| Title: NovaCustom NV41 laptop review | |
| Author: Solène | |
| Date: 03 January 2024 | |
| Tags: openbsd linux qubesos hardware | |
| Description: In this blog post, I'm reviewing a NovaCustom NV41 laptop | |
| with many operating systems | |
| # Disclaimer | |
| Hello! Today, I present you a quite special blog post, resulting from | |
| a partnership with the PC Manufacturer NovaCustom. I offered them to | |
| write an honest review for their product and also share my feedback as | |
| a user, in exchange for a NV41 laptop. This is an exceptional | |
| situation, I insist that it's not a sponsorship, I actually needed a | |
| laptop for my freelance work, and it turns they agreed. In our | |
| agreements, I added that I would return the laptop in the case I | |
| wouldn't like it, I don't want to generate electronic wastes and | |
| company's money for nothing. | |
| I have no plans to turn my blog into an advertisement platform and do | |
| this on a regular basis. Stars aligned well here, NovaCustom is making | |
| the only modern laptop Qubes OS certified, and the CEO is a very open | |
| source friendly person. | |
| # 2025-01 Update | |
| After more than a year using the laptop, I am convinced my next laptop | |
| will be from NovaCustom. I did not encounter issues, the battery | |
| charge threshold did save the battery will still shows 98% efficiency | |
| (and measured). | |
| Over the year, I got my hand on multiple new laptops (work, family), | |
| and they all lacked the huge number of i/o ports I have on my NV41. | |
| Although it is docked most of the time, it works great on battery and | |
| its keyboard feels good, although I was not convinced at first. | |
| Thermal management is still a strong point for me, it does really | |
| little noise, and the laptop is still cool enough when used on the lap. | |
| In my opinion, the biggest weakness of this laptop is its screen whose | |
| ghosting is annoying. I enjoy high refresh rate screens as I am really | |
| sensitive to latency, so experience may vary? The webcam quality could | |
| be better, although it is enough for most video calls (if ugly | |
| resolution is not a deal breaker). | |
| # Introduction | |
| The real introduction now :-) | |
| In this blog post, I'll share my experience using a NV41 laptop from | |
| NovaCustom, I tried many operating systems on it for a while, run some | |
| benchmarks, and ultimately used Qubes OS on it for a month and half for | |
| my freelance work. | |
| NovaCustom official website | |
| NV41 Laptop store webpage | |
| # The machine itself | |
| The laptop on a stand, running Ubuntu 23.10 | |
| This is a 14-inch laptop, the best form factor in my opinion for being | |
| comfortable when used for a long time while being easy to carry. | |
| It looks great with its metal look with blueish reflection and the | |
| engraved logo "NV" on the cover (logo can be customized). | |
| The frame feels solid and high-end, I'm not afraid to carry it or | |
| manipulate it. Compared to my ThinkPad T470, that's a change, I always | |
| fear to press its plastic frame too much when carrying with a single | |
| hand. | |
| The power button is on the right side, this is quite unusual, but it | |
| looks great, there are LED around the power plug near the power button | |
| that tells the state of the system (running, off, sleeping) and if the | |
| battery is running low or charging. | |
| It's running the open-source Firmware Dasharo coreboot, and optionally | |
| the security oriented firmware Heads can be installed. | |
| Dasharo coreboot official website | |
| Heads open source firmware official website | |
| ## Packaging and unboxing | |
| The machine came in a box containing a box containing the actual box | |
| with the laptop inside, it was greatly packaged. | |
| Laptop still wrapped in the protections, all the boxes are in the background | |
| The laptop screen had a removable sleeve that can be reused, I | |
| appreciated this as it's smart because it's possible to put it back in | |
| case you don't use the laptop for a long time or want to sell it later. | |
| The box contained the laptop, the power supply and the power plug, the | |
| full length of the power supply is 2 meters which is great, I hate | |
| laptops chargers that only have 1 meter of cable. | |
| The laptop, power supply, power plug and other (manual, screen cleaner…) | |
| ## Hardware | |
| The specifications of the hardware I received are the following: | |
| * CPU: i7-1260P (4 Performance cores with hyper-threading, 8 Efficient | |
| cores) | |
| * Memory: 2x32 GB of 3200 MHz | |
