Some Notebooks are Fun... others are Not

Maybe your cat is sharpening his claws on the Lenovo?

I nearly bought a Lenovo laptop earlier in the year, because they're one of the only companies to have a full size SD card reader (Something I REALLY want) option in their 13-14" laptops.
Then I looked on their forum and saw all the issues, not going near them again.

Hey Derek I also use the P14s gen 2
If you know ThinkPads you'll know that this one sucks! cheap plastic instead of magnesium, flimsy body design means it bends EVERYWHERE (screen, palmrest), and the worst thermals on any laptop I've ever tested
Lenovo also completely abandoned europe and UK for warranty support. I'm certain there will be a class action lawsuit about it
DO NOT BUY THINKPADS ANYMORE! Even the highest end X1Carbon Extreme is built poorly - there is no QA anymore

The t400 is really cool card and I was thinking about using it as a stream encoder or a video decoder but idk

Lenovo desktop background on a Gigabyte laptop. Interesting, clearly this means its a great background :P

Thinkpads are a joke

To be fair you should really be comparing the Legion series to the Aero not the P series

You know what I hate the most on laptops Roman - the bloody plastic that wears out and gets shiny after short use.
I had an MSI GE72-something that got shiny spots on the palmrest and the touchpad after less than a month of use because the touchpad was from plastic....not to mention that the touchpad becomes very hard to use when it gets 'polished' by the finger.

I personally hate laptops, underpowered and a bitch to take apart.
especially new laptops. think my Toshiba core 2 quad was the last laptop i bought in 2010.
since then its all towers and now Threadrippers :) would love to see a Threadripper laptop though. :)

Too bad macs can’t game but they don’t tend to have these build quality issues.

I am also unable to undervolt via XTU my Zephyrus M with 8750H/1060 anymore, I used to be able to undervolt and reduce temps/fan noise, not anymore.

Wow, that last laptop is amazing. The way the back cover comes out so easily and everything is so accessible to replace or upgrade. I wish more modern laptops were like that.

Is that a "Gate" address on your arm?

That P14s matte plastic is so awful. The place you rest your hands looks like you fried an egg on it as soon as you touch it after cleaning, even if your hands are squeaky clean. I think this is for market segmentation. They want to be sure that anyone not buying the "carbon" series is punished severely enough to justify the price hike.

I agree about the Thinkpads. I've owned so many over the years, it's a bit crazy. My last was an X1 with an 8th gen i7. At some point, Lenovo did a BIOS update and the thing got slower due to aggressive battery life enhancements and no amount of tweaking seem to be able to get it back to how it was when I first bought it. I stuck with thinkpad because I've always liked the the trackpoint button. I'm learning to live without it now.

I'm not in the market for a new laptop, but these are exactly the type of reviews I'd be looking for if I were.

There will always be dozens of "reviewers" out there who are hyperventilating over every new device while reading the same marketing bullet points that anyone can find on the manufacturers' sites with not a hint of critical thinking, but stuff like "this screen is too dim and reflects too much" or "it's too hot to hold" or "it scratches instantly" or "the charging port is in a terrible place" or "the touchpad feels unresponsive" or "this minified keyboard is painful to use and leads to tons of typos" or any of the never-to-be-fixed software quirks are what's actually important to know before buying a device that you're planning to use for years.

I love my Gigabyte Aorus 15G with i7-10875H and 2080 Super Max-Q. Not sure why your control centre keeps crashing thought.

I swear it is one of the best gaming laptop I have ever used. The keyboard, display and refresh rate (300Hz) is the main highlight. So I can overlook the camera placement at the bottom of the screen because I don't use it.

Also I mainly use my desktop for gaming and work but because I regularly experience power outages from inclement weather, I have a gaming laptop as backup.

Matte displays are terrible, but I could understand wanting one on a laptop since you can't always fix the real problem (the room) as laptops are intended to be moved around. For desktops - glossy all the way.

The Aero is really just badly designed, port placement, button and cam location, there is just so much.
Not to mention all the bloatware included

Der8auer, whats that "Sapphire Rapids QWP3" folder on the XMG laptop? Is that from your delidding video that gave me nightmares? Or something else we havent seen yet :O

Completely agree with you. Lenovo's Support is even worse than Dell's support. But hardware is absolutely awesome and easy to upgrade.

Any chance you are going to try long term a Macbook..?

It's so sad xmg isn't available all over the world. Very realistic guide and like everyone you definitely skipped the guinea pig testing of mobile alder Lake for your personal on the road and heavy duty DTR paired with xeon server CPU.

