Aaron44126

Eh. Sort of opposite situation here. I spent the last two months trying Linux and in the end decided to just go and buy a MacBook. We'll see how it turns out...

Well, this was a fun two-month experiment, but it is coming to an end. One reason I am ending it is ongoing frustrations with my Dell laptop hardware and the direction they are taking their products in general. (My posts in the Precision 7X70 threads go into this.) Another is the lack of access to professional/commercial software, which I decided that I do actually want to use. (Visual Studio proper, Adobe products, Outlook/OneNote/OneDrive, etc.). I've been bouncing to a VM to use these but that's not really the workflow that I want. The final kicker is basically KDE's flakiness. I think that they just don't have the people/resources to deliver a fully polished experience. I keep having to add workarounds to get the behavior that I want when I feel that it should be just there. I already disqualified GNOME (see above) and none of the other DE's look like they have the functions that I want from a power user OS... at least any more readily available without tweaking than KDE does. Examples of niggling issues with KDE: At 200% DPI scaling (using X11), a maximized window of a QT application leaves an empty row of pixels along the bottom of the screen. This is not the case with GTK apps, so you could see a GTK app poking out from behind a QT app. There has been a bug report on this since 2019 with no action to fix it. It tries to take control of my keyboard backlight, overriding the BIOS behavior and forcing it off when the system is idle, but sometimes it does not remember to turn it back on. (I put in a script to fix that.) No option to automatically disable the touchpad when a USB mouse is connected (...I could script that as well). Moving the mouse at the lock screen will prompt for a fingerprint read, which will time out after 60 seconds if I am not ready for it (i.e. just moving the laptop from one room to another), so I have to intentionally botch the login and wait for a few seconds before it will be ready to try the fingerprint read again. As if to push me over the edge, last night while I was just working in OneNote on the VM, the system went and visually locked up. (Mouse could move but nothing actually worked. Except, the system was still up and running because stuff that I typed in OneNote would still be synced in to the cloud notebook, which I could also see on my phone.) This is not an exhaustive list. Stuff like this keeps popping up. It's like lots of little paper cuts. What to do? Well, I'm not going back to Windows. I put in a lot of thought and investigation before deciding on this next step. I'm going to give macOS a go. I'm ordering a maxed out MacBook Pro 16" and it should be here Wednesday Tuesday. (If I'm going to have a system that is a pain to repair, let's at least have it be one that is very well engineered.) I'll probably sell the Precision 7770 and that will make up for much of the expense of buying the MacBook. I'm quite familiar with macOS, I used to work with it professionally, so I feel like I know what I am getting in to. Unlike Linux, nearly all of the apps that I want are available on macOS. I thought about holding out for Framework, I am very interested in the direction that they are going. But, it'll probably be a few years yet before they deliver what I want (larger system with a 4K-or-better display that can hold multiple SSDs in addition to a dGPU) and even then there is the fact that I'd have to run either Windows or Linux on it, neither of which I seem to want. Up above, I gave three reasons why I felt like macOS is a non-starter, which I will address: MacBook keyboard layout. Well, since switching to Linux I have been trying out a different keyboard layout, leaving "num lock" turned off and using the home/end/pgup/pgdown buttons over there, and the top row of keys for numbers when I would normally use the keypad. (This is as opposed to remapping right alt/ctrl and F11/F12 keys to handle those functions, to make up for Dell's keyboard layout deficiencies.) It took a week or so but I adapted to it fine. So, I'm willing to try out using the Mac keyboard layout with no/few remappings. I think it'll be OK. No removable storage. Well, this is definitely disappointing. They offer 8TB which is not enough for me to have everything in one spot, which I would really like to have, but I think that I can make it work by also taking the large SSDs currently in my Precision and using them as NAS storage instead and that will hold my more "archival" stuff. Poor gaming library. ...I'm encouraged by recent activity in this area, both from CrossOver and also Apple's own new game porting toolkit, made available just earlier this month, which allows you to basically attempt to run any Windows game on macOS. People are reporting success running big games like Elden Ring. It might not be at the same spot as Linux+Steam+Proton is just yet, but its heading in the right direction with actual momentum which is good enough for me. I have no shortage of games to play that will work. Apple putting that toolkit out makes me think that they have no plans to pull Rosetta 2 away in the near future. Also, I do a fair amount of console emulation and each of the big emulators of recent Nintendo consoles (yuzu/Ryujinx/Cemu) have made big strides over the past year-ish in getting a proper macOS version off of the ground. Older stuff will work fine in RetroArch which I am already familiar with from using it on both Linux and Windows. I'm also planning to heavily leverage the Homebrew repos and casks to have a Linux-esque package management experience. Some work that I did in Linux to manage process priority/affinity/etc. will translate pretty easily to macOS. I'm already somewhat in the Apple ecosystem (iPhone/Apple Watch) so the ability to tie those products together more seamlessly is also nice. I'll install the ARM version of Windows in VMware Fusion for the odd case where I need to use a Windows app not available on macOS. I'm excited to see how this goes. But that will be a story for a different thread (...if I even go into it here). [Edit] Order is in...