| * Storage: NVME Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB | |
| * Wireless: blob-free Atheros QCNFA222 Wi-Fi a/b/g/n + bluetooth 4.0 | |
| * Screen: 14" 1080p (1920x1080), 98% sRGB 60 Hz, anti-glare treatment | |
| * Weight: 1.4 kg | |
| The default wireless card is an Intel AX-200/201 compatible with Wi-Fi | |
| 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, but I received the blob-free card which was | |
| convenient for most operating systems as it doesn't need a firmware | |
| (works out of the box on Guix for instance). | |
| There are options to remove the webcam or add a slider to it, a screen | |
| privacy filter or secure screws+tape for the packaging to be sure the | |
| laptop hasn't been intercepted during transit. | |
| You can also choose the keyboard layout from a large list, or even have | |
| your own layout. | |
| Kudos to NovaCustom for guaranteeing the sell of replacement parts for | |
| at least 7 years after you buy them a laptop! They also provide a PDF | |
| will full details about the internals. | |
| ### Hybrid CPU | |
| This is my very first Hybrid CPU, it has 4 Performance cores capable of | |
| hyperthreading, and 8 Efficient cores that should draw less power at | |
| the expense of being slower. | |
| I made a benchmark, only on Qubes OS, to compare the different cores to | |
| a Ryzen 5 5600X and my T470 i5-7300U. | |
| Phoronix benchmark link | |
| Qubes OS forum: Hybrid CPU benchmarking performance when pinning to specific co… | |
| If your operating system doesn't know (Linux does) how to make use of | |
| E/P cores (like OpenBSD or FreeBSD), it will use them like if they were | |
| similar, so no worry here. However, the performance and battery saving | |
| aren't optimized because the system won't balance the load at the right | |
| place. | |
| TL;DR: the P cores compete with my desktop Ryzen 5 5600X! And the E | |
| cores are faster than the i5-7300U! Linux and Xen (in Qubes OS) does a | |
| great job at balancing the workload at the right place, so you don't | |
| have to worry about pinning a specific task to a P or E core pool. | |
| ### Coil whine noise | |
| I think this deserves an entry because it's a plague on many modern | |
| computers. If you don't know about it, it's an electric noise that | |
| happens under certain conditions. On my T470, it's when charging the | |
| battery. | |
| I've been able to get some coil whine noise, only if I forced the CPU | |
| frequency to the maximum in the operating system, instead of letting | |
| the computer scaling the frequency. This resulted in no performance | |
| improvement and some coil whine noise. | |
| In my daily "normal" use with Linux or Qubes OS, I never heard a coil | |
| whine. But on OpenBSD for which the frequency management is still not | |
| good with these modern CPUs (intel p-state support isn't great) there | |
| is a constant noise. However, using obsdfreqd reduced the noise to | |
| almost nothing, but still appeared a bit on CPU load. | |
| There is a specific topic where coil whine on this laptop was | |
| discussed, a fix was provided by NovaCustom using heat pads (sent for | |
| free for their customers) placed at a specific place. I don't think | |
| this should be required except if your operating system has a poor | |
| support for frequency scaling. | |
| Qubes OS forum: NV41 coil whine topic | |
| ### Screen | |
| The screen coloring is excellent, which is expected as it covers 98% of | |
| sRGB palette, it's really bright, and I rarely turn the brightness more | |
| than 50%. I didn't try to use it outdoor, but the brightness at full | |
| level should allow reading the screen. | |
| However, it has a noticeable ghosting which make it annoying for | |
| playing video games (that's not really the purpose of this model | |
| though), or if you are really sensitive to it. I'm used to a 144 Hz | |
| display on my desktop and I became really sensitive to refresh rate. | |
| However, I have to admit the ghosting isn't really annoying for | |
| productivity work, development or browsing the web. Watching a video | |
| is fine too. | |
| One slightly annoying limitation is that it's not possible to open the | |
| screen more than a 140° angle, this sounds reasonable, but I got used | |
| to my T470 screen able to open at ~180°. This is not a real issue, | |
| but if you have a weird setup in which you store your laptop vertically | |
| against your desktop AND with the screen opened, you won't be able to | |
| use the screen. | |
| ### Sound system | |
| I've been surprised by the speakers, the audio quality is good up to | |
