HTWingNut

Is that lid painted or a vinyl wrap? That looks really nice.

I've been away too long. Great comic there @LunaP

This is true. I guess with thin and lights, just M.2 or mSATA is OK, but hard drives are a necessity especially with these larger laptops.

They should make the ODD bay more modular then. I guess you can swap it for an extra hard drive or SSD, but would be nice if they added other options too like card reader or some PCIe adapter cards. But personally I'm glad to see it gone too. ODD drives and media, even in most work places that would use such a machine, are not that common from what I've seen. Best to use it for cooling. Hoping M.2 drives become more robust, and run much cooler so we can do away with 2.5" bays and keep slimming the form factor and/or more room for cooling or other neat new features.

Crap @Prema - I didn't realize that this happened. So sorry for your loss. That is horrible and hard to deal with. I wish you strength and my thoughts are with you.

I have IC diamond, GC Extreme, and just ordered some NT-H1. I'll have to do some testing and check results on my P650SE as well as on the P770ZMG if i have it long enough to test.

I have not found a better non conductive, non capacative TIM than IC Diamond. From my own experimenting, it runs 2-3C cooler than GC Extreme at load, and results are instantaneous and don't degrade over time. GC Extreme takes a little bit of set time, to see some improvement (not much, but a handful of hours at temp/load) and it does start to degrade after 10-12 months. I know the scratching with IC diamond sucks, but with some due care you can minimize it. It's really cosmetic anyhow.

Leave the battery in. Seriously, you gain very little from removing it. People get so uptight about it, drives me nuts. Just leave it in. I know someone that removed the battery because he wanted to conserve it (which is not really achievable considering they lose capacity over time anyhow) and went and spent $200 on a conventional UPS for his laptop. /facepalm.jpg/ What!? Leave it in. Worse case, buy another one in 2 years for $50-$100. /shrug/. And people that say that they remove it because they don't need to run on the battery, well then why are you removing it in the first place then!? It's free power outage safety. Trip over your cord, adjust your laptop and cord comes out, cat plays with the cord, whatever.

I should have qualified that by saying MXM high performance TDP cards.

P570WM3 is 17" though. There really isn't enough room for SLI in a 15". There's barely enough in a 17" unless they shrunk the MXM card form factor, but then you'd be sacrificing something else then I'm sure.

Has anyone successfully flashed a third party vBIOS (like Prema's) to unlock their locked vBIOS?

Just for the record, here's what overclocking can achieve:

Clevo didn't really have a choice since no socketed CPU's were available unless they used the previous gen chips. They DID come out with the P750ZM though which uses a desktop CPU in a traditional 15.6" gaming laptop chassis so you can't go so hard on them. Only thing that they could do is if they made their own socket adapter for BGA chips with a socket on the mainboard. But that would be proprietary and likely not very efficient either. With regards to the locked down overclocking I just hope that one of our talented BIOS modders can make a vBIOS that will simply unlock overclocking with software without the need to constantly flash to test clocks. Honestly, I hope that AMD does offer some decent competition with their R9 300 series but I'm not holding my breath and really it's irrelevant because I'm certain that Nvidia has plenty of options to trump whatever AMD has to offer, unless AMD secretly is able to outperform Nvidia by 2:1.

I'm surprised this didn't show up here yet, but Nvidia, in their infinite wisdom, has officially stated their stance on mobile GPU overclocking. Basically it will no longer be supported in any way, shape, or form in their drivers or BIOS. See this post here: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/805791/geforce-drivers/gtx-900m-overclocking-with-347-09-347-25/post/4458903/#4458903 This discussion has also been taking place at NBR: No more overclocking on Nvidia mobile GPUs | NotebookReview From ManuelG: "Unfortunately GeForce notebooks were not designed to support overclocking. Overclocking is by no means a trivial feature, and depends on thoughtful design of thermal, electrical, and other considerations. By overclocking a notebook, a user risks serious damage to the system that could result in non-functional systems, reduced notebook life, or many other effects. There was a bug introduced into our drivers which enabled some systems to overclock. This was fixed in a recent update. Our intent was not to remove features from GeForce notebooks, but rather to safeguard systems from operating outside design limits." I'd like to get Prema's and svl7's take on this and what this means down the road.