Sigh. Very disappointed in the lack of "precision" with regards to this new display enclosure + panel that I received. It is a refurbished part — clearly labeled as such on the packaging. That made me nervous out of the gate. First off, it was completely covered with very sticky plastic stuff that I had to pull off. I was worried that I was going to damage the display just by doing that. I fire it up and the first thing I noticed were visible bits of adhesive glue stuff sticking up from inside of the bottom bezel edge. Now, I was wondering about the attention to detail given by whoever put this refurb together. I removed the bezel and pulled those off without much trouble. The next thing that I noticed was that the bottom few rows of pixels are covered up by the plastic bezel. The screen is mounted too low in the enclosure. It was also slightly worse on the right side. I could scoot the mouse cursor along the bottom of the screen — on Linux, at least with my cursor, maybe six pixels stick up out of the bottom when I do this — on the left edge, I could only see two pixels of the cursor, and it would "disappear" as I moved it over towards the right. Pulling up the corner of the bezel, I could see what I expected in the corner of the screen, and it would be covered up as soon as I snapped the bezel back on. I pulled the bezel off entirely to see if anything could be done about that. Unlike previously, this one does not have visible adhesive pull-tabs so I couldn't try to remount it even if I wanted to (...which I don't...), without some prying or heating that might damage the display. I tried to see if I could nudge the display panel up slightly but it would not budge. There was also a substantial backlight bleed / pressure issue in one spot along the top but that was resolved after removing the bezel and snapping it back on, like last time. I also spotted backlight spilling out of the bottom of the enclosure and shining on the bottom left hinge. That was resolved by pulling up that bit of the bezel and putting some black electrical tape in place to stop the bleed. Despite the issues, after doing the work described above I ended up completely satisfied with the panel, other than the issue with the bottom rows of pixels being covered by the plastic bezel ... which I would treat as a deal-breaker. Before calling Dell to complain, I decided to check and see if I could manipulate the bezel into snapping on in a different way. I started by bending the bezel's plastic tabs a little so that it could mount in a slightly lower position, and I had some success fixing the bottom corners in this way. ...As I was working towards fixing the bottom-center, messing with the bezel too much eventually did me in. The display stopped working. I must have jostled the display-side of the eDP cable in the wrong way when pulling off the bottom edge — there is a lot of adhesive there and it tends to get stuck to the silver tape stuff that is on the bottom of the panel and the eDP cable runs right behind that. I put the old display back in and it works, but it still looks like there is a tiny bug stuck in the screen. So, Dell is sending a replacement display panel again. A shame, because this panel doesn't appear to have any pixel issues or actual defects on the display itself, and once I pulled the bezel off and snapped it on again once it had pretty uniform backlight with no bleed or pressure spots on the edges that I could see. It was a good one. I feel a little bad about messing with it to the point of breaking it and then having Dell replace it a second time at their expense ... but not too much, really, since I wasn't going to keep a panel with the bottom portion covered by the bezel anyway, and because I don't at all mind taking Dell to task for issues caused by what I believe to be a bad design choice in this system. If I could swap out the panel only as in past Precision systems then I would probably have ordered a replacement panel myself rather than going through warranty support to replace it over a "minor" display issue. I was already considering buying my own mini-LED panel to try out before I found out that the panel alone is a non-replaceable part because of the adhesive. They won't let me do a "parts only dispatch" a second time for the same issue, so I'll be having a tech install it this time. I will be sure to have him stay until I do a full examination of the display and have him document any issues that I spot, with a copy of Dell's pixel policy on hand. At least, I didn't have much trouble installing the PTM7950 stuff. I watched a couple of videos ahead of time and I did stick it in the fridge for a while. I ordered a 8×4cm pad. I cut off a 2×4cm strip and that was enough to cover both the CPU and GPU, so I have enough here for four total attempts. I didn't have time to do temperature testing but at least I could tell that the system was not trying harder than normal to cool itself off. Since I had to repaste again to put the old display panel back on, I'm just using the ordinary paste that Dell provided for now. (...Looking back, I should have done a quick job with the Dell paste and only applied the PTM7950 after I was sure that I liked the display.) [Edit] Looks like the panel will be available to ship today, so hopefully a tech can come out on Monday.