| ~80% of the max volume, but then the quality drops when you set it too | |
| high. | |
| I have no way to measure it, but the speakers appear to be quite loud | |
| compared to my other laptops when set to 100%, I don't recommend doing | |
| it though due to quality drop, but it can be handy sometimes. | |
| The headphones port works fine, there are no noises, and it's able to | |
| drive my DT 770 Pro 80 ohm. | |
| I’ve been able to figure an equalizer setting improving the audio to | |
| be pretty good (that's subjective). I’m absolutely not an audio | |
| expert, but it sounded a lot better for pop, rock, metal or piano. | |
| * 31 Hz: 0 db | |
| * 63 Hz: 0 db | |
| * 125 Hz: 0 db | |
| * 250 Hz: 0 db | |
| * 500 Hz: -4 db | |
| * 1 kHz: -5 db | |
| * 2 kHz: -8 db | |
| * 4 kHz: -3 db | |
| * 8 kHz: -3 db | |
| * 16 kHz: +2 db | |
| The idea is to lower the trebles instead of pushing the bass which | |
| quickly saturate. Depending on what you listen to and your tastes, you | |
| could try +1 or +2 db for the four first settings, but it may produce | |
| saturated sounds. | |
| ### Cooling | |
| I think the cooling system is one of the best part of the laptop, it's | |
| always running at 10% of its speed and is inaudible. | |
| Laptop view from below | |
| Under a huge load, the fan can be heard, but it's still less loud than | |
| my idling silent desktop... | |
| There is a special key combination (Fn+1) that triggers the turbo fan | |
| mode, forcing them to run at 100%, it is recommended if the laptop is | |
| used to run at full CPU 24/7 or for a very long period of time, | |
| however, this is as loud as a 1U rack server! For a more comprehensive | |
| comparison, let's say it is as annoying as a microwave device. | |
| I was surprised that the laptop never burned my knees, although under | |
| heavy load for 30 minutes it felt a bit too hot to keep it on my bare | |
| skin without fabric between, that's a genuine lap-top laptop, | |
| compatible with short skirts :D. | |
| ### Keyboard | |
| The keyboard isn't bad, but not good either. Typing on it is pleasant, | |
| but it's no match against my mechanical keyboards. The touch is harder | |
| than on my Lenovo T470 laptop, I think it feels like most modern laptop | |
| keyboards. | |
| Check the layout for the keys like "home", "end", "page up/down", on | |
| mine they are tiny keys near the arrows, this may not be to your taste. | |
| The type is quite silent, and there are 5 levels of back-light, I don't | |
| really like this feature, so I turned it off, but it's there if you | |
| like it. | |
| There are NO indicators for the status of caps lock or num lock | |
| (neither for scroll lock, but do people really use it?), this can be | |
| annoying for some users. | |
| ### Touchpad | |
| The touchpad may be a no-go for many, there are no extra physical | |
| buttons but you can physically click on the bottom area to make/hold a | |
| click. It also features no trackpoint (the little joystick in the | |
| middle of the keyboard). | |
| However, it has a large surface and can make use of multitouch clicks. | |
| While I was annoyed at first because I was used to ThinkPad's extra | |
| physical buttons, over time I got used to multitouch click (click is | |
| different depending on the number of fingers used), or the "split-area" | |
| click, where a click in a bottom left does a left click, in the middle | |
| it does a middle click, and in the bottom right it does a right click. | |
| It reacts well to movements and clicks and does the job, it's not the | |
| greatest touchpad I ever used, but it's good enough. | |
| Unfortunately, it's not possible for NovaCustom to propose a variant | |
| touchpad featuring extra physical buttons. | |
| ### Suspend and Resume | |
| The suspend/resume feature works as expected on Linux and Qubes OS. | |
| Closing the lid correctly triggers the suspend function, opening it | |
| resumes the system. | |
| ### Webcam | |
| Nothing special to say about it, it's like most laptop webcams, it has | |
| a narrow angle and the image quality is good enough to show your face | |
| during VoIP meetings. | |
| ### Battery life (short version) | |
| I tested the battery using different operating systems (OpenBSD, Qubes | |
| OS, Fedora, Ubuntu) and different methods, there are more details later | |
| in the text, but long story short, you can expect the following: | |
| * battery life when idling: 6h00 | |
| * battery life with normal usage: 3h00-5h00 for viewing videos, | |
| browsing the web, playing emulated games, code development and some | |
