Eurocom P5 Pro / Clevo P750ZM Introduction

Some people look at notebooks as a way to cut the cord and go mobile for long periods of time, but others view the portability as a mere convenience while they move from one power socket to another (e.g. from home to the office). If you’re mostly running with your notebook connected to the power grid and you need the absolute fastest processor possible, there are some interesting options.

Clevo is pretty much the go-to option these days for desktop replacements (DTR), with the ability to support full performance desktop processors (including LGA2011 options) and up to two GTX 980M graphics cards in SLI on their top models. Today we’re looking at the next step down from that, the P750ZM that supports Haswell processors up to the i7-4790K and a single GTX 980M graphics chip.

We’ve already seen with the MSI GT72 that the GTX 980M is quite the potent mobile GPU, and in fact the GPU is so fast that there are times (especially at lower quality settings) where it becomes CPU limited. Moving up to an 88W i7-4790K should remove most of the CPU bottleneck, at least at settings anyone is likely to use, so let’s see exactly how fast the 980M can run with a desktop processor.

We’ve noted before that there are only a handful of true high-end notebook providers: Alienware, ASUS, Clevo, Gigabyte, and MSI are pretty much it, with a few companies like Razer and Gigabyte’s AORUS brand maxing out at the GTX 970M. We’re working on a review of Gigabyte’s rather slim P35W v3 as well, which is almost insanely thin for a full 980M laptop, but we’ll hold off on further comparisons until that review is ready.

As for the Clevo P750ZM, our sample laptop comes courtesy of Eurocom, where it’s sold as the Eurocom P5 Pro. While Eurocom may offer a few tweaks and options you might not find in stock configurations at other vendors, I have to be brutally honest here and say that there’s not much that separates the various branded Clevo notebooks from each other – Clevo, Eurocom, Sager, or whatever else you want to call it, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The main factors when buying any Clevo notebook are going to be price and component options.

Of course that doesn't mean there are no differences between the various vendors. Eurocom is one of the few (only?) vendors to offer a TPM 2.0 security chip on the P750ZM, and they also offer Radeon R9 M290X graphics (though at this stage in the life cycle I'm not sure why you'd want to go with AMD's Pitcairn-derived GPU). Finally, Eurocom uses IC Diamond 7 thermal paste on their notebooks, where many vendors charge extra for that feature.

Moving on to the component side of things, Eurocom doesn’t disappoint, with a pretty well fully loaded solution being available. You can choose between several 1080p display options, as well as two different 4K panels (including the 4K Sharp IGZO display in our test sample). Four SO-DIMM slots allow for up to 32GB RAM, there are two M.2 slots (SATA or PCIe supported, though RAID requires SATA), another two 2.5” drive bays, and five USB 3.0 ports (with one being an eSATA combo port). Here are the full specifications for our review unit:

Eurocom P5 Pro / Clevo P750ZM Specifications
CPU	Core i7-4790K (Quad-core, 4.0-4.4GHz, 8MB L3, 88W)
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M 8GB (1536 CUDA cores, 1038MHz + Boost, 256-bit 5010MHz GDDR5)
RAM	16GB (2x8GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1866 (Two additional SO-DIMM slots available)
SSD	256GB M.2 SATA SSD Array (2x128GB  Crucial M600 in RAID 0)
HDD	1TB 7200RPM (HGST 7K1000-1000
Optical	N/A
Display	15.6" Glossy 4K (3840x2160) (Sharp IGZO LQ156D1JX01B)
Networking	Killer N1525 Combo (2x2 802.11ac + BT 4.0) Realtek RKL8111/8168/8411 Gigabit Ethernet
Audio	Realtek ALC892 2.1 speakers Four audio jacks
Front	N/A
Left	1 x USB 2.0/eSATA Combo Flash Reader (SDXC/SDHC/MMC) 3 x USB 3.0 Ethernet
Right	1 x USB 3.0 4 x Audio jacks Kensington Lock
Rear	Left/Right Exhaust Vents 2 x DisplayPort 1.2 1 x HDMI 1.4 AC Adapter
Input	102-Key Keyboard Multi-touch Touchpad
Power	8-cell ~82Wh battery 330W AC adapter
Extras	2MP webcam Configurable Multi-colored Backlighting Fingerprint Scanner TPM 2.0 Security Chip 100% Cooling Switch (Fn+1)
OS	Windows 8.1 Professional 64-bit
Dimensions	15.4" x 10.48"x 1.4" (386mm x 262mm x 35mm)
Weight	7.48 lbs. (3.4kg)
Pricing	Starting at $1995 with GTX 980M $3192 as Configured

Short of an SLI equipped notebook, this is pretty much the fastest system currently possible, and the only areas left to upgrade over the configuration we’re testing would be via increasing the amount of memory and/or solid state storage. Otherwise, Eurocom sent us the maximum performance/quality configuration in every respect. We’ve got a Core i7-4790K that’s overclockable (more on that later), the GTX 980M, a 4K IGZO display, 16GB of DDR3-1866 RAM, 256GB of SSD storage, and even the optional 330W power adapter (again, more on that later).

