1610ftw

Here is a bunch of QHD 165 Hz screens: https://www.panelook.com/modelsearch.php?op=advancedsearch&order=panel_id&inch_low=1730&inch_high=1730&resolution_pixels=8380&vertical_frequency=165 You can also filter for 240 Hz. Forum member @JeanLegi successfully made the switch to QHD with one of the above screens:

Not sure if it would have been so easy for them to get access to those panels but it looks like they are going for thin and light anyway so a bigger panel would not have helped with that. Even back when Alienware, Asus and MSI still had 18.4" panels Clevo did only have 17.3 panels so I am not sure they would be willing to go that route even with a heavier model - missed opportunity in any case. You can also see the level of excitement for it when you look at its thread in the Sager / Clevo section - oh wait, nobody bothered to start an X370 thread...

It would be nice to get those 64GB memory sticks but I will not bet the house on it 🙂 Alienware did away with 4 slots after the first 51m so I would be very surprised if they returned. For my work I prefer 4 SSD slots, 4 memory slots and RGB lighting on the keyboard in order to color code certain shortcuts and currently only MSI produces such a machine and sadly with the new GT77 starting in February they will drop the 4th SSD slot.

It would be more honest to just retire the X-series. This is insulting.

Oh, I overread the A - those indeed would not help!

There were some last year but you had to sell a kidney to get them new, I think it got as high as the RTX A4500? If you got one then that means you will not be able to buy a 4090 MXM this year as that one will cost you two kidneys 😄

So let's make it 250W TGP with air and 300W with watercooling - will be a lot more than we have now. As for TIM many manufacturers already offer liquid metal or phase change pads, that helps, the next step would be vapor chambers and bigger ones at that. It can obviously be done as laptops from the past did better even without vpor chambers and technology for cooling has improved since then. The next Intel socket that should be introduiced towards the end of this year should be good for about 2 or 3 CPU generations and AM5 for 4 or 5 - you obviously want to introduce a socketed CPU at the right time and not at the end of a cycle and like motherboards there would have to be some support. Benefits for the end user would not just be to have a socketed CPU but to choose which CPU to use. Want a lesser CPU with a 4080 or 4090? Not possible at this point with most manufacturers, same for a big CPU with a lesser GPU. That could easily be addressed and would really help those of us who do not need the top CPU AND GPU as especially the big GPUs cost a lot and are somehow forced on the buyer as he has to buy them together with a high end GPU.

Question is how much more it would have to cost. Something like the MSI GT77 is not that far away and would only need a CPU socket and vapor chamber cooling for substantial improvements and a slightly larger chassis for an 18" screen. A halo product has positive effects in and of itself so there would be some trickle down effect having the greatest and the best. Die size works for us - a 4090 desktop die has an almost twice as big die size as a 1080 and that was cooled quite well even going up to 200W. With close to twice the die size and advancements in cooling it would most probably be easier to cool a 4090 die at 300W TGP than a 1080W running at 180W TGP due to reduced thermal density. Nobody is really expecting to run a 4090 in a laptop at 450W but even 300W would be feasible with proper cooling design although a more realistic goal would probably be 250 to 275W with the 4090 desktop die and a total of 400W between the GPU and CPU. Even at 250W I would not be surprised if the 4090 die would give about 50% better performance than the current 4080 die used in the laptop 4090. Or the simplest approach with still very good results would be to "only" go with a socketed CPU and allow a power limit of up to 250W for the current 4090 chip - even the 4080 chip can do a lot more if we give it more power as currently it is only getting a bit more than half of its designed TGP. So there are options and I do not think that they would be that expensive as a socketed CPU has ben offered by Clevo in a 15" chassis and that cannot have been too successful and MSI had those , too some years ago and neither were they extremely expensive nor sold in a way that even made the customer aware they existed. So there is some room for improvement with some marketing and costs can be exaggerated for the sake of not having to answer the real reason for these not being released which is that the industry does not believe in high performance any more but mostly in slim and light even in their top models. Has been done by Asus and Tongfang/Uniwill and I have not heard of too many issues with the second approach, Asus I do not have much experience with and it was also impractical due to size.. Also with the Uniwill approach it is just tacked on to a normal system - all it does add if you do not use it is a little height and weight, probably 2 or 3mm and about 100g. It is a simple and very effective solution for people who want to use it but it can also not be used/offered for people who aren't that extreme and a very powerful system could still be offered without it.

