My Macintosh Portable weighs 16 pounds. It's a monster. A gigantic behemoth.
This thing weights almost as much. And once you include the power bricks, it's probably a tossup.
And whaddaya know, they're pretty close to the same physical size, too! The Macintosh Portable is 15.25" wide, so this thing is an inch wider; the Macintosh Portable is 14.83" deep, so this thing is 3.5" narrower, but this also has 2" less thickness. (4" for the Portable.)
Although the Macintosh Portable came with a 2 pound lead acid battery that could run it for nearly 10 hours... Or nearly 1400% the battery life of this new behemoth.
Their website doesn't list their latest models. While at Intel, I played with one that had dual Xeon L5530s in it, and a GeForce GTX 280. (The fastest GPU available at the time.)
Now you could throw in two 6-core L5640s and a GTX 480 or Radeon 5970. And with its 520W power supply, you could *POSSIBLY* go with a Crossfired pair of 5870s.
Spotted another one. Under the specifications it says that the USB 3.0 ports are on the right side, a few paragraphs later it states that they are on the left side.
I don't mean to nitpick, just making it look more professional for those who will read it later.
Some companies, like mine, are no longer buying workstations. We are issued "desktop replacement" laptops, like HP 88740W with dual i7 quad cores and 8GB of memory. Throw in Virtual-Box and run one or two other VM's and its workable as a full function portable desktop with 1920 x 1200 screen resolution and a 5.9 Win 7 rating.
The 8740W is not quite a spec'd-out as this, but its in the same league. Yes, its heavy. Yes, the power brick is huge. Yes, I bought a rolling laptop case.
Honestly, why not go for a desktop GPU with those sort of thermals? You could quadfire a mobile Juniper GPU, or use a vanilla, normally binned 5870 and still come in with the same power draw.
A: It's easier to cool two separate sources of heat. B: Moduals are of the smaller size are made already with mobile GPUs. C: Quadfire would take up more space and would suck for efficiency. D: Desktop drivers do not have some of the mobility options. E: Mobile 480M crossfire is faster than a single desktop 5870.
I forgot if you guys ever got a review unit from Alienware, or are going to in the near future, but a comparison of the dual GPU notebooks out there would be fun to see.
Otherwise great review! I really read closely this time the Powerdraw, heat, and noise comparisons. This always the most important buying decision I have when buying DTRs.
We looked at the previous generation M980NU with QX9300 and SLI GTX 280M, which is pretty similar to the older M17x. Now M17x is doing up to i7-940XM, with either HD 5870 CF or GTX 285M SLI. (5870 CF is going to be faster than 285M SLI by around 20-25% I think, but no PhysX or CUDA.) Anyway we updated our gaming benchmarks and don't typically have the opportunity to rerun new tests on previous reviews, which is why we focused on comparisons to desktops.
You can always get a rough estimate by comparing 3DMarks, but it's pretty safe to say the M17x needs a new revision before it's going to come anywhere near the performance of the X7200. Pricing for a maxed out M17x is currently $3900 without the RAID 0 C300 SSDs, so $5000 total with 5870 CF and 8GB RAM. But you have to look at what you're missing: 480M SLI is quite a big jump from 5870 CF, and the i7-980X is, as I mention in the text, about 50% faster than even the i7-940XM. Alienware does have a much nicer LCD panel, though: 1920x1200 with RGB LED backlighting.
It's not "much faster" than an M17x with 5870m Crossfire + 940xm. If you look at NBR, you'd see that the 480M SLi barely outpaces the 5870s by a mere 500-800 3dmark vantage points. That's basically nothing. When both are overclocked, the X7200 again does not surpass the M17x, they are about even.
The biggest advantage the X7200 has is the desktop processor but there's a program called ThrottleStop that allows end users to manipulate TDP/TDC + multiplier settings for the 940xm in the M17x. I've gotten the 940xm as high as 3.8 GHz on all 4 cores (8 threads) so again, the X7200's desktop processor advantage is diminished even if it is 6 cores.
You have to keep in mind the X7200 is severely limited by it's 300W PSU as you discovered so there's no real room for overclocking. One of the first users to purchase the X7200 on NBR discovered that his 480m SLI + 980x setup was shutting off during the Mafia 2 benchmark and he was running the system at stock!
