so on the desk here we have a meta box laptop and I got this in today as a
trade-in on a system that I sold and the value I placed on this when the guy
wanted to get rid of it was 200 Aussie dollars now this has a gtx 1070 in it
and it's also got an i7 6700 HQ but the problem with it is that when it's on
battery it works absolutely fine, but as soon as you plug in the AC adapter it
then starts to either reset or switch off and so what I'm gonna try and do is
replicate this problem right now and see what's actually going on in front of my
own two eyes because basically when he came over and he showed me the problem
it was just starting up and I couldn't really get a proper glimpse of things
but basically the history of this laptop was is that he bought it initially for
$900 dollars and then it worked fine for three months but then when he was
playing call of duty warzone it started to crash and the crashes became more
frequent to the point where he had no idea what was going on with this laptop
and of course being the situation that we're pretty much all in and around the
world at the moment he just wants to play games and basically when it comes
to laptops I still really have no idea what they're worth or how much they cost
to fix where I put the worst case scenario down as the motherboard could
be faulty or the GPUs faulty and that would cost me a lot of money to fix
hence why I traded in for $200 dollars because that is the worst case scenario
that I would be able to get my money back on at least with that value so
anyhow this thing I'm looking at it already and the drivers here from 2017
so that's already one big problem I can see another problem here is that it's
got a hundred gigabytes of SSD storage just completely unallocated so it looks
like it's got a 500 gigabyte SSD in it that I'd have no idea why this is just
100 gigabytes sitting around there and we go here Windows is activated it's got
all the specs there 16 gigabytes of ddr4 memory everything's looking great it
except those two things so what I'm going to do now first and foremost is
just quite simply reinstall the OS and also take this thing apart make sure the
thermal paste is fine everything's intact and the temperatures are fine but
before I do that I'll also quickly plug in the AC adapter and run some stress
tests just to see what the temperatures are like now and just to see if I can
actually get it to switch off like the guy was saying people like to laugh with
me for this kind of stuff
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so now we've been stress testing this CPU for over ten minutes and the
temperatures are getting pretty hot especially on core one which could
indicate that we do need to change over the thermal paste but for what it's
worth laptops do usually run pretty hot anyhow this thing is getting moderately
loud I have heard laptops get a lot louder though for what it's worth it's
showing here it's using up thirty-eight watts so it's pretty powerful but the
CPU is micro throttling there we can see with this overheating detected so
basically it means that we've got to change the thermal base but I haven't
seen it crashed just yet so what I'm going to do is I'm going to change over
to unity in heaven now and put it on low settings on low resolution to not only
try and stress the graphics card but also stress the CPU at the same time so
we just loaded up UniGene heaven and as soon as we did that we will almost
instantly met with a black screen and now the system has restarted so the
problem is definitely to do with either the GPU itself or it just can't get
enough power so what we're gonna do is we're gonna quickly install afterburner
on this system and then pretty much down clock the GPU on both the core clock the
power limit and the memory and then run this test again and see if it works
so going through some further tests with this laptop it's clear to see that the
GPU is having some sort of issues and what we saw was not only did it drop out
after the heav'n benchmark but it also dropped out after we installed the
latest drivers and I tried loading up afterburner and changing the core clock
speeds and the system would just go one color even when I try to drop it down
fifteen megahertz then I tried dropping the memory speeds down individually just
by itself and that's sort of bugged out where it just went plus to some insane
value and then I tried changing it and just basically ended up setting it to
default so it doesn't like to communicate with MSI Afterburner that
well and still in the latest drivers did not help so we're gonna pull this thing
apart right now and see if something's wrong that's visibly wrong with the
hardware we're gonna try to give it some tag guest loving and then give it a
reboot so pulling the laptop apart I can see that this thermal paste is really
sloppy we definitely need to clean up this GPU right here and then put some
new thermal paste on that could even be the problem in itself where if this is
even capacitive this thermal paste that could be causing the instant cut out
when the benchmark is loaded I wouldn't say it would be the fans because we
heard the fans ramping up before and even if one of the fans has failed it
would take like a good thirty seconds for this to overheat and switch off
where it's switching off instantly and it's even switching off when we try to
change things like the core clock so what we're gonna do now is of course
clean this all up and then put it back together and see if that fixes it but
also just go over this laptop with a fine-tooth comb and see if anything else
stands out [Music]
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so here we are now at the next day we've given this some tech yes loving
temperatures are looking a little bit better but the problem is it's still
like after I've reinstalled everything it still does cut out after that running
that heaven benchmark and I've also managed to find the cleveo app where
we've managed to down clock the GPU and also down clock the memory to as low as
it can go and this is the weird thing I'll show you right now it I can get it
to actually work properly and it's a weird fix where I go to the Nvidia
control panel and then I change to integrated graphics the Intel HD
graphics run the benchmark close it down then I change it back to auto select and
then I run it and it then works after that so it's looking to me like either
something is damaged on this laptop like a little chip that connects the GPU and
the CPU or it needs a new v bios where it's just not as efficient as it used to
be so what I'm gonna do now is I'm actually gonna flash a gtx 1070 max cube
bios onto this laptop and see what the results are like
