The Fight for Your Mobile Gaming Dollar

At a macro level, there really aren’t all that many viable gaming notebook options. These days, Sandy Bridge processors rule the roost in notebooks, with the quad-core variety handling everything from single-threaded to multi-threaded workloads with aplomb. On the graphics side, you can try to get by with midrange mobile GPUs, but if you’re serious about mobile gaming you’ll want at least something from NVIDIA’s GTX line or AMD’s 6900M alternatives. Take the CPU and GPU; match them up with reasonable memory, storage, display, and other accoutrements; and you’re all set. That all works very well in the desktop world, even if it glosses over many of the finer points that separate the contenders from the pretenders. In the mobile world, however, the little things matter.

Modern computers are very modular by design. We have standards for power, memory, storage, and peripherals and you can generally choose what fits your needs. With notebooks, however, a lot of flexibility gets sacrificed in the name of making a reasonably sized chassis. Not coincidentally, profit margins tend to be quite a bit higher for notebooks than desktops, which is why so many companies want a piece of the pie. While it’s still pretty easy to upgrade memory and storage options, swapping out the CPU for something faster is more difficult and you need to make sure the cooling setup can handle any additional heat. Upgrading your GPU on the other hand is difficult at best, and frequently impossible. The issue with mobile GPUs is that despite MXM being something of a standard, chip locations are left up to the implementation, so there’s no guarantee that, for example, an HD 6770M could be installed in place of a GT 540M. And as far as the LCD, keyboard, touchpad, motherboard, and chassis are concerned, you’re stuck with whatever you buy with no chance of upgrading individual parts in the future. (Okay, perhaps you could upgrade the LCD panel in some cases, but you get what we’re saying.)

The point of all this is that you can’t simply compare notebooks based purely on features, components, and performance. Today’s head-to-head matchup between CyberPower’s Xplorer X6-9300 (aka, the Clevo P151HM) and MSI’s GT680R (also available as the CyberPower Xplorer X6-9400 and X6-9500) is a perfect example of this. On a pure performance and feature level, the two notebooks are very similar. They both came with an i7-2630QM processor and GTX 460M graphics card and 8GB of DDR3-1333 memory. The GT680R comes with two 500GB HDDs in a RAID 0 set while the X6-9300 supports a single 500GB HDD, but that’s the only major difference in terms of performance potential. Elsewhere, you get a 15.6” 1080p LCD, two USB 3.0 ports, and then all the miscellaneous bits like the keyboard, touchpad, speakers, chassis, etc.

If you just sit down and compare specs, MSI comes out on top, mostly by virtue of the second 2.5” HDD bay. In practice, however, determining which notebook is “best” requires a lot more work. Assuming potential buyers will actually use these as notebooks rather than portable boxes that they plug into an external LCD, keyboard, mouse, and speakers, the areas that often get the merest of lip service from the design departments matter most. The build quality and materials are frequently the difference between something that feels good in your lap and can last several years, or a cheap plastic notebook that can start to creak and wear out in less than two years. While I’d like to say LCDs are next in importance, the reality is that many users focus more on price and thus sacrifice quality in the one element that you look at constantly while using a computer. Last, there’s the rest of the user interface, the keyboard and touchpad. As someone who types a lot, this area matters as much as anything else in my day-to-day impressions of a notebook. If a keyboard is unpleasant for me to type on, all of the other elements end up being meaningless.

So with that introduction, let’s meet the two latest notebooks to cross our notebook test bench. Then we’ll investigate performance and other objective test results before wrapping up with our subjective evaluation. Will one of these laptops float to the surface of the mobile gaming ocean, or will both sink together? Perhaps they might be seaworthy, as long as you steer clear of the occasional iceberg or two. (Okay, no more sea analogies, I promise.)

CyberPower X6-9300: Checking Out Clevo’s P151HM

We’ve looked at more than a few Clevo notebooks over the years, and we’ve had our ups and downs. Most recently, we’ve been impressed by the LCD used in their P150HM, and the Xplorer X6-9300 from CyberPower we’re looking at today uses the Clevo P151HM chassis with the same beautiful, matte 1080p panel as the P150HM. Pricing is good and performance is right where you’d expect from the component choices, so if you’re after an affordable gaming notebook with an awesome display, you can almost stop right here. Almost. The catch of course is that it’s still a Clevo chassis, so there are some compromises and omissions you’ll have to deal with.

CyberPower offers a wealth of configuration options for the X6-9300, and they sent us a moderately loaded notebook for review. The table below summarizes the test configuration in bold, with alternatives listed in a standard font.

