Helios 700 love/hate relationship (incl. Predator Sense / Audio/ Screen)

When I set my laptop to custom cooling at about 1200 RPM then it stays silent and CPU temps are usually between 40 and 50°C when doing desk stuff. Never seen them go higher than 70°C even under stressful applications. So that is super fine. And that's the 8 core. Remember that the Helios comes undervolted, so the CPU will not throttle at all. Can't speak from experience with the 9750H, but you should be more than fine

And 6 cores are quite well, for gaming you will not be bottlenecked and for applications it still carries a lot of "oomph" to get the job done. Also, your laptop should be much cheaper than the Alienware without losing much power.

The GPU is quite bored overall, in Desktop expect it around 30 to 40 degrees and in games it will not get hot if you run it stock.

Just remember, a 1200RPM custom profile will most likely get you in trouble in gaming, so I recommend you to switch to auto when gaming.

If Acer had not made the 2nd profile "fast" (which is super dumb, as it will have the same performance as "normal" just the fans blow at max speed) but "silent" then this laptop would be super awesome.

Stay away from "fast" and "extreme" and go with custom fan "normal" for everything not gaming and "boosted" with keyboard tucked out in gaming. (you can decrease the OC on the GPU in "boosted" to keep it cooler via notepad edit, the GPU still is strong enough for 90% even without OC)

Oh, and avoid the coolshot tick or whatever it is called. That is just a safety measure you will not need ever.

But to clarify, if I set 1200 RPM in one of the modes (say the normal docked mode), it will save and remember the setting, right? And say I set 15-1600 RPM on the undocked boosted mode, perhaps that will be enough? I do not care if it throttles a little bit. The 9750H is fine, I just like having the best **** available. But the full scale 2080 is the big star here.

Hmm, good tip about the OC decrease, will most definitely do that. My current laptop smokes every single game out there anyway at 60 hz and ultra settings, so should be able to reach 100+ fps easily even if the 2080 is not overclocked.

You've made me somewhat at peace with my purchase, with your posts, so I thank you for that. I'm such a tech nerd, I sometimes just have to buy something new, even if I don't really need it. Having to return something cool is not much fun.

Tech nerd to tech nerd: I feel you!

Just give it a try, test things out, good luck with backlight bleed and pixel errors or other things where you go to the lottery whenever you buy a new laptop

I bought two, so I'll keep the one with the best monitor. **** thing went on sale the day after I bought it, at a 17% discount. So I'll return whichever laptop has the crappiest screen and keep the discounted order.

Received the laptops today. I got no dead pixels and not a whole lot of backlight bleeding, so I'm probably not going to bother opening the other one.

Well, it benchmarks great, I will give it that. Almost twice as high Fire Strike score than my GTX 1070 laptop. But the noise is simply unacceptable no matter what profile it runs. And I can't stand the fans stopping and then revving up part. So I have now set both fans to 1600 rpm. I can live with this when doing light work, and it may be just enough to play demanding games with.

As I type this, it's running the Resident Evil 2 remake maxed out at around 100 fps, just sitting there while I watch the temps on my smartphone. GPU has no problems whatsoever (I disabled the OC when the keyboard is undocked too), currently sitting at below 80C (at 100% load and 1600 rpm fan speed for 15-20 mins). CPU is hotter, it passed 90C at one point, but hovers around 85C (but only sits around 35% usage). System temp is around 80C. I could live with around 2200 rpm when gaming, but I cannot be bothered to switch fan speeds every single time I play games and then stop playing later. So this will have to do when I am not benchmarking.

If it dies, it dies. But I reckon it can survive these temps. Other than the noise, and the crappy speaker sound when the keyboard is undocked, it seems like a good machine.

I upped it to 1700 rpm on the CPU fan and 1630 on the GPU fan. But is there really no way to save 2 different manual fan speeds? I figured it would save one fan speed pr. OC profile. But it doesn't even do that!

Also, the BIOS menu on this laptop is like going back to the 1980's. Plus most everything is locked too, for some reason. Wasn't even able to disable secure boot. And the Intel raid 0 that was set up was useless - after I removed it and benched one single drive, it had almost the exact same speeds. After much hassle though, I was able to install a proper Windows version (Enterprise). Actually had to clean the partitions manually with diskpart in CMD.

I'm trying really hard to like this laptop, but it's making it kinda hard. I can't even get more than 90Mbit/s on the wifi card after formatting - it should do around 160 (my work laptop has no problems squeezing 160 out of the router).

