• ×
    Information
    Windows update impacting certain printer icons and names. Microsoft is working on a solution.
    Click here to learn more
    Information
    Need Windows 11 help?
    Check documents on compatibility, FAQs, upgrade information and available fixes.
    Windows 11 Support Center.
  • post a message
  • ×
    Information
    Windows update impacting certain printer icons and names. Microsoft is working on a solution.
    Click here to learn more
    Information
    Need Windows 11 help?
    Check documents on compatibility, FAQs, upgrade information and available fixes.
    Windows 11 Support Center.
  • post a message
Guidelines
Any failures related to Hotkey UWP service? Click here for tips.
Common problems for Battery
We would like to share some of the most frequently asked questions about: Battery Reports, Hold a charge, Test and Calibrating Battery . Check out this link: Is your notebook plugged in and not charging?
HP Recommended
HP Gaming Pavilion - 15-cx0999na Serial number: [Personal Information RemovedProduct number:4RE79EA
Linux

HP Gaming Pavilion - 15-cx0999na Serial number: [Personal Information Removed]Product number:4RE79EA

 

It has a 16GB NVMe which I want to replace with a larger one as the main disc. 

 

It has a 1TB disc, I would prefer a smaller one or none at all - I am not interested in capacity, If running off NVME will need  spinning disc. 

 

It has 2 banks of 4GB ram, totalling 8GB, I cannot find if this is the max for the main board.  The chipset deetails on the intel website suggest possibly.  There are no fully detailed tech specs on the HP website detailing this. 

 

It has a wireless card in an M2 slot, but the chipset already has a wireless LAN function (in addition to wired).  Can I switch on the embedded wireless lan, remove the M2 Wireless can and insert a second M2 ssd? for mirroring with the NVME port for data transfer speed and data loss protection? Is this other M2 port a PCI port and how many lanes?

 

Many thanks

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions
HP Recommended

Repairatrooper_0-1609569130525.png

The maintenance guide shows that if you have a 16Gb SSD that is actually an INTEL Optane memory module designed to speed up the system. To add an SSD of larger size you will need to remove the optane module as this laptop supports one or the other, not both at the same time.

If you find the information provided useful or solves your problems, help other users find the solution easier by giving kudos and marking my post as an accepted solution.
I am a volunteer, offering my knowledge to support fellow users, I do not work for HP nor speak for HP.



View solution in original post

3 REPLIES 3
HP Recommended

Repairatrooper_0-1609569130525.png

The maintenance guide shows that if you have a 16Gb SSD that is actually an INTEL Optane memory module designed to speed up the system. To add an SSD of larger size you will need to remove the optane module as this laptop supports one or the other, not both at the same time.

If you find the information provided useful or solves your problems, help other users find the solution easier by giving kudos and marking my post as an accepted solution.
I am a volunteer, offering my knowledge to support fellow users, I do not work for HP nor speak for HP.



HP Recommended

Ahh, really helpful, Thanks. 

 

I can only just read that if I scroll zoom in a load, can you post a link? Is there a user-guide repository I can browse? I was not able to find one, you could expect such. 

 

Yes I thought the optane was not an NVME SSD. 

 

I might be able to answer my own question about onboard wireless by playing around with the BIOS and the UEFI. 

 

I think that 8GB may be the most ram, as there does not seem to be an option on the HP webste, I would be surprised, as that is a little small these days, phones are bigger.  the intel chipset does not give me much about upper ram speed, But does indicate there is onboard wireless. 

 

What would really help is some good motherboard documentation.  where do you suggest I look for this?

HP Recommended

For anyone interested in a fuller answer here is more.

 

I have expanded my questions a little more, if it was not immediately obvious what I was asking.

The link here is the one that will take you to the specifications library. I do not think I found this one initially and the one I found did 'support site busy come back later' messages. Look for your laptop by model, just as the results shows in quotes. It is not a clever search so make sure you spell it right with spaces in all the right places.