New post on the Framework Laptop 16 chassis design & manufacturing process. https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-16-deep-dive---enclosure

Huh, maybe I will give GPU C-states another try.

There's rather limited space for direct uploads. You can see what you have posted and your quota here: https://notebooktalk.net/attachments/ I find it best to just host images externally. OneDrive is easy enough (use the "Embed" option in the web UI to get a URL to an image that you have uploaded). If you paste a URL to an image in the compose box here, it will automatically be converted to an in-line picture.

Display panel issue. Again! No idea why this suddenly popped up. (I'm sure I would have noticed it quickly so it hasn't been around for long.) (Dark spot in the middle of the circle here, not quite centered.) I think it's not stuck pixels but rather some kind of display defect. It seems to be "behind" the pixel grid and moves around slightly if I change my viewing angle. I was a bit bummed because the dark pixel guideline is more loose than the bright pixel guideline (I had a bright pixel last time), requiring six messed up pixels to qualify for an automatic replacement rather than just one. So, I was prepared to get some grief about that from the tech. But, I measured it and found that it does cover six pixels, so there should be no reason for them not to replace it. Call me persnickety, but I do have sensorimotor OCD and this sort of thing is very bothersome once I notice it. I called Dell tech support and the tech agreed to replace the display. (...I had to talk him out of replacing the graphics card instead???) I asked for parts only this time so I'll do the replacement myself and won't have to worry about scheduling a tech. (I'm going to be traveling soon, so if there is a parts delay that could lead to a scheduling headache like I ran into when having the panel replaced last year.) My last two parts for this laptop faced weeks-long shortages. I wonder if I will actually get this one to me tomorrow... @Ionising_Radiation Have you been liking the Honeywell PTM7950 pad thing? Since I have to take off the heatsink to replace the display enclosure, I'll have to repaste so I'm thinking about trying this if it actually works decently... [Edit] (One hour later) At this moment, it is looking like both the display and the PTM7950 pad will be here tomorrow. [Edit 2] (Seven hours later) It's on the way, FedEx has picked up the display panel with estimated delivery of tomorrow.

I don't know if there was a NVPCF error in Device Manager beforehand, but I can say that disabling the NVPCF device from safe mode was enough to allow the system to boot normally.

I think all of the displays are IPS at this point, other than the Precision 7670/7680 OLED display, so I guess they don't bother specifically stating it.

Immediately at boot.

Only Windows 10 systems here. Experienced the BSOD on two of them (so far).

BIOS update warning. The nvpcf.sys BSOD from earlier rears its head. I had a coworker upgrade the BIOS today and then got stuck in a BSOD loop. Fixing it required going to safe mode, disabling the NVIDIA Platform Controllers & Framework device, and then installing an older NVIDIA driver. Too late to check now but I suspect turbo boost 3.0 was enabled which is what was "saving" him from the BSOD before the BIOS update was applied. If you have Intel Turbo Boost Technology 3.0 enabled, I would suggest that you try disabling it before applying the BIOS update and make sure that your system can boot up without a BSOD.

I think the BIOS update effectively disabled that option and removes the option to enable it again, so you should be fine if you already have it disabled; it will be basically no change for you.

P4000 is an 8GB card. P5000 is 16GB.

It can be an issue if you want to use that drive in some sort of RAID or other "combination" setup; often you'll not be "allowed" to include a drive that is showing a SMART warning and you might have to jump through hoops to work around that.