If you have more tips for me, regarding fan speeds and whatnot, I'd appreciate it

Edit: attached 3 pics which shows the differences between manual fan speed, auto and max fan speed. You can see which is which by the "Viftehastighet" (fan speed). It cools insanely well when the fans are maxed out, but I wouldn't wish that kind of noise on my worst enemy, haha.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/u1/im3l1s1o037w.jpg

TimoFaust said:

Any other Helios 700 user ( I feel so alone among the 300 users...FOR SPARTA!)that has edited the XTU settings with success?

Whenever I try to edit the XTU settings it completely screws up all of my profiles and defaults to one terrible ...default setting for all profiles and I have to reinstall PS newly. It just says that my profiles are not compatible with my CPU, which is not true, as even the Acer standard profiles give that message as soon as you exchange and rename profiles.

GPU editing by .ini is easy and fine, but I could get my laptop so much more efficient (yes, I am German. Guilty) if I could find a way to make the XTU editing working that was shown for older Helios models with older PS versions.

Any help?

@TimoFaust
It's been a while so you may have already solved it. I got my Helios 700 today and was seeing the same problems as you. I remembered having similar issues with my Helios 500 after an automatic update to Predator Sense that came through via Windows Update. I found an older version of XTU and it fixed the issues.

I gave it a go on the Helios 700 and so far so good. I was able to import the 'fast' profile into xtu, set a slightly increased undervolt of -0.122v and slightly increase the Short Power Max of 115w. I then saved and exported the profile to replace the Normal.xtu in Predator Sense.

So far my settings are sticking after muliple reboots.

The version of XTU I'm using is 6.4.1.205
https://www.station-drivers.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=352&func=fileinfo&id=552&lang=en

If you haven't already solved it I hope this helps.

Cheers
Mick

Hey @TimoFaust

Just in case you or someone else is still struggling with this issue. I can confirm that by using the older version of XTU I have now been able increase the voltage offset in all four profiles – Normal, Fast, Boosted, and Turbo – and then export them and overwrite the original ones.

My new Normal profile sticks at boot and all profiles work fine when switching between them on the fly. Just to confirm the issue, I went back to the latest version of XTU and everything was a mess again.

As I said earlier, I originally came across this problem on my Helios 500 after Predator Sense was updated via Windows Update. All had been working fine with profiles made with the latest version of XTU up until that time.

At the time there was two solutions that seemed to work. One was to downgrade Predator Sense, and the other was to downgrade XTU. The latter is the only option in this case due to newer settings for the Helios 700 not available in older versions of PS.

Overall, there seems to be some incompatibility between the latest versions of XTU and PS, where for some reason they don’t get on anymore.

To be honest, I am finding the Helios 700 stays pretty cool as is. As a comparison, I do lots of flight

Hey guys,
This is important, I just realised I linked to the wrong version of XTU, it's actually 6.4.1.23 that I am using with the Helios 700 (I used the other one for something else).

If you search google for the version number there are a few download locations

Cheers

Mick

@mikeyjames
yes you are right, proper xtu version makes method of hotel hero working!

TimoFaust said:

TimoFaust said:

TimoFaust said:

Any other Helios 700 user ( I feel so alone among the 300 users...FOR SPARTA!)that has edited the XTU settings with success?

Whenever I try to edit the XTU settings it completely screws up all of my profiles and defaults to one terrible ...default setting for all profiles and I have to reinstall PS newly. It just says that my profiles are not compatible with my CPU, which is not true, as even the Acer standard profiles give that message as soon as you exchange and rename profiles.

GPU editing by .ini is easy and fine, but I could get my laptop so much more efficient (yes, I am German. Guilty) if I could find a way to make the XTU editing working that was shown for older Helios models with older PS versions.

Any help?

Anybody? Tomorrow is my birthday and working XTU support for all 4 profiles would be such a nice present

Ok, now I have tried to manage with the newest XTU version. Older versions always stated that my CPU versions were not compatible, the newest XTU version can not even open the .xtu files included by Acer anymore.

So basically Acer seems to be doing everything in their power to prevent people editing the PS software.

Why does Acer not let me edit it and apply better OC / UV for my CPU?

