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to make it clear, i am a HUGE sucker for powerful hardware, and even more so for insanley powerful gaming notebooks, and its a disease i cant get rid of

3 something years ago at the dawn of 2008 i blew like $2300 on one of the worlds top of the line gaming notebooks, a 17' with an 8800GTX.
i even made a thread about it (man i remember how exited i was)
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=122481&b=2

anyway, after 1.5 years, first one of my hinges snapped, then the case started cracking around the hinges, my audio- jack was busted, and one of the usb ports stopped responding. After inspecting it, i discovered that it wasnt because, i took bad care of it, First the plastic was incredibly poor quality, and the design of the laptop was made to make it break after about 2 years. The tight screen hinges were moundted on the poor quality plastic without ANY reinforcement, so opening and closing it puts pressure on the plastic corners so its expected to break after 2 years. Also the hinges were mounted in such a design (one screw from the bottom, and another on the side THROUGH the mounting bracket. That hole in it for the screw weakened the mounting bracket, and the screw pressured against the plastic case when opening/closing the lid, pushed the screw against the mounting bracket also pretty much breaking it over time.

so now you know why this laptops case sucks, its a good laptop, but the case for it sucked.

Anyway, i completley screwed it up trying to solder new USB ports which didnt work anyway, screwed up some other stuff and fried the 8800GTX making this laptop completley worthless (well its possible to fix the 8800). I did however replace my broken brackets before i broke the GPU. but anyway!


the following paragraph is relating to a something thats further down and is in no way random ranting of any kind:

i moved on to desktops for gaming, leaving my stupid teenager mentality and got a very cheap netbook (it broke) then i got a cheap acer (it gets clooged very easily, overheats, pain to take apart to clean as you have to take it completley apart, like take out the motherboard, to get to the heatsinks and the CPU) i started playing around with an idea of making a custom case for this notebook (i successfuly made a few cases for mp3 playes before) so this might be a challenge. But the actual setup of the laptop is actually quite simple compared to most laptops so it looked possible. But then again, i though.... is it worth it for THIS! laptop that has a crappy AMD 2.0 dualcore and a HD 4500, can play some older games, but nothing new. But forget about the acer, i wont bother with it because its definatley not worth it to make a case for this perticular one.

i wanted to buy a cheap older laptop with something more decent for a gpu (and intel/nvidia setup, they usually heat up much less in laptops vs AMD)and more powerful than what i had. I spent 5 hours, researching these 2 german laptops that i chose. one of them was kinda sketchy 350 bucks for a german fujutsu seiment with a 7800GS 512 mb in new condition complete lack of any detailed desription. then for laughs i typed in "clevo" into the search (my old monster) thinking i am not gonna get anything and i am just making fun of mysef 3 years ago.

Then my eyes nearly popped out of my sockets.

There was only 1 listing with a picture of my old $2500 clevo! and the guy is selling it for $400 bucks! i looked at the descripton and here is what i saw.

This laptop was bought in Germany in 2009 for $4000 Core2 extreme CPU 3ghz, 4 gb of DDR3 ram, and a 1gb GF 9800GTX! the reason he said he was selling it is, because the monitor went dark (my thoughts: either inverter or the lamp, or maybe just a bad connection) and there was 1 broken screen hinge (my thoughts: 2 years, broken hinge? thats just like my laptop! so THEY DID design the thing just so it would break in 2 years! BUT I HAVE 2 WORKING HINGES AND AN ENTIRE LAPTOP OF PARTS TO FIX THIS ONE WITH!) the guy concluded by saying, after his drivers screwed up and he couldnt setup an external monitor anymore, he got tired of it and is selling it off, at the end of the listing he said "dont miss your chance to buy an exclusive gaming laptop for the price of a netbook" The listing was like 2 weeks old already, but me being the sucker for powerful laptops, the teenager inside of me kicked me in the head and made me take out the phone and call the guy. I didnt think hed still have it, for that money, anyone would have bought it by now.
And another surprise! the guy actually still had it! i asked him a few questions and confirmed that the GPU and everything exept for the monitor works! i went to buy it the next day. a bit dissapointed seeing that besides the broken hinges the corners of the case around them were worse than mine. Thats still good because i can just replace it with my case which is still not too damaged!, i confirmed that everything, works, the actual components, were in much better condition than in mine, so i got it for 400 bucks.
I guess another catch for the 400 bucks was that he tried fixing it himself and failed, put wrong screws in places, had a bunch missing, and ripped a wire that he forgot to move out of the way by driving a screw trough it (i fixed it). The lcd inverter was acting strange yet i confirmed the screen was working. Luckily i found that a popular russian notebook uses the same model LCD inverter as the one i need (really i actually think i fried the inverter they are kinda fragile. either me or the owner before me, he definatley took apart the screen part there were wrong screwes there and rubber nubs were missing. So after i buy the inverter tomorrow, ill reasemble the working clevo inside my older laptop chassis which isnt as broken, replace the screen hinges and for some time it will be almost good as new again worth $3000 bucks ( wont sell it.