CyberPower Xplorer X6-9300 Specifications
Processor	Intel Core i3-2310M (dual-core 2.10, 35W) Intel Core i5-2410M (dual-core 2.30-2.90GHz, 35W) Intel Core i7-2630QM (quad-core 2.00-2.90GHz, 45W) Intel Core i7-2720QM (quad-core 2.20-3.30GHz, 45W) Intel Core i7-2820QM (quad-core 2.30-3.40GHz, 45W) Intel Core i7-2920XM (quad-core 2.50-3.50GHz, 55W)
Chipset	Intel HM65
Memory	1x4GB + 1x2GB DDR3-1333 2x4GB DDR-1333 (CL9)
Graphics	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M 1.5GB GDDR5 192 SPs, 675/1350/2500MHz Core/Shader/RAM clocks
Display	15.6” LED Anti-Glare 16:9 1080p (1920x1080) (AU Optronics B156HW1-v1)
Hard Drive(s)	250, 320, 500, 640, 750GB 5400RPM HDD 250, 320, 500, 750GB 7200RPM HDD 30 to 256GB SSDs from various vendors 500GB 7200RPM HDD (Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS)
Optical Drive	8X Tray-Load DVDRW(TSST Corp TS-L633F) Blu-ray Reader/DVDRW Combo Blu-ray Writer/DVDRW
Networking	Gigabit Ethernet(JMicron JMC250) 802.11n WiFi (Realtek RTL8191SEvB) 802.11n WiFi + Bluetooth 3.0 (Intel Advanced-N 6230) 802.11n WiFi (Intel Ultimate-N 6300) 802.11n WiFi (Killer Wireless-N 1102)
Audio	Realtek ALC892 2.1 Speakers + THX TruStudio Pro (Stereo speakers and subwoofer) Four audio jacks (Microphone, Headphone, Line-In, Line-Out) Capable of 5.1 digital output (HDMI/SPDIF)
Battery	8-Cell, 14.8V, 5.2Ah, 77Wh
Front Side	IR Receiver
Left Side	Memory Card Reader Mini FireWire 1 x USB 2.0 2 x USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet
Right Side	Optical Drive Headphone/Microphone/Line-In/Line-Out 1 x USB 2.0 Kensington Lock
Back Side	2 x Exhaust vent 1 x eSATA/USB 2.0 Combo HDMI Dual-Link DVI-D AC Power
Operating System	Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Dimensions	14.8” x 10.08” x 1.38-1.69” (WxDxH)
Weight	6.93 lbs (with 8-cell battery)
Extras	2MP Webcam Flash reader (SD, MMC, MS) Fingerprint Scanner 98-Key keyboard with 10-key
Warranty	1-year standard warranty Life-time technical support
Pricing	Starting Price: $1094 Price as configured: $1322

We received a moderate configuration, all things considered, but the price even with the upgrades still comes in at a compelling $1322. We’d love to get a decent SSD in there, like the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB, but that would bump the price up nearly 50%. It’s a shame there’s not a second HDD bay, as a moderate 60GB SSD for the OS and apps paired with a larger 750GB HDD would be a great combination. (Of course, you could use the optical bay with an appropriate Clevo adapter—note, I’m not familiar with that site, but it’s one of the few places that clearly stocks the correct part.) Outside of the quad-core CPU and the 8GB memory, everything is stock. The 1-year only warranty is also a bit of a concern; notebooks go through a lot more use and abuse than desktops, and ponying up for a 3-year warranty often works out well in the long run. With CyberPower, your only choice is their default warranty, though you do get unlimited technical support.

All of the important specs are present, with USB 3.0, eSATA, and Firewire available should you need them. The fingerprint scanner is something a lot of people prefer over typing a password, and there’s a flash memory reader on the side. I’m still not sold on putting the video, power, and eSATA ports on the back of the chassis, but some people like that approach—just be careful if you ever tip the notebook back. Also interesting is that Clevo skips VGA and DisplayPort and instead includes a dual-link DVI port on the back—just in case you want to hook up to a 30” LCD.

The notebook itself looks virtually identical to the P150HM, except the soft-touch coating is gone and in its place is standard ABS plastic. I actually liked the rubberized paint texture so this feels like a downgrade, but the touchpad benefits because I don’t want my finger to stick when tracking. We also get the same old story of matte plastic literally everywhere, except for the screen bezel. That’s a double whammy when you factor in the anti-glare LCD, so you thankfully lose the reflections there but get them around the border. I frankly just don’t get why manufacturers go this route.

The other issue is a familiar refrain: the keyboard and its layout. Key travel isn’t very good, and while you can type on it well enough, the number keypad makes the layout for that element useless. The keys themselves also feel a little small, especially when you consider this is a 15.6” chassis. Of course the keyboard layout was pretty much set in stone a year (or three) ago, and if you want the rest of the notebook you’re going to have to live with the keyboard. I’m sitting here typing this out on the keyboard right now, and it’s certainly not the worst experience in the world (that would be a 10” or smaller netbook in my book), but besides the layout I really wish it had a backlit keyboard to go with the other premium components.

Clevo has a THX TruStudio PRO sticker on the P151HM (just like the MSI we’ll get to in a minute), and the chassis sports a 2.1 speaker configuration. Unfortunately, while music and games don’t sound bad, the P151HM is not at the same level as the Dell XPS 15 (or the MSI we’ll look at in a moment). Even with the subwoofer, audio comes across as tinny and lacks bass response, so you’d want a set of good headphones (or speakers) for serious audio. At least the speakers don’t actually rattle and distort at maximum volume, and they’re fine for general use, but gaming and movie viewing come up short.

