Details on the upcoming Control Center for Ionico laptop (and other future Tongfang 2021 chassis)

[Macco26]

In the following reddit post another Tongfang reseller has just given an exhaustive detail on the upcoming Control Center for Tongfang chassis of 2021. Expect this to be shared knowledge to other upcoming Tongfang chassis PCS might offer in the future:

It should come for Ionico as well (obviously only for the Intel part). Definitely worth a read.

I am still reading all of the informations and simply put, it's amazing the details and customization Tongfang put from the feedbacks of the community in 2020.

EDIT: this might be applicable also to ELIMINA PRO 2021, as it might be a Tongfang 2021 chassis AFAIK.

EDIT2: link was removed, oh well, fine; you can visit reddit and find it yourself, or hoping PCS adds some sort of manual like this in its forums, lol.

 

[Romain337]

Thanks you @Macco26. I am seeking for information about this new model too as I ordered the Ionico the last month (and I carrefully read the forums since then ... finding some haters and all so I stay silent until now). I plane to run Linux on it so the control center will not be available to me (that's not a problem at all) but I like all technical details. Cheers.

 

[Macco26]

In that thread you can find the other reseller saying their side-brand for Linux might help to get some of those functionalities into Linux. You should check and maybe subscribe to their subreddit for that.

 

[Romain337]

Yes no worries about that
I wrote a software for the MSI GS73VR to be able to control the LED keyboard (thanks to prior community work).
I can do it again. Also dumping the EC memory, looking at it etc is not a problem.

 

[barlew]

Thanks you @Macco26. I am seeking for information about this new model too as I ordered the Ionico the last month (and I carrefully read the forums since then ... finding some haters and all so I stay silent until now). I plane to run Linux on it so the control center will not be available to me (that's not a problem at all) but I like all technical details. Cheers.

You'll have to give us an update when you take delivery mate and let us know how it is?
It will be interesting to see if it has the same problems as the Vyper.

What size did you go for 15 or 17 inch?

 

[Macco26]

Despite you asked to Romain I'll tell mine: Ionico 17 from me, mate.
If I have spare time when it gets delivered, I'll do a deep review here (maybe even a short video, we'll see).

PS: assembly is expected the 15th, not before, so some more time to wait.

PPS: I do not plan to keep it far from the wall for extended periods of time, more like a DTR, tbh, but I'll test the problem Vyper had in battery mode.. for SCIENCE!

 

[TheMash]

If it's up to the reseller to customise the Control Center and the bios, I've very few hope it will happen with the PCS one, as I've seen the Gaming center and the BIOS from PCS are the less customised and feature rich compared to other brands so far.
I really like PCS products and I'm a happy customer but as enthusiast we usually expect a little more than the standard set or worse lack of features.
The Vyper III it's missing the option to select the default power profile, as an example, when booting the system, so I end everytime booting the system with gaming profile and I have to wait to boot on Windows to set the default profile.
Also the power profiles are somewhat weird.
Game profile is 120W for the CPU and the same value for Turbo mode.
For some reason office more, with Eco disabled, now set the TDP to 100W instead of 35W, as it was happening before.

Anyway, I've just looked at the posted link and the new set of features it's impressive and they're what I always looked for in a laptop.
Wish I could have waited in August when I bought the Vyper.
Thinking about of selling the Vyper III to replace it with the new gen Tongfang laptops.
But I don't what what feature set will have the ones sold by PCS.

Speaking about marketing and branding names... Who choose the laptop model names in PCS?
I'm Italian and the name Ionico and Elimina aren't very attractive to me... 🤔😁

 

[Romain337]

@barlew I went for the 17' and I'm not sure about the battery problem you are talking about since not a lot of people is complaining about it. If something seem to be wrong I will report it here. I'm far more worried about how the workers are treatned at PCSPECIALIST. I wish we could give a tip to them (via the order form why not). Seem like they have a lot of works and with the COVID it sounds not easy.

 

[Macco26]

If it's up to the reseller to customise the Control Center and the bios, I've very few hope it will happen with the PCS one, as I've seen the Gaming center and the BIOS from PCS are the less customised and feature rich compared to other brands so far.
I really like PCS products and I'm a happy customer but as enthusiast we usually expect a little more than the standard set or worse lack of features.
The Vyper III it's missing the option to select the default power profile, as an example, when booting the system, so I end everytime booting the system with gaming profile and I have to wait to boot on Windows to set the default profile.
Also the power profiles are somewhat weird.
Game profile is 120W for the CPU and the same value for Turbo mode.
For some reason office more, with Eco disabled, now set the TDP to 100W instead of 35W, as it was happening before.

Anyway, I've just looked at the posted link and the new set of features it's impressive and they're what I always looked for in a laptop.
Wish I could have waited in August when I bought the Vyper.
Thinking about of selling the Vyper III to replace it with the new gen Tongfang laptops.
But I don't what what feature set will have the ones sold by PCS.

Speaking about marketing and branding names... Who choose the laptop model names in PCS?
I'm Italian and the name Ionico and Elimina aren't very attractive to me... [emoji848][emoji16]

Lol I'm italian too and yes those names sound crazy! [emoji23]
Anyway the same control center info (but written instead of pictured) are available from competitors for their Tongfang so I definitely believe there is a common denominator here. Pretty sure PCS does very little job at customizing but other resellers, lucky for us, give tremendous amount of feedback to Tongfang and we all enjoy how the next generation turns out. I'm optimistic we'll get pretty much the same as you see in the link. Probably we won't get newer updates along the year. But since it seems so customizable I'm ok with what we get now. We will see. [emoji106]

 

[barlew]

If you could both post some in depth feedback on your laptops that would be fantastic guys.
As far as I am aware you two are the first on the forum to admit to buying the Ionico so it will be great for other potential customers to see your feedback.