| compilation | |
| * battery life in continuous heavy use: 2h00 (I accidentally played a | |
| long video with no hardware-acceleration, it was using 500% CPU) | |
| ### I/O ports | |
| On the I/O, the laptop is well-equipped. I appreciated seeing an | |
| Ethernet port on a modern laptop. | |
| On the left side: | |
| * 1x Thunderbolt 4 / USB-c (supports external screen and charging) | |
| * 1x USB | |
| * anti-thief system | |
| * Ethernet port | |
| * Multi-card reader (a SD card plugged in doesn't go completely inside, | |
| so it's not practical for a persistent extra storage) | |
| Left side of the laptop | |
| On the right side: | |
| * 1x USB-c (supports external screen) | |
| * 1x headphone | |
| * Charge port | |
| * Power button and two discrete states LEDs | |
| * 1x HDMI | |
| * 1x USB | |
| Right side of the laptop | |
| The rear of the laptop is fully used for the cooling system, and there | |
| are nothing on the front (Hopefully! I hate connecting headphones on | |
| the front side). | |
| Back of the laptop | |
| Front of the laptop | |
| ## Dasharo coreboot firmware | |
| The laptop ships by Dasharo coreboot firmware (that's the correct name | |
| for nowadays devices when we speak of the BIOS), it's an open-source | |
| firmware that allows to manage your own secure boot keys, disable some | |
| Intel features like "ME" | |
| I guess their website will be a better place to understand what it's | |
| doing compared to a proprietary firmware. | |
| Dasharo official website | |
| ## NovaCustom | |
| NovaCustom is building laptops based on Clevo (a manufacturer doing | |
| high-end laptop frames, but they rarely sell directly) while ensuring | |
| compatibility with Linux systems, especially Qubes OS for this specific | |
| model as it's certified (it guarantees the laptop and all its features | |
| will work correctly). | |
| They contribute to dasharo development for their own laptops. | |
| They ship their product worldwide, and as I heard from some users, the | |
| custom support is quite reactive. | |
| NovaCustom official website | |
| # Operating system support | |
| Now I shared about the hardware part, let's see how it behaves with | |
| many operating systems! | |
| ## Linux distributions | |
| I guess most users will use a Linux system on this laptop, so let's | |
| start by testing some popular distributions: | |
| ### Fedora | |
| Fedora project official website | |
| Screenshot of Fedora 39 running GNOME | |
| Fedora Linux support (tested with Fedora 39) was excellent, GNOME | |
| worked fine. The Wi-Fi network worked immediately even during the | |
| installer, Bluetooth was working as well with my few devices. Changing | |
| the screen brightness from the GNOME panel was working. However, after | |
| a Dasharo update, the keyboard slider in GNOME stopped working, it's a | |
| known bug that also affects System76 laptops if I've read correctly, | |
| this may be an issue with the Linux driver itself. | |
| The touchpad was working on multitouch out of the box, suspending and | |
| resuming the laptop never produced any issue. | |
| Enabling Secure Boot worked out of the box with Fedora, which is quite | |
| enjoyable. | |
| ### Ubuntu | |
| Ubuntu company official website | |
| Ubuntu 23.10 support was excellent as well, it's absolutely identical | |
| to the Fedora report above. | |
| Note: if you use VLC from the Snap store, it won't have hardware | |
| decoded acceleration and will use a lot of CPU (and draw battery, and | |
| waste watts for nothing), I guess it's an Ubuntu issue here. VLC from | |
| Flatpak worked fine, as always. | |
| ### Alpine Linux | |
| Alpine Linux project official website | |
| Alpine Linux support (tested with Alpine 3.18.4) was excellent, I | |
| installed GNOME and everything worked out of the box. The Atheros card | |
| worked without firmware (this is expected for a blob free device), CPU | |
| scheduling was correctly handled for Efficient/Performance cores as the | |
| provided kernel is quite recent. | |
| The touchpad default behavior was to click left/right/middle depending | |
| on the number of fingers used to click, suspend and resume worked fine, | |
| playing video games was also easy thanks to flatpak and Steam. | |
| It's possible to enable Secure Boot by generating your own keys. | |
| Alpine Linux wiki: UEFI Secure Boot | |
| ### Guix | |
| Guix project official website | |
| Screenshot of Guix running GNOME | |
| Guix support is mixed. I've been able to install it with no issue, | |
| thanks to the blob-free atheros network interface, it worked without | |
