1610ftw

I would want to point out a few more differences about these Alienware laptops compared to the X170: the heatsink in the R1 is not as capable as the heatsink in the Clevo but the heatsink in the R2 is probably closer there are different display panels for the Clevo, you have a selection of 1080p 144 and 300HZ, QHD 165 and 240Hz and UHD 60 and supposedly also 120Hz serviceability of the Clevo is better than the Alienware which can affect you if you are into frequently working on your laptop the palm rest on the Clevo is aluminium , the palmrest on the Alienwares is rather rubbery and usually wears off to a degree the Clevo will take 3 x NVME SSDs and one m2 Sata SSD, the Alienware R1 will only take 2 NVME SSDs and a 2.5" Sata SSD, not sure about the R2

Let me check my SM-G, I have upgraded to such a panel. OK, just had a look and there is no g-sync option.

Happy to help, let us know how it goes! Did you consider QHD? There is a 165Hz option that also should work very well with the 3080.

300Hz: AU Optronics B173HAN05.1

128GB supposedly causes issues with Thunderbolt on the P870 chassis, even the latest ones. I have not tried it but that is a serious limitations when using a Thunderbolt docking station to for example support 10G. Bios support for the X170 has matured and they can be dialed in very well, certainly enough to in my experience handle a bit more heat in CPU only loads which is also needed with two more cores. The unified heatsink design is a bit better suited to that. Obviously fully maxed out and running on all cylinders the DM3 will allow for significantly higher single GPU heat dissipation due to having been built to handle two GPUs. I fully agree that the difference in gaming will probably be very little with stock cards. Also it seems that the P870DM3 weighs over 2 lbs more than the X170 - truly a monster 🙂 As I am mostly interested in CPU power and drive support apart from memory I was not that fond of the P870 chassis as it does not do that much for the CPU especially on the power delivery side but then with that crazy add-on MXM card even early models could be extended to take 6" NVME SSDs albeit at a price. That is pretty cool! I still have an early DM here and I may play around with it a little to see if I can get it to accept 128GB and then I will see how well the Thunderbolt still works after that while also using a 9900K 🙂 In any case I love the P870 and I wish it would have had a true successor in a proper X370 with a socketed CPU that can take up to the 13900K and an MXM GPU but lacking that the X170 ticks a few boxes for me that the P870 doesn't - love them both.

Nice write-up! Unless you want to do a lot of CPU-heavy stuff with a bit more portability the P870 will be fine. Imo the X170 has a number of advantages for heavy CPU-use / memory intensive / mobile workstation use: - works better and with faster memory at 128GB - 10 cores run roughly as quiet as 8 cores in the P870 - color coding via RGB keys is possible on the X170, keyboard is also better overall - not a lightweight but weighs about 1 to 1.5 lbs less than a P870DM(3) - on the go it is also nice to have better speakers Also I checked out a youtube video of somebody comparing gaming with the 9900K / 10900K and 12900K and I believe a 4090. There was quite a jump in performance going from the 9900K to the 10900K which surprised me. The biggest downsides imo: - The most stupid ever power supply solution - it boggles the mind how Clevo could ever have come up with that - pretty crappy firmware that did not really work well with 11th gen Intel in the KM-G - 4th SSD slot in the KM-G is not working when a 10th gen CPU is used

@Rengsey R. H. Jr. just had to check you are still on the forum, any news about this? Apart from the missing heatsink did you ever get this to run long enough to see if the GPU would even be properly recognized in that GT75? I would think this is the first step before putting a lot of effort in a cooling solution only to find out that it is not that easy to get the card to run properly in the GT75 that for its later models does not have an iGPU option to fall back on..

There is no 18" OLED plus OLED has an issue with burn-in and reduction of light output in TVs and it depends on mostly non-static images and added use cycles at night to mitigate that burn in. Could be more of an issue with laptops depending on how they are run. I also think that they suffer from relatively high power consumption at a given brightness which is not very helpful in a laptop. For watching movies on TV's they are however very nice to look at and I like them a lot, just not sure they are the best option for laptops.

Ah, I misread, thought that was the AX200. Shame that all those superhigh 6E and 7 speeds as of now seem to be reserved for W11.

Strongly doubt that will fit. Just get the AX210 and be done with it. If you have W11 on your X170 you should also look into a 6E router if you are close enough to it when you need WiFi.

certainly the biggest upgrade for gaming and 2080 prices are quite affordable these days

That is a nice machine! The 9900KS is not needed though. You can even get 5 GHz on two cores with a 9900 and the 4.6 all cores that are possible with it are already beyond what I would recommend you to run on your chassis, the power delivery just isn't made for it. So if you "only" need 8 multi threaded cores and 5 GHz on up to 2 cores you can go for a 9900, 9900K or 9900KF. Especially the K variants are in my experience more efficient on average and therefore consume less for a given multiplier so they may be preferable but also more expensive. Something like 5/4.8/4.6/4.0 to 4.4 for 2/4/6/8 cores will be possible with all of the CPUs and with a lower 6 and 8 core speed you will keep your Clevo running cooler and longer.

Nice panel indeed but with the connector on the other side. This is a regular panel: and here the UHD 120Hz panel:

The part numbers are from Clevo not Eurocom and I can confirm that cables for 1080p 144 and 4K 60 panels are different. I do not think that ánybody has claimed that only these panels can be used but the cables only go so far. For example a more modern QHD 165Hz or 240Hz panel will not fit easily as the connector is in the wrong position.

kylpasta - I like that 😄 This guy also has some promising results: Will be interesting to see a comparison with PTM7950. The biggest benefit of these could be that this is a what you see is what you get solution. No curing at first and then degradation after a relatively short timespan. This could last longer that most paste and also allow to work on laptop heatsinks more often where it is also paramount to cool other parts. Optimizing that was not so great with regular paste or some LM solutions and most of all messy.

Only 1080p 60 but it shouldn`t be too difficult to get another cable to support other displays: https://eurocom.com/ec/lcd()upgrade

You can just get a regular UK power cable to connect to the power supply. You can just use one from the X170 and you can even use the power brick from the X170.

I agree that it is a great price and unlikely to fall much more when you buy new.

Behold the Titan 18 HX, 4 memory slots, 4 SSD slots: https://wccftech.com/msi-titan-18-hx-gaming-laptop-worlds-first-18-4k-120hz-miniled-display-14900hx-rtx-4090/ Great color combination - I guess MSI is making sure that nobody would mistake it for a workstation... UK price will probably be close to double what @wilpang is asked for that GT77 HX.

As BGA books go It is a very good / the only choice if you need more than two SSDs and/or 96GB memory and a very bright screen and I doubt the price will go down that much more. The mechanical keyboard also is very nice although the GT75 keyboard still is king of the hill imo. As is often the case MSI is also good for undervolting and overclocking of the CPU. One caveat is that this is very deep which will make it a difficult fit for most backpacks.

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.