2018 14" Huawei MateBook X Pro (MX150) [8th,4C,U] + GTX 1080 @ 16Gbps-TB3 (Zotac AMP Box Mini) + Win10 [noxo]  

Nice! I haven't even seen any of these enclosures on sale.... where did you find it?

Yeah, this is a rare one - I couldn't also find that much information about the box, except couple of  Youtube videos  🙂 I bought it from Amazon.de  https://www.amazon.de/Zotac-AMP-Box-Thunderbolt-External-schwarz-grau/dp/B079QLVWRD/. 400eur with shipping.

Very nice build! I did not realize how compact the AMP Box is. Would you be able to provide additional details on the power supply?

Wunderschön!! 😀 How about cpu thermal? Is there any improvement with or without AMP box? It’ll be great if you can run 3Dmark like firestrike or timespy if you have it, sorry I’m a gamer

Posted by: itsage

Very nice build! I did not realize how compact the AMP Box is. Would you be able to provide additional details on the power supply?

Box has internal power supply, basis on product id (251-09100-7800F) it's build by Zotac. There is no mention of PD in specs, but I guess it's at least 60 watts. PSU has one ~90mm fan, interestingly facing downwards under the box.

• 450W power supply
• Up to 250W (2 x 8-pin PCI-E power cable)

http://hkftp.zotac.com/External/ExternalBox/AMP-BOX/Brochure/AMP_BOX_Brochure.pdf
https://imgur.com/a/KHCvGtS

That 2-lane TB3 port is seriously gimping those internal display benchmarks. It's really a shame they couldn't have used 2-lane for the MX150 and gave 4-lane to the TB3 port. (Samsung did this with their Notebook 9 15" with the MX150).

Posted by: odin

That 2-lane TB3 port is seriously gimping those internal display benchmarks. It's really a shame they couldn't have used 2-lane for the MX150 and gave 4-lane to the TB3 port. (Samsung did this with their Notebook 9 15" with the MX150).

Yeah, but it's not big issue for me, since I usually do gaming using external displays; projector and VR headset... so far this setup has been more than sufficient for my use.

Samsung Notebook 9 looks nice, but I really like Huawei's choice of 3:2 aspect ratio and spacious MS precision touch pad.. I have had several (MSI) gaming laptops, but they all come with crappy ELAN touch pad, and then the wider 16:9 screen is not super good for productivity tasks. Huawei finally got almost everything right.. as all purpose ultrabook  😉 

Hey hi!
I have a similar build with razer core X + zotac rtx 2080 amp extreme and I am wondering if you experience sudden freezes in idling mode? 
I had some freezes recently like laptop completely freezes and only can be forced shutdown.

Posted by: Jensen Wang

Hey hi!
I have a similar build with razer core X + zotac rtx 2080 amp extreme and I am wondering if you experience sudden freezes in idling mode? 
I had some freezes recently like laptop completely freezes and only can be forced shutdown.

I can't recall issues with idling.. I have such a short cable to eGPU so I usually right away unplug after the usage, so I have it idling rarely..  🙂 Does it occur by the time that computer goes to power saving state and starts shutting down the display or when? 

I remember having lots of trouble with Aorus Gaming Box when it was plugged in.. I ended up having black screen and unresponsive computer and had to force power down the computer. But with this box, even the plugging in the box works surprisingly smoothly. It could be the box itself, or maybe I had the NVidia drivers updated at some point.

Have you tried disabling MX150 from device manager, I remember reading about it  and trying that with Aorus Gaming Box issues?

Would be nice get some benchmarks of your setup, I've been daydreaming of RTX cards a bit  🙂

Posted by: Joikansai

Wunderschön!! 😀 How about cpu thermal? Is there any improvement with or without AMP box? It’ll be great if you can run 3Dmark like firestrike or timespy if you have it, sorry I’m a gamer

Does 3DMark benchmark differ a lot from what Unigine does? I've done quite a bit of CPU+GPU intensive flight sim gaming (AeroFly2 wth Ultra detail) with VR, and CPU usage is around 50% and GPU 75-100%.. giving frames quite steadily at rate of 90 FPS to headset.. so I think the setup performs pretty well with heavy gaming..

Posted by: noxo

Posted by: Jensen Wang

Hey hi!
I have a similar build with razer core X + zotac rtx 2080 amp extreme and I am wondering if you experience sudden freezes in idling mode? 
I had some freezes recently like laptop completely freezes and only can be forced shutdown.

I can't recall issues with idling.. I have such a short cable to eGPU so I usually right away unplug after the usage, so I have it idling rarely..  🙂 Does it occur by the time that computer goes to power saving state and starts shutting down the display or when? 

I remember having lots of trouble with Aorus Gaming Box when it was plugged in.. I ended up having black screen and unresponsive computer and had to force power down the computer. But with this box, even the plugging in the box works surprisingly smoothly. It could be the box itself, or maybe I had the NVidia drivers updated at some point.

Have you tried disabling MX150 from device manager, I remember reading about it  and trying that with Aorus Gaming Box issues?

