Hi guys
Finally got my new laptop (long story - this is my second one after faulty motherboard :-( )
Long post so here is a summary:-
1. It is a beast of a machine and destroys anything off the shelf for the same money, get one.
2. As everyone who has got an Octane 3 has reported PCS don't seem to have got their driver install order correct as i received 2 octane IIIs - both of which didn't have CPU Overclock working or FN + F1 to switch off mousepad - I just called them to have hotkeys and mousepad drivers reinstalled and i would suggest you do the same as it all works fine after that.
3. Out of the box this got 16441 on normal firestrike - with standard thermal paste (see below) - after some fidlling got it to 17991 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/11044087 with an OC.
4. They use the 'single dot in the middle' technique for applying paste - my CPU had too much and my GPU had a corner missing paste entirely - buy some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut and paste the thing yourself - kryonaut is hard to work with as it doesn't spread easily but I noticed 6-8C drops with it (and 1-2C from arctic MX-4) - it is worth the time and effort. That is why I ordered with standard paste on my second order, the paste job will always be better if you do it yourself and grizzly is unrivaled apart from the liquid metal 'pastes'.
5. Get a m.2 drive - this thing is just insane 3200 MB / s read - just mental.
6. If you get 3 drives total check that they have assigned the drive before panicking (as I did
) that they missed it out - both laptops came this way (only C: and D: - no E: visible) so i am guessing they don't bother with more than primary and secondary allocations, really nothing to worry about just a heads up as it caught me off guard!!
7. If you are wondering whether to get a 1070 or a 1080 - spend the extra money and get a 1080 - I got a good 2k more on firestrike with it out of the box.
8. If you get the 1080 then for the love of god get a 6700k @ 4ghz or better - it is still the bottleneck in this system on benchmarks even with a 4.4ghz OC.
9. If you are trying to OC this machine and get best results, settle for a slightly slower clock speed that lets you under-volt the CPU - this machine gets starved of power if you take the CPU over 98w and want the GPU to run at full tilt (also keep the temps below 80C as despite the system not indicating thermal throttling at 85C i noticed it performed best below 80C so I assume the system was adjusting voltages or something to throttle it back)
10. Despite my rough journey taking this from a 3 day build to a 21 day build I am still happy with the end result!
The long-hand version
first the spec:-
Octane Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-6700k (4.0GHz) 8MB Cache
Memory (RAM) 32GB HyperX IMPACT 2133MHz SODIMM DDR4 (4 x 8GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1080 - 8.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1, G-SYNC
Memory - Hard Disk 1TB WD BLACK 2.5" WD10JPLX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 32MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
2nd Hard Disk 1TB WD BLACK 2.5" WD10JPLX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 32MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
M.2 SSD Drive 1TB SAMSUNG PM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3000MB/R, 1700MB/W)
Thermal Paste STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & KILLER™ WIRELESS-AC 1535 M.2 GAMING 802.11AC + BLUETOOTH 4.1
As many people have covered unboxing etc. i will jump straight into it (for the second laptop i received):-
When I started the machine up and completed the 'switch off everything so windows doesn't know my inside leg measurement' windows setup the first thing I noticed was i only had 2 drives visible.
My initial reaction (on the first machine) was they had made a mistake but I soon realised that it was simply that they had left my 3rd drive as unallocated. Minor point and easy to fix - just something to look out for if you have more than 2 drives. (it is also possible that as I ordered 2 identical drives they thought i would put them in RAID so left it like that on purpose)
Once got the drives up next thing to do was benchmark the m.2. drive. Now this is the most impressive part of the system (yes more so than the 1080) - check out those speeds (and it actually ran faster on first benchmarks but i forgot to save them)
I also ran a couple of quick benchmarks on firestrike:-
Not too shabby, but I new there was a lot more in this machine (especially as i took standard thermal paste option as i knew I was going to put some thermal grizzly kryonaut on as it is the best paste for the money at the moment.)
So I switched off and turned the thing over.
There are 5 screws holding the back panel on so i removed them.
Then the heat-sink inside is held on with 4 screws over the GPU (which were tight so be careful not to strip the head if removing them) and 4 over the CPU plus one located towards the battery compartment / HDD bay. Take the battery out too before opening it up!!!
After that there are two handy tabs for lifting the whole heat sink off.