If I could edit the files and rename the edited files to the names used by PS, then I could change the "fast" mode (why would anyone want full speed fans with the keyboard in standard position when the OC is bareley noticable???) and could turn it into "silent" by applying a -.125V undervolt and limit the CPU cores to less power (4GHz is enough for a silent mode) and set manual fan RPM to unnoticable 1000 RPM.

But no, I can not customize that on a 3000+ € machine. Because ...what?

Do you really think they do smth intentionally lol they just too lazy for that

they made xtu profiles and adopted PS to the version XTU available to those moment

So using XTU version 6.4.1.23 I am able to edit XTU profiles which accepted by PS, now I can switch profiles in PS with my custom undervolt and PL in each so Hotel Hero method works again

I have one question, can you share whole folder C:\ProgramData\oem\PredatorSense from your machine?
When you set custom fans profile, is it common for all PS profiles or individual for every profile?

I get tons of infos that people answer this topic, but I can only see about a third of the posts. WTF ;D

belik said:

So using XTU version 6.4.1.23 I am able to edit XTU profiles which accepted by PS, now I can switch profiles in PS with my custom undervolt and PL in each so Hotel Hero method works again

Sounds good, need to try that in the next few days. A little min maxing is never bad

EDIT: The issue I have with this old version of XTU is that it has a lot of security risks. Hm....

BTW: There is a new Bios out, that "Adds Nvidia VK key in BIOS"; I have no clue what that means ^^

TimoFaust said:

belik said:

So using XTU version 6.4.1.23 I am able to edit XTU profiles which accepted by PS, now I can switch profiles in PS with my custom undervolt and PL in each so Hotel Hero method works again

Sounds good, need to try that in the next few days. A little min maxing is never bad

EDIT: The issue I have with this old version of XTU is that it has a lot of security risks. Hm....

BTW: There is a new Bios out, that "Adds Nvidia VK key in BIOS"; I have no clue what that means ^^

I have no idea what the bios changes mean either.

When you use XTU to save the new profiles just check them first within XTU to make sure your voltage offset sticks. Occasionally, when you save a new profile and then click on "show values", the voltage offset will be zero. Usually, it just requires a second save and the voltage will stick. Once you click on "show values" and see what you want you can then export the profile and use it.

After reading your post I checked and did see a post where someone mentioned the security issues with older XTU versions. I'm not an expert on this so can't really comment on how serious these flaws are and whether they represent a threat even when XTU is not running. Once everything is up and running I think we should be able to uninstall XTU. Maybe then we can install the newer version of XTU just for occasional verification that the settings are still working.

Cheers
Mick

TimoFaust said:

I get tons of infos that people answer this topic, but I can only see about a third of the posts. WTF ;D

Yes, I am finding the same thing. When I posted the wrong link for XTU I came back to verify and couldn't find any of my posts - I could see all the other people's posts but it was like mine had all been deleted. Then I logged out and back in and all the posts were there again.

Ok, at this point I think it is either bugged or I am blocked by Mikeyjames, as I get a lot of notifications about posts, but can not see a single one.

It would be much appreciated, if somebody could put all of his posts in a single qoute post, to bring me up to date about his last 3 to 5 posts I can't see. Thanks.

Old version XTU needed only for editing profiles, I guess you can even edit it on another machine with old XTU and then deploy on main one

Because latest PS and latest XTU can work with profiles created in old XTU

So in general PS is turning into smth useful, it can use PS profiles which controls PL and undervolt on CPU, core and memory overclock on GPU
And the only one thing left that activating profiles adjusts fan curves simultaneously and does it in stupid way and even this can be fixed

Stay tuned!

belik said:

Old version XTU needed only for editing profiles, I guess you can even edit it on another machine with old XTU and then deploy on main one

Because latest PS and latest XTU can work with profiles created in old XTU

So in general PS is turning into smth useful, it can use PS profiles which controls PL and undervolt on CPU, core and memory overclock on GPU
And the only one thing left that activating profiles adjusts fan curves simultaneously and does it in stupid way and even this can be fixed
Stay tuned!

Looking forward to your solution about fan curves.
Btw: As I can not read any comments by Mikeyjames, did he say something insightful in this thread that would be interesting for me as well?

There are so few sources about our laptop that I am interested about any tiny bit.

Did anybody also test the new bios?

belik said:

I have one question, can you share whole folder C:\ProgramData\oem\PredatorSense from your machine?
When you set custom fans profile, is it common for all PS profiles or individual for every profile?

Do you still want that? I can share in the next few days when I am back home, if you like.
Sadly it is one profile for all.