In the documents section there are 4 docs. (Sadly it is mostly boiler plate and much of it relates to windows or HP software - not hardware) only the last few pages of the service guide has enough detail to answer my question, and even then it still is not clear.


Question 1:

Can I increase the RAM? Yes, but low ceiling.

In the service guide see page 43. It indicates you can only get it with a maximum of 16GB of RAM. It comes with 8GB, in 2 * 4GB banks. You can mix and match, you do not need same sized banks. The most is one 16 gb sodimm or 2 8gb sodimms. This seems a bit of a low limit, I am curious what the system board chipset is but this information seems to be nowhere in these docs.


Interestingly it seems this supplier of RAM can outperform ANY other retailer with their product awareness, and I am impressed, They indicate this machine will take 32GB of ram. So I want to know where they get their info, have they found the chipset model number? Where is it?


Question 2:

Can I change the HDD (spinning rust) for an SSD (Solid sate)? Yes but are there better options

Page 47 of the service manual seems to indicate you can you have a 2 tb spinning disc, on this 2.5 inch traditional sata slot. This seems an arbitrary ceiling, I wander if the options listed are in fact the parts HP will supply/guarantee to work to service agents, when in fact SATA can be almost any size you purchase. So the listing in the service guide is just part numbers not upper limits...?

 

This makes me think that this laptop Pavilion 15-cx0999na could take more than 16GB of ram, it's just that is the max HP will guarantee to service agents going by the service manual. So I want to know what the chipset is on the mainboard. ? any one?

 

Further there is an M2 sata\pci 1.1 slot carrying a wireless/bluetooth chip - you might be better putting an M2 ssd in there for weight, and taking out the spinning disc.  Better than that you could swap out the optane card in the other m2 slot which is an pci3.0 m2 slot, and put in a good sized PCI3.0 m2 NVMe drive/card in there. Frankly 1tb of storage is ridculous, unless you are storing movies. If you are storing movies why are you watching them on a laptop? or if not watching them on a laptop why are you using a laptop as a media server when you should be using a media server as a media server? Or if you are doing video editing, that would be much better on a desktop with a full sized screen.  Ok you can put a big screen on this laptop and use the geforce 1020 to drive it, but for video editing, is 8GB ram enough?  I think a 1tb drive is too much and I thought that when I bought it. Perhaps it is to store lots of games, it is a gaming laptop (I am not a gamer).

 

Question 3:

Can I swap the optane (16GB) for an NVMe pci ssd and how big can it be? Most likey and not that big.

 The card in there on purchase is an 16GB optane card. It caches your most read data from the hdd, and for frequently loaded files (the OS?) it can dump them in RAM waaay faster than the spinning rust HDD, but it is only 16gb (note twice the system ram...?)

 

This only really makes boot times faster if you have an spinning hdd, and may be the one program you use all the time - web browser? Ok, it is twice the system ram so the whole ram data set up can be kept in the optane and dumped rapidly into ram on boot. You can easily fit a whole OS and productivity suite in that envelope, so whats left out  is movies and games. (I have neither) The Games might take time to load, and you will not  fit many on the 16gb optane. (Remember if caches they will be on the spinning disk drive, just copied in tothe optane if you loade them frequently). But then it is transparent, it detects what you are loading most frequently and does a hardware cache, so when you go back to that game, the more you play it, it eventually becomes cached and it loads faster.

 

But if you had a nice big NVMe drive, you would not need this, especially if your storage requirements are not that high.

ok so what can I get? Well page 45 indicates you can only get 128 or 256 GB NVME drives. Again I think this might be what you can get, rather than what it will take. For a whole OS, Prod suite and specialist app (dev, or 3d cad) 128 GB *might* be small? So you think you want to go big, but then you want speed, and the tech specs at the end (p86) indicate the larger NVMe drive might be *SLOWER*??? see page 86. The smaller NVMe dirve is faster to read and slower to write. Do you read or write more? You mostly read, so you want the smaller NVMe drive. This feels all upside down. Is this a limitation on the product HP would detail and supply here or a statement about the upper limits of the board? I want the details of the board and chipset again!!