The paste job was as others reported - not great, in fact the CPU it was all down the sides and the GPU it was missing off one corner. i am guessing they still use the 'dot in the middle' technique for applying paste, not the 'X' shape - which is now the accepted best way to put paste on if using the pressure to spread the paste. (I have some pics of their paste job so will upload these if i get chance.)
I cleaned the heat sink and chips with some arcticlean thermal remover and then surface purifier. i then went on to putting on the kryonaut.
Big warning (as I had never user kryonaut before) - this stuff is HARD to spread. It comes with a little spatula to spread it with but it took me a good 10 minutes to do the CPU and GPU as i kept opening up little gaps. However with a little patience I got a nice even and thin coverage.
I would recommend that anybody do the same - paste it yourself, it doesn't take away from PCS it is just you can take a lot more time and give more attention to it than they can.
Replaced the heat sink, screwed it all back together and fired the laptop up again.
Ran firestrike again (as kryonaut has no curing time) and got these results:-
5 degree drop off the bat (and with all benchmarks i did average of 6-8 degrees drop across the board as i did all the tests with fans maxed with and without repaste but didnt save them).
Next - Overclocking
Now I knew thermals were about as good as they could get I set about overclocking.
Unfortunately the overclock software built in to clevo control center (FN + Esc to access) kept crashing - quick browse of forums showed that drivers weren't installed correctly - called PCS and they installed the drivers again remotely (meant i could do some work while they fiddled) along with mousepad drivers (as they didn't seem quite right) and all was working.
Natural reaction was to just push the CPU right up - got it to 4.6ghz but ran tests for all of 10 seconds before seeing temps jump to 87-90 - not happy with that.
After lots of fiddling I got the following settings:-
The main thing is the under-volt (offset -111mV) - this meant i could keep the power requirements below 95w even under load.
As I have said previously this was the second laptop so I got 4.4ghz at -86mV on that - hopefully should give you a good range to work with / aim for.
There are 2 reasons for the under-volt:-
1. life of the processor should not be affected as the temps and voltages are well within limits (actually runs at steady 78C under constant load, way lower than stock).
2. When I started to ramp up the GPU I noticed it was throttling, not because of temperature but it seemed like it was starved of power.
Finally got my new laptop (long story - this is my second one after faulty motherboard :-( )
Long post so here is a summary:-
1. It is a beast of a machine and destroys anything off the shelf for the same money, get one.
2. As everyone who has got an Octane 3 has reported PCS don't seem to have got their driver install order correct as i received 2 octane IIIs - both of which didn't have CPU Overclock working or FN + F1 to switch off mousepad - I just called them to have hotkeys and mousepad drivers reinstalled and i would suggest you do the same as it all works fine after that.
3. Out of the box this got 16441 on normal firestrike - with standard thermal paste (see below) - after some fidlling got it to 17991 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/11044087 with an OC.
4. They use the 'single dot in the middle' technique for applying paste - my CPU had too much and my GPU had a corner missing paste entirely - buy some Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut and paste the thing yourself - kryonaut is hard to work with as it doesn't spread easily but I noticed 6-8C drops with it (and 1-2C from arctic MX-4) - it is worth the time and effort. That is why I ordered with standard paste on my second order, the paste job will always be better if you do it yourself and grizzly is unrivaled apart from the liquid metal 'pastes'.
5. Get a m.2 drive - this thing is just insane 3200 MB / s read - just mental.
6. If you get 3 drives total check that they have assigned the drive before panicking (as I did
) that they missed it out - both laptops came this way (only C: and D: - no E: visible) so i am guessing they don't bother with more than primary and secondary allocations, really nothing to worry about just a heads up as it caught me off guard!!7. If you are wondering whether to get a 1070 or a 1080 - spend the extra money and get a 1080 - I got a good 2k more on firestrike with it out of the box.
8. If you get the 1080 then for the love of god get a 6700k @ 4ghz or better - it is still the bottleneck in this system on benchmarks even with a 4.4ghz OC.
