17.3" DEFIANCE V - They could have done better...

[jamgas]

Hello all

I bought this laptop Just after the beginning of February, and thought I'd give it a good month or two of use before posting any review. It has since been upgraded with another 8Gig of RAM. Specs pictured below.



Now at the time I was looking an 8 series CPU and GTX 1070 because I game quite heavily, at a price point around £1400 but I didn't want to carry the extra bulk of the thicker laptops they came with as I use them daily, moving to and from work and the price increment for those was a little out of budget. I felt this was a good compromise at the time. When the laptop arrived I was impressed with how thin it was, and performance was great... HOWEVER...

The heat of this thing is a MAJOR issue. Its almost unbearable warm (think when you put your hand to a kettle that's boiling and it heats to the point you need to take your hand away or your hand will burn... yes, THAT HOT). The entire top left of the keyboard is incredibly warm, so much so that with the combination of HEAT and FRICTION from using WASD keys they are beginning to wear off, pictured below... This is INCREDIBLY disappointing with a practically brand new laptop.



Lifting the rear of the laptop increases airflow that's so badly needed but its not enough, dropping the temps by just a few degrees. If your going to be using a controller or some other peripheral to game, you're golden. But if you want to play FPS shooters or anything that is keyboard recommended you're going to have to fight through the pain.



Full tilt gaming the fans ramp up and the noise is very off putting unless you are using headphones, which I am thankfully. However in saying that its still quieter than my girlfriends PS4... that thing sounds like a damn jet engine warming up. The fans seem to ramp up and down constantly while idle, I don't know if this is something to do with the CPU/GPU fan curves or what but its a little annoying to hear this thing spin up and down every 10-15 seconds.

Aesthetically shes perfect in my mind. No gamer DNA anywhere and looks like the Lambo of laptops. She is however, hard to get the knickers off, getting into this thing to add a simple stick of RAM was a pain, having to remove the keyboard deck etc were most other Clevo laptops have simple expansion ports on the back you can easily remove to get to the goods are absent.

Gaming performance is great, slam dunks everything I've thrown at it. It would damn well need to for £1400.

Now to my final point. I returned to the website today to type up this review, and in doing so got curious and headed over to the laptop I had just purchased to see if the price had changed at all... And what I discovered was that the laptop I had just purchased now has 144hz screens WITH Gsync AND and 8 series CPU available for around the same price mere months after I had purchased mine.... This was to say at the least INCREDIBLY disappointing... AGAIN!!

Your customers NEED to know when these system improvements are expected so that they can make the BEST purchasing decision for themselves. Had I known that these upgrades were inbound I would of held off a month and THEN bought the damn thing... :taz:

In summing up, all in all I'm slightly disappointed. The keyboard will almost certainly need to be replaced at some point if I want to maintain its appearance and I will need to source a laptop cooling stand that actually works as intended, so far I haven't managed to find one after several returns to Amazon.

If PCSpecialist staff have any recommendations for for lowering these damn near unbearable temps I'd be very grateful. Maybe even a straight swap for the laptop I WANTED in the first place but I wont hold my breath :shifty:

Arbitrary score 7/10

Does the job but could be doing it better. That goes for the company too.

 

[Oussebon]

Re the temps, have you monitored the CPU and GPU temps while gaming? What are they?

There are options like repasting and undervolting.

As for a new gen of hardware coming out, I can't think of any vendor that advertises these. It's possible they're not allowed to until Intel, AMD, Nvidia etc officially announce the product, and when that happens (pre-)orders are very often available shortly after. Often new hardware is only known about as rumour and conjecture until shortly before the official launch.

The forum community usually advise people asking for spec advice to hold off when new hardware is believed to be coming out, if that hardware would result in a real difference to performance.

 

[ubuysa]

Thank you for posting your honest comments, this will (and does) help others considering a similar purchase.

Regarding the upgrade now available, that's par for the course I'm afraid, technology is moving all the time. The same thing happened to me when I bought my PCS Optimus IV about 4 years ago, only a few weeks later they brought out the Optimus V, now they're on the Optimus IX. I know it's disappointing not to have the latest kit but that's life. My PCS desktop, which is less than a year old, is now well out of date in many areas, not least in terms of CPU, RAM and SSD speeds, but it does exactly what I wanted it to do and that it's no longer the cutting edge isn't really that important.

Regarding the excessive heat, and notwithstanding Oussebon's excellent advice about repasting, you're up against the laws of physics I'm afraid. You wanted a thin laptop and that of course means that the case volume is going to be small. When it's packed full of a CPU, drives, and everything else, the air volume inside there is tiny and it quickly heats up. Yes the heat pipes and fan do remove a large percentage of that heat but you're caught between a rock and a hard place. You simply can't have a thin and cool gaming laptop. That it's difficult to get into is also probably a factor of the ultra-thin design.