Interestingly, Clevo even dropped support for optical drives on this chassis, which seems a bit odd as Gigabyte manages to stuff a slim optical drive into a much thinner 15.6” chassis. Of course, I rarely use optical drives these days so it’s not a huge concern, but it’s something to be aware of. It’s also worth pointing out that battery life isn’t going to be a strong point on this system; even with a large 82Wh battery the high performance components will typically mean two hours of light use while unplugged, and if you want to try doing some gaming you can easily drain the battery in under an hour.

Considering the P750ZM is a full desktop replacement notebook, including an 88W desktop processor, it’s actually surprising that the system isn’t bulkier. Older Clevo models that supported desktop CPUs were often in the 10+ pound range, but the P750ZM is at least reasonably portable at 7.5 pounds. Of course, that’s not including the AC power brick, and with the 330W model we received it tips the scales at an impressive 2.6 pounds (1.2kg) all by itself. Yes, the 330W power brick actually weighs more than some 13” Ultrabooks.

The default 230W adapter should be lighter and less bulky, but there’s a reason for going the 330W route, specifically overclocking. I’m planning a separate article to do a deeper investigation of overclocking potential with the P750ZM, but under full load I’ve seen power draw at the outlet hit 260-270W. At 85% efficiency that would be a 100% load on a 230W adapter, so it’s still possible to use the default adapter and that will save you about $75-$100, but if you’re buying this sort of system it’s probably not a bad idea to opt for the 330W adapter.

Pricing as usual is going to be the biggest obstacle to overcome. There’s no getting around the fact that $2000 is a lot of money for a notebook, and as configured we’ve passed the $3000 mark. I checked around and Eurocom is generally slightly more expensive than some of the other Clevo resellers – and if you’re okay with a preconfigured unit, Amazon has some options as well – but there are differences in the specific RAM and SSD modules so I won’t belabor the point. Obviously this system is designed to set performance records for our notebook test suite, and it does.

Clevo P750ZM: Subjective Evaluation

I’ve harped on Clevo in the past for some questionable design aesthetics, and I’m glad to report that at least the P750ZM is heading in the right direction. It’s not going to win any beauty contests I don’t think, but for all the performance it offers it actually looks quite nice. It’s also impressive to see a full DTR system stuffed into a 15.6” chassis, as in the past it has often required a 17.3” chassis to achieve sufficient cooling.

The P750ZM comes decked in black, which is generally a safe bet for a gaming notebook, and it includes a soft-touch coating on the palm rest and LCD cover. The chassis is primarily constructed of plastic, and while that may not be as attractive as machined aluminum it still gets the job done. Plastic has the added benefit of not conducting a bunch of heat into the surfaces where your hands and fingers will feel the effects.

Getting to the more subjective elements, the keyboard and touchpad are one of the better Clevo implementations. That’s good because I’ve seen way too many Clevo notebooks over the years where they mess up one of these areas. The 10-key has a pretty standard layout, with my only gripe being the half-size zero key (which means if you’re not careful you’ll often hit the right arrow instead of zero). That’s really the only layout issue to speak of, and I definitely appreciate the dedicated document navigation keys at the top-right (Home, End, etc.)

The shape of the keys on the other hand is different than most current laptops. I don’t know that they’re any worse than regular chiclet style keys, but I also wouldn’t say they’re clearly better. The main change is that the keys have beveled corners. I think the idea is to create a bit more of a distinct separation between adjacent keys, and they look a bit like the old-school keyboards from eight or so years back.

Typing on the Clevo P750ZM keyboard is pretty much standard fare for a modern laptop. I've pounded out the majority of the text for this article on the laptop and I haven’t had any complaints. The keys have a moderate amount of travel – a bit less than you might expect from a desktop replacement but nothing that creates any problems for me personally. The key action is quite soft, so there's no clickiness to speak of, and there's also no issues with key wobble that I can comment on. While this doesn’t necessarily sound like high praise for the keyboard, there's not a lot to be said on the subject unless something is truly off. In this case Clevo is on the right side of the fence with regards to the keyboard feel, which is always good.

