Hello
As the title say I own the Ionico 17' 10th gen (10875H) laptop since march 2021. I've configured it with the 1440p 165Hz screen, 32 GB of RAM, and an RTX 3070.
After about 1,5 year of daily usage for various task I can put this little review. My daily OS is Linux Mint.
First I used Windows 10 for a few weeks (also tested Windows 11, working "fine") on it to play a bit of Warzone, Resident Evil 8, and some other games but I feel the Control Center to be not the same quality as the laptop. The CPU indicator of the Control Center always end up not working and I got blue screen of death time to time. Control Center settings are not always saved etc. Everything is fast, of course. But my user experience was pretty bad.
Finally I went back to Linux Mint as daily distro and main OS. At this time last year the Intel driver shipped with the all kernels was not ready to handle the 165Hz screen, it was then locked to 40Hz. I had to dump and tweak the screen edid to make it 120Hz. It was a bit tedious to do but I did it only once and it worked perfectly.
There was that F5 button (toggle touchpad) that was not working.
Now with kernel 6.0.2 (xanmod), the screen work perfectly with no custom edid. I don't know about the touchpad toggle, since I forked some code on github and fixed it poorly
It was fun to do.
Everything else just work since the beginning, from the ir camera (I use howdy to login with it), the integrated/dedicated gpu switch, USB-C external display (this wake up the dedicated GPU, like on windows), Bluetooth, Wifi, LAN. Even the turbo button is doing it's job, allowing the CPU to eat 70W, 60W, or 30W of power.
There is no official software to control the RGB lighting (keyboards F6/F7 are working however), but you can find some code on github to make it working and change color using the command line. You can also go further and adapt the code to also handle the lighting bar of the laptop (it work exactly the same as the keyboard, it's only on another USB port and another product ID). Or you may want to configure it on Windows before installing your distro.
I got a new BIOS from PCSpecialist to enable dGPU mode (I requested that to them like some users). This BIOS contains a bug that can make you end up with no display at boot. This happened to me and I was not happy. However, if you manage to enter the BIOS blindly and reset it, everything will be back to normal. That the only thing wrong with this laptop in my opinion. dGPU is working fine on Linux too.
This laptop run all my steam game perfectly (linux and windows, almost no multiplayer on windows games due to anticheat). It can also compile a kernel fast (about 30 minutes for linux 5.19 if I remember), and the whole Android sourcetree in about 2h15. No need to say that for other tiny development project it's working real good... everything is responsive. I did not make use of video or audio editing software, so I cannot tell you if they are working fine.
When I am gaming, I use CPUFreq to restrict the CPU to 2.6 / 3.2 Ghz. This does not really change the framerate of my games, but CPU temperature stay between 70/80°C which looks good to me. GPU barely goes upper than 72°C. It use 115W max. Rebar is enabled with nvidia drivers like on Windows.
The battery life is on par with windows. The bios show no real error in dmesg.
I've replaced the thermal paste once. Didn't find the good thermal pads (0.5mm too tiny, 1.0mm too big) to replace, so I used K5 pro instead and thermal grizzly on cpu and gpu. Evrything is working fine so far (it's been 4 month now).
The keyboard is still in perfect shape (no key print that disappear, they are all here).
So yeah that's my weird reveiew. This laptop is real good.
As the title say I own the Ionico 17' 10th gen (10875H) laptop since march 2021. I've configured it with the 1440p 165Hz screen, 32 GB of RAM, and an RTX 3070.
After about 1,5 year of daily usage for various task I can put this little review. My daily OS is Linux Mint.
First I used Windows 10 for a few weeks (also tested Windows 11, working "fine") on it to play a bit of Warzone, Resident Evil 8, and some other games but I feel the Control Center to be not the same quality as the laptop. The CPU indicator of the Control Center always end up not working and I got blue screen of death time to time. Control Center settings are not always saved etc. Everything is fast, of course. But my user experience was pretty bad.
Finally I went back to Linux Mint as daily distro and main OS. At this time last year the Intel driver shipped with the all kernels was not ready to handle the 165Hz screen, it was then locked to 40Hz. I had to dump and tweak the screen edid to make it 120Hz. It was a bit tedious to do but I did it only once and it worked perfectly.
There was that F5 button (toggle touchpad) that was not working.
Now with kernel 6.0.2 (xanmod), the screen work perfectly with no custom edid. I don't know about the touchpad toggle, since I forked some code on github and fixed it poorly
It was fun to do.Everything else just work since the beginning, from the ir camera (I use howdy to login with it), the integrated/dedicated gpu switch, USB-C external display (this wake up the dedicated GPU, like on windows), Bluetooth, Wifi, LAN. Even the turbo button is doing it's job, allowing the CPU to eat 70W, 60W, or 30W of power.
There is no official software to control the RGB lighting (keyboards F6/F7 are working however), but you can find some code on github to make it working and change color using the command line. You can also go further and adapt the code to also handle the lighting bar of the laptop (it work exactly the same as the keyboard, it's only on another USB port and another product ID
). Or you may want to configure it on Windows before installing your distro.I got a new BIOS from PCSpecialist to enable dGPU mode (I requested that to them like some users). This BIOS contains a bug that can make you end up with no display at boot. This happened to me and I was not happy. However, if you manage to enter the BIOS blindly and reset it, everything will be back to normal. That the only thing wrong with this laptop in my opinion. dGPU is working fine on Linux too.
This laptop run all my steam game perfectly (linux and windows, almost no multiplayer on windows games due to anticheat). It can also compile a kernel fast (about 30 minutes for linux 5.19 if I remember), and the whole Android sourcetree in about 2h15. No need to say that for other tiny development project it's working real good... everything is responsive. I did not make use of video or audio editing software, so I cannot tell you if they are working fine.
When I am gaming, I use CPUFreq to restrict the CPU to 2.6 / 3.2 Ghz. This does not really change the framerate of my games, but CPU temperature stay between 70/80°C which looks good to me. GPU barely goes upper than 72°C. It use 115W max. Rebar is enabled with nvidia drivers like on Windows.
The battery life is on par with windows. The bios show no real error in dmesg.
I've replaced the thermal paste once. Didn't find the good thermal pads (0.5mm too tiny, 1.0mm too big) to replace, so I used K5 pro instead and thermal grizzly on cpu and gpu. Evrything is working fine so far (it's been 4 month now).
The keyboard is still in perfect shape (no key print that disappear, they are all here).
So yeah that's my weird reveiew. This laptop is real good.
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