9. If you are trying to OC this machine and get best results, settle for a slightly slower clock speed that lets you under-volt the CPU - this machine gets starved of power if you take the CPU over 98w and want the GPU to run at full tilt (also keep the temps below 80C as despite the system not indicating thermal throttling at 85C i noticed it performed best below 80C so I assume the system was adjusting voltages or something to throttle it back)
10. Despite my rough journey taking this from a 3 day build to a 21 day build I am still happy with the end result!
The long-hand version
first the spec:-
Octane Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD IPS LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-6700k (4.0GHz) 8MB Cache
Memory (RAM) 32GB HyperX IMPACT 2133MHz SODIMM DDR4 (4 x 8GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1080 - 8.0GB GDDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1, G-SYNC
Memory - Hard Disk 1TB WD BLACK 2.5" WD10JPLX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 32MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
2nd Hard Disk 1TB WD BLACK 2.5" WD10JPLX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 32MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
M.2 SSD Drive 1TB SAMSUNG PM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3000MB/R, 1700MB/W)
Thermal Paste STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & KILLER™ WIRELESS-AC 1535 M.2 GAMING 802.11AC + BLUETOOTH 4.1
As many people have covered unboxing etc. i will jump straight into it (for the second laptop i received):-
When I started the machine up and completed the 'switch off everything so windows doesn't know my inside leg measurement' windows setup the first thing I noticed was i only had 2 drives visible.
My initial reaction (on the first machine) was they had made a mistake but I soon realised that it was simply that they had left my 3rd drive as unallocated. Minor point and easy to fix - just something to look out for if you have more than 2 drives. (it is also possible that as I ordered 2 identical drives they thought i would put them in RAID so left it like that on purpose)
Once got the drives up next thing to do was benchmark the m.2. drive. Now this is the most impressive part of the system (yes more so than the 1080) - check out those speeds (and it actually ran faster on first benchmarks but i forgot to save them)
I also ran a couple of quick benchmarks on firestrike:-
Not too shabby, but I new there was a lot more in this machine (especially as i took standard thermal paste option as i knew I was going to put some thermal grizzly kryonaut on as it is the best paste for the money at the moment.)
So I switched off and turned the thing over.
There are 5 screws holding the back panel on so i removed them.
Then the heat-sink inside is held on with 4 screws over the GPU (which were tight so be careful not to strip the head if removing them) and 4 over the CPU plus one located towards the battery compartment / HDD bay. Take the battery out too before opening it up!!!
After that there are two handy tabs for lifting the whole heat sink off.
The paste job was as others reported - not great, in fact the CPU it was all down the sides and the GPU it was missing off one corner. i am guessing they still use the 'dot in the middle' technique for applying paste, not the 'X' shape - which is now the accepted best way to put paste on if using the pressure to spread the paste. (I have some pics of their paste job so will upload these if i get chance.)
I cleaned the heat sink and chips with some arcticlean thermal remover and then surface purifier. i then went on to putting on the kryonaut.
Big warning (as I had never user kryonaut before) - this stuff is HARD to spread. It comes with a little spatula to spread it with but it took me a good 10 minutes to do the CPU and GPU as i kept opening up little gaps. However with a little patience I got a nice even and thin coverage.
I would recommend that anybody do the same - paste it yourself, it doesn't take away from PCS it is just you can take a lot more time and give more attention to it than they can.
Replaced the heat sink, screwed it all back together and fired the laptop up again.
Ran firestrike again (as kryonaut has no curing time) and got these results:-
5 degree drop off the bat (and with all benchmarks i did average of 6-8 degrees drop across the board as i did all the tests with fans maxed with and without repaste but didnt save them).
Next - Overclocking
Now I knew thermals were about as good as they could get I set about overclocking.
Unfortunately the overclock software built in to clevo control center (FN + Esc to access) kept crashing - quick browse of forums showed that drivers weren't installed correctly - called PCS and they installed the drivers again remotely (meant i could do some work while they fiddled) along with mousepad drivers (as they didn't seem quite right) and all was working.
Natural reaction was to just push the CPU right up - got it to 4.6ghz but ran tests for all of 10 seconds before seeing temps jump to 87-90 - not happy with that.
After lots of fiddling I got the following settings:-
The main thing is the under-volt (offset -111mV) - this meant i could keep the power requirements below 95w even under load.
As I have said previously this was the second laptop so I got 4.4ghz at -86mV on that - hopefully should give you a good range to work with / aim for.
There are 2 reasons for the under-volt:-
1. life of the processor should not be affected as the temps and voltages are well within limits (actually runs at steady 78C under constant load, way lower than stock).
2. When I started to ramp up the GPU I noticed it was throttling, not because of temperature but it seemed like it was starved of power.
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