I have another topic where I talk about wanting to install win 10 on my new 15 advanced, but I decided to just leave as is.
Overall it's been good, I like typing on it, build quality excellent, keyboard lighting is really strong and beautiful, synthetic benchmarks are low vs other brands with same CPU but it still performs well in games
3 issues
1) DPC Latency - latencymon fails horribly within 5 seconds, and one of the worst results I have ever seen. It goes as high as 5000us which is really bad, I can take pics if anyone interested or wants to know more. This just means I won't be able to use the laptop for my music production at this stage, as all other processes will take priority over the audio interface, especially if I set that to low latency itself, which is what us studio guys do. (my interface is thunderbolt UAD Apollo
.2) I tell the keyboard lighting to turn off after 5 minutes when powered, and after 1 minute when on battery. Therefore there is nothing in my way when gaming with a controller or watching a movie. However, 90% of the time, when i touch the keyboard, the lights don't come back on after they have gone off. Today I had to reboot the computer, nothing I did would work, no matter how long I typed or "wiggled" touchpad.
Oh, sometimes when I touch the keyboard the lighting WILL come back on, with random timing. Sometimes it happens instantly as it should (rarely), sometimes it takes a minute, sometimes 30 seconds. I am typing away in full whilst this is happening by the way.
3) Using cinebench R20 which is a short benchmark. The CPU instantly goes to 100 degrees at 4.2ghz, then falls to about 98 and stays there for 10 seconds or so, there is no thermal throttling actually happening, then after that it instantly drops to between 3.4 and 3.5ghz for the majority of the test. So what is happening here is a power limit issue. Rather than the fans spinning up to cool it off under load, it stays at 98 celsius, then drops the power limit and drops to 3.4ghz at 80 celsius, THEN the fans come full blast to bring that down further.
I have tried:
balanced mode
balanced mode with full manual fan
custom mode with CPU slider to max right and GPU to lowest power on left, so all power was for CPU
custom mode with both sliders to max right
I know the slider works cause if it's not in boost mode it will never even try to sustain 4.2ghz under load on all cores, it will go to the low 3's. Middle mode is more like 2.8 and low power mode is closer to base clock.
Ultimately, cinebench R20 result is 4600, which is very low for an 11800H but in line with the frequencies reported. My previous Alienware 10980HK managed a 4472 but that's because it could sustain the rated 4.4ghz all core turbo of that chip at all times. If the razer would even try sustain the factory 4.2ghz of the 11800H, it would be over 5K score.
I can't undervolt or change multipliers cause it's all locked. Interestingly, someone I know in the UK just bought the exact same razer advanced 11800H/3070 and has an unlocked CPU in throttlestop! Is it different for UK market and Australian?
I guess I am asking, is my performance normal, is the razer supposed to only allow max boost for say 10 seconds or do I have a fault? I need to know whilst the machine is brand new so I can get a replacement if faulty.
The keyboard lighting issue and really everything here can be fixed in firmware updates if Razer deem them a problem, so I am not too concerned that it can't be fixed, just that I really like the auto off feature of the lighting which very few laptops have, but it's not working properly.