That said, if it's getting hot enough for the outside of the case to burn you then something is not right. For one thing that's a safety hazard, especially if there are children in the home. It may be that the cooling system (possibly the paste) is not working properly, I would phone PCS as soon as you can and talk this over with them. These fora are not an official support channel and very few of us on here work for PCS.

Getting accurate measurements of the CPU/GPU temperatures will help a lot.

The rapid wear on the keyboard is IMO not acceptable, even in a thin laptop that's getting hot. I would also suggest you phone PCS and tell them what's happening to your keyboard.

 

[jamgas]

Thanks for your replies guys.

Yes I have watched the temps reach 80+ degrees on synthetic benchmark runs, as far as I remember one run had it sitting 83/84 degrees which gave me abit of a shock. I'm looking into undervolting but tbh I'm kind of a noob when it comes to that stuff lol. I'm competent enough to repaste myself if needs be but I'll try undervolting before hand. I tried using MSI afterburner but it's freezing intermittently when I try to change anything. Any other programs I could try?

 

[SpyderTracks]

Thanks for your replies guys.

Yes I have watched the temps reach 80+ degrees on synthetic benchmark runs, as far as I remember one run had it sitting 83/84 degrees which gave me abit of a shock. I'm looking into undervolting but tbh I'm kind of a noob when it comes to that stuff lol. I'm competent enough to repaste myself if needs be but I'll try undervolting before hand. I tried using MSI afterburner but it's freezing intermittently when I try to change anything. Any other programs I could try?

Are those temps on cpu or gpu or both? Are you seeing any performance issues related to the temps? To me they seem totally normal for a gaming laptop, gpu is designed to run at that temp at full load, and cpu can run higher.

 

[ClarkF1]

If the keys are getting too hot to use comfortably then there must be an issue somewhere. I would deem that making the laptop not fit for purpose. I'll be on the phone to them ASAP.

 

[jamgas]

Sorry for not getting back, been a busy week.

GPU temps seem fine under load... screenshot below.



The CPU on the other hand doesnt seem right. I know laptops run hot but is this normal?



This is all under load playing Hunt Showdown. The laptop chassis to the left of the WASD keys was painful to touch.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Sorry for not getting back, been a busy week.

GPU temps seem fine under load... screenshot below.

View attachment 11628

The CPU on the other hand doesnt seem right. I know laptops run hot but is this normal?

View attachment 11629

This is all under load playing Hunt Showdown. The laptop chassis to the left of the WASD keys was painful to touch.

I would agree, that’s too high, you really want it peaking at a max of about 90 on that chassis.

It’s possible a repaste would do the trick, sometimes a bubble can form or the application isn’t good enough which can cause this.

There’s also the option to undervolt, but I’d still suggest (even though that would lower temps) that there’s a problem that needs addressing here in the longer term.

Either way, I would contact PCS to make your case known and see what they suggest.

 

[liljom]

It's very easy to undervolt in Intel XTU.
Under "Advanced Tuning" (on the left) set "Core Voltage Offset" and "Cache Voltage Offset" to -0.080. Should be stable, but stress test it. You can try to push it up to -110mV
-80mV helps 5-10 °C and ~5W, resulting in overall less fan noise, and also extend battery life a bit.

 

[liljom]

Also on a sidenote... you can not avoid getting new hardware generation. I just purchased a Defiance V with the 8th gen CPU and a GTX 1060, but I know already now, that a GTX 11xx will come out in a few months.
You need to follow the news to make good guesses. I ordered mine with 1060, because the new generation is coming. 2-3 months ago it was abvious, that laptop (ix 8xxxH), gen 8 CPU is close, because 8th gen ultrabook (ix 8xxxU) came out many months ago.

 

[ubuysa]

Also on a sidenote... you can not avoid getting new hardware generation. I just purchased a Defiance V with the 8th gen CPU and a GTX 1060, but I know already now, that a GTX 11xx will come out in a few months.
You need to follow the news to make good guesses. I ordered mine with 1060, because the new generation is coming. 2-3 months ago it was abvious, that laptop (ix 8xxxH), gen 8 CPU is close, because 8th gen ultrabook (ix 8xxxU) came out many months ago.

This is an excellent point and is true for almost any laptop or PC that you buy from anywhere. It's only going to be cutting edge for a few months at best, but if it still does what you need it to do then does it matter?

This is why my sig doesn't contain my laptop and desktop specs. Although the desktop is only a year old I don't want people laughing at me!

 

[Tony1044]

Couple of points - as others have said, those CPU temps are too high. Silicone degrades from 105C and most systems will shut down way before that in an overheat condition.

My Defiance II was always hot until I took the time to do a repaste myself. Not that you should need to do that on such a new machine, but being quite literally painful to the touch as well as causing such early degradation to the keys isn't acceptable and needs a call to PCS.

