Latest revision of LapBook 14.1 has a power management bug!

[Yap Chong Chieh]

Unfortunately, I also have the latest version with the 0.26 BIOS. True to what you have said, the clock speed never went up to 1.5GHz, and the CPU core temperature has been consistently hovering around 65-75 degrees Celsius. Had ordered the copper plate and thermal paste for the cooling mod to bring down the temperature.

I wonder if it is possible to flash the BIOS back to 0.17. I have a feeling it might cause the system to stop working since like what you have mentioned, there has been quite a number of changes to the hardware.

[Ernst]

Don’t flash a version of the BIOS for the older release of the LapBook 14.1 to the latest hardware!

You will brick your LapBook.

See:

Warning for newer model Chuwi 14.1 bios update will kill it.

[Justinkeyback]

As far as I can tell it is no bug. Lapbook functions fine, it is stable and is reasonably well equipped (for that money). My guess is, its just a preemptive measure of Chuwi for unwanted warranty-claims. It surely has an effect on the fun playing with it, but as far as work goes, I accept all awkward idiosyncrasies so far. I do not game and do not need the lapbook all day in my lap ;-). But I do regret there is no option to disable the touchscreen, that is all I have to complain. As concerns fiddling with BIOS, it must be something like heart surgery. If you put an old deprecated pump in a youth, you should be very sorry for him.

[Ernst]

I regard the fact that this BIOS does not allow the CPU to go into its deep sleep mode a bug. It might be a conscious decision of Chuwi (or Hampoo, the OEM of the main PCB) but since this decision means the loss of more than 2 hours of battery life, turning approx. 10 Watt of the battery power into heat, I find it a rather stupid decision.

This LapBook now has worse battery life than my HP nc6000 of 2003.

BTW; forgot to mention that there is another difference between this revision of the LapBook 14.1 and the previous version; the touchpad mentions V2 on its PCB. So it might be better than the previous version.

Perhaps TouchFreeze (use google)  helps with any touchpad problems during typing.

[Justinkeyback]

You are probably right from your point of view. But there may be lots of users who to like to see their laptop fully functional as soon as they open the lid, as I do. Sleep in C7 takes a bit more time and can for one be a source of … the start of a bad day … something like that. But yeah, from speed and all you are right. It was a bad day for me too, had ordered the M2 2280 and discovered it won’t fit. Thought all sizes would fit, so no, damn. Would a 2260 fit? Even when the clip would be removed?

Btw, thanks for the link to TouchFreeze, so a bit of sunshine after all.

[Ernst]

In the meantime I noticed (by a closer look into HWINF)O that it is/are the Intel Graphics core(s) that consume all this power…

This is very much related to:

Weird power characteristics of the n3450?

If the Intel Graphics Driver is exchanged for the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter the power consumption of the CPU drops from 5 Watt to 2 Watt.

In the post above a BIOS update solved the problem… but there are no newer BIOS’s for this latest revision.

[Ernst]

Yep. That is it. Same problem. With the Microsoft Basic Display Driver the system runs easily at 2.100 to 2.200 Mhz.

Geekbench: uni/multi : 1457 / 4236 instead of previous 1041/2787.

Tried updating the Intel Graphics drivers. Didn’t help.

[Justinkeyback]

How did you find out? What way can you measure power consumption of a graphics driver?

[Ernst]

First of all I noticed with BatteryMon that the latest revision LapBook consumes a lot more power than the previous version. Then the question where all this power goes is interesting.

I used HWINFO (freeware tool) to show the data of all the sensors in an Intel CPU. These show that even when doing almost nothing (i.e. idle) the CPU consumes around 6 Watt which is the maximum for this type of CPU. First I thought it was the CPU cores but it turns out it is the GPU engine that consumes two-thirds of that power. This causes the package to run hot which means the CPU throttles, that is why it will never go higher than 1.500 Mhz.

In the post I pointed to the same problem was discussed to be present in BIOS versions before 012 and it was solved by 012 and 017 (which also added Linux booting). I believe all LapBooks until December 2016 came with BIOS 011.

So apparantly for this new revision of the LapBook (which come with BIOS version 026) the same error has been re-introduced. Hopefully it will be fixed.

I found a copy of the AMI BIOS tools and I can dissect these BIOS’s but there are a lot of other differences so hard to pinpoint what causes this without source code of the BIOS.

I posted the question to update the BIOS on the official Chuwi forum, but Chuwi doesn’t appear to deliver a lot of technical support so I don’t know whether this will be solved.

See:

http://forum.chuwi.com/thread-4547-1-1.html

 

[Justinkeyback]

Thanks for your tenacity. I used the software you mentioned and noticed a difference if you tweak the Intel Graphics settings in advanced power settings. Processor activity dwindles to 0.5% however, power consumption remains the same. With nothing running, in flightmode, it still consumes about 4.5W.

Are you optimistic about Chuwi updating a more efficient BIOS?

[Ernst]

Yep, in contrast with my first post in this thread, it is not the CPU cores’ power management that is at fault here but some combination between the Intel HD Graphics driver and the GPU power management parameters set by the BIOS. It is weird since even with the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter doing nothing, the graphics cores use 2 Watt. Better than the almost 6 Watt owhen using the Intel HD Graphics driver but it should be almost 0 Watt when idling.

Whether Chuwi or Hampoo, the OEM of the PCB, will deliver a new BIOS solving this, I don’t know. For some reason there are various BIOS files floating around, even in the official Chuwi forum. For the previous revision we had 011, 012 and 017.

Even for the latest revision we already had 024 and 026 so there is some process to spit out new BIOSes…

We will have to see. In its current form the latest revision is worthless to me with such a bad battery life, meaning it won’t last during my workday.

[Razor Blader]

Oh my, Chuwi what are you doing… I have the old revision and still like it a lot but the thermals were a problem even with the thermal mod it was possible to push it beyond 90 degrees Celsius when charging and really pushing it at the same time. I went to digikey and got myself a flat heatpipe (for around 10 bucks) that now transfers the heat from the center of the aluminum heat spreader (where the CPU sits) onto the metall bar underneath, with a couple of copper heatsinks glued in between so I didn’t have to bend the heatpipe.  3 hours of Prime 95 heat generating test were only able to push it to 76 degrees Celsius, it won’t go higher than this no matter what you do, ever since I did that mod a few month ago I wasn’t able to push temps beyond that with the thermal throttling limit disabled in the Bios so it can be done without resorting to CPU/GPU throttling measures like they seem to have done on the newer models, shame really.

[Justinkeyback]

Hackerjac posted revised BIOS and other files on the official Chuwi forum. Don’t know if it would be wise to use any of them. Anyone?

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