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so now we have a meta box laptop that we picked up for 200 Aussie dollars and
it's working absolutely fine nothing is now faulty it now runs due
maternal runs f1 2019 and it ran those games for quite a while and the
temperatures are okay on the CPU and the GPU but to get here it was a string of
events that I consider very lucky and we'll talk about the string of events
the first being the env flash tool now I went onto Reddit and there was
thankfully someone who had left up an older version of env flash and it was
only one of these versions that enabled me to force flash a different bias on to
this laptops gtx 1070 and that was the 5.1 for so big thanks to vipre and also
the guy on reddit that uploaded this and made this env flash version to begin
with so after that we then went on to tak power up and bless the tech power up
for having this v bios database because someone uploaded an unverified cleveo
gtx 1070 bios with the same file size as this meta box right here and basically
the meta box is a I guess of rebrand of a cleaver laptop which I think cleveo
our big laptop manufacturer in Taiwan so we then got that gtx 1070 bios we
downloaded it I then tried false flashing it numerous times and it was
right at the last time I was like look I'll just try this on this different
version of env flash and sure enough it then forced flashed and we restarted and
it ended up working and the funniest thing is we just had nothing to lose so
I tried everything I could to get it working and of course trial and error in
today's video ended up prevailing with the Big W though what if this laptop
didn't work after that V BIOS flash well this comes down to me just then putting
it up as an office PC and turning it on integrated graphics and disabling the
gtx 1070 because i would have still got my money back as a just a 15.6 IPS
laptop ddr4 i7 6700 HQ that would have easily been worth what I traded it in
for so that was sort of like my retainer I really had nothing to lose except my
time when I tried taking the gamble on this laptop but it paid off big time
with those three steps but you're probably wondering now this TDR video
failure blue screen what's going on there because I read up on forums that
people were having these problems not with just with meta box laptops but
other laptops out there so you're probably wondering what is the exact
issue now I can only really hazard a guess as to what exactly is going on
with this laptop and that comes down to this feature in the BIOS I feel it's
called GPU performance scaling now what this does is if your CPUs not using a
hundred percent and the GPU is using a hundred percent it can then essentially
borrow that TDP budget that's not being used or that what's that isn't being
used by the CPU and then transfer it over to the GPU essentially over volting
the graphics card to get more performance while your CB is not using
up much performance and what happens in this process is I feel is that there's a
chip for that that enables that to happen and on this particular laptop I
feel like that chip has become faulty and it's just cutting out so by me
flashing it to a different gtx 1070 cleveo bias that maybe doesn't support
this technology I was then able to get the gtx 1070 working absolutely fine
again so if you do see this error on a laptop
in the future then you may wish to consider flashing the vblast but the
problem is you've got to then rely on lock to see if someone's uploaded a
different V bus for your gtx 1070 on your laptop or whatever grabs card for
your laptop is on to the tech power up website so I was really fortunate and
really lucky that someone did that and it ended up working because basically it
said the PC a subsystem ID was different to the gtx 1070 i had on board here and
so basically that ended up fixing this laptop where the performance was
impressive the noise wasn't that loud at all in the keyboard and everything else
checks out the build quality is actually quite good on this box right here to
begin with now the gtx 1070 that's actually got
more cout cause then the desktop very nice just
clocked lower and then of course there's the max-q variant which is even clock
slower than this gtx 1070 in this laptop here so I will give kudos to this
particular 1070 it's not a bad version or bad variant it actually can get up
and go especially at 1080p even in something
like doom eternal on Ultra settings we're getting some really good fps
numbers so I'm really impressed at what this thing can do but one thing I will
point out is there's only a single ddr4 16 gigabyte stick in there I'd like it
to be 2 sticks to get that dual channel so perhaps I'll upgrade this laptop and
make it 32 gigabytes of ddr4 who knows but for what it's worth we've now got
this thing up and running it is working absolutely fine and I've got to say this
is probably one of the best scores I've gotten in the history of the channel
where this thing here is traded in for $200 dollars we just gave some tacky as
loving applied some new thermal paste and here it is at Tech yes City going
through the steps the trial and error with that motto that is if you've got
nothing to lose you've got nothing to lose so do let us know in the comments
section below what you think of this deal right here I believe personally I
think this thing would be worth in its current state in Australia in the
current situation going on right now around about 1100 Aussie dollars that's
what I feel something like this would go for so that's a big win on my part
getting this thing to work again to a hundred percent of course love reading
your thoughts and opinions as always and speaking of thoughts and opinions we've
got the question of the day from 60 schastye and they asked do these apply
to AMD based components as well and they referred to yesterday's video put the
link up here where we talked about one of the tuneups you can do using the
inspector program on Intel CPUs now I've tried inspector on AMD CPUs both old and
both Rison in the past and it doesn't give any performance boosts in fact it
can be a slight by 1 to 2 percent detriment to performance if you do
disable the spectra and meltdown updates on the CPUs well I think it's actually
you can only disable one of them because Rison at least is immune to the other
vulnerability so if you're on an MDC PU you don't have to worry about
using inspector it's not going to really make any difference whatsoever and with
that aside I hope you guys enjoyed today's video if you did then be sure to
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another tech video very soon peace out for now but
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