We’ve got one more laptop to discuss before we get to the benchmarks, but the X6-9300 puts in a good showing. Pricing is better than many similarly equipped alternatives, and the LCD alone is worth the cost of entry. As far as gaming notebooks go, the 2630QM and GTX 460M is the current sweet spot. With the 460M, you have enough GPU performance to handle medium to high quality gaming at 1080p, without the high price premium of faster GPUs like the 485M or 6970M. On something like the Clevo P150HM from AVADirect, it’s $225 to move from the GTX 460M to the HD 6970M, and that’s a sizeable performance jump. Unfortunately, the P150HM also carries a $110 premium over the P151HM, so it’s actually a $335 upgrade at AVADirect, and CyberPower has better pricing on the P151HM so it ends up being a over $500 extra to move from the X6-9300 we’re reviewing to a P150HM with HD 6970M. If only the P151HM had support for Optimus, this would be a do-everything, go-anywhere notebook; instead, it’s a gaming notebook with plenty of performance and a great screen, but only so-so battery life.

MSI GT680R: Doing the Time Warp

We originally had the MSI GT680R in for review in February. Then the whole Cougar Point chipset fiasco came, and we never completed a full review. We did post a quick look at the performance the Sandy Bridge i7-2630QM offered, with the recommendation that anyone looking for a new gaming notebook would be well advised to wait. Here we are two and a half months later and we have the GT680R back in for the finished review, so on the one hand we have a flashback to a couple months ago. On the other hand, looking at the design of the GT680R feels like a throwback to several years ago. The MSI GT680R is also available as a barebones laptop (e.g. the CyberPower Xplorer X6-9400 and X6-9500 use the MS-16F2 chassis, though the palm rest is black instead of silver/gray), but the standard GT680R specs are in the following table.

MSI GT680R Specifications
Processor	Intel Core i7-2630QM (quad-core 2.00-2.90GHz, 45W)
Chipset	Intel HM67
Memory	4x2GB DDR-1333 (CL9) (Max 16GB)
Graphics	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M 1.5GB GDDR5 192 SPs, 675/1350/2500MHz Core/Shader/RAM clocks Overclocking to 709/1418 Core/Shader available
Display	15.6” LED Anti-Glare 16:9 1080p (1920x1080) (AU Optronics B156HW1-v5)
Hard Drive(s)	2x 500GB 7200RPM HDD in RAID 0 (Seagate Momentus 7200.4 ST9500420AS)
Optical Drive	8X Tray-Load DVDRW (TSST Corp TS-L633F)
Networking	Gigabit Ethernet (Realtek RTL8168/8111) 802.11n WiFi (Intel WiFi Link 1000)
Audio	Realtek ALC892 2.1 Speakers + THX TruStudio Pro (Stereo speakers and subwoofer) Four audio jacks (Microphone, Headphone, Line-In, Line-Out) Capable of 5.1 digital output (HDMI/SPDIF)
Battery	9-Cell, 11.1V, 7.8Ah, 87Wh
Front Side	Orange Lighting
Left Side	1 x USB 2.0 Memory Card Reader 2 x USB 3.0 Exhaust vent
Right Side	Headphone/Microphone/Line-In/Line-Out 1 x USB 2.0 Optical Drive
Back Side	Intake vent Kensington Lock AC Power Gigabit Ethernet VGA 1 x eSATA/USB 2.0 Combo HDMI
Operating System	Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Dimensions	15.55” x 10.51” x 1.84-2.17” (WxDxH)
Weight	7.56 lbs (with 9-cell battery)
Extras	2MP HD Webcam GPU Overclocking Flash reader (SD, MMC, MS, xD) 103-Key keyboard with 10-key
Warranty	3-year standard warranty
Pricing	$1500 MSRP Online Price Starting at $1446

Nearly all of the specs are the same as the Clevo P151HM, other than the additional hard drive and RAID 0 set; what’s interesting is the specifics of the implementation. The GT680R is a bulkier chassis, coming in around .75” wider, .5” deeper, and .5” thicker. It also weighs .6 lbs more, although a good chunk of that goes to the second HDD. You lose out on Firewire support and the fingerprint scanner, and MSI puts a VGA port on the back instead of DVI or DisplayPort. As with the P151HM, quite a few ports are on the back of the chassis, so if you don’t like that arrangement you’ll want to go elsewhere. One other piece of information to point out is the difference in LCD panels; both are AU Optronics B156HW01 panels, but Clevo uses the v1 panel and MSI uses the v5 panel. Oh, what a difference that single digit makes! You lose matte, lose the high contrast ratio, and reduce viewing angles, so the v5 panel is definitely inferior.

