One of the selling points of this series of laptop is that you have the ability to disable NVIDIA Optimus and pass the display directly to the dGPU on a hardware level. I highly advise to use this because NVIDIA Optimus is complete and utter jank. Literally jankier than my trench foot. You may notice after doing so that applications actually run as they should. No shade to the iGPU of course--that little Iris Xe chip is a 750ti-outperforming champ, which isn't too shabby for an iGPU. In that respect things have come far. It's just unfortunate that NVIDIA Optimus has not. i and d are not made to work in tandem just yet.
Reporting in to say this laptop is still my daily driver and still doing its job fine. I'd hope so given the price tag it came with though. After two appearances on the hit mtv show pimp my ride it is now sporting an extra NVMe drive (stolen from my tower) and as of today the maximum supported 64GB RAM. Unfortunately said RAM is capped at the now (and then, if you go by certain graphs) pretty basic 4800MT/s but that's what I get for going bleeding edge at the time I suppose. Servicing this laptop is pretty annoying, though nothing out of the ordinary with most portables of the 21st century- it involves picking away at the edges until it finally gives way or you give up and yank it like I did. Once you're in though, storage and memory, most guaranteedly your only options for upgradeability, are right there. I've done both so I've officially marked my territory !! !
As I mentioned in the OP, it runs hot, this hasn't magically gone away. It's to be expected from a highenergy performance laptop though it can be a concern when it's desperately thermal throttling at water boiling temperatures and you're not even half utilizing the CPU. It somehow seems to cope okay regardless as I've not experienced major slowdowns or shutdown events (though one time in the summer the critical temperature flag was tripped, meaning it would've been imminent). Would like to invest in a cooling pad of sorts but it do seem you need to fork out and endure The Noise if you want somethign that's not essentially placebo.
I guess one new negative I can add is somewhere along the line, the coating on the trackpad started to wear:
I'm not sure if this is user error or what but it's more of a grievance than it should be to me as I have tried to take care of it throughout. It was expensive and I want it to at least look that way come time to put it out of daily commission.
Other than that, it's still working as it did. TheUPS battery is almost exactly as new:
note the very low number of charge cycles though. It has sat on my desk its entire life, with the exception of when I took it to Japan (more on that soon if you bully me more about it). I'm going to assume that's where most of its charge cycles came from as that was the only point it's not had constant access to a magic electricity wall. No other examples of degradation to report on as of now touch wood.
Going to try Linux on this woman at some point I fear.
As I mentioned in the OP, it runs hot, this hasn't magically gone away. It's to be expected from a high
I guess one new negative I can add is somewhere along the line, the coating on the trackpad started to wear:
I'm not sure if this is user error or what but it's more of a grievance than it should be to me as I have tried to take care of it throughout. It was expensive and I want it to at least look that way come time to put it out of daily commission.
Other than that, it's still working as it did. The
note the very low number of charge cycles though. It has sat on my desk its entire life, with the exception of when I took it to Japan (more on that soon if you bully me more about it). I'm going to assume that's where most of its charge cycles came from as that was the only point it's not had constant access to a magic electricity wall. No other examples of degradation to report on as of now touch wood.
Going to try Linux on this woman at some point I fear.
