X370 Owner(...s?) Lounge

[bennyg]

Is anyone willing to admit they own a X370? I can't even see an owners thread

I picked up a X370SNW-G (Metabox Prime VR) cheap on ebay (cheap compared to what its original spec would have cost - 13900HX, 4090M, 64Gb and 4Tb SSD) knowing the cooling was bad but with some mods in mind.  And yes the cooling is bad and the fans are horribly loud and it gets hot on the chassis above the side vents and the bottom RAM stick goes above 85C and I have had to underclock both CPU (4.5ghz max) and GPU (0.8V / 2000mhz)  to be able to watch TV in a room while using it and Advanced Optimus causes minor stuttering in Windows and the Clevo Control Center doesn't allow fans to go below 30% dutycycle which is too loud so I use ClevoFanControl which can set them to 23% but keeps waking the GPU and the speakers are rubbish and I get audio crackle as soon as I install a Realtek driver and the caps on the keyboard are all wobbly and loose

Aside from that it's nice to be back to a 17" UHD screen after a couple years on more midrange QHD laptops and its less noisy at these settings for more pixels and fps than the i9/4060 Helios Neo 16 on which I have had to redo the liquid metal 3x now in about 20 months of ownership.  I had my P870 on my lap the other day and the stand dug into my legs after 15mins, I forgot how heavy that thing was! (6kg with all the extra stuff from my watercooling mod)  To be honest this feels very similar to the Helios and that's both good and bad... I actually really like the quality and materials of the Helios chassis, but can you imagine the howls of rage if I said a decade ago on NBR to the never-BGA crowd that one day Clevo's high end would be on par with a midrange Acer.......

[bennyg]

I figured out the issue with general Windows stuttering under Advanced Optimus.  The UHD 770 iGPU is not boosting above 300MHz.  300MHz is enough for about a 720p youtube vid but causes 100% utilisation and dropped frames at higher res e.g. 1080p60, or Google Earth, or causes lag when dragging or scrolling complex elements on the screen.  To fix this, I installed XTU, set the igpu voltages to the minimum available (UV protection didn't allow OC on default voltages), set the ratio to x14 for 1400mhz, and iGPU util% dropped far below 100ish% and all the dropped frames on yt went away.  Power consumption was barely affected at all.

 

(the two hwinfo screenshots show a before & after on the same 1080p yt vid that was dropping frames at 300mhz. These were just the first settings I tried and further tuning I'm sure will refine it)

But basically the point is, this laptop was sold with Advanced Optimus disabled in the BIOS, and I've seen loads of reports of 'stuttering' with it enabled from various resellers, and here I think is the explanation for that.

[bennyg]

Reset the thing because I suspected installing drivers from the Metabox website package was the start of some screwy stuff. Default windows drivers only now.

iGPU still locked at 300mhz and requires "overclock" (will set up XTU command line to profile load to run at startup) but the speaker crackling is gone by reducing quality from "Studio" to "CD quality" (16bit 48KHz) in windows settings. A nice inconvenience fixed and its not like the speakers are anywhere near good enough to notice the difference ...

[win32asmguy]

6 hours ago, bennyg said:

Reset the thing because I suspected installing drivers from the Metabox website package was the start of some screwy stuff. Default windows drivers only now.

iGPU still locked at 300mhz and requires "overclock" (will set up XTU command line to profile load to run at startup) but the speaker crackling is gone by reducing quality from "Studio" to "CD quality" (16bit 48KHz) in windows settings. A nice inconvenience fixed and its not like the speakers are anywhere near good enough to notice the difference ...

 

Interesting. I still have my X370 as well. It's a version purchased from System76 their open source firmware. I also had the speaker audio distortion issue and found it to occur when the Nvidia GPU was over 80C. I could try that quality setting too.

 

I fixed my igpu issues actually by swapping to a 1920x1080 144hz display. It also helped my Linux experience as it removed the need for any scaling.

 

It still runs very hot under load even with a single SSD and only single rank memory. I wish it were as thick as the x170.