Air to Pro upgrade review

[Thiago]

Hi all,

I was a happy user of the Teclast X98 Air. As a graduate student, for a long time I was looking for an affordable, compact and responsive tablet/pc. After going through M$ Surface, Dell Venue Pro 8 and a few others, each one with some minor problems, I finally found myself a good companion on the Teclast X98 Air. My primary use is web browsing, pdf reading (lots of articles…), programming and running some linux VMs. The Teclast was doing pretty well, although I felt that 2GB of RAM and a 32bit OS were kinda making the VM stuff a little slow and sluggish, especially because the newer versions of VMware are only available for 64bit machines. For this reason I decided to upgrade to the new and shinny Teclast X98 Pro. I tried to look for reviews to know if the new intel cherry trail would have a decent desktop speed improvement, but all the reviews I found were focused on gaming. I like games, but this definitively is not my focus with this tablet. I decided to give it a shot anyway and bought one.

After using it for about a week I must say that I noticed a big desktop improvement over the old model. The extra RAM makes VMs to run much snappier. I can even run multiple VMs (2 or 3) without problems. I was impressed! However, I’m concerned about a few annoying glitches this tablet has. To begin with, I must say that the EFI system takes forever to boot. As suspension mode never worked well with the teclast tablets, I always shutdown my tablet to preserve battery. Since the X98 Air took about 5 seconds to boot, that wasn’t a big problem for me. However, X98 pro usually spends 5 seconds only on EFI logo screen! That is ridiculous! I tried to change a few settings on EFI setup, but couldn’t find anything that helped with this.

Another problem is that the battery calibration is WAY OFF! I had battery calibration issues with the X98 Air as well, but it wasn’t that bad. Actually it would stuck at 7% once in a while, and all I had to do was to have the battery depleted completely and then perform a full recharge. I tried to do it with the X98 pro but it didn’t work. Any ideas?

Last but not least, this poor thermal design is bothering me a lot! Right now, I’m just writing this post on my browser and my cpu is around 65C. How can it be? If I open anything a little more intensive, let’s say, a large document on a word processor, the temperature can raise up to 70/75C!!! This can be really bad for the processor in long term…

Anyway, I’m overall satisfied with the tablet. It gave me a really good improvement over the things I use daily, which is good. I’m only concerned about these few points I mentioned. Any ideas about how can I fix them?

 

Thanks,

Thiago Alves

[mark]

This is what worked for me,

1.5mm*15mm*15mm thermal pads between the chipset and the chipset cover (cough heatsink), then on top of the chipset cover I used heatsink adhesive to glue .3mm copper shims to it and on the other side used Artic 5 compound. Now it stays nice and cool and you can feel the heat being transfered to the back lid. The tablet comes apart very easy and it was well worth the 30-45 minutes I spent on it. Links to the items I used below.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/221339482358

http://www.ebay.com/itm/171241106495

[Thiago]

It’s good to know that the tablet comes apart easily. However I’m still afraid to open it… Anybody willing to make a youtube tutorial video on how to open the  tablet and perform the thermal mod? Chris maybe? 🙂

Also, any ideas on how to speed up booting time?

[Jonathan]

Until the above post gets approved, google “Teclast X98 Pro Heat Sink Mod How to & Internals”.

[Jonathan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZWMyjZk8Bo

[Author]

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