What is up with these chipsets installed in these Omen laptops?!

[khex01]

Hello HP:

I would like to first congratulate you on an awesome design for the laptops and excellent built qulaity on the materials-- keyboard, speakers, display, etc.  The speakers are superb and 10X better than some of your competitor gaming laptops. The keyboard is also fantastic and I like it much better than my MSI gaming keyboard in fact but there is one major problem holding these systems back from being the best.....

That is the chipset and perhaps the overclocking you have done and set to the CPU.  Whatever you have done, you have totally and completely killed these laptops from functioning as anything other than playing a game. One cannot or may not even be able to install the applications they need to because the chipset seems to continuously hang or stall out after 5 to 10 minutes everytime. The only way to get it back is to reboot.

Immediately after I received my 17-AN120NR, and I am a certificed professional technician by profession so I know what I am doing, is replace the original SSD and HDD with my own 250 M.2 NVMe SSD and a 2TB HDD.  I then installed a clean copy of Windows 10 (defaulted to Home, of course, so I upgraded to Pro with one of my Windows 7 keys lying around still) and started installing the rest of my apps.  Originally, allowing Windows to download all updates and drivers itself goes smooth, without a hitch as does installing simple apps like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, iTunes, Realplayer, Adobe Reader, and even Microsoft Office Pro Plus 365.  All good. Until I come to Acronis True Image software. That and Visual Studio begin to run into problems with causing the chipset or CPU to stall out repeatedly during the installation. Pass these on and continue to some CyberLink software, and Power DVD installs fine. Power 2 Go installs fine, except it stalled out on the end where it would ask if I wanted to install WaveStudio. I opened up Task Manager and closed the WaveStudio Setup task (as it was no where to be seen) and it finished the install and closed fine. No Wave Studio though.  Continued on... after a reboot... and some more installed fine until I came to Power Director which stalled at 2%.  Rebooted and continued, Power Director quickly installed smoothly.  Etc. Etc. All this continues showing the same pattern... the chipset or CPU repeatedly stalls out after a while. The system does not hang or freeze, you can still work and open Apps and Windows Explorer and play videos and such, but installation of applications is just not possible anymore.

I wish there was a way I could open the back up again, locate some jumper on the system board that would reset whatever overclocking you have done to the CPU to reset it to the NORMAL, REGULAR state it should be.  Also, I would like to re-enable the Intel UHD Graphics 630 which I see you have disabled and I see no way of adding support for it.  I know the processor definitely supports it because the 8750H definitely has UHD Graphics 630 on board. My point is, your overclocking the CPU a and your changes has just completely killed an otherwise fantastic system.  I would love to be able to get this system reset to a normal, regular system-- just with the 8750H CPU and the GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card but I do not see anyway of doing that. Guess this system is going to get shipped back to Amazon for a full refund and I will have to continue my search for a competitor laptop system I can use as a workstation. I love the ability to connect three (3), yes 3, additional displays to this laptop. That is what I am going for and have done with my prior MSI gaming laptops. I wish I could do so with your Envy laptops but they allow a max of only 3 displays period including the laptop display.  This was my best hope but you have totally killed it by the CPU overclocking. I do not want the CPU running at 3.95 - 3.99GHz all the time-- that is overclocking and makes it more unstable.  I just want it in its normal, regular state.

Thank you for reading my discussion. Any ideas or help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[REO51ST]

Welcome to the HP Support Community  @khex01 

Just to clarify one thing:

HP does not "Overclock" any CPU in the BIOS.

Being a "Certified Professional Technician" you know that the CPU is using its built-in Turbo boost.

It is not using any BIOS/Chipset overclocking.

Processor Base Frequency 2.20 GHz   Max Turbo Frequency 4.10 GHz

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/134906/intel-core-i7-8750h-processor-9m-cache-u...

Regards,

REO

[khex01]

Thank you for the response. No, there is no way to over lock it BIOS but the way HP has programmed the BIOS and disabled UHD GRAPHICS support has done something to the CPU. On all my other laptops, including one I really want to replace with this same CPU installed, it never constantly runs at Turbo speed. It may at times get there but never constantly.

I think the main issue is that many programs are seeing the GPU as the CPU and trying to use that. Well, I plan on continuing to play with the Omen and spend more money on a second set of drives to do so over the next week before boxing it up to ship back for a refund. In which case, if that happens, I will have to forget about the OMEN line or nice powerful laptops because they simply do not run like a traditional computer. Have you even tried installing a bunch of applications on one of these? Try installing Visual Studio 2012 and some CyberLink media apps and see how the install goes.

normally, I can do a complete full Windows 10 setup with all my software including the full Adobe Creative Suite apps in 3 hours. That includes all updates and drivers. Not true on this thing... most installs keep stalling out and I have to reboot. How can I attach a display to the Integrated Graphics to enable UHD GRAPHICS on this? I don’t think you can because all ports including the laptop display are connected solely to the NVIDIA card. No Optimus technology on this either.