I'm out of town now so I can't test other scenarios, but I ran every benchmark several times and the only thing to ever overload the power brick was Furmark. All the other tests I saw topped out at power draws of around 310W, but it's possible some combination could get that higher. I'd like to know exactly what others have seen overload the PSU, though. Note that I did get beta drivers from NVIDIA for testing (260.80 I think -- the WHQL drivers should release "soon" according to NVIDIA), and that might be why I didn't experience other overloads.
As for performance comparisons, you can't cite 3DMark Vantage as a meaningful item. I include it as a quick point of reference, but it's not a game and it doesn't really behave like most games. Simply getting GPU PhysX to work should boost the score I posted by 1000 or more, but it's ultimately the games that matter.
For gaming, the X7200 with 480M SLI beats the tar out of everything else in the notebook world. If you had a similar X7200 with HD 5870 CF, the difference would be smaller (thanks to having a fast CPU), but with a large cross section of games it's pretty clear 480M is faster. It's also more power hungry by a large amount, though, so I can understand going the 5870 CF route. It's too bad that the only way to do get 5870 CF is the M17x or Clevo X8100, since that also gives up the desktop CPU and you get areas where you're CPU limited.
PhysX scores are not valid results for comparisons.
The original intention of the test was for 3rd party physX cards at showing the potential in the future, even then the scores were not valid.
Nvidia twisted this and while it has not been removed, PhysX scores will not appear in comparison searches unless you specifically choose them to. They will never appear in the hall of fame.
Futuremark recommends that reviewers keep PhysX off when using 3dmark to review graphics cards.
Ouch... :) I'd be surprised if mine is over 25lb, though it's hardly a power machine. I'd love to have a play with a 50lb desktop... see if the power/weight ratio is favourable. ;)
I'm not interested in a high-end rig that has to limit its own capabilities to keep from overloading itself. There is no point in paying the nose-bleed price for the extra power the SLI'd 480Ms have if they can't deliver more than the Crossfired Mobility Radeons.
Furmark is hardly a realistic example of power requirements. I consider it more of a test of whether or not a system will outright crash, or fail gracefully. I'd prefer to see the power brick limit things rather than shutting off and leaving you on battery power, though.
The X7200 also shuts off during long gaming sessions that push both the CPU and GPU. The 480M SLi's are a major fail: They're very expensive, they run hot (as evidenced by your furmark results and confirmed on NBR) and they don't outperform Crossfire 5870s by much at all.
Sure, you can buy three similarly-powerful desktops for the price of this laptop. However, from years of owning both high-end desktops and laptops, there is nothing like having the versitility and compact efficiency of a DTR/gaming laptop. Just the amount of engineering, design and testing that goes into a top-end gaming laptop will forcibly make them much more expensive than a desktop (which is essencially a bunch of components bolted into a metal box.) On a simpler level, it's just amazing to think you can have something that is 5-10x more powerful than a gaming console in a self-contained 15lb package.
Would be very interesting to see a review of this DTR's closest competitor in brand and GPU, the m17x R2 with 5870 Crossfire.
I'm idling at 25W with a P9600/ 9600MT/15,4" and two hard drives with max brightness. I'm looking for a mainstream laptop which can idle at 15W so 105W not for me ;)
The displays in all of these are the HannStar HSD173PUW1. To my eyes, it *looks* more like CCFL than LED, and the brightness levels are pretty weak (maximum of 180nits or so). I can't find any concrete details, but everyone else appears to thing it's LED backlighting so I might be wrong.
They simply list it as "17.3" Full HD (1920x1080)/HD+ (1600x900) Color-Shine (Glare-type)", which would be odd for an LED backlit display. Especially when the G60Vx explicitly states LED backlighting: http://rog.asus.com/Product.aspx?PId=30#product_ta...
Why do you guys never mention the fingerprint sensors on these laptops? I know they're not the most exciting things in the world, but they're pretty nice feature additions. Beats typing in your password every time.
Now, about the power brick... did Furmark just cause a 'thermal runaway' back there? 410W, are you kidding? That's nearly 40% overload on the nominal brick power, no wonder it cried for mommy and called it a day after some time of testing.