one of the happiest days of my life.

So i decided, that for THIS laptop its worth trying to make a custom case as replacing the screen hunges and the chassis will buy the laptop some time, but as i said earlier, this laptop was designed to break. the good thing, i have my old laptop that i can use to design the prototype case for so i dont have to harm the newer one doing it. If i suceed in this task, i can just take the new laptop, from its crumbling plastic case, and install the components inside of the new custom designed case. I even looked up a few companies which can manufacture custom parts based on your own design. But designing a case for this particular monster would be a little harder than my acer, but for this laptop its worth a try. The best part about this one is since this laptop is already huge and heavy, this gives me the luxury, to make it a bit bigger and out of better material like aluminium or if i can afford, steel or magnesium.

sorry for the long post and this post covers kindof 2 subjects here and pretty much how happy i am faith gave me another chance with a laptop i loved so much (everyone says i need to get myself a girlfriend maybe theey are right)

so, i am planning to try to go trough with this custom case business, my friend even has AutoCad that he will let me use. so if anyone has any suggestions on this custom case thing tips or tricks? i have a few thoughts of my own maybe ill share them later.

this is a review of the $4000 laptop i got if youre interested or if it helps.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-mySN-XMG7-Clevo-M570TU-Notebook.11690.0.html

and that thread earlier today about LCD inverters, well it was about this one that i bought and dried to fix and, well i think i fried it. and i dont really know if the one ill buy tomorrow will be working because most of those parts are taken out of broken laptops and are also possibly fried
so wish me luck with the lcd inverter thing! and any ideas and warnings and wisdom on laptop case/chassis project would be appreciated.


thanks

I hate taking laptops apart, it's a bloomin nightmare!

Personally, I would buy an aluminium briefcase and stick it all in that, big, clunky, but plenty room for cooling, protected, will last, something like this maybe:



It might not be as elegant as most laptop cases, but then I can't imagine the pain and hassle involved in moving laptop components into a new case, not unless it was big and roomy, like a briefcase. That would be a dream to customise IMO.

And makes you look like an assasin

JUST GOT TO PUT THIS IN THERE


that basicly means for 400 dollar bucks OR 400 bucks bucks

x)

it would help, but as i said, the crap-plastic bends and the tight screen hinges put a lot of pressure when opening and closing the lid, bending that part of the case causing it to eventally crack. its a design flaw. no matter what i do it will eventually break. Unless i find a way to seriosly reinforce the corners where the hinges are mounted
you got a pint there

ummm.... yes

I can imagine trying to explain that at the airport.

"No! It's JUST a laptop!"

HAHA thet would be quite a situation lol

[men in black suits with earpieces come over] sir, come with us please

but when i was moving from US to russia, i had like 2 laptops with me, by broken clevo(i coudnt just abandon it there is still a chance to save it and look it came in handy). i also had another laptop with a missing screen (my first good laptop with x700 awesome design but same problem with the screen hinges) and because my luggage weigh too much, i had to move the huge clevo monster to my other bag (and give up my last $200 for exta weight) so i had to go trough security with 2 laptops, but to my surprise they didnt think it was least suspicios. (i also had like 2 motherboards in my luggage as well)


