Ethrem

Yeah, it was just a test. I was watching it very closely, I know it can fry a card fast. Unfortunately, I am not getting good results with the paste. Watch Dogs is high 80s but it does spike over 92C and kick the fan into maximum, which is unbearable. ICD7 got here today, not I need to wait for my replacement screws to get here. In the meantime, I've been working on my desktop. Gonna have to get that Devil's Canyon chip... 4.4GHz @ 1.3v :'(

Why did I get quoted in that string? lol @deadsmiley - let me know how the MX-4 works out for you. I'm starting to agree with svl7's notion that there may not be enough pressure with this heatsink to use a thinner paste like MX-4 so I ordered a tube of IC Diamond.

Firestrike w/ 87C temperature target, +450 memory: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M video card benchmark result - Intel® Core i7-4940MX CPU @ 3.10GHz,Notebook P377SM-A Not too bad. I did find out that even -12.5mV is not stable when it comes to Unigine Valley. I really lost the silicon lottery on this one. There's absolutely zero room for a stable undervolt. 87C seems to be the best compromise between heat, system noise, stability, and speed. The fan never hits its maximum which is a small trade off for the performance hit whereas 88C will let one of the GPUs pass 91C and kick the fan to max until well after the benchmark or game is closed. That fire strike is a lot faster than my stock vbios, which was 9131. 3DMark 13: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M video card benchmark result - Intel® Core i7-4940MX CPU @ 3.10GHz,Notebook P377SM-A Again, still faster than my stock 12907. Thanks again for the vbios slv7! Hopefully I can get my thermals under control and see what kind of performance can really come out of this thing but this is still a sizable increase over stock which is awesome! EDIT: Catzilla went to Catzilla 3* - 15202 http://www.catzilla.com/showresult?lp=274612 It throttled when it got to the fluid and raymarch benchmarks so it probably would have been 200 or 300 points higher if my temps were better.

Yeah I would like to know how he pulled that off too because 90s seem to be par for the course with this chip. Although Alienwares have always had excellent cooling capabilities (with proper fan tables of course) - my M17x can move some serious air due to the fact that a good 50% of the underside of the machine is a steel mesh for air intake. It is pretty much the same situation with cooling on my machine as yours although they (either Sager or XOTIC) put in foam pads to fill in that very gap that you have with the fins there. The good news is that I can adjust the temperature target for most games without negatively impacting performance too much thanks to you pointing out Inspector (I've never had Kepler GPUs before, the 260M was my last mobile and 8800 GTS was my last nVidia desktop) so realistically, heat is only a problem for benchmarking... and Watch Dogs until it gets optimized. I made a 70C/-12.5mv every day profile, a -12.5mv benchmark profile, and an 85C/-12.5mv gaming profile I'm going to test out on Watch Dogs and see how it runs. I'm going to test them both with and without the memory overclock. I know that what it throttles is the memory but I scored 9031 on Fire Strike using the 70C with +450 as opposed to 8700 without it. I wish we could make custom fan tables for the machines though. 70C wouldn't be as limited if I could switch the fan settings to be in line with the behavior I want for the temps.

Yeah I'm not complaining. The heat is not fun though. I didn't use Inspector on the stock vBIOS so I don't know if the temperature target in 92C from the factory or not but even high 80s is a bit much in my opinion. At the same time though, I was doing some comparisons between the 880M SLI and a single desktop 780 Ti or Titan card and the 880M SLI actually has the leg up on both cards a good bit of the time which is impressive given the limited power and cooling in a mobile graphics chip. I wouldn't worry about it if it didn't make the fans sound like a whining, dying animal... Its a creepy sound when these go on full blast LOL! Of course, I'm worried about long term damage as well but I've seen worse come out of nVidia so who knows.

I am using his modded vBIOS as well. Silicon lottery screwed me on these... I did manage the 450MHz memory overclock though, nice boost.

All I have to say is you got one seriously nice card... Mine won't UV below -12.5 with all stock clocks (-25 freezes as soon as 3DMark 11 starts) but I won't complain because that small undervolt dropped my temps back into the high 80s without having to drop the clocks. I haven't tried testing each card individually but setting both at -12.5 is stable, -25 is unstable.

Yeah unfortunately I won't be seeing any higher than that with this machine. Way too much heat for its tiny heatsinks and fans to get rid of as it is. I find myself wishing I went for the 9570 more and more.

