Acer Switch 7

Thanks @Steve S I'll give those a look into but I do think I'm returning this next week now. It's all boxed up.

Pen stuff: tilt works out of the box in all apps I used, MS Sketchpad, Photoshop. I found using tilt in Photoshop tanked the performance though, it was super laggy. I tried out various battery/performance settings, switched between the GPUs, disabling GPU etc but it was always laggy. But that's Photoshop for ya! Animate CC worked immediately too, but not sure about pen pressure (current project doesn't use brush tool), but it didn't do that stage panning and dragging thing the Surface used to do!

 

Acer press conference revealed no switch update. The line looks dead.

 

<<...no switch update. The line looks dead...>>

...There's been a lot of that going around in recent years...

 

@CribCoe could you maybe share some details on how you underclocked/undervolted the CPU/dGPU/iGPU ?

Were you using external tools like MSI Afterburner, Intel XTU or is the bios open ?

 

I used Throttlestop and read up some tutorials. BIOS are not open and intel XTU doesn't work on laptop CPUs (I think). You could use Afterburner too.

 

Everyone, stay away from this piece of garbage.

As soon as the tablet will be on heavy duty and reach 50°C (matter of minutes) the CPU will throttle at 800Mhz ! You'll have to install a software like ThrottleStop to fix this (turn off BD PROCHOT). And even then the CPU frequency will be stuck around 2Ghz.

So you pay a premium to get a Core i7-8550U and a MX150 but as soon as you try to use both you end up with 800Mhz of raw power and a 1d12 MX150 stuck at 950Mhz.

Received mine this morning, it's already back into its package ready for return to ACER.

Stay. Away. From. It.

 

ouch

 

This is my recommendation too, real sorry to read you had to experience this first hand too. fairly certain mine didn't throttle nearly as bad as this. I had ran a few benchmarks from prime and cpu-z, hwmonitor open, and had terrible results before I ran updates on it, performed average after updates.

In case anyone wants to know, I found an open box deal on a HP Elitebook x360 1040 in the end. Whilst it's AES 2.0, it's "fine" and powerful for my uses. Shame Samsung Notebook 9 Pen wasn't available in the UK as I would have really liked some of that EMR action. When will the stop-gap laptop thingy ever end?!

 

Now either I found a proper fan cooled detachable tablet with MX150 or wait for Gen11 Intel GPU.

 

Acer has given up refreshing the Switch line. They're focused on the Concept D line. On paper the 7 is surface pro killer. If only it the execution worked. Unfortunately, there are even fewer surface pro competitors.