| having to use guix-nonfree repository (that contains firmware). | |
| However, I was surprised to notice that the graphical acceleration | |
| wasn't working, it seems that Intel Xe GPU aren't blob free. This only | |
| mean you can't plan video games or that any kind of GPU related | |
| encoding/decoding won't work, but this didn't prevent GNOME to work | |
| fine. | |
| Suspend and resume was OK, and the touchpad worked out-of-the-box in | |
| multi-tap mode. | |
| Secure Boot didn't work, and I have no idea how a Secure Boot setup | |
| with your own keys would look like on Guix, but it's certainly | |
| achievable with enough Grub-foo. | |
| ### Trisquel | |
| Trisquel GNU/Linux official project website | |
| Trisquel is a 100% libre GNU/Linux distribution, this mean it doesn't | |
| provide proprietary software or drivers, and no device firmware. | |
| I've been able to install Trisquel and use it, the Wi-Fi was working | |
| out of the box because of the blob-free Atheros card. | |
| The main components of the system: CPU / Memory / Storage were | |
| correctly detected, the default kernel isn't too old, and it was able | |
| to make use of the Efficient/Performance core of the CPU. | |
| When not using the laptop, I was able to suspend it to reduce the | |
| battery usage, and then resume instantly the session when I needed, | |
| this worked flawlessly. | |
| The touchpad was working great using the "3 zones" mode in which you | |
| tap on the touchpad in the left/center/right bottom of it to make a | |
| left/middle/right click, this is actually as convenient as using 1, 2 | |
| or 3 fingers depending on the click you want to make, this is something | |
| that could be configured though. | |
| Sound was working out of the box, the audio jack is also working fine | |
| when plugging in headphones. | |
| There is one issue with the webcam, when trying to use it, X crashes | |
| instantly. This may be an issue in Trisquel software stack because it | |
| works fine on other OS. | |
| A major issue right now is the lack of graphical hardware acceleration, | |
| I'm not sure if it's due to the i7-1260P integrated GPU needing a | |
| proprietary firmware or if the linux-libre kernel didn't catch up with | |
| this GPU yet. | |
| ## Qubes OS | |
| Qubes OS project official website | |
| Qubes OS 4.2 desktop screenshot | |
| Qubes OS support (tested with 4.1, 4.2-RC2 to RC5 and 4.2) is | |
| excellent, this is exactly what I expected for a Qubes OS certified | |
| laptop (the only modern and powerful certified laptop as of January | |
| 2024!). | |
| Qubes OS documentation: Hardware certification requirements | |
| Qubes OS is my main OS as I use it for writing this blog, for work | |
| (freelancer with different clients) and general use except gaming, so I | |
| needed a reliable system that would be fast, with a pretty good battery | |
| life. | |
| So far, I never experienced issues except one related to the Atheros | |
| Wi-Fi card (this is not the stock Wi-Fi device): 1 time out of 10 when | |
| I suspend and resume, the card is missing, and I need to restart the | |
| qube sys-net to have it again. I didn't try with the latest Dasharo | |
| update though, it may be solved. | |
| Watching 1080p videos x265 10 bits encoded is smooth and only draw ~40% | |
| of a CPU, without any kind of GPU accelerated decoding. | |
| The battery life when using the system to write emails, browse the | |
| Internet and look at some videos was of 3 hours, if I only do stuff in | |
| LibreOffice offline it lasts 5h30. | |
| I'm able to have smooth videoconferences with the integrated webcam and | |
| a USB headset, this kind of task may be the most CPU consuming popular | |
| job that Qubes OS need, and it worked well. | |
| The 64 GB are very appreciated, I "only" have 32 GB on my desktop | |
| computer, but sometimes it lacks memory... 64 GB allows to not ever | |
| think about memory anymore. | |
| The touchpad is working fine, by default on the split-area behavior | |
| (left/middle/right click depending on the touchpad area you click on). | |
| There is a single USB controller that drives the webcam and card reader | |
| + the USB ports, including a USB-c docked that would be connected on | |
| either the thunderbolt or USB-c ports. The thunderbolt device is on a | |
| separate controller, but if you attach it to a qube (that is not | |
| sys-usb), you lose all USB connectivity from a dock connected to it | |
| (there is still the other plain USB-c port). The qube sys-usb isn't | |
| even required to run if you don't use any USB devices (this saves many | |