Would be nice get some benchmarks of your setup, I've been daydreaming of RTX cards a bit  🙂

Thanks for replying! By idle mode, I meant not gaming or under any heavy usage. I use an external display and sometimes the entire display will just freeze at a frame and everything becomes unresponsive. My laptop on the hand just shows a black screen and nothing I could do besides pressing the power button. Hmm and I did disable the MX150.

I will do some benchmark and post here maybe! Other than this problem I am enjoying it. There is some bottlenecking with the i7-8550U but I can get 40ish fps in 4k with almost all games at high-ultra.

Posted by: Jensen Wang

Thanks for replying! By idle mode, I meant not gaming or under any heavy usage. I use an external display and sometimes the entire display will just freeze at a frame and everything becomes unresponsive. My laptop on the hand just shows a black screen and nothing I could do besides pressing the power button. Hmm and I did disable the MX150.

I will do some benchmark and post here maybe! Other than this problem I am enjoying it. There is some bottlenecking with the i7-8550U but I can get 40ish fps in 4k with almost all games at high-ultra.

Strange, it could be anything..  I would recommend try running Matebook manager and check at least that all the drivers & BIOS are up to date.. have you checked Windows Event logs, usually there's something that points to malfunctioning thing/driver?

Posted by: noxo

Posted by: Joikansai

Wunderschön!! 😀 How about cpu thermal? Is there any improvement with or without AMP box? It’ll be great if you can run 3Dmark like firestrike or timespy if you have it, sorry I’m a gamer

Does 3DMark benchmark differ a lot from what Unigine does? I've done quite a bit of CPU+GPU intensive flight sim gaming (AeroFly2 wth Ultra detail) with VR, and CPU usage is around 50% and GPU 75-100%.. giving frames quite steadily at rate of 90 FPS to headset.. so I think the setup performs pretty well with heavy gaming..

Unigine mostly measure gpu performance and may be vary due resolution and other setting in benchmark,  3Dmark measure both physical (cpu) and graphics (gpu) performance you can see bottleneck on egpu setting or cpu throttling better on this.

Posted by: noxo

Posted by: Jensen Wang

Thanks for replying! By idle mode, I meant not gaming or under any heavy usage. I use an external display and sometimes the entire display will just freeze at a frame and everything becomes unresponsive. My laptop on the hand just shows a black screen and nothing I could do besides pressing the power button. Hmm and I did disable the MX150.

I will do some benchmark and post here maybe! Other than this problem I am enjoying it. There is some bottlenecking with the i7-8550U but I can get 40ish fps in 4k with almost all games at high-ultra.

Strange, it could be anything..  I would recommend try running Matebook manager and check at least that all the drivers & BIOS are up to date.. have you checked Windows Event logs, usually there's something that points to malfunctioning thing/driver?

I just updated my windows to 1809 and seems like the freezes have stopped for now. Anyways I did some benchmarks on superposition and got 7973 for 4k and 10867 for 1080p high, both on external monitor

Posted by: Jensen Wang

I just updated my windows to 1809 and seems like the freezes have stopped for now. Anyways I did some benchmarks on superposition and got 7973 for 4k and 10867 for 1080p high, both on external monitor

Good that you got it working with Windows update.. I'm still on v1803 of Windows 10.

Interesting numbers on 1080P,  1080GTX vs 2080RTX results are almost identical.. the thunderbolt connection becomes bottleneck and just can't deliver data faster rate on 1080P resolution... I think on desktop 2080RTX should give ~17000 on 1080P. Because of eGPU setup, -40% is lost vs desktop setup on 1080P. With eGPU 1080GTX the drop seems to be reported here in forums -30% for 1080P resolution. Maybe somebody can  correct my numberings, if they don't seem accurate 🙂 

4K then looks a lot better, 2080RTX being ~20% faster than 1080GTX as it should.

Posted by: Joikansai

Unigine mostly measure gpu performance and may be vary due resolution and other setting in benchmark,  3Dmark measure both physical (cpu) and graphics (gpu) performance you can see bottleneck on egpu setting or cpu throttling better on this.

Added the 3Dmark results. I didn't notice the Matebook CPU fan starting to spin any faster, while it was running the benchmark..  🙂 Maybe with something longer running would cause eventually throttling down of CPU- because of thermals.

So, of course, it's theoretically possible, that game can put load on CPU so much that it starts affecting the communication with eGPU.. I'm just not sure, if it's valid use case, as most of heavy calculations can be offloaded to the GPU nowadays (e.g using PhysX and Cuda).

Small Update
I recently "upgraded" to RTX 2070 Gaming Box.. as I wanted to try out some new stuff in Turing GPUs and
also this box is more petite.

Graphics benchmarks are close to GTX 1080 as expected. There's a huge 1,5x (vs Pascal cards) leap in CUDA Integer calculation performance (IOPs) as in Turing architecture it can go parallel with Float calculations. Floats are a bit down than 1080, I guess it's because 2070 has less CUDA cores.

Also dreaming a bit of Matebook Pro 2019 as it should have 4x lanes now.