There are a couple more interesting points to bring up. First, MSI added an extra 1-year warranty on the GT680R, thanks to the Intel Cougar Point chipset snafu. That means the GT680R now has a 3-year warranty, which is a nice change of pace. The other item to mention is overclocking. MSI includes an overclocking tool with the catchy name of Turbo Drive Engine. Back in the Core 2 days, overclocking the CPU was a common feature on higher end notebooks, but with Clarksfield and Arrandale it became less useful. Thanks to Intel’s Turbo Boost, overclocking often resulted in slightly lower performance as the increased bus speeds would result in lower turbo modes kicking in.

With Sandy Bridge, overclocking by changing the bus speed is basically dead, and particularly on the mobile parts the Turbo Boost range is very impressive. The i7-2630QM runs at a base speed of 2.0GHz but can hit 2.9GHz on a single core when needed—or all four cores can run at up to 2.6GHz. If you need more than that, an i7-2720QM will bump pricing up about $165 (depending on the vendor) and give you a 2.2GHz base and up to 3.3GHz Turbo, but that’s a relatively small gain for the price hike. With CPU overclocking thus addressed, MSI’s Turbo Drive Engine turns to the GPU and will nudge the GTX 460M core/shader clocks from 675/1350MHz to 709/1417MHz. Yes, that’s a relatively small 5% overclock, but it comes free with the notebook and it does give it a slight edge in gaming performance compared to other GTX 460M notebooks. (Note that GPU memory speeds remain the same, so a 5% performance increase is the most you’ll see from the overclock.)

Okay, calling the GT680R a throwback to several years ago might be a bit severe, but the glossy plastic notebook designs have got to end. I actually think they gained prominence among designers because they liked the 3D renders the artists could put together; in actual practice, I can’t come up with any good reason to prefer glossy plastic exteriors, especially glossy black plastic. Fingerprints show up the instant you touch such surfaces, though at least MSI takes one step in the right direction by using glossy gray plastic (with a honeycomb texture on some of it) for the palm rests. While we’re on the subject of the palm rests, let’s also talk about the stickers that adorn so many laptops. MSI has small Energy Star, NVIDIA, Intel Core i7, Windows 7, and THX stickers on the palm rest, along with a larger sticker listing some of the features of the GT680R. While it’s possible to remove all of those stickers with a bit of work, they only make sense for retail show floors where potential buyers can find out what they’re getting. If you buy a laptop in a box, there’s simply no reason for the stickers—they’re advertisements for something you already bought.

Another item that will either please or detract is the extra lighting on the chassis. The chassis is reminiscent of the older Dell XPS designs, with lights on the front grille and on the left and right edges of the LCD bezel and palm rest. Unlike Dell’s older XPS (and the Alienware laptops), the lights cannot be customized, so you’re stuck with the orange glow. The orange lighting motif extends to the indicator lights as well—orange is the new white apparently. Thankfully, you can disable the lights (via a touch-sensitive key in the top-right) if you dislike them. I’ve never been a fan of bling, even on the Alienware laptops, and it’s almost insulting to put the effort into superfluous chassis lighting when keyboard backlighting would be the best place to start. As a company with strong Asian market ties, perhaps MSI is simply catering to that market—I wouldn’t know if this sort of chassis is considered better or worse than the competition overseas. What I do know is that personally this feels like a misguided design that could have been fixed with a few focus groups and mockups to solicit feedback.

The keyboard is of the typical chiclet variety, which you’ll either like or loathe. Typing action is okay if not great, and at least there’s minimal flex. Actually, the keyboard feel is very similar to the Clevo—that’s not necessarily a good thing, although it could be worse—only with a different layout. The good news is that MSI gets the 10-key layout correct, so you can actually touch-type on the thing. The cursor keys do partially overlap the zero key, but it’s still about 1.5x regular key size. What’s missing is direct access to the Home and End keys; PgUp and PgDn are in the top-right and the same keys give you Home/End via an Fn-key combination. Alternately, you can turn off num lock and use the 10-key shortcuts, but that’s still not ideal. Amazingly, we do get direct access to the scroll lock and pause/break keys—keys which few people ever use, and certainly not with the frequency they would use home/end. And as a final complaint against the keyboard, like so many Clevo notebooks, there’s also no keyboard backlighting; that’s a shame on a gaming notebook that would conceivably be used at dark LAN parties.

The problem with input devices doesn’t end at the keyboard, unfortunately. The touchpad has a moderate-sized surface, which works well enough, but what I can’t fathom is why any modern notebook would ship without support for any form of gestures. Heck, it doesn’t even have the old vertical/horizontal scrolling on the edges of the touchpad. Instead, the right and bottom corners can be configured to scroll when you tap/hold them. It’s as bad as it sounds—and if that doesn’t sound bad, it should. The hardware for the touchpad apparently comes from Sentelic, a company I don’t recall hearing of before, and if the chassis design seems several years old the touchpad feels positively ancient. Couple that with rocker-style buttons and really there aren’t any good qualities to the touchpad other than that you can move the mouse cursor around and click on things.