| headaches and annoying times). | |
| Connecting a usb-c dock on the thunderbolt port allows to have USB | |
| passthrough with sys-usb, an additional ethernet port and external | |
| screen working with sound, it's also capable of charging the computer. | |
| Whereas the simple usb-c port can only carry USB devices or the | |
| integrated ethernet port of my dock, it should be able to support a | |
| screen but I guess it's not working on Qubes OS. I didn't try adding | |
| more than one screen on either ports, I guess it should work on the | |
| thunderbolt port. | |
| ## BSD systems | |
| I tried OpenBSD and FreeBSD with the laptop. I always have bad luck | |
| with NetBSD, so I preferred to not try it, and DragonFly BSD support | |
| should be pretty close to FreeBSD for which it didn't work well. | |
| ### OpenBSD | |
| OpenBSD project official website | |
| Screenshot of the OpenBSD 7.4 desktop using GNOME | |
| I tried OpenBSD 7.4 and -current, everything went really well except | |
| the Atheros WiFi card that isn't supported, but this was to be | |
| expected. If you want the NV41 with OpenBSD, you need to take the | |
| Intel AX-200/201 which is supported by the iwx driver. | |
| OpenBSD manual page: iwx(4) | |
| Suspend and resume works fine, the touchpad is using the "3 zones" | |
| behavior by default where you need to tap left/center/right bottom to | |
| make a left/middle/right click. The webcam and sound card were working | |
| fine too. | |
| The GPU is fully supported, you can use it for 3D rendering: I've been | |
| able to play a PSP game using PPSSPP emulator. OpenBSD doesn't support | |
| hardware accelerated video encoding/decoding at all, so I didn't test | |
| it. | |
| WipeOut Pulse emulated in the PSP emulator PPSSPP | |
| ### FreeBSD | |
| FreeBSD project official website | |
| I installed FreeBSD 14.0 RC4 with ZFS on root and full disk encryption, | |
| the process went fine, I had Wi-Fi at the installer step (thanks to the | |
| blob free Atheros card). | |
| However, once I booted into the system, I didn't succeed to get X to | |
| run, the GPU isn't supported yet and using VESA display didn't work for | |
| me. Suspend and resume didn't work either. | |
| I gave another try with GhostBSD 23.10.1 in hope I did something wrong | |
| on FreeBSD 14 RC4 like a misconfiguration as I never had any good | |
| experience with FreeBSD on desktop with regard to the setup. But | |
| GhostBSD failed to start X and was continuously displaying its logo on | |
| screen, only booting in safe mode allowed me to figure what was wrong. | |
| I was really surprised that the hardware is still "too new" for FreeBSD | |
| while OpenBSD support is almost excellent. | |
| ## Other | |
| Some less known operating systems were tested as well. | |
| ### Haiku | |
| Haiku project official website | |
| Photography of the laptop running Haiku (live USB) | |
| I booted Haiku revision 57370 live USB, I was actually surprised to | |
| have the desktop displayed, and the network interfaces recognized. | |
| Unfortunately, the Atheros card was recognized, but I haven't been able | |
| to connect to a scanned network. | |
| The display was using the correct resolution, but it was using software | |
| rendering. | |
| The webcam and the touchpad didn't work, I had to connect my USB | |
| trackball. | |
| I didn't go as far as installing it. | |
| ### OpenIndiana | |
| I tried the freshly released OpenIndiana Hipster 2023.10 liveUSB. | |
| After letting the bootloader display and start the boot process, the | |
| init process seemed stuck and was printing errors about CPU every | |
| minute. I haven't been able to get past this step. | |
| # Measurements | |
| I had fun measuring a lot of things like power usage at the outlet, | |
| battery duration with many workloads and gaming FPS (Frames per Second, | |
| 30 is okayish depending on people, 40 is acceptable, 60 is perfect as | |
| it's the refresh rate of the screen). | |
| ## Power | |
| I measured the power usage in watts using a watt-o-meter in different | |
| situations: | |
| * power supply connected, but not to the laptop: 0 watt (some power | |
| supplies draw a few watts doing nothing... hello Nintendo Switch with | |
| its 2.1 watts!) | |
| * charging, sleeping: 30 watts | |
| * charging, idling: 37 watts | |
| * charging and heavy use: 79 watts | |
| * connected to AC (not charging), sleeping: 1 watt | |
| * connected to AC (not charging), idling, screen at full brightness: 17 | |
| watts | |
| * connected to AC (not charging), downloading a file over Wi-Fi, screen | |
