up I found out that WifFi 6E is almost impossible to get working and WiFi 5 is by 25 to 50% slower than with Windows 10 but it is possible that I could make some changes for WiFi 5 to work better. There is a bunch of other stuff that I am missing on Linux but this is not something that belongs in this thread. Will report back when I get my first WiFi 7 router or card.

Great to hear! I usually only have one Throttlestop folder on dual system (W10/W11) installations and for everything up to Comet Lake it has been Throttlestop 9.4. I never experienced any issues but then I mostly skipped Rocket Lake as more cores were more important to me than IPC gains.

Which version do you use? I am running something like 9.4 on my W10 systems that also have W11. I have only run it with up to Comet Lake though, which CPU do you have?

QHD is a nice resolution, very glad I switched to that from FHD! With a few custom refresh rates you should be good to go and there will be no need to increase power consumption / heat over your previous panel. Something like 180/120/90/60Hz should be good for covering 99.9% of titles out there at QHD resolution.

My card seems to have had the same arrangement of pad that is in the post from brother @Scruffy and it was just missing the pads over the memory. So I went and only installed those 0.5mm pads. Looks like now I have a great fit and temps are lowered by about 15 to 20°C - thanks for the help! The only thing I noticed is that the card only seems to draw about 180W max - is there a way to easily modify it to take up to 200W? I do not have a programmer or something like that but if there is an easier way to do it I am all for trying that. It would be fun for some benchmarking and in normal operation it is always possible to reduce the power limit to 80% or lower to keep temps down.

I think it is a joint effort by Intel and Windows 😄 I will be fair though and say that for me I am getting reasonably constant and high speed with large file transfers in the 160 to 180MB/s range now. For me it works with 22.250.1.2 on my multi operating system laptop and its W11 partition. I will soon also try it on a version of Linux or two.

Only the 6E band isn't working, 2.4 and 5 are fine. Seems to be a pretty common issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/wifi/comments/15jbvkd/wifi_6e_on_windows_10/ https://www.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/t0ghsc/fix_for_6_ghz_wifi_on_the_intel_ax210/ Looks like Windows wants to use 6E as another means of pushing people towards W11 and at least for Intel all the new drivers are making sure that the AX210 is not seeing the 6E band under Windows 10. Could be the same for you but it is probably only noticeable if you have a separate network ID for the &E band of your router.

Good to hear you got this working - Windows 10 or Windows 11? I have the same speeds with Windows 11 but no WiFi 6 with Windows 10 and apparently this is a known problem and reading further into it not really worth the hassle to get it going. I will probably try something different instead, first try will be one of the upcoming WiFi 7 cards.

WiFi 7 cards if cheap enough may be a good option if they have proper 6E support with Windows 10. My AX210 cards only work with Windows 11 and that really sucks as there is a speed difference of ca. 1.0/0.5 Gbps with Wi-Fi 5 to 1.5/1.5Gbps with WiFi 6.

CAMM is a stupid idea with only a single module in different sizes and it isn't even that small. LPCAMM looks more promising with a possible option for at least two modules in mobile workstations / high end gaming laptops especially given its much smaller size: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-presents-replaceable-LPCAMM-RAM-with-LPDDR5X-7500-speeds-for-laptops-desktops-and-servers.755631.0.html Knowing manufacturers they will probably find a way to fuck things up again like they did with M.2 form factor drives but the tech behind LPCAMM looks solid. MInd you manufacturers could even - gasp - use the saved space for more drives and/or better cooling while keeping size and weight the same but then that is of course a completely ridiculous idea that would get us thrown out of every BGA-book design meeting...

Wow guys, thanks for that - super-detailed!

Hmm, I will have to re-measure but I think my old pads also were 1mm and the die did not make proper contact. As the other pads were all stock maybe Clevo messed something up with the other pads.

Maybe 0.5 with hard and 1.0 with soft pads? 😄 In any case thanks for the responses @Scruffy and @Developer79, I will have a go this week. If results still aren't what I expect I will use thermal putty for the first time. I have been meaning to do it before but for a CPU and that would have been a much bigger mess.

Looks to me like the Nvidia way of doing things, where both performance and price increase by the same percentage, no "free" intergenerational gains any more for customers! To be fair this has been a trend in many areas of consumer electronics at least at the top end and it seems that customers have kind of gotten used to the top models in many categories getting ever more expensive.

