1610ftw

Make that for laptops keeping up with desktops, being upgradable and easily serviceable. On their own the performance can certainly be impressive and laptops are just more portable than your average high end watercooling rig - at least that has improved even though it has improved to the detriment of performance. But yeah, much less fun in getting a BGA book and about the only thing you can do without voiding the warranty is to tinker with the thermal paste. What bugs me the most is that not even the CPUs can be swapped any more as this would be easy and not depend on a certain green, red or blue GPU company supporting manufacturers with hardware. But then without help in updating microcode to support all CPUs that fit on a socket this would again be turning out to be a one generation solution like almost all of the last Alienwares, Clevos and MSIs that had a socketed CPU.

Looks like the tragic loss of the Clevo DTR team at the 2021 company outing

I still like socketed designs as they are really nice for tinkering and when out of warranty they give you a lot more options / less costs with defects but indeed until I see it I will not believe that we get an upgradable laptop again with intergenerational upgradability like we had for so many years with the Clevo units for CPU and GPU. Even then this was all mainly aftermarket as the manufacturers never officially supported this at a price that could be considered interesting so this is something else to consider. I hope you will be right that we get some OLED or Mini LED, too as the first new screen where we have specs is a classic TFT model but with 165Hz and 480(!)Hz: https://www.panelook.com/resmodlist.php?st=&pl=&so_attr=&resolutions[]=8400&panel_size_inch=1800 And I would definitely tell you that getting the X170 is a good idea - it even has a sub and can get very loud which is rare for a laptop.

At least they do not get up your hopes like Clevo and Alienware before only to then offer no upgrades whatsoever. I got the X170KM-G here and I knew there would not be any CPU upgrades but it is getting really disappointing when there are also no GPU upgrades. But then as an owner of the last socketed Clevo you know what I am talking about...

Sad to hear it go - you got PM.

One could get the impression that you kind of like Alienware laptops 😉 Indeed truly intergenerational upgrades seem to be a thing of the past as even in cases where the hardware would easily support it for CPUs neither Clevo nor Dell have come through for us. Not sure about the panel as so far only a 2560 x 1600 panel has popped up (and that would be my preference) but I would expect that we will see both that resolution and a 3840 x 2400 option. Maybe not right from the start but if 18" catches on.

Upgradability has mostly become a tease - just look at the last Clevo notebooks with sockets - no upgrades possible for the last 17.3" and the two last 15.6" laptops. I still welcome the serviceability with potentially cheaper repairs and the chance to go for the highest possible CPU with a lesser GPU but there isn't something like a real upgradability any more. As for being skinny I think this is a given and I resent it almost as much as the BGA build.

Probably a BGA book but still pretty cool to see 18" make a comeback. Wouldn't be surprised to also see an MSI GT88, a Dell 7880 or a Zbook 18.

Will have to check with the new unlocked firmware but when I tried with the old locked firmware it wasn't possible.

Has anybody already activated Optimus and checked out how much battery life improves? I am planning to possibly have a quick look this week after updating the bios on mine but it would be cool to hear from other members. Also is there any way to use the 4th SSD slot with a 10900K? It is really annoying to lose one SSD slot but I am not interested in downgrading from 10 to 8 cores.

Speaking of Macrium, yesterday my 1TB WD 850 system SSD disappeared and my 7760 would not boot any more. Turns out that it was the SSD after all after I first had a suspicion it was the PCIE 4.0 slot. Unfortunately for me I tried another SSD in there and wanted to do it the quick and dirty way as the SSD was a bit too large for the Dell supplied SSD bracket and then I saw this morning that there was the small switch that only gets pressed down when using the bracket - helps to have enough light when doing that kind of work 😄 In any case the backup went really well as I had internal backups up to 1 hours before the crash and my preconfigured recovery pen drive and a spare SSD, too. Could have happened while I was away and it would not have been much of an issue. So very pleased with Macrium - that was quick and effortless or at least it would have been if I had not missed that tiny black switch....

Yep, completely unnecessary and not smart at all to complicate fan control like that once you realize that not all users have the same goals and tolerance to noise - impossible to please everybody. Not sure though I would hold the bios settings against HP in particular - they probably do not expect a normal user to spend any substantial amount of time in the bios and my Dell also tends to get louder when in its bios for a while.

I think that I must have about a dozen of those licences by now - always buy them in packs of 4 🙂

That is a good situation to be in 🙂

If you are looking at 16" it is hard - if pressed I would probably right now go with the thick 7670 as there is a solution for fan noise from what I hear but only if I needed at most 32 or 64GB memory as I find the memory prices from Dell extortionist. HP will probably do nothing to address the fan issues - they have been lacking in that regard for years which is truly puzzling. It would be no problem to allow for manual adjustments with built in fail safes for people who overdo it.

