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[Review/Customer Service/Undervolt/Repaste] HP Spectre x360 15 (i7-8705G) as a Uni Student

My exact model is the HP Spectre x360 15-ch0004na found here, it includes the i7-8705G with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD.

 

For context, I am a University Student who studies Computer Science and I decided to get this laptop to replace my ageing Asus Zenbook and potentially my desktop, so a lot of this is going to be from that kind of perspective. However, I haven't actually used this laptop when going to Lectures as Uni hasn't started up again yet, but I can update this when that happens. I decided to go for this as it has the I7-8705G as I was looking for a decently powerful CPU with a decent GPU so I could play some games. I had originally ordered the Dell XPS 15 but ended up cancelling it due to hearing about significant thermal issues with the i7-8750H in it and I was told that all of the ultrabook/portable style devices that had the 8750H had this issue so I decided to go with this rather than a smaller laptop with an 8550U. In hindsight for my use case, I feel like I should've gone with something like a Dell XPS 13 as for my use (going to lectures) the size would work better and I could've got an eGPU to go with it for gaming. With the student discount, I got this model for £1671.12 (16GB, 1TB) which included the "3 year Care Pack" from the HP Store, It also had free next day delivery so I received it the day after. (A side note for anyone looking at this, I didn't really get any tracking information or indication of when it was going to be delivered from HP or DPD other than the "Next day")

Customer Support experience

After I received the laptop it didn't take long to find out that the RAM was faulty, it was nearly unusable. I had received it on a Friday and discovered the issue after the lines had closed so I had to wait until Monday to be able to call up the support to get it sorted. After calling support they promptly brought up a DPD pickup for the laptop, I was told they would arrive on Wednesday, but the email I received after the call said Tuesday, I was also told that I would get a text on the day of pickup from DPD saying when it would be picked up. It ended up being picked up on the next Wednesday and I didn't get any text about the pickup timeslot. I got an email on Friday that they had received the laptop and later that day I got an email saying that it had been shipped back and I received it on Monday. After that, everything seemed to be working. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it, I later discovered that the headphone jack wasn't working. I then called them up again and they were very apologetic about it having issues again after being repaired. I called on a Wednesday, the email said it would be collected on Friday, however, it was collected on the following Monday, received by them on Wednesday, shipped same day and I received it again on Thursday. On the phone the second time they offered me a free accessory to say sorry for it requiring another repair, it was mostly stuff like wireless mice, mousepads, sleeves, backpacks and a Bluetooth speaker and a speaker system. I ended up going for the Bluetooth speaker which I had to follow up on again because I didn't receive it and they got it sent out and I received it not long after (For anyone interested, it is decent but I wouldn't pay the £25 or whatever they normally charge for it)

Overall Thoughts

Screen

The screen on this is very nice, it's 4K which I think is a bit overkill for a machine of this size, I would've preferred something like 1440p or 1080p. It is a glossy screen, I prefer Matte screens but it does the job.

Keyboard

The keyboard is pretty good, I normally use Mechanical keyboards and I don't have any complaints about the feel of it. However the layout is kind of annoying, I'm from the UK and it doesn't have a big Enter key which is pretty annoying as the # key is moved above enter rather than being to the left of it that throws me off sometimes. It also has very short Up and Down arrow keys which are kinda take up the space of a single normal sized key. It's kinda weird, but I haven't found it to be too annoying. A thing I would like it to have would be FN+Arrows to trigger Pg Up/Pg Down/Home/End which I had on my Asus Zenbook which I found very handy for quickly navigating pages, it's not the end of the world though. It also has a numpad, which I guess is nice.

Trackpad

The trackpad is nice, the only problem I have with it is that on Windows you have to have the 3-finger tap trigger Cortana rather than acting as the Middle mouse click which I find pretty inconvenient (There's probably a way to change that, but I couldn't find any option available for that in the settings), but I didn't experience that issue on Linux.

Build/Exterior/Ports/Biometrics

The whole thing is built really nice and I think it is nearly all made of metal. Obviously, the device is a 2n1, I find it handy and I'd rather have it than not, but it isn't a game changer or anything. It is heavy enough that holding it in the tablet mode is kinda weird. It has a pen included which is nice, it works well enough but I don't use it regularly so I don't have much to say. The port situation is good and bad, it has 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports which are really nice, but only 1 USB A, I would've preferred more USB A's, but it does include a Type C to A adapter which is pretty handy. It also has an HDMI, Headphone jack and an SD card reader. The fingerprint scanner is on the right side on the line with the ports, on the opposite side from the power button, it's a pretty weird placement but I mainly use Linux which doesn't support it so I don't really use it, but with Windows, it works decent enough. I would've preferred it somewhere else, like on the power button on the keyboard like other laptops have. It also has a Windows Hello supported Camera, it works pretty well but it has some sensors which light up and flicker when it's trying to find you which is kinda annoying, I don't know if that is something that they all do, but it works pretty fast so it's got that going for it. The Speakers are okay and can get pretty loud, they're not the best thing ever but they're good enough.

Battery

The battery is pretty good, I haven't done a full run on Windows, but on Linux, I've been able to get 6/7 hours doing light stuff which is enough for my purposes. While writing this I checked my uptime which is at 10hrs with the battery almost dead, not all of that is in active use, a significant portion was while it was suspended, but it's pretty good regardless.