 

[Macco26]

Sure will, but I am expecting it delivered here, Brexit permitting, no less than by the very end of Feb. Sit tight.

 

[Greenman]

Yeah would be interesting to see some reviews on these. I loved mine at first but the motherboard failed completely about 3-4 times. Shocking reliability but obviously as small a sample size as you can get.

 

[barlew]

Yeah would be interesting to see some reviews on these. I loved mine at first but the motherboard failed completely about 3-4 times. Shocking reliability but obviously as small a sample size as you can get.

Was that the 17 inch Vyper?

 

[Macco26]

However apart from some benchmarks and some few games (I mainly play Overwatch, plus some Valve's games, nothing too crazy) I am planning to try to reduce the heat in a concious way, hence Power Limit the CPU around 35W or 45W max (it'll depend how Overwatch can keep the 165 hz 1440p with) and give some more headroom to the GPU but not too much.
I remember last year Max-17 (hance probably also Vyper) was set at crazy 120W power limit. That's no good at all.
Despite the nasty fan noise I don't want to cook it immediately, so I'll try to simulate more like a Max-Q but with good thermals, than a crazy 140W GPU onlylasting 2-3 years.
That's my plan.
If we really get that Control Center it should be a breeze to setup this.

 

[Greenman]

Was that the 17 inch Vyper?

Recoil.

 

[barlew]

@Macco26
However apart from some benchmarks and some few games (I mainly play Overwatch, plus some Valve's games, nothing too crazy) I am planning to try to reduce the heat in a concious way, hence Power Limit the CPU around 35W or 45W max (it'll depend how Overwatch can keep the 165 hz 1440p with) and give some more headroom to the GPU but not too much.
I remember last year Max-17 (hance probably also Vyper) was set at crazy 120W power limit. That's no good at all.
Despite the nasty fan noise I don't want to cook it immediately, so I'll try to simulate more like a Max-Q but with good thermals, than a crazy 140W GPU onlylasting 2-3 years.
That's my plan.
If we really get that Control Center it should be a breeze to setup this.

Even set to 120W the Vyper had some of the best thermals I have ever seen in a gaming laptop.
I appreciate its horses for courses but why would you buy a top end gaming laptop and then massively limit its performance?
Even if the new GameCenter doesn't let you do that you could do it easily in ThrottleStop.

The thermals were never a problem with the Vyper's chassis. The problems came from the generally poor build quality, a sub standard battery and really bad screen bleed.

If they have fixed those issues on the new Ionico chassis then you are going to have an extremely nice laptop.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Even set to 120W the Vyper had some of the best thermals I have ever seen in a gaming laptop.
I appreciate its horses for courses but why would you buy a top end gaming laptop and then massively limit its performance?
Even if the new GameCenter doesn't let you do that you could do it easily in ThrottleStop.

The thermals were never a problem with the Vyper's chassis. The problems came from the generally poor build quality, a sub standard battery and really bad screen bleed.

If they have fixed those issues on the new Ionico chassis then you are going to have an extremely nice laptop.

This.... so this.... I will never understand why some people think nerfing processor performance is any kind of win, if you're doing that it's because there's something wrong with the laptop that needs addressing.

 

[barlew]

This.... so this.... I will never understand why some people think nerfing processor performance is any kind of win, if you're doing that it's because there's something wrong with the laptop that needs addressing.

It boggles my mind every time I see people on here suggesting that there is nothing wrong with a laptop they just need to reduce its advertised performance to make it work.

 

[Macco26]

It boggles my mind every time I see people on here suggesting that there is nothing wrong with a laptop they just need to reduce its advertised performance to make it work.

Rated wattage for that processor is 45W. Previous Tongfang boost profile operation was 120W so to top chart in benchmark etc, but against Intel PL1 recommendations. It can handle this, sure but with quite noisy operation. A thing I can avoid during gaming where the more the juice to the GPU, the better, not CPU. Adds to that, New RTX 30 offer Dynamic Boost whereas the CPU stays at 35W or below, then you should start understanding why underpowering the processor during gameplay MIGHT be a good move, as you get more wattage for the GPU, and 1440p gameplay surely is GPU bottlenecked. I'm not thinking that Ionico can't sustain 120W CPU power, but unless for rendering or cinebenching for the lolz, keeping 120W CPU profile is actually detrimental for the gaming with 2021 machines and that's what I'll be doing, gaming.

 

[Macco26]

The thermals were never a problem with the Vyper's chassis. The problems came from the generally poor build quality, a sub standard battery and really bad screen bleed.

If they have fixed those issues on the new Ionico chassis then you are going to have an extremely nice laptop.

I am happy to know Vyper and its 20 mm height chassis could keep up with those thermals. What I'd like to avoid though is to require unneeded fan noise to keep up with that level. Plus take advantage of new Dynamic Boost 2.0 if possible. See the above answer.

Regarding the build quality: what it scares me the most is the keyboard as it seems unchanged in the Ionico and I definitely will use it the most. About the screen bleed, the new 1440p panel is totally new so defect's history should not be a concern. Battery is not my personal problem: I plan to set this bad boy with the new battery wearing optimization set just because.. I won't operate it on battery.. probably ever.