What? No 965m in the 13"? That's quite a shame, I hope it does pop up.

What happened to my post? I posted my results from Prema's mod OC 970m... will try again: GTX 970m GPU @ 1443MHz (+405)/1.168V vRAM @ 6200MHz (+600) CPU i7-4710HQ @ 3.7/3.6/3.5/3.5GHz -60mV Temps: 87C GPU Temp: 79C I noticed that OC the CPU doesn't help much so I also did a run at +420/+620 with CPU at 3.2GHz and undervolted -60mV and CPU and GPU temps were 78 and 70C respectively. I forgot to do a screenshot though, will run again later. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4710HQ,Clevo P65_P67SE powered by PremaMod.com

I really like the W230SS, except modified: - Perhaps a 14" model - Move the USB ports to the rear end of the laptop (along the sides still), not the front, and preferably most on the left side, not the right, and a USB port or two on the rear side if possible - Internal USB port, for mouse dongles primarily, get it out of the way - Eliminate the 2.5" drive bay and make a four M.2 bay with a heatsink of some sort to cool those puppies down - Better speakers and speaker placement. The P650SE actually has decent sounding speakers and decent quality, but probably just because they're on top! - MUX dGPU! Dump Optimus. Make it a manual switch with a reboot if needed. They did this in the old Asus N10Jc 10" netbook, don't tell me they can't do it in a 13-14" notebook - Even though I have used the VGA port, dump it, and go with 1x HDMI and 2x mDP - Improve cooling: more heatpipes, higher clamping force, and improve parallel alignment with the CPU and GPU, especially on CPU. - Configurable fan profile

Would like to see how the 970m fares.

I have a hard time trusting some of these temp reportings from these sites. My typical experience is I can get the temps 5-10C lower just by repasting myself and tuning the speed/frequency of the CPU, thanks to XTU.I have yet to get a laptop with factory applied thermal paste that I haven't been able to easily drop temps by at least a few degrees C with a repaste. I have an i7-4810MQ in my current Clevo W230SS, but I run it at 3.2GHz and -75mW undervolt for gaming. But use it at 3.6GHz when doing video encoding or other non-GPU hungry stuff. Not to mention limiting FPS in games, etc. I dropped CPU temps in BF4 from 95C+ down to 80-85C just by dropping CPU speed, undervolt, and limiting FPS to 60.

Wonder what that could be!? Or do you know and can't say? I saw an image of the interior of this model. Dual fans on the GPU, very nice. Gaming-Notebooks: Schenker XMG P505 Pro und P705 Pro mit GeForce GTX 970M und 980M But it looks like more than 1" thick from the images, but probably just optical illusion from the style lines.

Personal preference. But over at nbr forums your will see a vast preference for matte. I can't stand glossy screens right next to poor viewing angles.

Still can't decide between the thinner and lighter variants. And I want a matte 1080p screen: 1) MSI GS60 with 970m 6GB - Great overall package, but I despise the logo, battery life is meager ( ~ 3hrs it seems), and only 4710HQ. I can always vinyl the lid I guess if needed. 2) Gigabyte P35x v3 with 980m 8GB or P35W v3 with 970m 6GB - Sleek thin and light, although only concern seems to be with the flex in the keyboard. Will have to wait and see if new ones fix this 3) Clevo P650SE/SG 970m 3GB or 980m 4GB - Looks like my kind of laptop but the 980m version is thicker than 970m version, and only 3GB and 4GB vRAM. Normally this would be fine but with new console ports it seems 3-4GB is min requirement

Good to hear! Maybe I'm back in the running. Although that MSI GS60 is looking quite tasty with the 970m 6GB.

Eurocom, blech. Maybe Mythlogic will offer them and cut me a deal. OriginPC might too. Just the 1.5 lbs and 1/2" difference is hard to justify compared with the P150SM-A at a cheaper cost and more flexibility.

Looks like just the 3GB 970m and 4GB 980m and glossy screens. Why Clevo Why!?