Rounding out the hardware elements of the GT680R, we have the audio subsystem. With stickers for Dynaudio speakers and THX, you’d expect something that sounds better than the average laptop. For a change, the audio actually lives up to the quality claims made on the stickers. In blind listening, it was a tie vote between the GT680R sound and a Dell XPS 15—the XPS 15 tended to have a bit more bass, and while you can tweak the audio settings via the Waves Maxx control panel, there’s still plenty of subjectivity involved. The Dell laptop also gets a bit louder if you’re looking to fill a room, but the difference is only a matter of a couple decibels. If quality audio is something you care about, the GT680R won’t disappoint—or at least, it will disappoint less than most other notebooks I’ve tested.

As with the X6-9300, MSI’s GT680R certainly delivers in the performance department. Medium to high detail gaming at the LCD’s native resolution is possible with most recent titles, and there’s a large gap between the GTX 460M and most of NVIDIA’s GT 500M lineup. Pricing is comparable to the Clevo P151HM—in fact, you can buy the MSI as a whitebook offering in the form of the Xplorer X6-9400 at CyberPower. Doing a head-to-head comparison on pricing, while the MSI branded model will set you back around $1450 as configured, you can get the X6-9400 with the same components for just $1342. That actually makes the MSI notebook potentially cheaper than the P151HM, and even better CyberPower will let you customize the components. Our recommendation would be to go with a Kingston 128GB SSD for the OS and applications, and pair that up with a spacious 750GB 7200RPM HDD for data. With that setup, your final price from CyberPower still comes in at a very reasonable $1520, or you can further tweak the configuration as you see fit (e.g. higher performance SSDs like Intel’s 510 are available). There’s still no Optimus support, so battery life isn’t great, and I’m not all that keen on the aesthetics or design. Even so, the MSI GT680R (MS-16F2 whitebook) gives you plenty to work with for a good price. We just wish MSI would swap out the LCD for the panel in the Clevo (along with ditching all the glossy plastic).

Application Performance, Now with PCMark 7

We’ll start with our usual look at application performance, but we’re making a new addition to the benchmarks. Out goes PCMark05 results (we might still put them in Mobile Bench, but they won’t be in the articles) and in comes PCMark 7 (the seven is for Windows 7, incidentally; though the test runs on Vista as well, results may not be optimal and I’m not sure if you can run the full PCMark suite). Officially launched on May 12, PCMark 7 updates the benchmark suite with a revised set of applications and tests. This goes along nicely with the newly christened 3DMark 11, which we will get to in a minute.

We’re going to break with our mobile testing tradition and run the full suite of PCMark 7 benchmarks. They consist of the following areas: PCMark, Lightweight, Productivity, Creativity, Entertainment, Computation, and Storage. Each individual score represents a composite score for several other tests, and we’ll discuss some of the results in those tests where appropriate. Many have asked for additional application tests, and the various PCMark 7 benchmarks do a good job of running a variety of workloads. If you want to know the specifics of each test, you can consult the PCMark 7 Whitepaper.

With that introduction out of the way, here’s how the P151HM and GT680R stack up to the competition. We’ve used green for the two notebooks we’re focusing on in this review, gold for the Dell XPS 15 L502x, and black for the Clevo P150HM (sporting an i7-2720QM and an HD 6970M). The ASUS G73SW is also highlighted in a lighter blue, though most of the tests will have it running neck and neck with these two notebooks. As with any new benchmark, we don’t have a full set of results for all the older laptops and notebooks in PCMark 7, but we did run it on several other notebooks to provide some reference points. We’ll start there before moving to the rest of our application tests.

When we first ran PCMark 7, we noticed some oddities: the ASUS G73SW ended up beating the similarly equipped Clevo P151HM, Dell XPS 15 L502x, and MSI GT680R systems by 25%, which is well outside the margin of error we would expect. Looking at the individual test results, we quickly discovered the culprit: the storage subsystem results were around twice as fast on the ASUS compared to the other three laptops. The Dell has a 750GB 7200RPM Western Digital Scorpio Black, whereas the ASUS, Clevo, and MSI notebooks all use the venerable 500GB Seagate Momentus 7200.4; if those three all have the same HDD—heck, the MSI has two of them in RAID 0!—then why are the scores so different?

I decided to pull out the heavy guns on this one and make sure we were playing on a level field; that’s right: I defragged. Actually, I always do that before running benchmarks, but since I had just installed PCMark 7 I thought it was worth a shot. I reran PCMark 7 a couple times to see if some sort of optimization on subsequent runs was coming into play (e.g. SuperFetch). Nope; in fact, the first run on each laptop was usually the highest result out of five runs. After all the testing, I’m still not exactly sure what’s going on. I thought at first that since ASUS has two hard drives, so that might be part of it; however, PCMark 7 let’s you run the storage test on the secondary drive, and I did that as well (and generated an even higher result on the Storage test). A quick look at the ASUS K53E scores shows the same approximate doubling of HDD bandwidth in the various storage subtests, so I have to conclude that ASUS has a BIOS, firmware, or driver optimization that’s giving them a sizeable lead in the PCMark 7 results. Of course, that lead only holds up as long as you’re not looking at the performance of the Sandy Bridge i7-2820QM with an SSD.

