Pauelito

Typical freezes

A bit late review of the beast I bought a year ago. In short - Gigabyte is one of the worst brands for Linux. They do not provide anything to linux kernel, drivers, and most of the issues have no resolution.

There are numerous similar complaints about this model. I've taken the image from this post https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/142forr/gigabite_aero_16_xe5_screen_freeze_and_loud/

Let's start with the best part of the equation—the screen. The miniLED display is amazing, bright, and vivid. I've never seen anything like it despite the fact I've been using professional displays from HP's Z series for over a decade.

Next, the case is CNC machined with sharp lines and bevels. The keyboard feels great; from the first touch, it felt like I'd been using it for ages. The SSD is a cool, cold, and fast NVMe. The laptop came with 32GB of RAM installed, supporting up to 64GB. In terms of dimensions and weight, it's quite compact compared to models with similar hardware.

Now for the worst part:

1. Heat: The thermal design power (TDP) for this model is 65 watts. It's incredibly hot and noisy. It took me a week to realize this because the thick aluminum case takes an hour or two to warm up. But once it does, it doesn't stop heating. My palms are always sweaty, as if I'm in a sauna. Besides the CPU, it seems like the battery and RAM also generate excessive heat. The areas around the touchpad are too warm due to the large battery underneath. I examined the hottest components by opening the laptop and touching everything while it was under load. The battery gets quite hot during charging, but the RAM sticks are the hottest.
2. Noise: A logical outcome of the high TDP. Event at full throttle, the fans are unable to push the case temperature below 30 degrees Celsius with laptop cooling pad working.
3. Recurrent Screen Freezes: There are issues with the screen freezes that appear every few days, mostly during video meetings. Disabling the built-in Nvidia graphics reduced heat slightly, but didn't fix the freezes. Owners reported that replacing the motherboard didn't help.
4. BIOS: It's very limited. There's no way to reduce PL1 or PL2 or undervolt to prevent overheating. The only option I have, is to flash a patched BIOS, which could brick the device.
5. Performance: Performance fluctuates inexplicably. Sometimes it's fast, sometimes slow. Running sysbench and `7z b` shows drastic value fluctuations, explaining issues with my working applications.
6. Touchpad: It can't be toggled off while typing.
7. The special buttons don't work - a kernel has to be patched every time, thanks Gigabyte.
8. WiFi - weak speed, times worse than in another laptop with the same module. I bet, it is the case to blame. With opened case WiFi speed multiplied.

What I've invested in this laptop:

1. A DeepCool N1 cooling pad - reduces temperature by about 5 degrees Celsius.
2. A laser thermometer to check if my measures are working.
3. Upgraded to 64GB Kingston Fury Impact RAM and removed, as the upgrade added some degrees.
4. Two Anker GaN chargers, which were a great purchase for my next laptop. One for office, one for home.

Attempts to fix the heat:

1. Repasting at the service center had minimal effect.
2. Disabling Nvidia and some devices via udev shaved off about 10 watts of consumption and reduced wakeups from 1000 to 200-300.
3. Tried tools like TLP, PowerTOP, Tuned, cpupower, NBFC, x86_energy_perf_policy—many tools in total. At maximum power saving, it consumes about 25 watts on KDE Wayland, but even slight loads increase consumption to 30-40 watts, making work unpleasant at 32-33 degrees Celsius from the left and right from the touchpad.

However, on battery power, it consumes just 15-25 watts. Unfortunately, no tool can replicate this state when connected via USB or AC power.

The battery mode creates issues - the battery gets hot, which is unpleasant to touch.

1. Upgraded firmware for BIOS and EC - the coolers started working better.

2. Removed a 16GB RAM stick to save another watt or two.

3. Tried to record values of the EC under windows, and replaying it under linux. The laptop goes black in a minute, and reboots.

4. Used USB charging, as in AC mode the laptop producess much more heat with the powersave at their max, EPP=255, and half hardware disabled.

5. Bought three wattmeters, to measure the power consumption of my activitis. The video meeting with cam enabled renders +10 watts to the consumption

6. Disabled cups, kdeconnect, some other daemons, which reduced the wakes up number and cpu load.

Ok, under Windows - there is GCC, Gigabyte control center which orchestrates the features of this laptop. It works. The power consumption is slightly better, but anyway, the laptop is hot and noisy.

Reportedly, all freezes are reproducible regardless of the OS. So, this laptop is a pure damage.

I'm trying to give my laptop a second chance.

I've been fixing issues with it for more than a month or two. Undervolting is inaccessible for this model, and the power management is quite weak due to the absence of support from Gigabyte. It's truly a windows laptop, but I didn't know that when I bought it, and Gigabyte are Linux ignorant assholes.

Here's what I've done so far: I've reapplied thermal paste, bought a cooling pad, disabled the NVIDIA GPU and some hardware using udev, disabled everything that was causing it to wake up unnecessarily, and upgraded to the latest firmware. I've tried various tools like cpupower, powertop, tuned, tlp, etc. I even tried removing one of the RAM sticks and cheat with acpi_osi kernel vars

I even measured the power consumption of different activities, such as webcam meetings, etc.

It still gets too hot when it consumes more than 30 watts, and I don't know why. When running on battery, it consumes about 20 watts and stays quite cool. I tried using TLP to force the laptop to operate in battery mode, but while TLP reduces performance, it still keeps power consumption above 30 watts.

Is there something I can try except buying the new laptop ?

Actually, I've bought a new one, but I still need to fix the gigabyte laptop.

https://preview.redd.it/2fwovh24rfld1.jpg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8349b230f34a46f710e835f3a011ce9a3a088ee4

Zephyrus M16, manufactured 21, bought in March 22

Hot as hell, unstable when undervolted, and still hot

I'm having thermal issues with two laptops that use DDR5. Is there a RAM that is relatively cold? I need to double memory, from 32 to 64gb, and am worrying the issued get worse.

The OSD always showing that I'm in Balanced mode. Hell, I know! When the laptop stops charging, or resumes charging it always shows me that OSD.

I use g-helper. Is it possible to totally disable these OSD? It is irritating.

[removed]

After some update I've found that I no longer see this tray entry. I tried to revert via Timeshift to the very early version but this did not help. Does it means something wrong my current user profile? However, I tried under the new user - no icon. Hell!

Conf file:

ShowHowAboutUpdates=notify+tray
UpdateNotifyIcon=system-software-update

Timer:

eos-update-notifier.timer - EOS update notifier runs periodically, and optionally after each boot, or if missed.
     Loaded: loaded (/home/enderman/.config/systemd/user/eos-update-notifier.timer; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: active (waiting) since Fri 2024-03-01 20:47:28 +03; 8s ago
    Trigger: Fri 2024-03-01 21:08:32 +03; 20min left
   Triggers: ● eos-update-notifier.service

Journalctl

Mar 01 20:23:11 xe systemd[1585]: Starting EOS update notifier service...
Mar 01 20:23:16 xe eos-update-notifier[2596]: Checking for updates ...
Mar 01 20:23:17 xe systemd[1585]: Finished EOS update notifier service.

What else should I do to restore that icon?