Hey Roman, I’d like to see you try out the new MacBook Pros. I know they may not suit you, but they seem like quite a good fit for your needs: a decent webcam, a colour accurate and bright display, amazing build quality, and great video encoders and decoders. It won’t play games well but for productivity, you should definitely consider it.

I didn't know that software is such an issue with laptops. You may think that by now everything would be figured out but it's not. I have the Lenovo Y700-17ISK laptop. I can't complain too much about it. The software works just fine since the first day I bought it (that was almost 5 years ago). One thing I noticed is that through time the screen degrades with its pixels. There are visible marks on the screen. Lenovo must have gone out on cheap material for the LED screen. Nonetheless, I'm satisfied with the laptop.

Gigabyte software is mweh.

I have the same GBT laptop. There are many issues with it starting with Control Center which is awful and never updated. Battery life is extremely bad (2-3 hours) becaue of the bug in software. Wifi issues are common for these laptops (antennas behind metal lid). However the screen is awesome, performance is great so I never thought about returning it. As for the power brick, I learned last month that AERO 15 supports 100W GaN chargers, so no, you don't need to carry this huge power supply :D

This is an extremely useful video, far more than when creators review a laptop without using It heavily

HP really replaced IBM in the corporate space, good docking support and solid build quality and customer service and drivers. Also no QA issues like the Dell XPS which fail way too frequently.

Dealt with Lenovo support up here in Canada and I can comfortably say I'm not touching any of their products for the rest of my life. Bought a Y740 brand new, was shipped to me. Open it up to find some keycaps loose on the keyboard, ship it for repairs and get it back within a few weeks. Now I finally get to boot up a game but nope awful graphical glitches in any games I try. Send it back again this time for a few months. Get it back and repair notes says they had to replace the mobo. This time I got to use it for a while, that is until the led lights on the left side of the chassis just die. I was like, oh well, definitely don't want to wait another month for a repair. All the while I was having issues due to their VGA driver making the mux switch their "hybrid mode" unusable. The CPU also thermal throttled while gaming not even undervolting helped. Fast forward a year and a few months, I see a bios update. Great, I thought might fix something with this POS. Update it every thing looks good then bam battery won't charge anymore and chassis is very warm to the touch. So I call support but I was basically told "sry sir, it's past a year so this is your problem now". Since then, it's been dead, I tried to get it repaired by a third party and they've waited for months to get a replacement mobo but nothing.

I'll have nothing to do with PremaMod myself. Not the work - I have no complaints there - but the individual himself and the way his work is "distributed." For example I invested $3,000 in a Sager laptop a few years back, with the specific promise from the distributor and the Internet at-large that a Prema BIOS would be forthcoming within the next three months - and then Prema went and got all butt-hurt because someone shared something they weren't supposed to make public and so he not only didn't release the BIOS I'd been promised as part of the sale but he pulled all his previous work from the Internet and went dark. IMO that's no way to behave when a community has formed around your work and promises have been made. I have no problem whatsoever paying for a custom BIOS, but that wasn't offered - and what I'm assuming is happening here, I don't approve of either. Partnering with one particular distributor (who won't sell anything to the USA btw) and then for those who got their (identical equipment with a different name on the outer-shell) laptop anywhere else, well they're just frozen-out? It's fine if he wants to sell the thing versus making it freely downloadable, but it must be available to anyone who wants to buy it. Correct me if I'm wrong here, as I haven't followed this or even thought about it in a long time, but if this is still what's happening - the BIOS can only be had by those who bought their laptop from one particular source that won't sell to my country anyway - I call bullsh*t on the whole scheme.

My T14s (1st Gen) is quite disappointing. The coating on the lid and palm rest is terrible. Mine stains like crazy, and it does not clean easily. Quite a few scratches as well, which is strange given that it lives only on my desk and in its bag. The FHD display is okay, so is the keyboard. The worst part is the cooling. The i7 model has one heatpipe and it is quite insufficient. Also there is this bios bug that does not turn the fan on upon booting. I have to restart the laptop every time from within the Windows menu in order for the fan to start working. And guess what? Lenovo has not answered any of my emails too :D.

Great as always! I got a question regarding the whole alder lake non k oc thing. You must be close to many sources in the Industry and i bet many of us including myself would love an update on the motherboard situation. Are maybe some manufacturers planing on revising some lower end boards to ad the clk gen?