In both PCMark 7 and PCMark Vantage (see below), the presence of an SSD definitely makes its presence known. Part of that is because SSDs really do make a system snappier in a lot of ways; the other part of the story is that storage related subtests are in every one of the PCMark 7 suites, with the exception of the Computation benchmark. There’s an interesting element to that test as well, though, in that it has two video transcoding tests, and both appear to use Intel’s Quick Sync when it’s available. The result is that the dual-core and quad-core Sandy Bridge laptops with no discrete graphics come out looking like a champ in that discipline—and they really are fast on video transcoding with the right application. We could force the Dell laptop to run only on the IGP, but interestingly it appears that Quick Sync is only partially used with Optimus. Anyway, don’t get too caught up in the charts, because the large differences in the storage related tests really skew the results.

General Performance and 3DMarks

Here are the remaining application benchmarks, most of which remove the storage subsystem from the equation.

PCMark Vantage echoes what we’ve shown with PCMark 7 above, so we’ll just refer to the commentary we’ve already made. The remaining tests mostly focus on pure CPU performance, so all of the i7-2630QM notebooks fall in a tight cluster. The only systems that consistently come out ahead are those with faster Sandy Bridge CPUs, or the hex-core Clevo X7200.

Turning to 3DMark, we’ve dropped the 03 and 05 versions from our benchmark list, added 3DMark 11, and for higher end notebooks like these we are including 3DMark Vantage’s Performance preset. In all four tests, the performance falls out just as you would expect, with the GTX 460M notebooks all close together. MSI’s GT680R shows us two other interesting pieces of information. First, the latest 270 series NVIDIA drivers appear to have helped 3DMark performance slightly, bumping performance up a few percent. (I can’t say for sure whether I used Turbo on the original MSI GT680R when testing 3DMark performance, so it’s possible much of the increase in performance comes from that.) That already gets into the second point: the slight 5% GPU core overclock does show up in 3DMark; it’s not a major improvement, but it’s free so there’s no harm in including it. The same slight boost in performance generally carries over to gaming as well, which we’ll look at next.

Let the Games Begin

Our gaming suite is the most comprehensive set of gaming benchmarks you’re likely to find if you’re wondering how your shiny new laptop stacks up to the competition. As both of the notebooks we’re reviewing today are reasonably high-end, we’ll run through our Medium, High, and Ultra quality presets on each title. I’ve also added a couple new games to the list, Civilization V and Total War: Shogun 2, but I won’t include the graphs yet since we only have a few results. We’re also not fully decided on if we’ll keep these two benchmarks, so let us know what you think; in the meantime, you can find the scores in Mobile Bench. (We might also need to revamp the TWS2 test once the DX11 patch hits, which might be just in time to start testing Crysis 2 with DX11.)

We’ll focus our commentary on the High and Ultra results, but the Medium charts do a good job at showing the gulf between the midrange and high-end mobile GPUs. Something else to look at in the gaming benchmarks are the results for the original MSI GT680R; we’re including them mostly to see if anything has changed with the latest NVIDIA driver updates (and potentially firmware/BIOS tweaks from MSI), as the hardware remains the same; results for the earlier GT680R are in dark green.

Medium Quality Gaming Results

High Quality Gaming Results

Ultra Quality Gaming Results

Say what you will about the GT680R’s GPU overclock, if nothing else it’s at least consistently a few percent faster than the competition. We wouldn’t pay extra for the feature, and we aren’t recommending other manufacturers follow a similar path, but it’s there if you want it. Outside of that little performance bonus, the other GTX 460M notebooks (including the older ASUS G73JW with a Clarksfield CPU) are all clumped together. It appears NVIDIA’s 270 series driver also provides a consistent if small increase in performance.

As for other options, we currently have three faster mobile GPUs that we've benchmarked (though there are others). 480M SLI (and 485M SLI) come at the top of the pecking order, but you can only get those GPUs right now with a desktop CPU in the form of the Clevo X7200. A single GTX 485M is also a sizeable jump in performance relative to 460M, but don't forget the HD 6970M, which is nipping at the heels of 485M for quite a bit less money. GTX 470M and HD 6950M will also outperform the 460M, as would any CrossFire 5800M or 6900M setup.

Of course, if you want a reasonably priced notebook that can run current games at high detail settings (but generally not with antialiasing), the GTX 460M is a great place to start. Faster mobile GPUs certainly exist, but the price premium to get those is quite high.

Battery Life and Power

The battery life results again fall right where expected. Without Optimus Technology, the GTX 460M puts a major dent on battery life, so even with 75Wh and larger capacities the best such notebooks can manage is just under four hours of mobility. In reasonable workloads like surfing the Internet, that drops down to about 3.5 hours (give or take), and H.264 decoding will last through most movies but not much more. MSI did make some changes to their power management, apparently, as our initial testing of the GT680R a few months back did worse than the P151HM and G73SW even though the battery capacity is 13% greater. The MSI also gets slightly less relative battery life, but that’s easily explained by the presence of a second hard drive.