With regard to hardware and performance the CreatorPro X17 / GT77 are overall the best DTRs of this generation, postiives: very high maximum CPU performance and still relatively high sustained performance best in class GPU performance very nice keyboard keys fans are generally very quiet and can be configured to one's taste extensive bios options regular memory that can be upgraded properly, up to 128GB 4 x NVME SSD slots, up to 32 TB relatively good battery life of 6+ hours relatively light weight at a bit more than 7 lbs Downsides: CPU and GPU are soldered (could be a concern when warranty has expired but you can get 4 years over here) Screens are UHD only the Case is very deep funny keyboard layout speakers have good volume but little bass for an overall underwhelming experience I will not comment on looks as they are not that bad imo, just not great. I doubt it is different versions as much as it is a generally less demanding review. Look at the CB R23 multicore result - very bad numbers for this model and for an 8+8 core HX processor in general but he does not even mention it as an issue, same for the GPU scores. He is not critical of that part of the performance so he may also be forgiving with regard to fan noise. In any case even if it now was more quiet the last generations that I have tested all had the annoying tendency to ramp fans up and down a lot - very annoying and nothing that can be circumvented as HP uses their own AI/ machine learning for the fans - one cannot make these things up they are so silly. With regard to Linux support I could not comment on that but if that is an issue it would indeed be a big downside.

Back in the days workstations used to have an optical drive and at least one and often 2 2.5" drives. Those drives took up space that would have been sufficient for 5 to 8 M2 SSDs and Lenovo dares o give us 2 - in a workstation this is laughable. Both @win32asmguyand @DarginMahkumwould obviously like to differ. With regard to fan noise HP have gone out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot with their lack of configurability and overzealous power limits for some time now - shame. This generation I would only go with an MSI - too many compromises with the others even though MSI do also have their issues..

OK, understood, looking forward to hear your thoughts! The problem will be that it is almost only an interesting solution for people who had an SLI laptop and who want more than one added NVME SSD as there is already a single NVME version out there. I always thought it was a bad use of board space to have only one NVME drive on a big MXM module!

I did a search and indeed mostly found links to Taobao or other Chinese sites. That is an interesting MXM to NVME card you have posted, do you have a source and price for it? And does it automatically configure the two NVME SSDs on there as a hardware RAID?

As Dell has been relatively quiet through all of that it is possible that the performance issues do indeed fail to make waves where it counts - does not bode well for the next generation either.

So the plan is to update our XMG Zenith variant of the P870TM-G with a better CPU and I am looking at the 9900 variants and the 10980HK. 9900K still seem to be hard to find at a good price so I have narrowed down the search to the 9900KF or the QTJ1 10980HK. @ViktorV are you aware of a good source for that QTJ1 10980HK chip?

I ran into this some time ago and had to switch from 6 cores to 8 cores - soldered CPU means buying a new laptop instead of getting a new CPU - no thanks to all the manufacturers of BGA books 😞

That is the reason why I was very sceptical of the value proposition of this generation - CAMM memory may catch on but until it does it can only be bought at Dell at their usual inflated prices for memory and storage. Try getting 128GB of normal memory for any other workstation from HP, Lenovo or MSI and then 128GB from Dell - big difference. You can get good aftermarket prices on regular modules that can be used for other manufacturers and therefore you can buy their workstations with minimum memory form the factory and save a lot. And when you sell the workstation you can sell off 2 or 4 of the modules you bought separately on the used market before selling your workstation as most people will be more than happy with less memory. Not so with Dell where you have to get one single module that is oversized for just about everybody else and that is very inflexible both when one is buying or selling as long as it is only available from them - bad deal until CAMM catches on.

How about having only one motherboard and then attach everything and be done? Doesn't get any simpler than that and users could do it themselves. We used to have this but not any more. As for the vapor chamber I completely agree that they should have it and I will go one further and suggest that the user can select the cooling solution he prefers for lower tier product in order to get maximum cooling. And excessive soldering is really horrible and producing needless e-waste, it also leads to hideously overpriced spare parts like a 2000$ vs a 500$ motherboard.

I think it has been posted here before. The funny thing is that they sent him two and both performed miserably. I think that the MSI laptops he had were about 50% faster and he probably hoped for similar performance but with an all around more businesslike approach from Dell - can't have it all as it turns out.