Question 4:

I want to put 2 solid state drives in, one in each m2 port then mirror them to get high iops for some processor intensive activities. To do this meaningfully they need to be the same protocol, Are both the M2 ports pci/NVMe or not?

No they are not the same. Page 86 describes an M2 pci lots - which would physically take an m2 ssd and would speak NVMe to it and page 87 describes an M2 sata slot. This may physically take an M2 Nvme drive but does not speak NVMe. From experience it will not show up on system probing. You cannot use 2 NVMe drives. But if you used one NVMe drive and one m2 sata drive could one still do the same? Without trying I don't know, but it does leave you with the idea that you could put a fast traditional sata ssd in place of the spinning rust, and an m2 sata SSD in and mirror them for fast iops (and redundancy) Would they be faster than an NVME PCI card.  If you were to do this would it be any better than just using the PCI M2 with an NVMe drive inplace of the optane drive?  Well a mirror will simply double the read IOPS and the write IOPS will be the same.  A sata ssd mirror will take 60K IOPS and double it to 120k IOPS for readom read (P86 again).  The PCI NVMe drive on its own will do 330 k IOPS) so a mirror will be no faster but it will have redundancy which the NVMe drive will not.  Precious data that is not a game or a movie?  might be a consideration.  The PCI NVMe would have to be not mirrored with anything, but could be a really nice swap function for fully loaded ram. (which is probably was as optane)

 

More important point to note is the sata m2 port carries a wireless and bluetooth card. If you did do any mirroring of ssds for speed you would loose the wireless, may or may not be a problem. Something somewhere I read suggested there was onboard wireless.....so you did not need an additional wireless M2 card. 


Question 5:

seriously what is the chipset on the motherboard?

Well I think it is this chipset but I am not sure why.  I think I saw this link on a site detailing more about the pavilion 15 cx0999na.  Halfway down the page you can see it says onboard intel wireless, on chip.  However when you open the computer up the wireless card in the m2 sata pci1.1 port is a realtek wireless chip.  When I trawl through BIOS and UEFI there are no references to wireless.  Has it then been hardware deactivated?  Is there a BIOS/UEFI update that will allow it? why is it there? so you can connected your bluetooth head phones or tele? The main board would not supply bluetooth without it.  Looking inside I could not see any micro antennae ports on any other chip. 

 

Researching further this page gives me a breakdown of parts, and This page give me a "partsurfer".  I can take the serial number and put it into the second page as I have to get more on the main board.  So I did this and it did come up with the right model number so it should be as accurate as I can get from the HP website,   I cannot fully remember but I think the main board is L20301-xx1 or L20299-xx1.  Over halfway down you can see a line referencing a processor and I think a chipset (wrong mainboard part number??)

L11942-001 Assy,BU IDSDSC1050 2GB HM370 i5-8300HTG

 

So probably is the HM370 chipset?

 

Summary/bed rock on the issues:

What is the mainboard spec sheet, and what is the chipset spec sheet? prob HM370 intel.

Does the mainboard and or chipset carry wireless without the wiresless M2 card? I think yes.

If it does can it be activated and how, and where are the antennae ports? I think no.

What is the upper ram limit according to the mainboard/chipset tech spec sheet? really not clear but might be 32GB in disagreement with the service manual. can only experiment - Trial a £60-70 experiment on one bank of 16gb, if works, trial a second. 

What is the upper NVMe limit according to the mainboard/chipset tech spec sheet? not clear but whatever is pci3.0 (not 4, or 5) because that is how it works everywhere else I have seen.  What ever I am prepared to spend, probably not that high, if I thought 1tb disc was ridiculous.

 

This is as far as I can go from publicly available information, thanks. 

† The opinions expressed above are the personal opinions of the authors, not of HP. By using this site, you accept the <a href="https://www8.hp.com/us/en/terms-of-use.html" class="udrlinesmall">Terms of Use</a> and <a href="/t5/custom/page/page-id/hp.rulespage" class="udrlinesmall"> Rules of Participation</a>.