For the touchpad, Clevo uses a Synaptics Touchpad V7.5 solution. Synaptics has a lot of other hardware options, some better and some worse; for the target audience I think the inclusion of dedicated mouse buttons and the decision to eschew going the clickpad route is the right one. For general use, the touchpad works fine, and it includes the usual multitouch gestures. The palm rejection also works well and I haven't encountered any problems with the mouse cursor skipping around on the screen while typing. Similar to the keyboard, this might not come across as high praise, but more importantly there's nothing to condemn. It's a bit sad that the state of affairs with notebooks has to start with me hoping companies don't screw up fundamental elements like the keyboard and mouse, but we've seen plenty of otherwise good notebooks over the years that do exactly that.

One of the potential highlights of the P750ZM is going to be the display options. People generally fall into two camps these days: those that think HiDPI displays are the future and those that prefer something more usable in the present. Eurocom (Clevo) offers solutions for both types of user, with three 1080p display options and two more 4K options.

Our specific notebook shipped with their top display option, a 4K Sharp IGZO panel that looks great. With a GTX 980M beating at the heart of the notebook, there's even a possibility that it will actually be able to handle games at the native resolution, but truth be told you're better off setting your sights on 1080p or perhaps 1440p (2.5K) or 3K instead. Anyway, display quality is certainly good, and other than DPI scaling issues (which unfortunately have affected more than a few games), the default configuration should please most users. Calibrating the display further improves the situation to the point where most professionals would be happy, though there are still a few colors that don't quite calibrate properly.

Moving on, speaker quality is good though nothing particularly noteworthy. The speakers can get reasonably loud, enough that watching movies with friends shouldn’t be too difficult – unless your friends are really loud – but not enough that you can really fill a larger room. There’s also no NVIDIA Optimus Technology present, as this is a desktop chipset and platform, and there’s no option to switch to the Intel processor graphics. It’s not a huge issue for a DTR, but battery life takes a hit as we’ll see later – pretty much we’re looking at two hours max, at least with a 4K display.

Moving to the internals, the bottom cover comes off quite easily. There are four screws to remove, and then the back half slides out and reveals the cooling arrangement, one of the M.2 slots, and two of the SO-DIMM slots. There’s a second smaller cover with two more screws that also slides out the front, providing access to the other M.2 slot as well as the two 2.5” drive bays. There are two more SO-DIMM slots on the other side of the mainboard (under the keyboard), which is unfortunately far less convenient to access.

It would be nice if the system integrators (Eurocom in this case) populated those hard to access SO-DIMM slots first, as it would make it easier for users to upgrade to four DIMMs later if desired. You can always buy 32GB RAM up front and just not worry about it, but the Corsair Vengeance used in our test system can be purchased for $165 per 2x8GB, so there’s a significant price premium if you have Eurocom install 32GB memory.

Checking out the cooling arrangement, it’s interesting that the CPU cooling has five heatpipes whereas the GPU cooling side has four, with two of the heatpipes being shared between the CPU and GPU sides. NVIDIA usually rates their top mobile GPUs at around 100-120W power draw, so you’d expect the 980M would require more cooling than the CPU, but in practice there doesn’t seem to be any issue with the current arrangement. In fact, under load the CPU gets hotter than the GPU (at least going by internal temperatures).

Keep in mind that the Devil’s Canyon i7-4790K is a 22nm chip with a die size of 177 mm², while the GM204 in the GTX 980M is built on TSMC’s 28nm process and measures a whopping 398 mm² by comparison, so even though the 980M can consume more power the heat is spread out over a much larger area. We’ll look at thermals later in this article, and I’ve also been working on some overclocking testing (yes, of both the CPU and GPU – with older 344.75 drivers of course), but for now let’s just say that there’s a decent amount of cooling headroom available if you want to push things.

Overall, the Clevo P750ZM chassis is a good design for a DTR. It’s really quite impressive just how much performance we can now stuff into a 7.5 pound 15.6” chassis. Remember the old Clevo D900F? That was truly a beast, weighing in at nearly 12 pounds – and with “only” a 220W power brick. If you’re interested in something that’s more capable of running on battery power at times, I’d say the MSI GT72 Dominator Pro is still the better option, as you can turn off the GTX 980M and end up with nearly six hours of battery life when needed. Clevo also has their updated P670SG and P650SG that compete with the GT72, though it looks like MSI wins for battery life (~6 vs. ~4 hours for the P650SG, anecdotally). But if you want the fastest system with a single GTX 980M right now, well, let’s hit the benchmarks and see just how fast the P750ZM can go.