P.s. the asrock z690 phantom gaming 4 has something that looks suspiciously like a clock gen but it's located on the botom right of the board... Hmm

Laptops in general has been absolute shit for the last 8+ years. Because you can't get a good keyboard unless you buy a gaming laptop with crap battery life. I need real arrow keys not the stupid half-size everything has, I frequently use home/end/pgup/pgdn keys and I do have workloads that benefit from any dgpu. I'm still running a 2015 Lenovo Yoga 3 1470 with a 940m gpu because there is nothing that I can upgrade to. I've been looking for a replacement since 2018 and there is literally nothing out on the market.

I currently use the exact same aero 15 and the control center is always crashing too. Switched to Linux and a lot of problems went away so for me it's still good

We don't need bezeless displays on a laptop. We need space to open and close the laptop and if it's all display, we're more likely to get fingerprints all over it (unless it's a touchscreen, then we need the space to not accidentally tap on anything)

Isn’t XMG a rebranded Clevo?

now compare all of those to an M-Tech Laptop and i bet every single one of them will LOSE on pretty much every point.

The Lenovo touchpad sleep issue is a frustrating one.

Love seeing a laptop with tuning features in the bios

Congratulation. Very nice test review. (....what about reviewing in 2022 the XMG Neo with Oasis water-cooling? :-)

I have an Aero 17 and I totally agree with you about the software being terrible. The laptop itself is great, but the software feels like they had an unpaid intern at Gigabyte make it. The newer 11th-gen Aero doesn't let you change power limits anymore (my old 10th-gen Aero did), so all I use the Gigabyte software for is to control fan curves. And thankfully, someone made a better fan curve app called AeroCtl that works quite well. I never have to use Gigabyte's control center software anymore. I also don't mind the nose-camera personally, but I totally understand why a lot of people are annoyed by it.

My model has a matte 4K screen, which I think would have suited you better than the glossy version. My previous Aero 17 did not support charging over USB, and traveling with the 230w power brick was very annoying. And it drew more power than airplane seats could provide. The new 11th-gen Aero can charge over USB-C, up to 100w, and it's been much more convenient traveling with a small 100w USB power adapter.

please i am looking for the latest bios for clevo p170sm-A laptop windows 10 gtx 860m. the one i have as bios is the P170SM_34_31_PM_v2 prema mod. my keyboard has no light since this bios. can you help me.
which bios to put or the new bios prema mod.

Lenovo has widely known issues with devices powering up / down. My wife's notebook (IdeaPad) has a known issue with webcam suddenly being powered down and up again. Makes it unusable since webcam can go offline in the middle of your meeting. Nothing works, she basically had to switch to external webcam.

My 2020 Asus Zypherus G15 w/ AMD 5900 & Nvidia 3070 has been the best value bargain I've gotten in a decade. Paid around $1,600 for it & aside from adding a second m.2 drive & boosting my RAM from 16 to 24Gb I've had nothing to complain about.

The matte screen finish + 165Hz refresh rate + 1440p resolution were definitely "the cherry on top". Credit to Asus for really nailing the balance between visuals & performance on that product.

Hello everyone, and shout out to Roman for the comprehensive review. In this video you can see for the first time a glimpse of the Prema Mod BIOS for XMG NEO (M21) with 11th generation Intel Core. Since this is a kind of side project of our product management in cooperation with Prema (without concrete, commercial intentions), there has not been a public release yet. We wanted to wait and see some feedback from reviewers (such as der8auer) and whether we would find any serious showstoppers in the long-term real-life field test. So far, however, everything seems to have gone well, which is why we are now considering a free-of-charge release of this overclocking BIOS for all qualifying XMG NEO (M21) customers in a *public beta test*.

Interested parties may please contact us in Discord in the channel *xmg-neo-premamod*. We will set up a private channel there for all interested parties whose serial number and customer number have been verified, in order to discuss the further procedure.

Our Discord server is called "XMG & Friends" and can be easily found via our website or your favorite search engine. There is also a FAQ about the BIOS mod linked in the Discord channel.

Important Disclaimer:

(1) This BIOS Mod is only available for XMG NEO with Intel Core i7-11800H. Other variants (such as with AMD Ryzen or Intel Core 12th Gen) are not planned.

(2) The XMG Control Center features shown in the video, on the other hand, are independent of the BIOS mod and also exist in all other XMG NEO variants since the beginning of 2021. These include the user-defined power limits, temp targets and fan curves. The undervolting feature in the Control Center is only available for XMG NEO with Intel, not AMD.

Thank you for your attention. If you have any questions, please come to the Discord server or reply directly to this comment.

Best regards,
Tom Fichtner
Schenker Technologies GmbH