New HP spectre OVERHEATING!! and uneven OLED panel

[sudnut]

After being a loyal HP customer for many years, my old faithful 2014 edition spectre finally gave up. I decided to get a new HP Spectre as I had just started Uni and had loved the experience with my old spectre. I got the late 2019 i7 4K OLED HP spectre for $3000 at JB-HiFi, hoping it would be a good upgrade for the next years at Uni. However ever since buying it my experience has not been so pleasant.

I have had my laptop since the 25th of February 2020, so it is still new. Out of the box, I noticed that the right rubber near the fingerprint reader - which is supposed to stop the screen from making contact with the metal base when the lid is closed - was pushed in more than the left one – allowing the screen to scratch a bit on the first day which was a bummer, considering it could have been avoided if the rubber wasn’t pressed in - however it didn’t bother me and I shrugged it off as not worth taking the whole laptop back and just bought some foam stick on spacers.

Another problem I noticed that day is that the laptop gets extremely hot when I'm not even running anything demanding on it. It would get so hot that it’s difficult to touch without flinching and you definitely wouldn’t want to hold it for too long. I initially looked this up online and dismissed it as the computer setting itself up since it is new. But after a week it was still getting uncomfortably hot to the touch in the area above the keyboard and still does so today.

At times when I only have a few chrome tabs open and nothing is taking up any resources in task manager, the fans spin up like crazy. I understand that they need to cool the computer down but there seems to be so much delay between it getting hot and the fans actually kicking in before it’s uncomfortably hot and when they finally do cool it off, the cycle begins again it just heats back up to that uncomfortably hot point. This is all while I would have only one or two browser windows open. I am amazed at the heat this thing gives off, so I installed HW monitor and ever since look at my CPU temps daily. On regular, light use, temperatures easily range from 90-100 degrees. These temperatures are the point where damage starts happening to the laptop internals. I need this laptop to last me at Uni for three years and I can’t have it going short of that lifespan because of a heat meltdown. I have tried a full factory wipe and a reinstall from the recovery partition, reinstalling drivers and doing updates but nothing has seemed to have helped. Any ideas?

Finally, and what has pushed me to write this post is something I noticed a couple of days ago. I recently changed my windows colour theme to grey and upon doing that it has become apparent that there is a defect with my screen. When turn the computer off with my new grey theme, the shutting down screen comes up in grey and it makes it obvious that the right side of my screen is a completely different colour when compared the rest of the screen. (SEE PICTURES) Now that I have noticed it I can’t un-notice that my whole display is uneven on one side. This isn’t good enough HP and it can’t be burn in after just a one-month use.

I have treated my laptop and treat all my tech religiously careful so that is lasts and I am very annoyed as to why this laptop has these problems. I like HP but I don’t think this is good enough when I have paid $3000 (much more my good spectre was in 2014 which had no issues) for a half put together laptop. Would anybody be able to give me some advice on these issues?

Thanks.

 

[sudnut]

 

See my average CPU temps above.

Is anyone having an overheating issue aswell? The heat is one thing, but this also means that the fans are running at hair blower speeds most of the day, which gets extremely annoying.

This, together with a scewed rubber, damaged screen and the uneven backlighting, makes this $3k machine feel rushed and not worth it.

Has anyone else experienced these issues with the new spectre? I hope its just a lemon and I can get a replacement. JB-HiFi didn't want anything to know about it and said I would have to talk to HP which I hope can help.

Thanks.

[asmita6658]

Hi @sudnut

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[sushislicer]

Hello,

Very common issue but not specific to this model or brand.

Running a toaster is easy to fix. Because Windows (and Intel) is upgrading it's power management tools in Win10 some functionalities might be missing now.

What you refers to is a too aggressive CPU performance profile: You either can reduce the load or micro-manage the CPU.

Your cpu is kept awaken at 4+GHz, any load at that frequency will provide too much heat in a short time. Instead CPU must cool down itself by only reaching turbo speeds when necessary.

The key parameter behind this is called Intel SpeedShift. When it has a value set too aggressively the CPU might behave like a Desktop CPU but it is not suitable here.

Unfortunately Intel and Microsoft are not letting you setting this parameter explicitly. So HP have options to lock the CPU in a tighter power envelope (bios updates + tool to set which performance mode should be maintained). Which apparently didn't work here.

Unfortunately either, HP doesn't provide tools to control the fans (that could be a solution)

So if you want to put a definitive solution on this: you must find a tool to fine tune the cpu behavior (intel XTU or Throttlestop or other...)

Simple workarounds at the cost of loosing performance:

* disabling turbo (cpu sits at ~1.8GHz which is cool)

* reducing CPU max frequency (by enabling the option in the registry - old W7 power option)

Counter intuitively, reducing average cpu speed is not to improving battery life.

[sudnut]

Hello Sushislicer,

Thanks for your help. Ill look into those suggestions. Enabling cpu power options from the registry seems promising. However I believe that after paying this much money, I shouldn’t have to fix something that should work and run like a normal high end laptop.  I have been contacted by HP support and I will see how it goes. 

Thanks