Normally the touchscreen glass is not easily separable from the panel; the glass, digitizer, and display panel are adhered together. You'd probably have to replace the entire display enclosure with panel included.

The physical connector is the same but the pinout is not the same. Framework is using a custom pinout. It is not expected that any Dell DGFF GPUs will work in this thing.

...Is there some rule that you have to put games on the app store if they are converted with this toolkit? There are lots of Mac programs & games distributed outside of the app store. They could just distribute through Steam like they do with the Windows version.

Framework Laptop 16 will feature swappable rear modules. It's not really MXM, they are using a customized DGFF connector, but it will allow for either a discrete GPU or extra battery to be installed. They have not yet given details for what types of modules will be available at launch. (We can assume that dGPU will be there, but anything else is up in the air.) ...I am sort of thinking that swapping them won't be as easy as just pulling one module out and snapping in another. They use a DGFF connector on the motherboard side, so you'll probably have to snap out the keyboard and remove a couple of screws on the motherboard side holding the DGFF connector in place before a module can actually be removed.

Today, Framework released details on the power adapter for Framework Laptop 16, which will be 180W. https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-16-deep-dive---180w-power-adapter Some tidbits I saw: Under high load with a dGPU in play, the system can draw from battery power to push total power use above 180W. Framework Laptop 16 supports 240W over USB-C, and while Framework will not be providing such a power adapter, you can source your own and use it with this system. (You can also order the system without a power adapter at all, if you plan to do that.) The cables on both sides of the "brick" can be unplugged/replaced.

Saw this. Intrigued. But right now, the offering from Apple is pitched as being for developers or publishers, not users, to evaluate how their games might run on macOS and help with a port. It is still up to the publisher to leverage this and push out a Mac version of their app. This as opposed to say the Steam/Proton situation on Linux where end users can just download any Windows game in the Steam store, without the developer/publisher necessarily taking any action to make it available on Linux, and it will "probably work". Now, since maybe someone will slap together a solution to "easily" allow users to fire up any old Windows game using this framework (more like Lutris on Linux) and that would be pretty cool. I think I saw mentioned that Apple contributed some of their work back to Wine so it should help other products (like CrossOver) that use that stack.

Yes, I have experienced the same with Dell. They won't swap one part for another, even with an issue like this. You'd have to source the part and replace it yourself, or return the system and order a different one with the configuration that you want.

You should be able to override the board ID mismatch, try adding options "-4" and "-5". (I think it is only blocked for Turing and up.) Make sure you save the original vBIOS in case it doesn't work at all and you need to flash back.

I missed this post. They have detailed the display in the Framework Laptop 16. https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-16-deep-dive---display It looks like they were planning to allow preorders around Computex but they have had to delay and now it will be pushed into summer. With regards to the display... The Framework Laptop 16 has 2560x1600 resolution, a 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, variable refresh rate up to 165Hz, 9ms rise+fall time, 1500:1 contrast, and an unusually high 500 nit brightness. I was hoping for full 4K (3840×2400) so that 200% scaling can be used while maintaining a FHD desktop working space, but this would still be a fine display panel for gaming in a laptop. VRR and 165Hz is pretty nice and 500 nits is plenty bright. And, it has a matte finish. As you would expect, it is designed to be easy to swap out, though I don't know if you'd be able to transfer in another "generic" 16" eDP panel... We'll have to see what the mounting and rear display cable attachment look like. LTT also posted a video showing an upgrade of a Framework Laptop 13 to the new AMD motherboard, and putting the leftover 12th-gen Alder Lake motherboard in a standalone Cooler Master case.

Quadro P5000 is the best one that you could possibly expect to work well (with the ES vBIOS) but I do not know if it is a sure bet... I tried one myself in the M6700 and did get it working but I was plagued by periodic BSODs, so I ended up going back to Maxwell, and @jeamn experienced something similar with GeForce 1070 in Precision M6800. However, NBR user @DynamiteZerg and I think also @RMSMajestic had P5000 working in Precision M6800 with no trouble. Quadro P5200 is an unknown. If it has the same vBIOS issues booting Windows that earlier Pascal cards had, it is unlikely that there would be a vBIOS that could be installed that would work around it. Quadro RTX series (Turing generation, HP version) will work but requires a pretty substantial mod to the heatsink and even a minor mod to the chassis to fit in.