We also ran some additional battery life tests, for those who want to do something like play a game while on battery power. The GT680R managed 100 to 125 minutes while looping 3DMark 03/06, and the P151HM lasted 130 to 140 minutes in similar testing. Recharging time on the MSI was 183 minutes (with the laptop powered on but sitting at the Windows desktop), and 143 minutes for the Clevo. Note that the Clevo battery consistently reported 0% wear while the MSI battery wear ranged from 6% to 9%, so that could also affect the battery life as well as charging time. Finally, idle battery life with the LCD at maximum brightness is 190 on the Clevo and 213 on the MSI. That represents an additional power draw of 3.2W for both the Clevo and MSI notebooks, but the interesting thing is that the P151HM manages nearly 330nits compared to just 230nits for the MSI at maximum brightness. We’ll get into the LCD differences in a moment, but it appears that the low contrast on the MSI is a result of the same backlight intensity letting though more light when it’s supposed to show black and less light when showing white—a double whammy with no benefit to the end user (other than cost).

A Tale of Two LCDs

Clevo P151HM / CyberPower X6-9300 Gamut

MSI GT680R Gamut

As mentioned earlier, the LCD on the MSI laptop is noticeably inferior. The sad thing is that both the MSI and Clevo use the same AU Optronics B156HW01 LCD panel, but Clevo uses v1 while MSI uses v5. Presumably the v5 panel is a lot cheaper—at least it better be, judging by the results shown above!

On the other hand, the P151HM has what is very likely the best laptop LCD I’ve used in most areas. An 800:1 contrast ratio is great for a matte LCD, color accuracy is reasonable, and color gamut is close to ideal for the sRGB space. If you’re after a high gamut panel, there are better options, but most people feel high gamut panels just end up looking oversaturated. I really wish we could draw a line in the sand and have the P151HM panel set the minimum quality level that laptop displays should reach, but instead we have a race to the lowest priced LCD notebook manufacturers can find, which is why we see so many 1366x768 laptops.

Not only does the Clevo notebook offer superior contrast, but it also offers better viewing angles. We’re still dealing with TN panels either way, which is unfortunate but difficult to avoid, but the P151HM has a much wider sweet spot for viewing.

Noise and Temperatures

Clevo P151HM / CyberPower X6-9300

MSI GT680R

CPU temperatures are about 5C lower on the Clevo when the system is under a heavy load for a long time, but the GPU runs reasonably cool in both notebooks. The catch is that the Clevo only manages this by ramping up fan speeds much earlier than MSI.

At idle, the MSI GT680R maintains a constant 34.5dB output (for around 12”); in contrast, the Clevo oscillates between 31.9dB and 35.6dB. What’s truly unfortunate is that the Clevo is the more annoying under light workloads because you notice the frequently changing noise level more than you would a steady drone. Under load, the noise situation falls even more heavily in MSI’s favor. After looping 3DMark06 at 1080p for over 30 minutes, the MSI still maintained a reasonable output of 39.1dB, and it would even drop to 36-37dB at times. The P151HM on the other hand quickly ramped up fan speed to what appears to be the maximum RPM, putting out a loud 44.3dB. Under our worst-case load (4-thread Cinebench with 3DMark06 looping), the MSI also had to increase fan speed to 44.0dB and the Clevo maintained the same 44.3dB output, but most users likely won’t be putting a 100% load on all CPU cores while loading the GPU at the same time.

Looking at the cooling arrangement, MSI actually does something quite useful. The chassis at first appears to have a rear and side vent, but it turns out the rear vent is actually an air intake. Instead of trying to pull air through the bottom of the chassis like most notebooks, the fan gets easy access to fresh air at from the back, and vents it out the left side. ASUS’ G73 chassis is still the quietest gaming notebook we’ve encountered (though we’re not sure if that translates well to the smaller G53 chassis), but the MSI cooling arrangement tends to work well. It would be nice if they could reduce idle noise levels a bit more, but a steady 34dB is better than hearing the fan spin up and then slow down ever 10-20 seconds.

Conclusion: Two Notebooks Enter, Two Notebooks Leave

I really wish I could come out with a highly positive review for one of these notebooks; unfortunately, too many areas come up short. If you can deal with some of the quirks, both offerings allow you to get a well-equipped gaming notebook for around $1300. That’s a great price point to hit, and it puts these notebooks in the same company as Gateway’s old FX line. Prior to 2008, getting a reasonably equipped gaming notebook usually meant spending well over two grand, and Gateway changed the playing field when they launched the FX P-6831. Sadly, the FX line is no more, though it was long overdue for an aesthetic overhaul so maybe that’s for the best. Today, laptops like the ASUS G-series, Clevo’s notebooks, and MSI’s G-series carry on that legacy, with a good balance of performance and features at reasonable prices. What’s more, I’d say they mostly look better while offering significantly more performance than you’d get from an aging FX notebook. Still, there are areas that need fixing.

