I have this after my previous laptop bugged out right before a job interview and I wanted a drop-in replacement to my much-beloved older laptop. I needed something that would have the graphics oomph to run modern games and dev mid-size games. It’s expensive! But it’s built as a Macbook Pro competitor at a significant discount.
I’ve had a bunch of issues though and the design isn’t as foolproof as they used to be.
After three months I’ve had far more issues than my near-pristine 4-year-old laptop:
Spacebar occasionally registers as double-presses. I sent it back a week after I got it and they replaced the keyboard but I had the same issue. My research tells me it’s a design flaw and chassis imperfections might exaggerate it. This is obviously highly aggravating!
Power supply cord (to laptop) has wire shielding pulled out after 3 months; I’m re-applying electrical tape to it every couple weeks.
I experienced power throttling – after running a game for 20 minutes it would periodically throttle the CPU down to .8ghz for 30 seconds every 2 minutes. The temps on both the CPU and GPU were fine and the fans were running normally (this machine is almost always completely silent, by the way, and under load it’s quite reasonable). After several different attempts a recent profile that both undervolts the CPU and disables entire-system power throttling (so that the CPU alone and GPU alone can throttle but the GPU heat won’t trigger CPU throttling) seems to have solved this.
The screen may be the best you can get on a laptop but it sucks down battery. With an 84wh battery I get 5 hours if I’m lucky.
The SSD (single, one) is configured in RAID mode and a cold boot into Windows or resume from hibernate takes about 25 seconds(!); some have tried switching to AHCI mode but apparently the drivers aren’t mature and it bluescreens occasionally.
The tension screen has loosened after 5 months so the former perfect-tension throughout the entire range now has about 3 degrees of wobble which is only irritating in that it used to have none (I hadn’t used a laptop with no wobble before).
The screen is so darn pretty though!
Oh and it’s not Dell’s fault but modern Nvidia mobile cards apparently have an OpenGL bug whereby fullscreen exhibits horrific diagonal tearing! And it’s been present for two years! This means I have to run RetroArch with the Intel card which cuts off the nicer shaders and also crashes every 25 minutes or so.
The 960m this laptop ships with is just under a 750TI and so pretty close to current console power. Overwatch runs fine (or it did once I fixed the CPU throttling).
Honestly I’d wait for the new chips; the GPU boost should be substantial. If I hadn’t been time-pressured I’d probably have waited until this GPU changeover and bought a Macbook Pro and used bootcamp for games (someone let me know if the drivers are so buggy that this is actually a bad idea as I may be thinking about this again in 5 years).
I brought up your points to previously mentioned friend and he claims that pretty much all you problems are only relevant to older models or have been fixed with software updates. He can get really stubborn and defensive about the products he supports though so I’m still taking all your advice to heart. Seems like the right choice at the moment is to wait just a single month even:
Also hear that new laptop models tend to spring up around when school starts up again.
Yeah, I don’t have a clue if I’d find worse problems with another non-Apple laptop manufacturer; reviews all claim the build quality is excellent. My experience is that the materials are excellent but it’s not up to the standard of my Dell laptop from 4 years ago.
It’s not the worst (except for that frickin’ keyboard) and I’m comfortable opening it up to do stuff like repaste the cpu/gpu (which I did when trying to figure out the throttling) but it’s something big you’re getting into.
that article sports some hefty claims there, what with this box driving past a surface book. that skull tho’. seems you can do away with that since a non-skully-cover seems to ship with it as well.