| at full brightness: 22 watts | |
| This is actually good in my opinion, to have a comparison point, a | |
| standard 24-inch screen usually draw around 40 watts alone. | |
| The power consumption of the laptop itself is within the range of other | |
| laptop. I was happy to see it use no power when the AC is connected | |
| but not to the computer, and on idling it's only 1 watt, I have another | |
| laptop idling at 7 watts! | |
| ## Battery life | |
| I measured the battery life using different methods and sometimes | |
| multiple times to verify if it was reliable. | |
| ### Linux | |
| One method was to play a 2160p x265 10 bits encoded video using VLC, | |
| 1h39 long, with full brightness and no network. | |
| * With hardware accelerated decoding support: 33% of the battery was | |
| used, so the battery life would theoretically be almost 6 hours (299 | |
| minutes) while playing a video at full brightness | |
| * Without hardware acceleration: 90% of the battery was used (VLC was | |
| using 480% of the CPU, but I didn't notice it as the fans were too | |
| silent!), this would mean a battery life of 1h49 (110 minutes) using | |
| the computer under heavy load | |
| The other method was to play the video game "Risk of Rain Returns" with | |
| a USB PS5 controller, and at full brightness, for a given duration | |
| (measured at 20 25 minutes). | |
| * Risk of Rain Returns: 15% of battery used in 20 minutes, this mean I | |
| should have been able to play 2h13 (133 minutes) before having to | |
| charge. | |
| ### OpenBSD | |
| I played a PSP game for 25 minutes using PPSSPP in full screen at full | |
| brightness. | |
| * WipeOut Pulse: 14% of battery was used in 25 minutes, this mean I | |
| could have played for almost 3 hours straight (178 minutes) | |
| ## Gaming performance | |
| I did play a bit on the laptop on Linux using Steam on Flatpak. I | |
| tested it on Fedora 39, Ubuntu 23.10 and Alpine Linux 3.18.3, results | |
| were identical. | |
| A big surprise while playing was that the fans remained almost silent, | |
| they were spinning faster than usual of course, but that didn't require | |
| me to increase the moderate volume I used in my gaming session. | |
| * Baldur's Gate 3: Playable at stable 30 FPS with all settings to low | |
| and FSR2.2 enabled in ultra performance mode | |
| Baldur's Gate 3 (2023) | |
| * Counter Strike 2: Stable 60 FPS in 1600x900 with all settings set to | |
| minimum | |
| Counter Strike 2 | |
| * Spin Rhythm XD: Stable at 60 FPS | |
| * Rain world: Stable at 60 FPS | |
| * HELLDIVERS: Stable at 60 FPS with native resolution and graphical | |
| settings set to maximum | |
| * Beam NG;Drive: Playable with a mix of low/normal settings at 30 FPS | |
| * Resident Evil: Solid 45 FPS with the few settings set to maximum, | |
| better lock the game at 30 FPS though | |
| * Risk of Rain Returns: Stable 60 FPS | |
| Risk of Rain returns | |
| * Risk of Rain 2: Stable 60 FPS using 1600x900 with almost all settings | |
| to lowest | |
| Risk of Rain 2 | |
| * Endless Dungeon: with the lowest settings and resolution lowered to | |
| 1600x900, it was able to maintain stable 30 FPS, it was kinda playable | |
| I didn't try using an external GPU on the thunderbolt port, but you can | |
| expect way better performance as the games were never CPU bound. | |
| # Conclusion | |
| I'm glad I dared asking NovaCustom about this partnership about the | |
| NV41, this is exactly the laptop I needed. It's reliable, no weird | |
| features, it's almost full open source (at least for the software | |
| stack?), very powerful, and I can buy replacement parts for at least 7 | |
| years if I break something. It's also SILENT, I despise laptop having | |
| a high pitch fan noise. | |
| I still have to play with Dasharo coreboot, I'm really new to this | |
| open-source firmware world, so I have to learn before trying weird and | |
| dangerous things (I would like to try Heads for its anti-evil maid | |
| features, it should be possible to install it on Dasharo systems | |
| "soon"). | |
| Writing this blog post was extremely hard, I had to stay mindful that | |
| this must be an HONEST and NEUTRAL review: writing about a product you | |
| are happy with leads to some excitement moments and one may forget to | |
| share some little annoyance because it's "not _that_ bad", but I did my | |
| best to stay neutral when writing. And this is the agreement I had with | |
| NovaCustom. | |
| Honesty is an important value to me. You, dear readers, certainly | |
| trust me to some point, I don't want to lose your trust. |