You're doing better than me - this is with the BIOS mod: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M video card benchmark result - Intel® Core i7-4940MX CPU @ 3.10GHz,Notebook P377SM-A That pushed my GPU to 93C... Gonna repaste when my ICD and replacement GPU heatsink screws get here (I already stripped these... got the machine on the 21st, that didn't last long so I bought 3 sets) EDIT: By the way... I got that PrimoCache app... Is there any reason *NOT* to use this? RAM isn't an issue at 32GB...

Okay, I gave this a shot today. Before: 3DMark 11: P12907 / 3DMark Firestrike: 9252 After: 3DMark 11: P13498 / 3DMark Firestrike: 9533 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M video card benchmark result - Intel® Core i7-4940MX CPU @ 3.10GHz,Notebook P377SM-A NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M video card benchmark result - Intel® Core i7-4940MX CPU @ 3.10GHz,Notebook P377SM-A I need to get my temps under control though. I have 12 new GPU screws and a 4.5g tube of ICD7 coming. It doesn't like MX-4 for whatever reason. My gaming temps are running in the high 80s and after unlocking the BIOS, my GPU hit 93C which caused the system to kick fans on full blast to bring it back in the 80s. These GPUs are HOT...! Here's a GPU graphing. I ran both 11 and 13 on the same GPU-Z log (Firestrike was first then 3DMark 11 - 3DMark 11 stresses the computer more than Firestrike does from what it looks like). As you can see, the GPU is boosting the entire time that the benchmarks are running.

LOL I repasted the second one with a tiny blob and its running 70C under load compared to 79C for the primary. Less is definitely more with this stuff, gonna do another repaste on the primary. If I can get it down to what the secondary is running, I've dropped temps around 8-9C from what it came with which is nothing to scoff at (and also likely means they didn't use ICD7 like I suspected, even though that is what I ordered). I did remove the black tape from the second one. There was still paste under the tape (which I am unable to clean off because the capacitors shred anything that I use to try to clean it. Its cosmetic so its not a big deal to me, just interesting that the tape didn't even work. I'm going to remove it from the first as well. By the way, here's the stock paste job on the second one... Pretty horrendous if you ask me. I'm debating on whether or not I'm going to repaste the CPU while I'm at it. EDIT: It failed the test on Furmark with the temp going to 89C on the primary, 88C on the secondary. Stock maxed at 87C at the end of a 15 minute burn in and this was only 8 minutes in. I'm going to have to get some different paste, I guess. And now I'm on a hunt for some new screws.

Well Valley maxed at 87C before the fans kicked in, which is the normal Clevo behavior. When the fan kicked in, it was running 84-85C. With forced maximum fan speed, it only hit 80C during the benchmark. BioShock Infinite with the fan on maximum topped out at 77C right after and on normal fan speed immediately after topped at 85C which is actually lower than the thermal paste it came with. The way the heatsink is designed, when you screw it in, the metal clips pull down and put pressure on the copper base of the heatsink so pressure shouldn't be an issue I wouldn't think. 87C is the highest that it went with stock paste and from the look of it, the MX-4 actually performs slightly better. We'll see what results I get with the higher proof IPA on the second GPU. I should note that the fan didn't creep up to its anywhere near its max (it was actually pretty quiet) when BioShock's benchmark was running and it always did get quite loud with the stock paste. Temps don't stay very high for long either. Its back down to 49C right now and I just finished the benchmarking like 2 minutes ago.

The fan doesn't come unplugged when doing the master GPU so yes it's plugged in. Lol. Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk - - - Updated - - - I think I got it this time. I did a little line in the middle and I'm idling at 35C on the active one while the other is at 37C Just in case, I had the roommate go fetch some 90-99% IPA, this 70% might not be doing it. I need to get some new screws though and it doesn't seem like XOTIC is going to be very helpful with that, they want me to RMA the machine. So stupid.

That is my repasted job that just yield such high temps. I'm redoing it right now but that doesn't look like a bad job to me? Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