Performance

It's capable of doing pretty much everything I throw at it normally. I haven't properly tested it with gaming but there are plenty of benchmarks for the i7-8705G which you should look at if you're interested in this. I did briefly test Dota 2 when I had the faulty ram (they wiped it when they repaired it so I lost it) and it appeared to be able to run at 60fps while running at max settings at 1080p, I've also played "Rising Storm/Red Orchestra 2 Multiplayer" which when running through Wine on Linux it wasn't ideal, but playable but when I switched over to Windows I was able to run it smooth enough at Medium settings. I did also try running Rocket League and Golf with your Friends on Linux which weren't great experiences, I suspect it is something to do with the current state of the drivers for the Vega M chip (Note, you have to launch games with DRI_PRIME=1 for it to use the Vega GPU), however, due to my internet I haven't been able to get them downloaded on Windows to see how they fare there, but I suspect they'd be playable enough.

Linux Experience

I ended up installing Antergos on this (I was normally using Arch but didn't feel like wasting my time installing it manually as Antergos gets me pretty much to what I like). It was going pretty smooth but when I restarted to boot it up for the first time after installing it, It reached grub and completely froze, no matter what I did it would freeze, so I had to boot up from the USB again and I attempted another install. I ended trying to use Systemd-boot instead of grub to boot up but it wouldn't boot at all after that, at that point I had returned back home where my internet is very bad so I didn't want to fully reinstall. I ended up booting up the USB again and chroot'ed in and got it setup with a basic grub again and I was able to get it to boot without freezing (it would freeze when I had USB devices plugged in which I solved by enabling legacy support in the bios). Once I got in it was working pretty well, the Vega M GPU isn't supported on 4.17 kernel so to get it working I had to install linux-mainline and linux-firmware-git which got it working, but when you're reading this 4.18 might be pushed to stable so you might want to check that, as I'm writing this it is still under mainline. The speakers don't fully work on Linux, only the speakers on the bottom work and the ones at the top above the keyboard don't do anything. Other than that, everything works perfectly. For the Gnome users out there, I have found that the animations aren't perfectly smooth when running on battery, I'm not sure if that is a problem with the hardware or the software, but it doesn't bother me too much. Currently in an attempt to reduce the GPU usage and thus hopefully increase performance and battery life I've changed the resolution to 1440p and have set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor to 1.3 which seems to make it usable again and keep the crisp look of it, I was using 1080p for a while but it was noticeably a bit blurry.

Thermals, Undervolting and Thermal Re-Paste

I noticed that the Laptop would get kinda hot and noisy under somewhat normal use. It is worst when plugged in, on windows I would have it set to "Better Battery" while plugged in and it would start to heat up and get noisy (the main problem being the noise as I don't want to be annoying people in lectures). Initially, I tried to undevolt (using ThrottleStop on Windows and intel-undervolt on Linux) I reached -110mv on Windows, but when I had it that high on Linux sometimes it would freeze when switching TLP between AC and BAT modes. Right now I have it as -100mv CPU, -50mv GPU and -50mv on CPU Cache on Linux, I haven't tested boundaries with it so there's a good chance I could go higher. The undervolt didn't make a significant difference, or at least not a noticeable one.

I ended up deciding to repaste using Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, initially, I had looked at using Liquid Metal, but the whole thing seemed dodgy and I saw that people had issues where it would leak out after a long time of moving the laptop about and would kill it, so I went for the safer bet. The process was somewhat awkward, I had to buy Torx screwdrivers to open it up, with the T5 being the correct size for the two screws that required it. I was helped using this manual from the HP website, but it wasn't perfect. To fully take off the bottom you have to lift up the plastic stand thing that's at the top side of the bottom which reveals 4 Phillips screws. After taking the bottom off (you may need to push it up as I think it clips into the top part of the battery in the middle of the laptop) I had this plastic sheet thing that covers the heatsink which was attached to an insulating looking thing that was stuck on top, for me it seemed to have been somewhat damaged from the repairs and had been sellotaped on, so I lifted off the plastic bit and sellotape which left the insulating bit which I used a flathead screwdriver to lift up. After that, I had to unravel the cables that go along the fans. The left fan was pretty simple as all I had to do was unplug one connector and take it away, for the right there was one that is connected on each end which I unplugged on both sides and one that I was able to just unhook without having to unplug anything. For the fan connectors I had to use a flathead screwdriver to lift it up as it was stuck down, after removing the fans I then unscrewed the heatpipes/sink and removed it, I then used Methylated spirits to clean off the thermal paste as that is what I had handy, but if you want to do this there are better solutions to get. I applied the paste and reassembled anything, I did find the bottom of the case to be very inconvenient to put back on, taking multiple attempts to do successfully.

With the repaste and undervolt I've had a pretty good experience. With the TLP profile I normally use "Balanced" on battery it pretty much never has the fan running for what I've been using it for (right now, mainly web browsing, some programming and some other things, nothing heavy), sitting around 40 degrees Celcius on normal use and will sometimes get towards 45 when doing something more intense, this profile normally has the CPU at 1.07GHz but it can go up to 3Ghz if required. When plugged in it does seem to run the fan more often than when on battery, but I've been able to make it not as bad by using TLP in battery mode. I haven't properly tried on Windows, but I found Linux to be a bit better as I was able to better force it to run at various levels which forced it to run cooler and quieter. On a side note, there is no manual fan control, it's all automatic based on the temperature, I wish there was the option to manually control.

Conclusion

If you're in a situation like mine, I think I'd recommend getting something smaller like a Dell XPS 13. For a 15" laptop it is quite nice, however, I feel like there are better options out there and it is quite pricey.

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  • 2 months later...

Thanks for the post. Has it still been holding up well? I'm planning on getting it and then repasting. 

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