It raises a couple of questions:
1) In the review itself, it is mentioned about other notebook that would actually drain the batteries when the PSU is topped-out. Clevo should go visit the same idea, now knowing that some extreme usage can compromise the PSU. Call it a 'feature'. Call it 'Overdrive' or whatever; it lets you have all the juice you need even overloading the PSU, but it detects the condition, light up a yellow warning light, and lets you do it for, say, 30 mins before cutting BACK, not OUT, the power drain. It doesn´t shut down, not completely. Again, the battery being used as a VOLTAGE STABILIZER looks good. Well, then again, the benchmark was a deliberate attempt to overload the thing.
2) Aftermarket an even LARGER power brick, this time full-fledged 500W PSU at 4 pounds or higher. Considering everything else, it is not so preposterous.
3) If Anand dumped the original PSU, but kept it going on a LARGER DC source (a good and nice desktop PSU ought do it), how far would it go? Would something else drop out?
I have read in the X7200 User forums that Clevo has offered a "Solution" of combining two PSU's together with some sort of adapter. There wasn't a lot of detail where I read it though. Does anyone know anything else about this? Does anyone know if it is possible to get an aftermarket PSU for this rig?
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CharonPDX - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
My Macintosh Portable weighs 16 pounds. It's a monster. A gigantic behemoth.This thing weights almost as much. And once you include the power bricks, it's probably a tossup.
And whaddaya know, they're pretty close to the same physical size, too! The Macintosh Portable is 15.25" wide, so this thing is an inch wider; the Macintosh Portable is 14.83" deep, so this thing is 3.5" narrower, but this also has 2" less thickness. (4" for the Portable.)
Although the Macintosh Portable came with a 2 pound lead acid battery that could run it for nearly 10 hours... Or nearly 1400% the battery life of this new behemoth.
MeTechE - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
A bit heavy on the memes here, eh? Otherwise an excellent review, what an outrageous notebook...CharonPDX - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I mean, with that little battery life, it's just a glorified UPS, as you call it.Why not just go for a dual-socket briefcase computer with a full-blown desktop video card in it? http://www.nextcomputing.com/products/mobile-works...
Their website doesn't list their latest models. While at Intel, I played with one that had dual Xeon L5530s in it, and a GeForce GTX 280. (The fastest GPU available at the time.)
Now you could throw in two 6-core L5640s and a GTX 480 or Radeon 5970. And with its 520W power supply, you could *POSSIBLY* go with a Crossfired pair of 5870s.
yelped - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Isn't X59 under Chipset a Typo?yelped - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Spotted another one. Under the specifications it says that the USB 3.0 ports are on the right side, a few paragraphs later it states that they are on the left side.I don't mean to nitpick, just making it look more professional for those who will read it later.
JarredWalton - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Thanks, no problem with the corrections. Got the sides switched in the table. :-)my_body_is_ready - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Choose oneSteelCity1981 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Really Clevo, only a 9 cell Battery? At least throw in a 12 cell battery for how much this thing cost.MrSpadge - Friday, October 8, 2010 - link
And that would change what except price?MrS
jed22281 - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
So who's getting their wallet out?Pics or it didn't happen!!! :)
Candide08 - Saturday, October 9, 2010 - link
Some companies, like mine, are no longer buying workstations. We are issued "desktop replacement" laptops, like HP 88740W with dual i7 quad cores and 8GB of memory. Throw in Virtual-Box and run one or two other VM's and its workable as a full function portable desktop with 1920 x 1200 screen resolution and a 5.9 Win 7 rating.The 8740W is not quite a spec'd-out as this, but its in the same league.
Yes, its heavy. Yes, the power brick is huge. Yes, I bought a rolling laptop case.
crackedwiseman - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Honestly, why not go for a desktop GPU with those sort of thermals? You could quadfire a mobile Juniper GPU, or use a vanilla, normally binned 5870 and still come in with the same power draw.Meaker10 - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
Because:A: It's easier to cool two separate sources of heat.
B: Moduals are of the smaller size are made already with mobile GPUs.
C: Quadfire would take up more space and would suck for efficiency.
D: Desktop drivers do not have some of the mobility options.
E: Mobile 480M crossfire is faster than a single desktop 5870.
rsgeiger - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I forgot if you guys ever got a review unit from Alienware, or are going to in the near future, but a comparison of the dual GPU notebooks out there would be fun to see.Otherwise great review! I really read closely this time the Powerdraw, heat, and noise comparisons. This always the most important buying decision I have when buying DTRs.