@Neuro Fuzzy i thought your avatar was an actual bug and tried to kill it. i feel like a cat now lol

well, i bought a few inverters just in case because all of them were used in russian branded clevos anyway and all looked pretty much the same but there wasnt a single one i could find that was from that exact laptop. and not a single one of them worked. Then one of the guys in a repair shop told me that the weird behavior that i had when the backlight will just start working 10 minutes after the laptop is turned on could be a board related problem. a unit on the motherboard which powered the inverter is likley dead.

and i guess he was right. i was THIS CLOSE to getting the laptop to work and its like faith is lauging at my face. this is so cruel because everything works, the videocard, and i bet the inverter works too. the i have 3 lcd screens and they ALL work i tested them like 30 times. so unless i find a new board which i wont and if i will it will proboly be from an older version of my laptop which supports neither DDR3 or the core2 extreme cpu and definatley not my the 9800GTX.



so unless there is another way to power the lcd screen or mod it to take LED screens which is impossible. i wasted 500 bucks on a piece of expensive junk

Your experience with the first laptop wasn't a big enough clue? Hope you're not planning on buying a 3rd Clevo laptop.

WHAT IS THIS SORCERY????? it started to WORK all of a sudden! and this time its stable! WOW!!!! i thought my day is ruined!

ITS LIIVES!

altho my suspicions are not over, its possible that i fried something that got in the way before,

or another suspicion i have is that the previos owners cat hairs that are all over the computer insides, possibly the cat hairs might have been shorting something out.

its still a mystery to me on how it started to work, but it was from the ORIGINAL LCD inverter that i thought was dead! and i noticed, 3 strange solder bubbles on it after it started to work that dont seem to belong there. Maybe they were there before and i just didnt notice them.

but anyway, what do you think? should i test this laptop now while its taken apart? like try to run a game (will have to use a live cd to remove the old password from win7 first because i dont feel like reinstalling. I am sure the previous owner had some good games in there.)

but damn. .... wow.... i hope this is for real.

also the reason i got this second one is because, i already had my first one to use for parts. and i know this laptop inside out. and the fried graphics is my own stupid fault (and there is still a chance to save my 8800gtx there are people who know how to fix this stuff) and the second one was extremeley cheap. also coincidentally i actually saw a third one of these laptops in a laptop-repair shop today, but it was an older version of mine. so i guess i dont have the only 2 of these in moscow lol. but WOW I AM SO HAPPY IT finally WORKS AT LEAST! and all i remember doing, is just trying all the different LCD inverters again, and just for the sake of giving it a chance, i tried the original again and it frigging WORKED!!!

i am so happy i just wanna die

Glad to hear it!


I did the same when I first saw someone else with that avatar... which is why I have it now!

well as it turns out, the 9800m GTX in this laptop is kinda fried. It works fine and everything, but when you attempt running a game in it, it starts to glitch and there is a BSOD and after that, it will be impossible to get the driver to work without reinstalling the OS. But even that dosent guarantee that the card will work properly. I had no idea what the previos owner did to this card, but knowing that a 9800mGTX is the same as 8800mGTX which i used for 2 years. the 9800 just has more memory, but everything else is the same.

anyway, i know this card is very tough and you cant fry it by playing sims and WoW which was installed by the brevios user. Also the video bios is weird. When it boots it says like 9800gtx blaah blah ENGENEERING USE ONLY NOT FOR PRODUCTION i thought that was kind of weird, so i suspect that either this card is actually one of the first revisions or prototypes or someone made a custom overclocked bios on it which destroyed the cards functionality (i cant even see its clock speed since the drivers dont work anymore and they wont install properny neither on XP or 7).

Also i am having dot patterns on the screen during dos/ bios and xp bootscreen. not bad so far and they dont really show when windows is running, butits definatley a sign of heat damage. I managed to get rid of the problem by reapplying heatsink paste, flashing the bios to the latest version (better win7 support) and reinstaling win 7 under the win7 compatibility bios option. This got rid of any patterns, the video drivers all worked and it was all good. then i tried running a game and all the glitches started happening and everything became even worse.

my only hope is to try to flash the videobios to its original state. I couldnt find any 9800mGTX vbios roms/bins tho, the only ones they had are 9800mGTS and the desktop bios (i didnt want to kill this card even more so the GTS bios i guess would do. altho i had no luck so far with flashing it. it keeps asking me for some zip which i never heard about... well i guess i will have to roam torugh all of internets forums to get how to flash vbios on this thing. If this dosent help, i dont know what will...

