TONGFANG GK7CN6S / GK7CP0S / GK7CP7S

As most of you have probably faced the same question and some of you may have had both in your hands: would you say the tongfang is worth 200 Eur premium vs. the vlevo p970, both with a 2060 and 300 Eur with a 2070 in the tongfang instead, all else equal? I am not really budget constraint, most of all I am interested in a low issue and low noise machine (with a few tweaks). Still I am wondering whether the premium is justified.

Thanks for your thoughts!

 

I had the P970 before the tongfang.
The clevo was good, build quality also.
The biggest disadvantage was tbe temperature of the keys. Wasd keys where hot to touch.

The Tongfang is much better in this regard.

If you search my posts, you will find a comparison between the 2.
Dont go for the clevo with 2070mq, it is not worth the premium from the RTX2060. Go for RTX2060 or full RTX2070. I regret my choice of 2070, I cut power down till 2060 levels because of noise. My laptop is now near silent, which I prefer above raw power.

Scores of TongFang:
Far Cry 5 is running great. 90-100 FPS fluently.

Scores of cinebench and Fitestrike.
Tongfang GK7CP7S, i7-9750H, RTX2070, 16GB DDR4 2666MHz in dual channel (Kingstong HyperX CL15)
Cinebench R15 --> CPU 1310, OpenGL 124,21fps
Firestrike: Score 18386, 21670 Graphics score, 16921 Physics score and 9163 combined score
The cinebench scores stays around 1300 in every consecutive run, pretty neat.

 

Just finished setting up my Selenite (specs in sig) and here are my initial impressions of the machine after playing a few rounds of Overwatch which is the only game i have installed at the moment.

1) Build quality of the unit was much better than i expected. Very sturdy base and keyboard deck. Very little to no flex at all when typing and using in on my lap. Though i'm a touch skeptical about the longevity of the rubberized coating on the deck as i tend to get sweaty palms quite often.

2) Screen is pretty good as far as 144hz laptop ones go anyways. Mine is a BOE07B6. I dont have the tools to properly measure brightness, contrast, PWM etc but so far its a touch on the warm side probably due to Illegear's calibration. I noticed a touch of ghosting on my panel compared to my main desktop's VG248QE but YMMW. Hardly any wobble to it as i'm typing this post on my lap. From my understanding, this specific panel uses PWM to control brightness and i will update this post accordingly when i start taking this machine around.

3) Keyboard is interesting to say the least. Much quieter than i expected but my unit has some key rattle. Would say its comparable to most other laptops with traditional chiclet keyboards. When typing quickly, it does tend to miss a couple of letters here and there but its not very common and can be easily avoided by slowing down your typing. Tactility is incredible for a laptop but could be more pronounced imo. Color me spoiled from my use of proper mechanical keyboards. Lighting is subject to your own opinion on backlit RGB keyboards but i just set mine to the rainbow setting in the control panel or just "white". But overall its a very good keyboard for a laptop.

4) Trackpad is your bog standard MS precision one. I use my G502 Lightspeed most of the time so i dont really pay attention to it much. My unit does have a touch of acceleration even though i've turned off pointer precision. The double tap top left corner to disable it is a real nice feature but the LED that indicates that it is off is kinda bright.

5) Sound is pretty alright for a laptop. Its no GT75 but it does produce decent sound and it is much better when using the Soundblaster app. My unit had no problems running both the realtek console and the soundblaster app. On another note my crossover frequency jumps between 50hz to 150hz and i'm unable to drag the slider. Anyone know whats up with that? But overall once you get the soundblaster app working, the speakers are more than adequate for daily use and gaming.

6) Gaming is as good as it gets for RTX2060 laptops. The only game that i have is Overwatch at the moment and i use very conservative settings to keep the frames up and the temps as low as possible. But it runs really good with no hiccups what so ever. Frames are also capped to 130 as this unit has some noticeable coil whine which gets even worse on turbo mode. Peak temps were low to mid 60s (when uncapped) for both CPU and GPU. Keep in mind that this unit has been repasted with TG Kryonaut. Will continue to monitor temps and the core differentials over the next few weeks and if it any of them jump drastically i will repaste with Mastergel Maker Nano. Gaming on Turbo mode however, boosts my 2060 to a steady 1905mhz

Overall i'm really pleased with this laptop. Great performance for the price i paid. Will continue tuning and getting my undervolts in over the coming weeks and hopefully i can get my girlfriend to ply her AC:Odyssey to properly push this laptop. I'm fairly confident that it can hold its own and keep cool while doing so.

A couple of things that i've noticed:

@alexnvidia my command center is 1.0.0.45 and i can confirm that all modes have very high PL1 and PL2 values. Hopefully this can be fixed soon otherwise i'll have to locate the 1.0.0.39 file.

My cache can't be undervolted past -80mv. Anything below that the whole system locks up and i have to force it to shutdown. Currently running a -150mv on the core and -80 on cache.