JarredWalton - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
We looked at the previous generation M980NU with QX9300 and SLI GTX 280M, which is pretty similar to the older M17x. Now M17x is doing up to i7-940XM, with either HD 5870 CF or GTX 285M SLI. (5870 CF is going to be faster than 285M SLI by around 20-25% I think, but no PhysX or CUDA.) Anyway we updated our gaming benchmarks and don't typically have the opportunity to rerun new tests on previous reviews, which is why we focused on comparisons to desktops.You can always get a rough estimate by comparing 3DMarks, but it's pretty safe to say the M17x needs a new revision before it's going to come anywhere near the performance of the X7200. Pricing for a maxed out M17x is currently $3900 without the RAID 0 C300 SSDs, so $5000 total with 5870 CF and 8GB RAM. But you have to look at what you're missing: 480M SLI is quite a big jump from 5870 CF, and the i7-980X is, as I mention in the text, about 50% faster than even the i7-940XM. Alienware does have a much nicer LCD panel, though: 1920x1200 with RGB LED backlighting.
Rasterman - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
CPU wise the 980x is 136% faster than the 940xm.http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
5150Joker - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
It's not "much faster" than an M17x with 5870m Crossfire + 940xm. If you look at NBR, you'd see that the 480M SLi barely outpaces the 5870s by a mere 500-800 3dmark vantage points. That's basically nothing. When both are overclocked, the X7200 again does not surpass the M17x, they are about even.The biggest advantage the X7200 has is the desktop processor but there's a program called ThrottleStop that allows end users to manipulate TDP/TDC + multiplier settings for the 940xm in the M17x. I've gotten the 940xm as high as 3.8 GHz on all 4 cores (8 threads) so again, the X7200's desktop processor advantage is diminished even if it is 6 cores.
You have to keep in mind the X7200 is severely limited by it's 300W PSU as you discovered so there's no real room for overclocking. One of the first users to purchase the X7200 on NBR discovered that his 480m SLI + 980x setup was shutting off during the Mafia 2 benchmark and he was running the system at stock!
JarredWalton - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I'm out of town now so I can't test other scenarios, but I ran every benchmark several times and the only thing to ever overload the power brick was Furmark. All the other tests I saw topped out at power draws of around 310W, but it's possible some combination could get that higher. I'd like to know exactly what others have seen overload the PSU, though. Note that I did get beta drivers from NVIDIA for testing (260.80 I think -- the WHQL drivers should release "soon" according to NVIDIA), and that might be why I didn't experience other overloads.As for performance comparisons, you can't cite 3DMark Vantage as a meaningful item. I include it as a quick point of reference, but it's not a game and it doesn't really behave like most games. Simply getting GPU PhysX to work should boost the score I posted by 1000 or more, but it's ultimately the games that matter.
For gaming, the X7200 with 480M SLI beats the tar out of everything else in the notebook world. If you had a similar X7200 with HD 5870 CF, the difference would be smaller (thanks to having a fast CPU), but with a large cross section of games it's pretty clear 480M is faster. It's also more power hungry by a large amount, though, so I can understand going the 5870 CF route. It's too bad that the only way to do get 5870 CF is the M17x or Clevo X8100, since that also gives up the desktop CPU and you get areas where you're CPU limited.
Meaker10 - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
PhysX scores are not valid results for comparisons.The original intention of the test was for 3rd party physX cards at showing the potential in the future, even then the scores were not valid.
Nvidia twisted this and while it has not been removed, PhysX scores will not appear in comparison searches unless you specifically choose them to. They will never appear in the hall of fame.
Futuremark recommends that reviewers keep PhysX off when using 3dmark to review graphics cards.
silverblue - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Ouch... :) I'd be surprised if mine is over 25lb, though it's hardly a power machine. I'd love to have a play with a 50lb desktop... see if the power/weight ratio is favourable. ;)Iketh - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Very enjoyable read... thanks a bunch!!Sabresiberian - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I'm not interested in a high-end rig that has to limit its own capabilities to keep from overloading itself. There is no point in paying the nose-bleed price for the extra power the SLI'd 480Ms have if they can't deliver more than the Crossfired Mobility Radeons.;)
JarredWalton - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Furmark is hardly a realistic example of power requirements. I consider it more of a test of whether or not a system will outright crash, or fail gracefully. I'd prefer to see the power brick limit things rather than shutting off and leaving you on battery power, though.5150Joker - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
The X7200 also shuts off during long gaming sessions that push both the CPU and GPU. The 480M SLi's are a major fail: They're very expensive, they run hot (as evidenced by your furmark results and confirmed on NBR) and they don't outperform Crossfire 5870s by much at all.marraco - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
The hard disk is a waste of weigth, money and energy.Once you have 500 Gb of SSD, just use an extenal HD for back up.
