1610ftw

Obviously you will get a certain amount of portability with a certain amount of other features like battery life, performance, screen size and so on, it is for you to decide what is more important. Except that it isn't beyond a certain point as performance, features and capabilities have been reduced compared to what we used to have both in relative and absolute terms.

Thin and light is always a con as whatever (relatively) great cooling solution a company comes up with in a thin and light could be better in a properly sized laptop. Add to that the space needed for more drives, memory and a big battery that can be readily accessed and a non-destructive way to open the device and you have a lot of factors that make thin and light undesirable. If one was to construct a proper 18" DTR I would draw the line at something like 7lbs and 3cm high at the back - anything less than that will just be too compromised and make the wrong choices just for looks. With a certain minimum height it is also quite easy to stack memory and SSDs which allows double the drives we see in a thin and light. The HP Zbook G9 and G10 show that and they are also quite easy to open. They have other issues but they certainly got that one right and with the stacked drive design we could even go up to 6 NVME drives for serious mobile workstations.

Given the size the performance is indeed quite stunning. If only Lenovo were more ambitious with screen size, memory, storage or modularity. Have you tested how much CPU power it can sustain for a 10 minute CB R23 run? As for not running the fans at max I would assume that you may still have something like stock performance due to your cooling pad, if not more as those temps are quite low.

Who cares about only being able to use 70% of TGP for his favorite game when he can always have 100% of RGB - laptop gamers need to have their priorities in order. 😄

The problem is not labels but that the cards do not use all of the advertised power for certain applications. If I buy a 140W card I do expect it to use that power for everything I choose to do on it. Sure there will be diminishing returns at some point but that is different than these artificial limitations.

With the performance that they achieve it should be.

I guess they could fit a set of longer slots in a Zbook 18 G10 that could also come with a nice and still relatively compact 330W GAN power supply and improved CPU, GPU and total system power limits but I doubt we will see such a beast. Fully agree about the 230W power supply in the Zbook 16 G9 by the way - it is too small and too low in power and often seems to be close to cooking itself - I usually cool it with an additional fan on my Zbook 17 G5 as it gets so hot. Coming back to the 22110 form factor was there ever a laptop that could hold these SSDs except for the MSI GT75? Not to my knowledge and in the GT75 it was more like a means to use some space left over from a second GPU slot of previous generations and not a "normal" design decision:

It is probably best to reset your settings to default. With default settings you should have some kind of fan curve that just lets fans increase in speed with temperature and without a need to manually turn on the fans. If that does not work then there may indeed be some kind of defect or at least there may be something seriously wrong with your windows installation.

Framework reportedly want to make their solution open to others which is great - it means that a manufacturer that is ready to go 18" could use it. It would be so cool to have such a graphics solution in a DTR, hopefully it will find more widespread adoption. Also another potential benefit has not been mentioned: Instead of that graphics module we may also have the ability to connect an external GPU module that could contain the biggest and baddest GPUs out there Add a socketed CPU and we may have upgradeability for a few generations even with Intel when they start with next gen.

This s supposed to be used between two metals so I would not think it is a good idea to put it on an SSD. Regular pads are just fine in my experience as the SSDs produce little heat - the problem with them is airflow and a decent heat sink, often they have none or close to none. I have seen extreme cases like the new MSI top of the line laptops (GT77 chassis) that have close to zero SSD cooling due to virtually no airflow going over them and no heat sinks either whereas two and three models before the GT73 and GT75 had both which results in SSD temperatures that are 15 to 30°C lower depending on load. For the X170 I would suggest to go with one like this for the three SSDs that are next to each other. It helps to have one that extends over all three SSDs as it will improve cooling due to higher total mass and because a single drive being able to offload that much more heat than if it only had a small heatsink of its own:

Sounds like he may have seen it somewhere and pics would be appreciated from my side.

There may be benefits with the H-series processors as they have direct Thunderbolt support on the CPU, it was the same with Alder Lake: They will also be a better option if you do not plan to always use the dedicated GPU.

Preventing any undervolting is a big no-no in my book. Dell really has dropped the ball this generation with their liquid metal disaster with the AW18 and now they prevent undervolting in the 7780. Do they have an official stance on the matter? In any case I bet you are happy with the single core performance!

Same here but we also used to think that about the X170KM-G and now it can use the iGPU. Maybe it is the same situation with the P751/775TM1? What is certain is that somebody would have to enable that functionality.

You are a crazy person 😄 Seems like a waste of a perfectly good card to go from the 3080 to the 3080 Ti. I would probably try to wait for a later model 40xx card instead in order to get something that is actually worth the upgrade - the 4080 or something similar. Edit: Just checked and you will gain maybe 5% in performance going from the 3080 to the 3080Ti so that upgrade definitely won't be worth it, better to gain closer to 50% by going up to the 4080 or similar.