Starting with the Clevo, there are two major complaints. First is the keyboard layout—I’d rather have something like Dell’s XPS 15 layout sans 10-key than to have a wrong 10-key crammed into a 15.6” chassis. The other big complaint is the fan noise; I don’t expect a 15.6” gaming notebook to be silent, but it doesn’t have to be loud either and it certainly doesn’t need to oscillate between near silent and 35dB when sitting idle on a desk or table. A steady 33.5dB would be preferable if we just take the mean of the two fan speeds. On the other end of the spectrum, while trying to keep components cool is generally recommended, Clevo could probably back off a touch and let the laptop run at 41dB with slightly higher temperatures under most loads. Fix those two items and get rid of the glossy LCD bezel and the P151HM (or CyberPower’s X6-9300) would be Editors’ Choice material, because the LCD is simply beautiful. I’ve had it sitting side by side with Dell’s XPS 15 and I prefer the Clevo panel (even if I prefer most other design elements on the Dell). Add in Optimus so that users don’t need to abandon battery life in the pursuit of a gaming notebook and this could even reach the Gold level.

MSI has very different issues. The cooling works well, and the keyboard is actually a substantial improvement from when I used the old GX640. If it had backlighting it would be even better; overall, I’d still take the Dell XPS 15 keyboard, because I use the Home/End keys all the time. I can live without a 10-key, personally, especially on a 15.6” chassis; I can’t get used to pressing Fn+PgUp, particularly when you have to go to the very top-right area of the keyboard with your right hand. If the keyboard layout were the worst of its problems, the GT680R would be in good shape, but I’ve got a laundry list of things that could use fixing. Worse than the keyboard for me is the touchpad, with no scrolling gestures, but you’d want a real mouse for playing games anyway.

It’s the overall design aesthetic that really nixes the GT680R, because glossy plastic used in this manner is something that should have gone out of fashion three years ago. It’s as if MSI took the old ASUS G50V, tweaked the design, and upgraded components, not realizing that most people didn’t particularly like that design in the first place. And the final straw for me is the low quality LCD; Clevo manages to pack in a better panel for roughly the same price, and I’d happily pay $100 more to upgrade from the MSI LCD to the Clevo LCD. Where MSI does well is in performance and sound quality, with very good gaming performance, the potential to use an SSD+HDD setup, and speakers that can rival the XPS 15 (depending on personal preference). It’s not a bad notebook overall, and some people will probably like the design a lot more than I do, but I wouldn’t want to spend more than $1200 for this particular notebook.

Because we’ve had several notebooks come through with roughly the same specs and performance, we end up with quite a few comparison points. The Clevo P151HM’s build quality may not be the greatest, but it’s not as bad as it could be. I prefer the rubberized texture on the P150HM, but the price premium for that upgrade is too high so the P151HM is a fair compromise. Both the P150HM and P151HM have an awesome matte 1080p LCD that’s my favorite current notebook display, which almost makes up for the other complaints I have. The MSI GT680R has a similar price (at least if you go with the CyberPower X6-9400), but you downgrade the LCD and chassis, upgrade the speakers, and add in a second hard drive bay. Again, pricing is fair for the performance you get, but since we’re not talking about a girlfriend I don’t think it’s shallow to focus a lot more on the physical appearance. If I had to choose between the P151HM and the GT680R, I’d live with the keyboard and noise and go for the Clevo/X6-9300, but it’s not a decisive victory.

Elsewhere, Dell has the XPS 15 L502x with an upgraded 1080p LCD and a few other extras occupying the same ~$1300 price point. That will get you great sound, a great display (second only to the P150HM panel in consumer notebooks), and a chassis that’s wonderfully devoid of glossy plastic. You also get much better battery life but only half the GPU performance, so it’s not all roses. For anything other than gaming, the XPS 15 is my current pick for a good 15.6” laptop. Finally, we already reviewed the ASUS G73SW with the same 2630QM and GTX 460M, but that’s a larger chassis and unfortunately we haven’t been able to get the G53SW in for review yet. Without hands on time, we don’t know what LCD ASUS is using, and we don’t know if there are any other serious problems. I did see a G53SW pre-production notebook at CES and the LCD looked decent, but that was pre-production and the G53JW apparently used the same LCD as the MSI (judging by at least one review). The G53SW also supports a second HDD like the MSI, and the overall aesthetic is superior, but I’m not sure it’s worth the $150 price premium.

So once again, what I’m personally looking for in a quality 15.6” gaming notebook is something that doesn’t exist just yet. Give me the LCD in the P151HM, a chassis and build quality like the Dell Latitude E6520 or ThinkPad T510—and toss in a backlit keyboard—speakers that sound like the Dell XPS 15, and a GPU like the GTX 460M but with Optimus enabled. I would be willing to settle for a slightly slower GPU like the GT 555M, but since I’m wishing for something that doesn’t exist we might as well go whole hog. Then we just need someone to put all of those features and components together and keep the price under $1500—which doesn’t seem likely to happen, given the prices on moderately specced Latitude and ThinkPad laptops. Instead, we have quite a few options that all offer parts of the whole, but no one has yet put together a modern Sandy Bridge laptop that nails every area.