About the hideous surcharges for the top cards: For gaming on the road a 4070 should easily handle a QHD screen as it should offer slightly above 3080 Ti performance. QHD is about the amount of detail one can resolve without the nose glued to the screen, even at 18". That leaves 1300 Euro in the above case that can be used towards upgrading the desktop PC - not too bad 😄 Of course we can expect or already know that many of the higher end laptops will not even offer a 4070 option but only the 4080 or 4090 - so much for laptops not needing to be modular. For my X170KM-G I could choose the fastest CPU with only the smallest CPU and there were three of them to choose from - not any more I guess...

The tragic thing is that we have a lot of capability these days but no ambition - not from Nvidia, not from the manufacturers and not from the customers most of all. If you look at a few tech channel guys around youtube you will now find them mentioning 6 to 7 lbs laptops as super heavy and huge when in weight they are below former 15" DTRs and in volume they are probably smaller, too. Before it was important to have a powerful laptop now it is about holding it with one hand apparently, no idea what this is all about: So not much is coming out of the capability to build a really good 8 to 9 lbs DTR with a vapor chamber and possibly water cooling when people mainly buy 14" and therefore companies innovate in those market segments? I will give it to MSI that they are the only company that still has good performance and most if not all DTR features in a less gamey chassis with the GT77 but I would much have preferred a GT88 with a socketed CPU now that socketed GPUs are obviously off the table and most of all with a bigger than 250W combined power limit - looks like this is a new invisible barrier nobody dares to cross.

It should be great - except if you need 128GB memory. Where else are we supposed to get that if not in the biggest DTR of this generation? Looks like the MSI GT77 and its Creator variant will remain the only high performance options with 4 memory slots but they don't have an 18" screen...

Thanks, I think I know that user from German forums. I can only remember one user who I believe was from Hungary - triturbo. Probably not the same guy as I only remember that he had the HP Elitebook 8740.

Glad you found it - do you have the name of the thread and the subforum for me? We also have a T-shaped heatsink and a 2080 🙂

Shouldn't it be in the NBR Archive? Can you remember where it was posted so that we can look for it?

That power connector is a mystery - it is obviously very shitty and falls off all the time yet it has been used in several Clevo, MSI and I am sure other laptops, too. The new connector on the other hand that is used by Clevo for the X170 and by MSI in newer units, too is a lot better and does not come out as easily any more - real progress for a change.

It is not like you missed much - as has been predicted we got a bunch of "behemoths" with an 18" screen that are mostly less big and powerful with regard to cooling capabilities than 17" laptops used to be and at least on paper they do not look like cooling has improved much over the last generation. Actual performance that will of course still be higher due to increased CPU and GPU performance. Still it is quite funny that with the extremely power hungry Intel GPUs a combined load of 240 to 250W is considered acceptable which leaves only 65 to 75W for the CPU when 175W is going to the GPU. The only company that could possibly offer more performance is Dell with the Alienware 18 that is about one third heavier than the competition so possibly some of that is going into a higher performance vapor chamber that might dissipate closer to 300W.

I can definitely understand - not something that I would long to do myself 🙂 There are more things you can do that may add up: Tweak the fit of the heatsink use a cooling pad lift the back of the laptop with a stand adjust undervolting reduce clock speeds If you gain a little with each option that may already be enough.

Biggest laptop disappointment of CES. It is probably the X370 which I would call an imposter as it is so inferior to the original idea of the X series. Let's look what features it offers that could be associated with the top of the line status of the X-series or ported over from the X170: socketed CPU? nope top of the line BGA CPU? nope socketed GPU? nope full fat vapor chamber? nope 4 memory slots? nope 4 storage slots? nope 18" screen? nope X-name to impress the gullible? Check! That water cooled Tongfang / Uniwill actually looks a lot more tempting if I was only looking for 2 + 2 memory + storage and a 17" screen.