Looking forward to what you can achieve with Throttlestop and PTM7950 - beyond 30K should easily be possible in single runs. I was not so much thinking that an aftermarket heatsink would be nice but I was showing them as an example that they were produced with very low volume for a limited market so surely Dell could have taken the time to improve upon the heatsink of the 7780 with its much higher expected sales volume. It would also help numbers if they just went with a single heatsink for all models with a dGPU that is based on the requirements of the top configuration. I am sure that not too many people would complain about too much cooling.

This handling of situations where sustained power is required can only be called pathetic. While it is not only Dell one would think that with all the feedback they are getting and with their Alienware laptop branch they would be willing to at least allow sustained loads of 80W provided that certain temperature thresholds aren't exceeded. And if the heat sink isn't beefy enough it would be easy enough to improve it. There are several aftermarket heat sinks out there for Clevo laptops that show us that it does not take huge sales numbers to do a redesign and if Dell is too lazy they may want to ask one of the guys who designed some of these monsters:

I guess it all depends from where you are coming from as those units are not that old compared to your Alienware 😄 Yes it is not that easy to find them in good condition and at a good price any day of the week but then they are used and at least in the US offers are pretty abundant if you are observing ebay for a while and I am sure there are other places where you can find deals. If you look for something newer that is fully socketed then indeed the X170 is your best bet but it will cost you more and you got to be patient when waiting for a good deal and cheaper ones may have some cosmetic issues. Best of luck getting your GPU or motherboard fixed so that the AW17 R1 will live to game another day.

I also got some branded stuff but I do not even know if it is for real as I have no idea how the branded stuff is supposed to look... So you got some more from ebuy recently and saw an improvement over the no-name stuff?

Do you have a link to the better pad? Looks like I will need some more soon once I am through all of our laptops here 😄

In case you cannot save your Alienware you may want to also look into the MSI GT75 - it is quite old now but it has the works when it comes to options and can be had for as low as 600$ with 4 cores: - overclocking and undervolting with very good (MXM) GPU performance for the 1080 models that can sustain about 200W for a 8000+ Time Spy GPU score, the CPU can sustain south of 100W - very good accessibility as long as you do not have to access anything above the motherboard but that is doable, too I am told but I have never had to do it on mine - very good 1080p 120 Hz screen (4k is rare) but should also take QHD and 4K screens or even an 18" ugprade if you are into putting in another screen - 10G ethernet for the first two generations - no other laptops ever had that - take that puny 2.5G! - 4 memory slots with up to 64GB and 4 drive bays for storage (3x m2 and 1x 2.5") with excellent cooling - very nice mechanical keyboard but you got to be able to tolerate "unique" key placement - excellent fan control options and very quiet in normal use - excellent sound, among the best and also plays quite loud - overall among best in class connectivity And you did not mention them but I have looked at Clevo P775 / P870 prices and they have been going for as low as 600$ it seems with a 1080 so they would be excellent deals for a fully upgradeable and modular platform. That is if you can put up with their subpar keyboard and not very exciting base chassis and buggy software. So you will possibly want to put more work into them but it also means that you CAN put more work into them and the threads in the Clevo section prove it 😄 If you start out with at least the DM3 versions then you can always upgrade from that later with the final options being 9900K, 3080 and even special heatsinks with and without watercooling. The rabbit hole goes very deep... Oh and X170SM-G with 10900K and 2080 Super have been as low as 1100$ lately which was a steal. If you want more drives and 10 cores it will be preferable to the X170KM-G. No comment on recent BGA books but you may get best bang for the buck CPU and GPU performance out of the usual suspects with a 3070 or 3070 Ti, there are even a bunch of good screen options. Pride of ownership you will obviously not get and I will leave it to others to make recommendations there as I have no interest in them.

In theory if somebody did a really good job on your X170 you may not need the PTM 7950 but it is likely you will see some improvement at least.

Hard to say, what temps do you get at max fans in a run of Time Spy or what are your Cinebench CR23 numbers and temps? Any undervolting / overclocking? If you are not into that kind of thing I would suggest to just apply some PTM 7950 if your temps are too high - it may not be the ultimate solution with a CPU heat spreader but it is long lasting so you will not have to redo it if you don't want to.

Good luck and please let us know, looks like it may be a rather tight fit.

Looks like my last PTM 7950 pad application has settled a bit as core temp differences are now down to 5°C from 7°C on the day of the application. Not bad coming from a 17°C difference. I also have used it on the IHS of an 8700K and 9900K where intra-core differences have also come down to 5° and 7°C from over 10°C before. Got my PTM 7950 from Ali Express and will probably buy from them again as so far it has worked extraordinarily well and there is very little guesswork as to how it is best applied.