TONGFANG GK5CN5Z / GK5CN6Z / GK5CQ7Z / GK5CP0Z

Well the next issue is finding a replacement keyboard and or battery. I have no idea where to start and I like you can't be without my laptop for 15 days, I use it for business.

 

@clone1008

i have the same problem with the keyboard since last week. i played a bit apex while it stopped working. first i thought it was only the light, but the keyboard stopped at all. i also opened the laptop to check the cable and after this, it worked for about 1 second. then it died completly. so i had to send it back to the manufacturer/assembler which is in my case Schenker (Germany). My Laptop is the XMG NEO 15 from Oktober 2018.

now i'm a week without my book and i think it will take another week to get it fixed.

PS: my battery looks pretty good, nothing swollen or so. i have no idea what the hell happend to the keyboard or the cable. also i dont think that the keyboard connector is soldered to the board. it should be the normal connector on the other side of the board. i found someone who sells parts from this laptop, but i think only 2B2.

https://www.fortunetechnology.com/fortune-spares/12141/

 

well, my laptop returned today after 8 days (including weekend). they fixed it for free by changing the mainboard. now i have to repaste again with LM, but thats no problem. i'm glad Schenker/XMG has such a good and fast support.

 

Gears 5 benchmark...

Puget Systems Photoshop Benchmark

 

I've been checking religiously for the battery upgrade and I'm happy to share that Eluktronics has the 4-cell battery back in stock.

https://www.eluktronics.com/4-cell-batt-mech-15-g2-mech-17/

 

Hey Mr.Fox, First of all thanks for the detailed review and posts regarding this laptop, really helpful for the rest of the community.
I noticed that your later posts tend to have significantly lower temps than your original review, could you explain what made the difference?
I am running the CPU at 35w and repasted with liquid metal both the CPU and GPU (1660ti) and during gaming load cpu temps get up to 90c.
Another thing I noticed is that a few people encountered (myself included) an issue with ThrottleStop which significantly reduces battery life (by as much as 75%)
but you didn't mention it so I assume you didn't had such issues?

Anyway thanks a lot for your updates looking forward the next ones.

 

Hi bro. You're welcome. Glad to contribute. I appreciate you letting me know you found the posts to be helpful.

Depending on what benchmarks you were looking at, if the temps were crazy low it might have been running on portable AC cooling. I have liquid metal on the CPU and GPU and running max fans while gaming I still see low to mid 80's. If I were in a warmer environment I have no doubt that it would easily hit 90°C. But, I am pulling way more than 35W from the CPU. More like between 80-90W.

If you are using ThrottleStop to get the most performance from the CPU it is going to dramatically reduce battery life. However, you can create a total of four profiles change the settings to focus on battery life. I almost never run on battery power and the thought of testing that and commenting never crossed my mind. I have the larger battery and the couple of time I used it on battery power (sitting in the airport terminal) it was something like 2.5 hours with ThrottleStop set to use the same High Performance power profile I use for everything else.

 

Can you post some more details about what sort of testing you did? Was it a fair apples to apples comparison? A 75% difference is pretty significant. ThrottleStop by itself should make virtually no difference to power consumption. It is not a significant consumer of CPU cycles.

If you are using ThrottleStop to under volt your CPU core and cache, it will be consuming less power compared to how it was shipped from Intel.

If you are using ThrottleStop to get the most out of your CPU and then you try to do some gaming on battery power and add an Nvidia GPU to the load, you are probably going to damage your battery in a short period of time. Most batteries in gaming oriented laptops are only intended for light duty use. High current draw can quickly damage any battery.

A more appropriate name for a gaming laptop would be portable laptop. Yes, you can use it between Point A and Point B but for any serious use, you need to have it plugged in.

 

Sounds odd I know, Didn't had such issues with my older 7700HQ Helios 300 or X230 thinkpad.
With my current GK5CP6Z I had the dGPU manually disabled and CPU power limit at 15w(battery profile) and settings like Speed Shift at 200.
From some reason my 62wH battery drained really quickly even at minimal brightness and load (CPU never exceeded 15w and dGPU was completely off)
Also had an issue where sometimes the CPU PL suddenly became capped at 30w with no way to increase it except restarting the laptop.
What eventually fixed the issue for me was deleting the Control Center app, ThrottleStop, and any related registries.
Once I had done that I could reinstall Control Center and it worked fine but Reinstalling ThrottleStop reintroduced said issues.
It seems like there is some sort of a conflict between the two programs considering I never had any issues with ThrottleStop on different machines.
I'll do some more testing to see maybe I can find specific settings that cause the problems.
My model is the Eluktronics G2Rx with 1660Ti.

 

Are you using the FIVR - Disable and Lock Turbo Power Limit feature? You should be.

There might be some weird interaction between ThrottleStop and the Control Center app. All I know for sure is that ThrottleStop by itself should not be a significant drain on any battery. I know ThrottleStop is not responsible for randomly capping your turbo power limit at 30 Watts. That sounds like a Control Center issue.

How did you do this? If these laptops support Nvidia Optimus, you should not have to do this. It should go into a low power state automatically. Some monitoring software will keep the Nvidia GPU active. This can significantly reduce battery run time. Perhaps the method you used to disable the Nvidia GPU did not truly disable it.

When using ThrottleStop to monitor the Nvidia GPU, you should see --°C when the Nvidia GPU is in its low power Optimus state. ThrottleStop tries to be smart and does not wake up the idle GPU to sample its temperature. Some monitoring apps will wake it up regardless.



If ThrottleStop is showing a temperature number, that means the Nvidia GPU is awake. Try exiting any other apps that might be using your Nvidia GPU.

I use the free version of BatteryBar to monitor the overall battery discharge rate. Scroll down to the bottom of his download page and click on the button, Try Basic Version.
http://batterybarpro.com/

When your computer is idle with only ThrottleStop open on the desktop, open up the C States window and post a screenshot of that info. If you have a significant amount of background activity running on your computer, that can also kill battery run time. You should be seeing cores spending 99% of their time in the low power core C7 state. These CPUs support package C8 for further power savings but many laptop manufacturers turn off this low power feature.

Hopefully you can do some further testing and find out what is really going on.