Still a relatively new FW16 owner with the HX 370 + 5070 module. I’ve been pondering over a few things as I get acclimated to the new machine. So far I’ve gotten my old laptops two drives cloned over to two new drives on the FW (the old Win11 install booted up just fine much to my surprise and just needed to copy over the driver package to get full functionality for playing with benchmarks; I won’t be connecting that to the internet) and have set up Bazzite which I have been bumbling around with for a few days now.
Has anyone tried a USB C dock?
I have yet to try USB C video output via the USB C port on the (GPU) rear nor have I tried charging without the official 240 W charger. If both the CPU and the GPU are under heavy load there’s going to be a very high power draw. Are there docks capable of delivering enough power to the FW16 while still maintaining the other functions of the dock and not hitting the battery?
Do heavy loads warrant a laptop stand/riser?
I got a laptop stand for my current laptop since it thermal throttles a lot. It helped, but it still didn’t perform like I hoped it would. I haven’t spent that much time stressing the FW16 but when it got really hot it took quite a while for the heat to dissipate from the body where my palms would rest. Should I get a dedicated stand for the FW?
How should I set up my old data partitions and new partitions?
My current laptop has a 2TB SSD as the OS drive and a 1TB SSD for additional data. I cloned the OS drive onto a new WD_BLACK 2TB SN770M 2230 NVMe drive with which I later shrank the partition (and turned off hibernate, fast boot, etc.) to dedicate 800 GB towards a partition specifically to install Bazzite on. The 1TB data drive was cloned to a 4TB Samsung 990 PRO NVMe drive. My initial plan was to use that 4TB for a Steam library and do some direct game capture that would be recording to the 2TB OS drive. And depending on how things go in the future I may have to reclaim the 4TB NVMe drive for use in a future desktop. (Hoping that large SSDs won’t be a nightmare to get by then.)
I hit a roadblock when trying the initial plan. The 4TB SSD is currently allocated as a big 4TB NTFS partition. I could mount and install to it fine but Steam wouldn’t be able to launch anything. Then I found out it’s generally not a good idea to use NTFS with Steam on Linux. After having Steam move one of the game installs to the home Bazzite partition the game launched fine. Now I have to wonder what I should do with my drive partitions going forward. I did do a test game capture with OBS and that recorded to the 4TB NTFS partition with no issues.
I did read that there are ways to get a Steam library on NTFS to work but I haven’t tried them. I am considering doing whatever Steam stuff I need locally on the possibly cramped in the future Bazzite partition and leave the 4TB NTFS for everything else. I’m also considering shrinking the 4TB partition and then making a new partition on the 4TB drive with a more appropriate file system and then going back to my original plan of doing Steam library on the 990 PRO and capturing to the SN770M OS drive. Which would be better?