So... I've never repasted anything before in my 18 years building computers. I had to take apart my machine the other day because I screwed up a BIOS flash and that meant I had to replace the stock TIM so I ordered some MX-4. Well I'm not having much luck with it. *Supposedly* I had ICD7 as the stock paste but I don't believe that because I used 70% IPA to remove it and there is no scratching on the GPU die. Actually removing the MX-4 is more difficult than the stock TIM because the stock TIM didn't goo up and spread all over when I removed it, it had hardened. Anyway, I removed the stock stuff with a makeup removal pad (the lint free side) and 70% IPA and I put a blob in the middle of the die. I put the heatsink back on and turned the machine on but I was idling in the 40s. It quickly hit 80s under load so I shut it off and tried the spread with a saran-wrapped finger method. Suffice to say that method is retarded - my temps hit 93C with the fans on max within seconds of starting Unigine Valley and that includes the roughly 5 seconds from when I saw it hit 85 and clicked quit. Well I removed it and reapplied it again, this time placing the tip of the MX-4 on the center of the die and just squeezing a tiny bit out, I put the heatsink on and I saw idles of 36C so I decided to run Valley - with the fans on high, it maxed at 84C before I ended the benchmark. Its currently at 41C while my secondary GPU which I haven't repasted (and is not connected to the SLI cable) is sitting at 36C. The ambient temp is 21.7C Don't these temps sound high? Is it because I have a single GPU being stressed by Valley instead of the load being spread? I don't know what to do here. Just to see, I ran Valley with the fan control on normal and it hit 89C before the benchmark even finished at which point I stopped it and came back here. With the stock TIM, I would hit 87C, the fan would kick in, and it would go down to the upper 70s. I have a 20g tube of the thermal paste but I'm starting to strip the screws so I don't know what to do. I don't want to repaste the secondary GPU until I get the primary sorted. Any help is greatly appreciated! EDIT: I was looking on the internet and there is something about my 880Ms that is different from what I'm seeing If you look at this image The space around my die? It has a black piece taking up most of the space. Is that beneficial or harmful to cooling? I'll try and take a picture of it the next time I open it (going to call XOTIC about getting some new screws before I attempt this again)

Try it without your overclock on the processor. You might be hitting too high power draw. Its just a guess but it doesn't hurt to try it. Generally speaking, when you are testing out overclocking a GPU, you should lower your CPU overclock or remove it entirely, tweak the GPU, then tweak the processor back up until you find the perfect stable point between the two overclocks. If that doesn't work, hopefully slv7 or johnksss or someone can help you figure it out.

Yeah, I will put my Sager and my old Alienware in the signature. I don't use the Alienware anymore but it saved my ass when my Sager wouldn't POST with the messed up vbios cards. Its an old M17x R1. Never really thought that machine would save my ass but it did.

Well I had flashed a test vbios and it bricked my cards... I had them separated from the heatsink three or four times so I need to clean up the thermal paste and reapply it. Besides, when I stuck it in the Alienware, whatever goop they used got on my 880M's die. So yeah, I don't want to risk it. One scare this week was more than enough. As for the heat, I'm curious too because my 880M's run quite hot as well. Watch Dogs kicks em up to the 80s stock.

Its much cheaper than a laptop. This is actually a really decent gaming rig right here... It should come quite close the 880M SLI configuration in most cases without the SLI issues that plague dual graphics configurations to boot. The CPU can be overclocked as well and while that is an entry level board, it has overclocking and other advanced features out of the box. CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($292.93 @ Micro Center) CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12S 55.0 CFM CPU Cooler ($48.25 @ NCIX US) Thermal Compound: Arctic Cooling MX4 4g Thermal Paste ($7.24 @ OutletPC) Motherboard: MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($84.99 @ Newegg) Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($72.00 @ Newegg) Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($72.00 @ Newegg) Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($137.87 @ B&H) Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($81.99 @ NCIX US) Video Card: PNY GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB Video Card ($668.27 @ Amazon) Case: NZXT Source 210 (White) ATX Mid Tower Case ($38.55 @ Amazon) Power Supply: Corsair CX 750W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($82.43 @ Amazon) Optical Drive: LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer ($59.98 @ OutletPC) Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 Professional (32/64-bit) ($199.99 @ Dell Small Business) Monitor: Asus VX228H 60Hz 21.5" Monitor ($129.99 @ Newegg) Total: $1976.48 (Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.) (Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-06-02 20:27 EDT-0400) Intel Core i7-4770K, PNY GeForce GTX 780 Ti, NZXT Source 210 (White) - System Build - PCPartPicker

To be fair, my short term memory is completely shot. But I pretty much knew that we wouldn't see the kind of results that you guys got, however, its disappointing that my particular cards don't like any bump on the stock vbios. It doesn't give me any sort of faith that this card will even achieve the modest overclock that deadsmiley managed. Amazon shipped my MX-4 with 2-day shipping but UPS delayed it a day so I won't have it til Thursday. I'll see what happens then. Stupid UPS. This is not just holding up my laptop, all of my desktop parts are arriving between tomorrow and Wednesday as well and I have to wait for my MX-4. I'm getting annoyed not being able to play Watch Dogs >_<

I'm talking specifically about the overclocks that have been achieved on the 780M. Catzilla Computer Benchmark - ShowTopList You can see Fox and John's 780M's then my 880M right below John's (although that was out of the box, we will see what happens with the vBIOS mod) - their memory clock rates are 250MHz over ours. It was my understanding that the memory on the 880M isn't going to be able to go that high as is par for the course with larger memory modules. I'll test it out tomorrow, I just got the UPS email telling me they scheduled my desktop parts and my thermal paste from Amazon for tomorrow.