maybe an oven on 400c for 10 minutes, but i am really skeptical about this. i mean the card still works fine if i dont play games on it. and the closest thing i could find on ebay is an 8800mGTX but that just wont cut it for me anymore (I NEED MORE!!! MEMORY... )

The laptop supports gtx260m and gtx280m. but the 280m is like $700 on rjtech site. plus all the shipping and customs fees will add up to over $1000. its hard to find one even in china (btw can anyone here navigate chinese internet?). And these laptops are very rare in russia, impossible to find parts for (Ukraine for some reason has a lot more of these than russia. gaming laptops, never really really took off here, people would rather build desktops for gaming here. The furthest people would go is buy a mac, thats considered to be the best laptop for some reason.) and i cant order from ukraine anyway since most dont want to ship to russia and they dont accept russian money.

so it was a bad day for me today and i guess i am stuck with my crappy acer laptopand a few desktops. (i hoped to go to some lan parties with my clevo notebook) i guess the 400 bucks i bought it for, it really is worth 400 bucks since you cant play games on it. otherwise its a pretty good system. my hopes and dreams are ruined i guess. i will proboly have to wait a few years untill used GTX 280m will start appearing on ebay or something.

And i even wanted to design my own custom case for it that will last more than 2 years and give good protection for the precios insides, but now... its not even worth it. i am better off trying to build a portable laptop-like desktop replacement out of a mini itx board or something if i can figure out how to power the monitor and the system from a single PSU or find some screen that would work or something.

Also now that i realise, every time something like this happens to me its ALWAYS nvidia. now that i remember nvidia graphics were alsways either some of the WORST cards i ever had (like the mx200, the fx5200, ti3500 or its an actually good/ok card but something bad always happens with it like some kind of a curse. fx 5600, GF6600GS- thrown out by accident, 8800mGTX i shorted it out by accident, 9800mGTX is screwed up, i almost fried my friends 8800GTX, also remember a few problems with GF cards having that chip peeling off issue that causes color patterns on screens. And i get the strangest feeling that my 2gb GTX460 will not last long as well. and i always seem to have troble with drivers with nvidia.
ATI however, i always had GREAT experience with those, never had troble with drivers, always worked great, not a single ATI i owned ever broke, If i had to choose between a used ATI and a USED nvidia and one of them is definatley broken, i would choose ATI. I even remember i found 2 ati in the dump (some nerd proboly cleaning out his bacement) found an x700 128mb agp, an x800XL 256mb pcie and a 9200 SE 128 mb. All of them were in perfect working order. Had a lovley MSI notebook with a mobility x700 which i pushed like crazy especially with dark basic. the chassis was one aluminium piece so the thing got crazy hot. it survived everything. eventually the screen hinges broke and i lost the inverter. but the thing still works with an external monitor. i have a x1950pro that i used for a while, still works. the 5870 is proboly the best card i ever owned, And now i may be hating my crappy ACER laptop. but unlike my crazy Clevo laptop with a glitchy damaged 1gb 9800mGTX, this crappy hd 4560 still works and can play most older games on full.

the only reason i keep returning to nvidia is their most expensive high end cards are really powerful and because nvidia had physics and all those small mainstream techiy thingies that somehow make it hard not to buy nvidia if you want to actualy do something with it. Dark basic is a great example, it lives off nvidia cards like all the plugins. and all games these days are sponsored by NVIDIA and they have the devs program them so they would run better on nvidia.

i am really angry at nvidia right now for pretty much shoving crap in my face all the time (maybe i am just unlucky with nvidia)and then lauging at me....
nvidia sucks. I ill stick to ATI from now on because they never failed me. I am tempted to get nvidia however even tho i know, its gonna break or bring me bad luck.

i wish voodoo 3dfx was still in the game so i would at least have some real choice.

also... i hope Radeon adopts infinite detail technolody, and use it to force nvidia into bankrupsy, that way i wouldnt be tempted to make the mistake of choosing nvidia again.