@win32asmguyshould at least get a member of the month award for that find - lots of users now with more GPU power 🙂

The 8770W is in a class by itself - VERY good build and the P775 is nice but no match for it, especially not regarding the durability of the surfaces. If I was you I would rather cover the ugly ONE logo and in the process the whole lid except for the fake metail parts maybe and you will not have to worry about it any more 🙂 To add to what @srs2236 said I would just downclock the 9900K a little. You do not really need that much all core performance and even in single core backing off a little will not hurt you much outside of benching in Cinebench maybe. So I would just drop those speeds a bit for normal operation until you do not exceed 80 degrees any more except in extreme cases - I doubt it will cost you more than a few percent in games. You may also want to compare your temps in certain benchmarks with other users and also the wattage that your system pulls - if you can sustain a lot less than other then it is time for another repaste / heatsink readjustment and possibly a delid!

AGA was a great concept and according to some users it still works with the 4090 connected to for example an Alienware 51m. You do not get 100% desktop level performance but a lot better performance than what will be possible with the upcoming mobile 4090. The problem for Alienware ist that one only needs a new card that doesn't even have to be purchased from them to increase the performance by a lot, we are talking about the Time Spy Exteme graphics score going from ca. 5000 to over 17000: https://www.3dmark.com/spy/31652567 Kind of makes the AW 51m with a 10900K a tempting proposition for 4k gaming with a laptop...

The 4090 looks good but at not much more than half the TGP it will suffer heavily even compared to the desktop 4080 it is based on. 4080 still looks decent but the 4070 is kind of the new 3060 as it really is suffering with regard to memory. It should have been at least 10 and not 8GB as otherwise one might as well just go with the 4060 that has enough power for some QHD gaming. Will be interesting to see how the pricing turns out to be but the best bang for the buck (or the least disappointing purchase if one has to get one of these) might be found with the 4080 and 4060.

And this is why soldered CPUs are so annoying - you have to play the silicon lottery with a whole laptop and not just with a CPU - looks like you went all the way to find your golden sample 🙂

We kind of have a duopoly here and even without price fixing it can easily lead to higher prices. One company goes first and introduces at a relatively high price as it can still go lower if necessary (Nvidia) and then company number two follows and can easily set its price point to get a good share of the market while still making a bigger than usual profit. And yes, we need not consider Intel and Apple as they do not play a role for this type of market and its pricing. Of course it is not a life necessity to get the latest and greatest GPU so the customer has some power and he can exercise it by not buying which to a degree seems to have happened with the 4080 which still should cost triple digits and not more but people will probably start buying sooner and if they do one could argue that Nvidia has found the correct price point. The 4090 has a justified price imo - it is an extreme card at an extreme price but it delivers and it is the 4080 that is out of line as the second tier used to be the value for money card.

Yep, looks like the end game is over actually. Companies like MSI and Asus could give us a platform with a socketed CPU if they wanted as they also do motherboards and updating micro codes should be possible for them across generations if they do not choose unsuitable chipsets. Clearly they do not want to do that and Clevo apparently cannot do it but what imo really kills any DTR from a performance perspective is the GPU side, not the CPUs. Looking at the last generation I can get over 24.5K on several stock laptops with the 12900/12950HX over 10 minutes on Cinebench and I can get over 26K in one run with a whole bunch of them, not too bad. That is not too far off from a stock 12900K. It is not the same but given the form factor it is actually reasonably close when comparing air cooled to air cooled even with some overclocking/undervolting, not a whole different ballgame. And then there would always be the option to go socketed of course, it is not like it would depend that much on Intel to help out as clearly the socketed CPUs are freely available. The performance difference from BGA laptop to LGA desktop may increase a little bit with this generation but the 13900HX will probably be not that far behind the 13900K as long as we again compare air cooled systems. On the GPU side on the other hand Nvidia has gone down a path where the GPUs are so gimped that it does not really matter if they are soldered or MXM based any more as they are so far behind that it now is questionable if the top laptop GPU can even bench more than half as well as the top desktop CPU in a number of benchmarks and real world applications and games will suffer, too. If I was into high performance GPUs (which I am not) I would never want to pay a premium for a card that maybe can keep up with the 4070 Ti but not more but then I predict that there will not be a lot of talk about this which is unfortunate as Nvidia could have done a lot better with this generation of mobile GPUs. And yes it is even sadder that even the best of the older DTR's cannot be properly upgraded so they are falling behind a lot first on CPU with the last generation and now with this generation also on the GPU front unless some third party company will again produce MXM modules that could possibly be used in our DTRs.