That's disheartening. It seems that the 880 won't be getting the speeds the 780 has hit then between the RAM and core because it's a ball of fire. I'll let you know what happens with my repasting and flashing. I'm not happy with these hitting 87C with stock clocks but it's also Clevo's fault for their fan tables being designed to not hit 100% until 91C too. Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

Nah you're not too bad. See mine in my Clevo for comparison http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/8351189 I have 32GB of RAM though which may be lowering my benches a bit but you're not looking bad at all compared to my 4940MX system. Sent from my HTC One_M8 using Tapatalk

WOW! Those are some seriously impressive numbers! I think that my 880Ms are duds unfortunately. With stock vBIOS, I can't overclock at all or I get a black screen. When my MX-4 gets here Tuesday and I repaste, I'll look at flashing the vBIOS and see what happens but I'm guessing my cards won't see much improvement without a voltage bump.

Okay guys, I promised you all a review and I'm finally getting to it. This is my first time doing something like this so bare with me haha. I ordered my machine from XOTIC on May 7th and received it May 21st. I will do a separate thread for XOTIC. My specs: 4940MX, 32GB DDR3L-1600, 2x240GB Crucial M500 SSD in RAID0, 2x1TB Hitachi Travelstar 7200 RPM HDD (no RAID), 72% gamut matte 120hz LCD, and GTX 880M in SLI. So let's get down to it then. I did a small unboxing: The box arrived in perfect shape I chose XOTIC's premium packaging service: Here's the shirt: And then we get to the Sager box tucked safely inside: In my excitement, I opened the Sager box upside down: The packaging far exceeded my expectations. Now on to the rest. Some of these are a bit blurry, I just had gotten the camera that day as well so I wasn't accustomed to using it Sorry that I don't have one off the other side, I blurred it and deleted it but didn't take another one, I can post one if someone wants it. I ordered two power bricks. So basically, out of the box impressions are great. Sager packed it decently but XOTIC's extra packaging really made sure it arrived with no damage, definitely worth the extra money for the peace of mind if you ask me. Now to fire it up... My stomach sank on that. It was first boot. When I rebooted it though, it came up fine and I haven't gotten a single issue since unless it was my fault (tweaking the CPU). Here you can see the keyboard and touchpad The keyboard takes some getting used to being a 15" model, I found myself hitting the up arrow instead of the shift key on the right a lot (and still do it every now and then) but otherwise, its a well made, nice and responsive keyboard. Definitely a far cry from the chiclet keyboard that my 17R had (although to be fair, that machine had a full 17" keyboard). The lighting looks cool but I mostly leave it off. The touchpad is a completely different story. It being centered in the middle of the palm rest means that it gets hit a lot more than it should. Most manufacturers place it off center, aligned with the space bar, to avoid this issue. I have to turn off tap to click otherwise I have had some really unpleasant things happen like erasing an entire block of text, hitting the back arrow when on a web page, etc. Next complaint is the buttons. The left button has a dead spot. Hit it anywhere but the middle and you won't get a response. XOTIC has said this is not normal behavior and offered to replace it but I can't see RMAing my machine for the touchpad so I am putting up with it. Next up, system noise. The fans aren't as bad as my old M17x when under load but they do have some sizable noise to them. Honestly the built in speakers are more than sufficient for covering up the noise of the fans unless you're looking for it. Basically, its loud like a gaming laptop would be expected to be but not to the extent that it sounds like a jet engine is taking off out of the back of your machine. My impressions of the sound system are also quite good. The speakers and the little subwoofer do actually have pretty decent audio quality. It doesn't beat the Harmon Kardon system my old Toshiba Qosmio had back in 2008 but it does beat my 2009 Alienware M17x and it leaves my Inspiron 17R in the dust. Basically, if you care about audio quality, the internal speakers in any laptop won't do it for you. The X-Fi MB3 actually is useful for audio quality tweaks but some of them add clipping to the sound. Pretty much what you would expect from software audio processing. On the networking front, I opted for the Intel 7260ac + Bluetooth combo. Out of the box, the wifi was dropping constantly and when it would connect, it would display 3 or 4 bars with the router literally 5 feet away. In my