The challenge will be to find a capable router for it that does not cost an arm and a leg. 2.5G would be the minimum but I would prefer to have a 10G connection and those routers will probably cost 400$ or more. As I have kind of a hotspot in my house where there is a lot of WiFi usage with up to 4 laptops running at once I have been looking at this monstrosity but it is not exactly a steal: https://rog.asus.com/networking/rog-rapture-gt-be98-pro/ Still it would be a worthy router for the X170 - not afraid to be big and powerful, same as the X170!

If you could measure the thickness over the memory chips that would be cool. I think that these may be too high or maybe the elasticity of the pads has been reduced over the years. As I can easily take out and clean the card it may also be a good occasion to try thermal putty on this one.

Does anybody have the pad thicknesses for a TM with the GTX1080 and this heatsink? Current pads clearly are too thick as the heatsink does not make good contact.

Dell now has two models with basically the same screen height with a 16:10 16" and a 16:9 17.3" model so it is important that they move up to an 18" 16:10 screen format with FHD+, QHD+ and 4K/UHD+ resolution. They also need to get back to a proper cooling design and stop that two fans next to each other on one side of the laptop nonsense - it can now be considered a failure. One big fan each left and right and a vapor chamber in between will do a lot better. This will probably add a little bit of area to the chassis and as @win32asmguy mentions for the top of the line 18" model there should be a heftier option with taller cooling. Together with a slightly bigger chassis area even 0.1" added thickness would make a difference, maybe with only 0.05" at the front and 0.15" at the back to give a little bit of a wedge shape? So that would be the 7890 then and it is imo the only sensible way forward for Dell as the 16 and 17.3" option are just too close to each other which probably is one of the reasons that Lenovo and HP recently went for 16" only. In the meantime if there are no 3840x2400 18" options Dell may even offer the 17.3" screen in the 18" chassis for people who think that they need 4K. This has to my knowledge been done before by Lenovo with 15.6" 16:9 and 16" 16:10 screen options in the same chassis. Also they will hopefully get back to standard memory or the new memory standard proposed by Samsung that makes a lot more sense than the not so great concept they came up with where memory cannot be added but has to be swapped out altogether at hideous prices with essentially no market to sell smaller modules: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-industry-first-lpcamm-ushers-in-future-of-memory-modules It has this important quote so first laptops with it should hopefully not be that far away: LPCAMM is set to be tested using next-generation systems with major customers this year, and commercialization is planned for 2024. Even going back to regular 4 slots of SODIMM would be an improvement and please keep the 4 full sized 2280 NVME slots. OK, fat chance of moving back to 4 SODIMM happening but with Samsung entering the scene I would think that other manufacturers will not adopt CAMM so Dell may as well admit defeat. Regarding power delivery USB-C 240W will be fine and 2 x 240W will be even better but I completely agree with @win32asmguy that USB-C only power delivery raises issues and concerns and I would strongly suggest to go with an up to 330W GaN power brick and also keep the classic power connector. This will also address concerns of power delivery for the highest spec models. As for the keyboard and knowing that Dell does not like to change these things too often I would strongly hope that they finally address some concerns voiced here and I would most prefer it if they brought back proper cursor keys and PG UP and DOWN keys and maximize size as much as is possible for the 16" chassis. That is if they do not want to release something entirely different for the bigger models which would of course be a dream but probably not that realistic. I hate that wretched half key height crap and would think that like @Ionising_Radiation mentions a 7730 style layout would be better but please make the 6 lower height keys where the lower row sticks out at the bottom taller! If it is sticking out already make it stick out all the way please and do not skimp on height - it is insulting to power users and I doubt that anybody would complain! I do not really see a satisfying layout that will work without some buttons sticking out that will also fit in the 16" model so the other option would be a rectangular keyboard with an added row that adds 5 more keys for the 18" model or the radical solution that HP employs that would require an external numpad which is not a good option for most people especially if not integrated seamlessly by Dell. I also think that it is about time that workstations also get proper RGB lighting that can then be set up to give proper color coding for programs or other user priorities. HP has understood this by now even though the implementation may not be quite there yet and Dell will hopefully follow soon.

You're probably right that not enough people complain even though display bleeding is really annoying for gaming where there are also a lot of dark sequences. Will have to check my bios options as it is the same for me - backups in place and only concerned about loss or theft. Hope you get some decent performance out of the 7780 - probably not quite as much as out of the M18 but we can't have it all!

There obviously is a point where display bleeding gets annoying and given that it is mostly an issue with mounting and not the display itself you really got to wonder why companies mess it up on a regular basis. Thanks about the password explanation, not currently using a Dell as my daily driver so too bad that it is a proprietary solution.

Congrats on your purchase - could you elaborate a bit on the AW M18 issues you had and on the password system you use? I hope you can sort out the numlock issue as I agree it is annoying not to have control over it.