marvdmartian - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
That's no moon. It's a space station!nitrousoxide - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Such thing should never appear in this universe...because it even overwhelmed the power of Alienware :)AVADirect - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
:)Harmattan - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Sure, you can buy three similarly-powerful desktops for the price of this laptop. However, from years of owning both high-end desktops and laptops, there is nothing like having the versitility and compact efficiency of a DTR/gaming laptop. Just the amount of engineering, design and testing that goes into a top-end gaming laptop will forcibly make them much more expensive than a desktop (which is essencially a bunch of components bolted into a metal box.) On a simpler level, it's just amazing to think you can have something that is 5-10x more powerful than a gaming console in a self-contained 15lb package.
Would be very interesting to see a review of this DTR's closest competitor in brand and GPU, the m17x R2 with 5870 Crossfire.
kallogan - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I'm idling at 25W with a P9600/ 9600MT/15,4" and two hard drives with max brightness. I'm looking for a mainstream laptop which can idle at 15W so 105W not for me ;)Wolfpup - Wednesday, October 13, 2010 - link
This article seems to imply that the G73jh/jw uses florescent backlighting, but it's LED, right?Wolfpup - Thursday, October 14, 2010 - link
Okay, I've been told the G73jh/w are LED backlit, so that's good.JarredWalton - Saturday, October 16, 2010 - link
The displays in all of these are the HannStar HSD173PUW1. To my eyes, it *looks* more like CCFL than LED, and the brightness levels are pretty weak (maximum of 180nits or so). I can't find any concrete details, but everyone else appears to thing it's LED backlighting so I might be wrong.JarredWalton - Saturday, October 16, 2010 - link
Update: notice the ASUS page:http://rog.asus.com/Product.aspx?PId=32#product_ta...
They simply list it as "17.3" Full HD (1920x1080)/HD+ (1600x900) Color-Shine (Glare-type)", which would be odd for an LED backlit display. Especially when the G60Vx explicitly states LED backlighting:
http://rog.asus.com/Product.aspx?PId=30#product_ta...
mikeev - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Why do you guys never mention the fingerprint sensors on these laptops? I know they're not the most exciting things in the world, but they're pretty nice feature additions. Beats typing in your password every time.Gonemad - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
Now, about the power brick... did Furmark just cause a 'thermal runaway' back there? 410W, are you kidding? That's nearly 40% overload on the nominal brick power, no wonder it cried for mommy and called it a day after some time of testing.It raises a couple of questions:
1) In the review itself, it is mentioned about other notebook that would actually drain the batteries when the PSU is topped-out. Clevo should go visit the same idea, now knowing that some extreme usage can compromise the PSU. Call it a 'feature'. Call it 'Overdrive' or whatever; it lets you have all the juice you need even overloading the PSU, but it detects the condition, light up a yellow warning light, and lets you do it for, say, 30 mins before cutting BACK, not OUT, the power drain. It doesn´t shut down, not completely. Again, the battery being used as a VOLTAGE STABILIZER looks good.
Well, then again, the benchmark was a deliberate attempt to overload the thing.
2) Aftermarket an even LARGER power brick, this time full-fledged 500W PSU at 4 pounds or higher. Considering everything else, it is not so preposterous.
3) If Anand dumped the original PSU, but kept it going on a LARGER DC source (a good and nice desktop PSU ought do it), how far would it go? Would something else drop out?
Classic Rock - Sunday, November 7, 2010 - link
I have read in the X7200 User forums that Clevo has offered a "Solution" of combining two PSU's together with some sort of adapter. There wasn't a lot of detail where I read it though. Does anyone know anything else about this? Does anyone know if it is possible to get an aftermarket PSU for this rig?Classic Rock - Sunday, November 7, 2010 - link
Adding to my previous post:http://www.nextcomputing.com/products/mobile-works...