Acer Predator (Vega 56+Ryzen 2) Helios 500

It'd be fairly easy to run it at 65W in eco mode with official bios support/ryzen master support. It'd far outperfirm any other laptop, even tdp limited, and the drop in frequency in eco mode is surprisingly small.

 

Exactly, but more to the point, the PH517-61 can also fairly easily run 2700x (a 105W TDP cpu) without huge temperatures on it... meaning that technically speaking a Zen 2 or Zen 3 105W cpu such as 3900x/3950x or 5900x/5950x should work fine too (more or less).

The thing with Zen 2 and 3 is that they are made on a much smaller node, meaning that they'd produce more heat than 12nm parts... still, running say Zen 2 or Zen 3 105W TDP parts in ECO mode would work (but in that case, 3900x or 5900x would be a much better fit from cost and performance/efficiency point of view as reducing cpu's to ECO mode would in fact reduce 16c/32th CPU performance very close to 12c/24th CPU).

 

Well, I just upgraded my main box from a 3950x to a 5950x, so I'm tempted to grab the latest bios and see if the 3950 works in it. If it wasn't such a pita to get into and repaste the cpu and gpu I'd be inclined to give it a try, but that's a lot of time and kryonaut to waste if it doesn't work...

 

Don't think it would be too much of a big deal.
You could grab the latest bios (off Windows of course) and just apply the thermal paste on the CPU itself (leave everything else as is).
In the past, when I was opening my previous laptops (but not the PH517-61) for a cleaning and had to remove the heatsink, I didn't clean up the thermal paste and reapply it... and it didn't affect the temperatures at all.
Mind you, these newest systems could be different... but the bottom line here is to try and get to see whether the system boots up with Zen 2 inside (would be amazing if it did - and if it does, maybe you could also try the 5950x too just to test it to see if the BIOS was updated with Zen3 microcode).

 

Btw, I've been upgrading the GPU drivers without issues lately via the Adrenaline control panel.
Seems the Recommended + Optional needs to be selected for new drivers to show up... freesync works just as before (probably because I didn't have to do a new install).

Anyone figured out yet what the Insyde UEFI optional update contains for our BIOS?
And if you installed it... did it work? Did you notice any improvements or more options in the BIOS? Perhaps faster RAM?
I still got no reply from Insyde or Acer on the subject (figures).

 

Were you able to try the optional Insyde update for the BIOS and if the 3950x worked in PH517-61?

 

Not yet, it's been in regular use so haven't had a chance to take it apart.