i7 Book modding, benchmarks, readings, tweaks and other thoughts.

[Hotcooler]

So I’ve done pretty much the same mod as Chris. First opening the tablet is a pain, managed to do it cleanly and with no issues, but was a pain..
End result looks like the shots under this paragraph. Since Chris did not manage to cram in 2mm heat transfer pad, I decided on 1mm thick 20x20mm copper square attached to 0.8mm copper sheet and 1.5mm thermal pad. Overall it works but a bit too thick, which is apparent when you apply pressure to the screen. Probably a good idea to cut down 0.1-0.2mm extra. I’d go for 0.6-0.7mm copper plate, would also save on weight a bit.

 

While this improved CPU temps by a lot, you need to do some undervolting. Even if you dont plan to actually do any modifications it will improve perf and save on power and temps by quite a bit. You can do it through bios in the overclocking menu, but there is no option to set System agent offset voltage, and on my system SA with no undervolt contributes about 1W on max load. So you will have to do it via software in either XTU ot ThrottleStop.

I ended up with -87/-82mv on CPU/GPU respectively. This was dont even on the stock cooling, without any BIOS mods done later, as for what that gives you here’s a comparison bench : http://www.3dmark.com/compare/sd/4237393/sd/4237017 While CPU temps are still in high 90’s  it gives you major share of the perf gains.

Now, our tablet never actually thermal throttles from the CPU, it does so from some other sensor, be it skin surface temp one (that I dont think actually present) or chipset or some other one I have no clue, but even after modding CPU cooling it wont actually stop tablet from throttling down to about sustained after 20min or so.

You can disable this behavior in the BIOS : Advanced – Platform misc – DPTF – Policy Configuration

I’m fairly sure that disabling Passive Policy and Adaptive Performance turns it off, but just in case I raised most of the temps in DPTF section a bit, the ones for various RAM/chipset/Skin temp sensors. Completely disabling DPTF will just throttle the thing down to 4.5W.

But even after the mod tablet does not really have adequate cooling to sustain more than 7W and even 7W is pushing it. For example after running at 9W for about 7min temps were as follows, CPU – 75C and rising, chipset – 68C and rising, Front glass hot point – 50C and rising, Back hot point – 58C and rising.

For myself I ended up with 7W sustained with 20S boost to 11W (max power it can actually draw to sustain max perf is 10.7W for my undervolt). In this mode temps are stable after 20min at 72/64/48/55 for CPU/chipset/Front/Back. As you can probably figure it’s far from being great, but that’s no airflow and 27C ambient temp.

If you point a desk fan at the back side, temps stabilize at 61/55/43/44. So you can probably have it run at 10W sustained if you make some sort of active cooling for it if need be.

For use as an actual tablet, I’d probably limit it to 4W with something like 10s boost for 12W.

Now to benchmarks, they were run before I disable auto throttling so they have some degree of throttling there. For comparison I reran 3D mark 06 with my 7W profile vs Max perf with auto throttling and got 7730 points vs 8136 points. So not that big of a perf loss for relatively sane temperatures.

Benches compares to stock config with no undervolt/cooling mods :

3DMark 06 Final Score : http://www.3dmark.com/3dm06/17908255 vs Stock : http://www.3dmark.com/…7908255/3dm06/17907796

Ice Storm Extreme Final Score : http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/14018089? vs Stock : http://www.3dmark.com/…/is/3903660/is/3905840

Cloud Gate Final Score : http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/14018192? vs Stock : http://www.3dmark.com/…/cg/3747868/cg/3745620

Sky Diver Final Score : http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/14018506? vs Stock : http://www.3dmark.com/…/sd/4237017/sd/4240672

Fire Strike Final Score : http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/14018910? vs Stock : http://www.3dmark.com/…/fs/9695655/fs/9720747

Time Spy Final Score : http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/14019127? vs Stock : http://www.3dmark.com/…/spy/250091/spy/239206

3Dmark 11 Final Score : http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/11484342

Now for some addition info :

Sadly you cant do anything to ram, if you try to change any settings the thing does not boot sadly. So RAM OC is out of the question at least at this point.

Wi-Fi is pretty good on it, connected to 5GHZ works slightly faster than my SGS7 : http://www.speedtest.net/result/5537869345.png On torrent based stuff it can actually do a fairly reliable 90mbps.

KingSpec SSD from Ali is also pretty good : http://openpandora.info/hosting/upload/big/2016/08/10/57aa83d6dcd5b.png

Book from SoCube seller has model Cube i16 and has a Windows 10 key in the BIOS (probably MSDN one, but still), one from Ali sale reports to be Cube i16-L and has no windows key in the BIOS (one would assume L is for Linux). Both run the same BIOS v0.11

Weight of the modded unit is : 765g Keyboard weighs in at : 666g Total unit weight : 1431g Which is sadly quite a lot… keyboard weighs too much, though to it’s credit is quite stable. Touchpad will require some tweaking since it’s way to sensitive while having not that great of a resolution and needs some dead zones.

Scanned default cooling plate in case any one wants to laser cut their own. 11MB warning. It’s 60.46mm wide, 104.12mm long, holes are 42.5mm by 21.5mm apart. You should be able to work out the rest from this. Scanned at 600dpi.

Will happily answer any other questions you have.

[lumpy]

Thank you for this very interesting information.

I haven’t received my tablet yet but I already know that I can make update / upgrade to improve it 🙂

[Author]

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