LONG LIVE RADEON!

i had a radeon 9800 (I think 9800) that failed on me That said, I had an nvidia fan go out on me too, so they both suck

Luddite

my radeon 9800xt- the first radeon i ever had and i loved it, i still have it, it still works

Q: What does an ATI card and a bus have in common?
A: They're both big, red and have terrible drivers

Hyuk hyuk, made my day.

That said I've found ATI drivers to be fine, only problem was when I was running them under Linux - in which case Nvidia are so much better.

Well red is one of my favorite colors. and where i come from buses arent red. Infact i dont think i ever seen any red buses. american buses are white as far as i know, russian buses are white and green sometimes painted with crapload of ads. And i dont remember ever having troble with ATI drivers. Infact every time i bought ATI cards, i always read in the comments about what a pain it is to get the drivers to work blah blah blah. And then when i bought the card anyway, the drivers ALWAYS worked properly and i kept wondering what is everyone complaining about. There was one time when i bought a card (5870) where i had a bit of troble with drivers. All it took is 30 seconds of googling and i found alternative drivers that worked. Plus some people apperently write their own ati drivers.

I cant say the same for nvidia. always a pain when it comes to nvidia drivers.

Also i decided to try an experiment. I bought an ATI 3870x2- BIG RED INSANLEY HOT DUAL PROCESSOR card and a GTX 290. both are really huge/hot cards (not sure about gtx290) both i got for 100 bucks brand new (leftovers that were never sold) interested to see which one will die first. BTW if i force the fan on the 3870x2 to work on max speeds, its unbelievable how well the card cools

soo there!

also, some ATI cards are blue ....

I love it when you can pick up an absolute monster card cheaply. I remember when I picked up two 8800 Ultras off eBay for about £100 together - I adored those things!

It' really couldn't be simpler. REALLY. you know

-Go to the website
-Go to download drivers
-Find your product, as accurate as the series it comes from
-Choose your OS, choose from a multitude of installation languages
download, install, never had a problem.

I'm sorry, but if you're having problems, you're either thick, or you're computer is held together with spit and mucus

I used to think that way but experience taught me otherwise. Some configurations just don't work.

yeah it wasnt always that easy for me with nvidias. Sure i had sucessful nvidia setups in the past (before they burned out or something bad happened to them) What surprises me that i generally had a LOT LESS problems with ATI cards than nvidia.

Also i think i am finally pleasantly surprised by the GTX 295 i got today. it actually runs cooler and quieter than the 3870x2. i am curios to see which of them can take more bashing and survive.

Public buses are white, but all the school buses are yellow. Never seen a red bus of any kind.

Buses are red in london, I think.

yes, even though the actual London buses got put out of service a few years ago, the buses are all red for some ridiculous reason.

Everywhere else, they're coloured in the company colour-scheme

Ok JUST NOW ati once again proved to love me. So i got a really nice monitor for a bargan of 30 bucks (the guy had no PSU for it and didnt know if it worked so he gave it away for cheap) as it turns out the moniitor worked. I hooked it up to my GTX 295 and for SOME FRIGGING REASON... i refused to run on max resolution. it gave me 1024x768 and didnt go any hiigher unless i set the monitor to 25Hz Not to mention that the drivers i tried downloading for the GTX 259 took like 4 hours to dowload. And now the drivers refuse to set its resolution right

(the OS on the GTX295 system win7 x64 btw)

I took it to my neighbor. Hooked it up to one of his servers with an old X800XL (the card actually belongs to me, i let my neighbor borrow it. I found it in the junkyard 5 years ago, and it works. Even ATIs people throw out still work. Nice huh?)
So i took his server, hooked up the same movitor (which nvidia refused to run on full res monitor to it, installed win 7 off the same disk, downloaded the ATI drivers/software (100mb) in about 1 minute (vs frigging 3 hours for the same 100 mb if Nvidias driver/soft) and the monitor works perfectly, running at max resolution at 70Hz with NO PROBLEMS AT ALL!

I DONT KNOW WHY? AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO ALWAYS HAS PROBLEMS WITH NVIDIA AND NEVER ANY PROBLEMS WITH ATI????

can someone tell me please? why is it complete opposite for me vs everyone else when it somes to Nvidia vs ATI/AMD video cards
WHYY??!

also btw Moscow had red doble deckeres as well like in the 60s like the british ones