Thanks to this community for being so active on the forums about this and for giving real solid advice, tips and tricks!

 

My backlight on my keyboard has stopped working on my Mech 17R. I have tried uninstalling and re-installing Game Center. Before I send it back to get repaired has anyone had this happen and come up with a software fix?

 

Congrates on your new laptop. A couple of tips for you to jump start your tweaking.

1. After much complain to illegear and they feedback to tongfang, they now have command center v1.0.0.50. you can download this from their support page. Keyboard lighting and system freezing for 1 second are fixed. CPU PL1/2 however is not.

2. The panel i got is CMN175D, and i consider myself lucky to have this panel because i was fully expecting BOE07B6. Here is something unique, and i'm not sure if this applies to all 9th gen selenite or all tongfang GK7 series. They now feature a "power boost" feature which lowers the display response time from 8ms to 5ms. this is quoted from their website:

https://store.illegear.com/extreme-performance/193-illegear-selenite.html
"Note: ILLEGEAR's superior 144Hz IPS display with 8ms response time (5ms with power boost enabled) makes it the ideal gaming screen for dynamic games with fluid, fast-moving visuals. A quantum leap forward from the old 120Hz TN display with 15ms+ response time."

This is not to be confused with GPU boost and truth be told, i'm also not sure what power boost is. I dont see the option in command center, i tried to ask illegear support they pretty much know nothing much about this other than some marketing BS. when you ask them more, they will stumble and give you nonsense answers. you will not get anything specific from them because from the way they replied, it's obvious they dont know anything about this. But you are always welcome to try and share the info here. FYI, BOE07B6 response time is 12ms btb and close to 20ms gtg. I would love to see how they can deliver on their claimed "8ms", let alone "5ms" overclock.

3. Taming GPU temperature is never a problem for this laptop. My full powered 2070 at 115W rarely exceed 75C so i'm pretty sure 2060 will have no issue as well. It's the CPU temps that this laptop really struggle with. you will easily thermal throttle if you dont cap your frequency during gaming.

4. For the random sound popping and crackling, i believe it is still there even with the latest software and driver. The only driver that can suppress this is windows built in driver but if you use that, you will loose sound blaster cinema. That being said, i find that if you disable power management in realtek console, the occurance is much less.

Enjoy your laptop!

 

Cheers dude! Thanks a ton for your input over the last couple of months

1) I did notice the keyboard lighting and freezing isssue and am now on 1.0.0.50. Issue is gone. Still hoping that they'll fix the PL issue. I don't know how this is going to affect battery life though

2) Hmm perhaps i can source that CMN panel or something similar from ebay. The PWM is somewhat apparent to me when dropping the brightness down. The ghosting on the other hand stands out quite a bit. I'll give it several more rounds of games to get used to it but if i can't play then i'll most likely be looking at a replacement panel. The line on their website is most definitely marketing BS. But i'll raise it with them if i have to bring my laptop in for any issues that may crop up in the future

3) Have been on my main rig the entire day but will be going for a few rounds of gaming after posting this. But from the get go my temps are really good. I've dropped my 6 core ratio to 40 and am currently sitting on a -160mv offset in Throttestop. I may drop it down to 39 or 38 further down the line. Overall still very impressed by the thermal solution on this machine. Much quieter than my old LM-ed X7. The boost on my 2060 is insane tho. Never expected it to go to the 1900mhz level.

4) So far the sound has been working perfectly on my unit (touch wood). According to the console my audio driver version is 6.0.8710.1 and my soundblaster is 2.2.10.0. Turning on SBX with crystalizer and smart vol on loud really does improve the sound. Power management was off by default in mine

Notes:

a) i've tried the fan manager app that was posted on the 15in variant's sub but all it does is max out my fans whenever i try to set a custom curve. Perhaps i'm doing it wrong?

b) i've noticed my package power indicator in TS is jumping all over the place. The 15in sub says that it is because of the Nvidia Type C driver policy. Can anyone chime in on this if they have seen this happen before?

c) my battery seems to always be at 99% everytime i turn of the machine and take it off its charger. Whats up with that?

 

Greetings everyone,

I've searched this whole thread but I wasn't able to find an answer.
Can anyone tell me if the turbo mode that overclocks the GPU, which is available in Illegear and Eluktronics laptops AFAIK, is exclusive to them or available in all TongFang GK7 chassis?

The retailer I'm considering buying from doesn't mention this feature.

Thanks!

 

GTG is 10ms (calculated by average: 20 divide 2)

I believe the display overboost is just marketing. There's no such option in Control Center

 

Yup found no option whatsoever for that overboost thing. Just the usual false advertising

On a sidenote: My unit has that speaker crackling. Gotta listen for it quite closely but its def there. Power management in the realtek console does nothing

Wicked coil whine as well

 

cant help you with this. I myself do not have GPU boost for my 2070 due to it being not max q.

just as i thought. the speaker crackling and popping is not solved even with the latest driver and yet illegear claimed it's solved.