My second point is that my DII is almost three yeas old and although there are times I've been tempted to upgrade, it would've been purely from a non-sensible position of wanting to as opposed to needing to.

It still runs most games, even if not at full detail (but my eyes aren't up to seeing it anyway these days so nothing lost) without any issues whatsoever.

It runs all the virtual machines I need in my demo/mobile lab.

Most importantly, it still feels very swift and responsive.

I guess my point is that the days where a system was obsolete in a year to eighteen months are way behind us. The days of each generation CPU being an order of magnitude faster are gone and the changers are far more iterative nowadays, so I wouldn't sweat the fact that it wasn't bang up to date for very long bother you.

 

[jamgas]

Ok so far so good with the undervolt, I've managed a -0.120mV undervolt and have it stable. Was playing Hunt for a few hours testing. It has dropped temps to high 70's low 80's. Much much better that the high 90's lol, so that's a plus.



Thanks for all your help guys. Now I just need to get onto them about a replacement keyboard.

 

[liljom]

I guess my point is that the days where a system was obsolete in a year to eighteen months are way behind us. The days of each generation CPU being an order of magnitude faster are gone and the changers are far more iterative nowadays, so I wouldn't sweat the fact that it wasn't bang up to date for very long bother you.

It was true what you write a year ago. Since then Ryzen came out, which is a huge improvement to AMD. Intel had to do real improvements for the 8th gen CPUs, because they have competition again.
I had an Alienware with i7 6820HK, whick is a very high-end unlocked mobile CPU with 45W TDP. You can imagine the price of the system. That's 6th gen.

I got a Lenovo ultrabook to my wife with i5 8250U, which is an 8th gen low power CPU consuming 15W. The price was less, than 1/6 of the Alienware.

When I benchmarked my wife's ultrabook, it gave me same 1 thread results for some seconds, and went down 10% after that. In multithread there was a more noticable difference. But, come on ... it's an ultrabook vs an ultra notebook. The difference is the 8th generation, and that Intel was forced to do real improvement.

So after so many years, this time it makes sense to upgrade to new gen CPUs.

But I would wait with desktop GPUs, because AMD will release a 7nm GPU in less, than a year. So no real investments are recommended until then. And definitely not now, because Nvidia releases new GPUs in a few months too.

 

[Tony1044]

And it is still true for me now

I have no pressing requirement, personally, to upgrade the laptop.

To be fair, this is also partly down to the fact that for any serious virtualisation/lab work, I have an HP ProLiant Gen8 server. That thing is currently running 19 VMs - again without missing a beat and some of those machines are beefy - SCCM, SCVMM, SQL, etc but it does have 96GB RAM soon to be 128GB.

Horses for courses - I've traditionally upgraded my laptops every 18 months or so because of the demands I put on them (physical as well as software) but the truth is my 2011 MacBook Pro* ran until I bought my DII in 2015. My DII still has plenty of life in it yet for me so to upgrade would be spending money for the sake of spending money and not because I need to.

I could be tempted by the Recoil II simply because it looks like a much neater package in a smaller physical form factor with some very nice features and plenty of storage slots. But it's still a want over a need.

*Still probably my favourite Windows laptop. The build quality was second-to-none and it looked and felt fabulous to use. OS/X though was a travesty on my personal opinion. Where people ever got the idea from that it is a "pretty" OS is beyond me. And even day-to-day usability was sub-optimal in my personal opinion: I'd take Windows or most versions of Linux over it any day.

 

[rsmarsha]

I'm also having issues with the hotness of the keyboard and cpu temps at up to mid 90's. So far it's been suggested I let them log in and look at the temps. I'm wondering if there is a bigger issue with this particular chassis and it's heating problems. Not sure what to do about it if they don't accept the temp of the case is a problem. My last clevo based laptop was an optimus (plastic case over metal), had a 660 in it and no issues with heat.

 

[liljom]

I'm also having issues with the hotness of the keyboard and cpu temps at up to mid 90's. So far it's been suggested I let them log in and look at the temps. I'm wondering if there is a bigger issue with this particular chassis and it's heating problems. Not sure what to do about it if they don't accept the temp of the case is a problem. My last clevo based laptop was an optimus (plastic case over metal), had a 660 in it and no issues with heat.

you got the one with 7th gen?

 

[rsmarsha]

8th gen processor. Running low 90's constantly in game, case/keys too hot to use

 

[liljom]

8th gen processor. Running low 90's constantly in game, case/keys too hot to use

nice, that you reecived
I ordered more, than 2 weeks ago. They are still waiting for a cable for the 4K screen. They build it after they received it. Then comes testing, and shipping to Denmark :/
Did you ask for the better paste?

 

[rsmarsha]

I did, had to return it today. Running far too hot on the cpu and making the case and keys unbearable. The recoil review seems to show the same cpu in the 70's so maybe a better cooling system.