I’ve heard from multiple people buying that thing now that it doesn’t automatically install all the drivers which is very silly for an all-in-one and also chucks one of my favourite surprisingly-successful overdue improvements in win10 right out the window
Assuming it’s real and AMD prices aggressively enough and it has decent overclocking ability/headroom, I think we’re looking at the new budget champion
oh cool, they finally got close to Sandy++ IPCs after six years
the 16nm shrink has actually been more beneficial than I was expecting across the board, and not just to x86; look at apple and nvidia.
then again it hasn’t been clear for a while whether Intel is interested in or capable of increasing their single-threaded performance beyond where it is now
the mobile x86 thing proved misguided yeah but it’s not like they’re being lazy, they have actually gotten way more mileage out of dedicating more die to edram and GPU. there just still aren’t too many desktop applications that are compiled to take advantage of openCL even though that’s obviously the way to go for more “power” – modern GPUs are technically capable of like 50x the pure computational throughput of a 2500k in specialized workloads – and the reasons why not are relatively obvious (would hurt battery life, multithreading is tough, obviously not beneficial in games which are the only clear bottlenecks for most users, etc).
that’s a bit unexpected … since I want to build a bullet proof windows-machine for my dad that has to survive ~5+ years. Want to throw linux on that box as well, to maybe ease the progression of my dad towards something that isn’t destroyed spectacularly easy when not being on your toes when it comes to updates that make/break things.
the _irony_ that i'm talking about linux, as a gnome/ubuntu user at the same time, yeah, I know. It gets me too.
But. My dad has no idea what a root-account is (and would probably say sudo is some rapper, see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TioSZGsJq7M
why that could actually _be_ the case)
and an auto-updating "click here" system sounds better than trying to talk my dad through the steps to enable remote access to fix things when win decides to break something™.
Still gonna see what the linux verdict is on that skull box and probably go with an m-ITX build anyway.
I started messing around with my leftover parts system again. It has a Q8300 running at a smidge over 3 GHz (I would go further, but the cheap memory I bought for socket 775 computin’ can’t go past DDR2 810 without taking the rest of the computer with it) and a GTX 760.
This monstrosity, this Frankenstein machine of random parts assembled together, this computer with an 8 year old CPU runs some multiplats better than my PS4. And all I had to do was spend hundreds of dollars over the years on now redundant hardware and take some time to actually put the thing together. It’s fun! Especially the part where I found out the GPU’s fans will spin up dynamically if, say, a cable was preventing the other one from spinning up. Which was nice, if not loud as fuck.
The next dumb step: source a cheap micro ATX board and the smallest case I can find, then stick my poor ignored E5200 in the ATX board and make a productivity machine or something, I don’t know.
my computer seems to crash all the time now when I try to play games and I get errors like clock_watchdog_timeout and machine_check_exception. should I use this as an excuse to buy new shit or should I just finally clean the radiator on the cpu cooler for the first time since I put this together like five years ago
it’s unlikely your CPU has anything wrong with it. look at the temps, but even so. killing a recent Intel CPU with heat is almost impossible unless you screwed with the voltage for no reason. PSU is always more likely (and other hardware failures can be caused by PSU issues).
nothing has been changed recently. definitely no voltage settings. the temperatures have always been slightly warmer than average but nothing bad. if it’s the power supply I’m mad because I bought the GOLD level shit and I have a battery backup thing to keep it safe. the thing did suddenly reset out of nowhere the other day though and I thought that was weird and maybe the battery in the thing finally gave out but I guess it could of just been the power supply itself.
first I just figured hitman crashed now and then cause my videocard is old, and it’s some fancy direct x12 new shit or something. then I started playing gta online again a little and I figured well that’s rockstar for you. then I tried playing one of the recent call of duty games because you can play it splitscreen on two monitors if you jack up the resolution, play it in a window, span your desktop across the two screens etc, and I thought maybe it was a bad port or cause I’m playing it weird. but then all this thief talk around here had me starting up dishonored again to play through the michael madsen dlc so now I know something is fucked when even this old ass game that originally ran fine is crashing.
I’d put like 80% odds on it being the power supply, slightly lower odds on the PSU having killed your video card
ignore GOLD everything, ignore the advertised wattage, the only thing you should look at when buying a PSU is the 12v amperage. nothing else realistically matters.