process of system updates, I updated the 7260 drivers and the problem resolved and hasn't returned. On the bluetooth front, I'm very impressed. I paired my DS4 controller to my laptop using DS4 Tool and it has no problem maintaining the connection whatsoever. It also pairs with my Sony HT-CT260H sound bar without issue for some higher quality sound when I want it. Now for the hardware. I've been really putting this thing through its paces so I have a lot here. CPU performance out of the box is stellar. The 4940MX absolutely blows through anything that you throw at it and it asks for seconds and even thirds. This machine does not lag. Even when doing a benchmark that pushing the cores and threads to the max, the system still remains responsive, something I've never seen before when it comes to PassMark CPU tests which have frozen many a computer over the years. Out of the box, my CPU was set a bit wrong. It was set at 67W TDP instead of 57W TDP with a minimum multiplier of 33x as opposed to the stock 31x. As a result of the TDP increase, I was seeing temps as high as low 90s under load! Upon realizing that this was set incorrectly, I tweaked it down. These are the stock XTU settings the machine came with As you can see, the TDP and the base multiplier are incorrect. I don't have an explanation for the multiplier but I found out that 67W is the TDP HIGH setting in the BIOS. Even with the BIOS set at TDP NOMINAL, which is 57W, XTU reads the default as the higher 67W TDP. Be careful with this. When the system crashes or fails to POST and watchdog kicks in, it will knock the settings back to their stock 57W TDP and 71.25W Turbo Boost Short Power Max. The best I was able to get stable was what my system is now running 24/7 - a -51mV undervolt with 40x multiplier per core. It runs between 3.69 and 3.79GHz when all cores are loaded. I had a -110mV undervolt but Watch Dogs killed that big time. I ran a bunch of benchmarks and I'm just going to post them here, I was pretty impressed by the out of the box performance but the GPUs need work. Keep in mind that I'm running 32GB of RAM in a dual channel system so that can impact benchmark results. I don't have the images for the 3DMark runs, I thought I did. 3DMark 11: P13041 3DMark Firestrike: 9252 3DMark 11 Extreme: X5387 PCMark 8 Home: 4344 Overall, not bad. The PCMark test takes so damn long that I didn't do another one after driver updates so the performance likely increased. Most of those were with the nVidia drivers that came with the machine other than the 3DMark tests. If anyone wants me to run them again, I can certainly do that. Now for the rest. The display is amazing. I have never seen such a nice panel on a laptop. It easily rivals the panels of desktop LCDs costing 300-400 and the glare is non-existent. No complaints about it whatsoever, great viewing angles, great color reproduction (don't ask me about professional calibration but to my eyes, it looks exceptional). The lid has a LOT of flex, however, so be very careful with it. I would not trust this thing in a swinging laptop bag, knocking it in the middle would probably shatter the screen. If you have to carry it with you, get a backpack that way there isn't as much pressure on it. I can easily make the screen ripple with a press of a single finger in the back of the screen - the worst points are the bottom left and bottom right. Temperatures are acceptable. The 880Ms idle in the 30s and 40s and hit 87C max under load before the fans knock them down to the 75-80 range. Not ideal but I've seen worse. The CPU temperature completely depends on the TDP. If you don't like the temperature, turn the TDP down and undervolt. I have tweaked it so it runs in the 70s and only hits 80s under extreme stress testing load. I have MX-4 coming in on Tuesday since I have to repaste my GPUs anyway, I might do the CPU while I'm at it. I'll post my updates. I can't speak for power draw but I would say the 330W PSU is supplying adequate power to the machine as I haven't hit a performance wall due to thermals. I was going to do a review with the unlocked vBIOS and that may be added in the future but yesterday was hell for me trying to recover my cards after flashing a test vBIOS. I lucked out that my Alienware M17x R1 was able to reflash one of the cards then I used that one to boot the system and flash the second. No idea what that mistake could have cost me to get it fixed if I didn't succeed in flashing them myself. Overall, I'm extremely happy with the machine. My major complaint is the lid flex. They really should fix that. Other than that, this is an excellent machine and with the vBIOS mod, it should become ever more excellent. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to ask away. Sorry if this is scattered, I'm not used to writing anymore LOL!