Clevo P950EP6 or ER review

I would avoid Centos/Fedora. With these kinds of laptops, particularly with GPU related drivers, you'll want a much faster moving distro or something with more ubiquitous support (ie *Buntu variants, Arch and the like).

Pretty much all of the hardware is. The main gripes are Optimus/switching and some of the more Clevo Control Center specific things like keyboard backlight and fan controls. For the keyboard backlight I remember a git project a while back which supported many Clevo models.

Bumblebee is a massive pain in the butt. I've tried it multiple times and it's just not anywhere near as usable as it is in Windows. Particularly issues surrounding sleep/suspending the NV GPU properly can get wonky under certain conditions. ie. The NV GPU not turning off correctly and draining huge amounts of enery, which rather defeats the purpose.

The "easiest" path is to use the proprietary Nvidia drivers and the included manual switch-over app (requires an X Restart). Alternatively, reboot in full DISCRETE mode whenever you want to game.

 

Thanks a lot Stooj for these details.

Actually my project is to use this laptop for video editing on Da Vinci resolve. I'd like to avoid Windows as much as possible (I switched from Linux to Mac years ago when I needed Final Cut and now that theses days are gone, I'll be glad to go back on Linux). It happens that Resolve works with Cent OS (and officially support it, not other distros)... so I'll need the nvidia drivers working on Cent OS.

I was thinking that maybe I could do a dual boot with one main distro like ubuntu or Pop!_Os (based on Ubuntu from System 76...which I suspect to be Clevo friendly), WITHOUT the nvidia driver, only the intel driver...to save battery life and power, and on another partition, the CentOS WITH the proprietary nvidia driver working.

What do you think ?
But in all these scenario, I'll need audio working and as much things as possible.

I am hesitating with the dell xps 15 (last version with i7-8950H). The battery power (97wh) is much more interesting on the dell but for the same price there is no 4K, no second hard drive, 1050 Ti vs 1060 and I am forced to buy Windows at full charge... But maybe the overall quality of the computer is better for the XPS. I don't know cause I don't have any experience with the clevo build quality. Any advice ?

Thanks again.

 

1) The 1080p 60 Hz panels PCSpecialist use either cover 60-70% or ~85% of sRGB. The 1080p 144Hz panel will almost definitely cover 96-100% of sRGB. The 4K panel option they have is a RGBW panel and should therefore be avoided at all costs. The only way to know for sure is to call PCSpecialist and ask.

2) If you turn down the brightness, and do nothing intensive with the laptop, you could probably squeeze 5 hours out of it. This is not a sure thing, so you might want to get a portable power bank like this one off amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/MAXOAK-Cap...=1529422601&sr=8-4&keywords=laptop+power+bank

3) When idle, the laptop is pretty much silent providing you have the latest BIOS/EC installed. Most Clevo laptops tend to have awful fan curves when they hare release, but this gets fixed with new BIOS updates about 6 months after they are released.

4) Really good. There's no keyboard flex at all - the laptop is built like a tank.

 

F*** I was aiming at the 4K screen. The website says " LP156UD1-SPB1 ou Samsung LTN156FL02 " for these 4K models. What would be the main drawbacks with RGBW ?

I contacted them to ask and they said :

"The panel model for the FHD is the B156HAN03.1. We do not have any confirmation for the 4K yet."

According to the website they are out of stock for this laptop. So maybe they are waiting to know what is coming?

I am really hesitant between the Dell XPS 15 (FullHD, same CPU but GTX1050Ti, 16Gb of 2666Mhz Ram and 512Go Pcie M.2 SSD) and the Defiance XS II A.k.a P950 (4K, same CPU, GTX 1060, 16Gb of 2400 Ram and 512Go Pcie M.2 ). The price is pretty much the same but it is hard to decide between battery/design vs power/upgrade with a second SSD

:-(

 

Some Clevo resellers offers new FHD IPS 144Hz like this LG Philips LGD05C0
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Euroc...Q-FHD-Laptop-Review.306110.0.html#toc-display
95% sRGB and no PWM.
I found this panel very good even for some enthusiast content creators.

 

Not really.

Avoid Bumblebee (which hasn't been updated in ~5 years) and stick to the prime-select tool for when you need to switch to the iGP.

Distros that work well here: Modern Ubuntu builds, and their variants.

For HDMI audio on Optimus notebooks, see https://github.com/hhfeuer/nvhda.

 

Out of all the distros I think I have seen the most success with Ubuntu on Clevo based models. Maybe Mint but I think that's just me remembering one person who did.

 

Just to add my two cent,

I have the pc specialist Defiance XS II from when it was still available, and currently have Opensuse and Windows 10 installed in a dual boot config.

Windows 10 works flawlessly, Opensuse has been a small nightmare but it has been working well. Issues with Nvidia as expected, Bumblebee with suse seemed like it would be a good idea ... slight mistake ... currently can't boot X but fairly confident it's fixable without a snapper. Also couldn't use visual installer.

Also other minor issues with Suse like lack of brightness control working, all looks fixable with some TLC.

 

Hello there,

Could you try out these workarounds?

(a). Don't bother with Bumblebee.

(b). For grub, edit /etc/default/grub and ensure that GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= is populated by this: "acpi_osi=! acpi_osi='Windows 2009' blacklist=nouveau elevator=deadline drm.debug=0xe quiet splash"

Then regenerate grub config:

(i). With Yast, it will automatically regenerate the configuration for you, but if you do it manually,
(ii). You must run grub2-mkconfig.

At this point, ensure that only the NVIDIA driver is installed. Bumblebee, at this point in time, is an outdated hack (that hasn't seen commits in over five years!), and a headache to even get it up and running properly on modern laptops.
Related, Pascal GPUs are very power efficient, and for desktop tasks, they actually 'idle' and consume very little power (an additional ~10-15W compared to the IGP).

Whatever benefits bumblebee offers are quite marginal in this regard, and for this reason, cannot recommend it for general use.

However, if you must use Bumblebee for whatever reason, on your machine, see this workaround (that fixes the X not starting issue): https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/issues/764#issuecomment-388701108

 

I will give these ago as soon as I can ... thanks for the help, really appreciate it