Clevo P750ZM Gaming Performance

This is primarily a gaming notebook, or if you want to stuff in a Quadro GPU it’s a mobile workstation, so we’ll start right with the important bits: gaming performance. There are a variety of GPUs available for use with the P750ZM, including the 980M 8GB we’re testing, a 970M 6GB that drops the price nearly $300, or you can even go for the 965M 4GB and save $450 – all at the cost of performance, of course. It’s also worth noting that the memory configurations on these parts are fully enabled as far as we’re aware, so there’s none of the “OMG I only have 3.5GB of VRAM” craziness of the desktop GTX 970 here. Of course, we’re more likely to hit other bottlenecks before the 8GB VRAM becomes an issue with the 980M, but that’s a different matter.

We’ve recently revamped our laptop gaming test suite, including some titles released in mid to late 2014; however, since we don’t have many results with the latest games (Civilization: Beyond Earth, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Far Cry 4, GRID Autosport, and Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor) we’ll include the full 2014 gaming suite for now; the other results are available in Notebook Bench.

We’ve run the P750ZM at our usual Enthusiast (1080p Max), Mainstream (1600x900 High), and Value (1366x768 Medium) settings, though we’ll stick to reporting our Enthusiast results here; again, the other results can be viewed in Bench. I’ve also run additional tests at the native 3840x2160 resolution of the display, at various quality settings (with the goal of getting more than 40 FPS if possible). Those results are in a separate chart below.

At our default Enthusiast settings, the only game that actually struggles to hit playable frame rates is Metro: Last Light. It still hits nearly 40FPS average, and this is with SSAA enabled (which is arguably too much to expect of any non-SLI notebook for the time being), but it does serve as a good “worst-case” scenario. Most of the other titles are well above 60 FPS, so the GTX 980M is more than powerful enough for such a resolution. It’s also interesting to see that even at settings that are traditionally GPU limited (1080p Ultra), especially for mobile GPUs, the GTX 980M still benefits from access to a faster i7-4790K processor. Of course, some of the performance changes are likely caused by using different drivers; the jumps in performance seen in BioShock, Sleeping Dogs, and Tomb Raider at least appear to have more to do with drivers than the CPU.

AnandTech 2015 Additional Gaming Tests
	1920x1080 Enthusiast FPS
Civilization: Beyond Earth	92.0
Dragon Age: Inquisition	51.0
Far Cry 4	62.6
GRID Autosport	106.8
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor	65.2

Looking at our newer gaming benchmark additions, most of the above still holds true. 1080p Ultra is definitely playable, though it’s interesting to note that Dragon Age: Inquisition is at 51FPS while Far Cry 4 and Shadow of Mordor are just above 60 FPS – so three of the five new titles we’ve added for 2015 tend to be more demanding than the previous 2014/2013 titles. But what about 4K gaming performance? For that, I’ve created a separate chart noting the settings used for each game at the native resolution:

With ten games tested, we were able to find reasonably playable settings in eight of the games. The two exceptions are again newer titles; Far Cry 4 even at Low quality proves to be quite demanding, averaging just 34FPS –you can’t even turn down the quality more to improve frame rates. Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor posts a similar frame rate of 36FPS, but that’s using Medium quality so there’s still an option to turn down a few more sliders if needed. It’s also interesting to note that NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience (GFE) comes up a bit short in this case, as there are no “optimal” settings for the GTX 980M at 3840x2160. (2560x1440 is the highest resolution where there are recommendations in GFE for the 980M right now.) You can still use the quality slider to pseudo-manually configure games at 4K, but we might have to wait a bit longer for GFE to catch up in this case.

Finally, as with the MSI GT72, I’ve run a larger collection of gaming benchmarks on the P750ZM and GTX 980M, and I’ve also run the same tests on the GT72, GT70, GS60, and GE60 (which I no longer have access to, so the results are with older drivers – I was able to retest a few games on the GT72 to “correct” the scores, but the GS60 and GE60 were on the 344 or perhaps earlier driver branch). Using maximum quality settings at 1080p, here’s what the performance looks like:

It’s interesting that even at 1080p Ultra quality (generally speaking, all settings at maximum) there’s still an average performance increase of ~5% gained by running the P750ZM with a desktop CPU. Of course, we’re looking at benchmarks with what is essentially the “entry level” mobile quad-core chip, the i7-4710HQ. That chip is nominally clocked at 3.2-3.5GHz where the i7-4790K is nominally clocked at 4.1-4.4GHz, so in tests like Cinebench the i7-4790K is around 25% faster than the i7-4710HQ.

That 25% performance advantage can definitely show up in certain games, especially those that tend to only hit two CPU cores (e.g. StarCraft II, though we didn’t test that particular title). There will be games where the speedup is very large while others will show little to no difference. In general, at least at 1080p Ultra we expect the majority of newer games will see closer to a 0-10% performance change thanks to the CPU, all other aspects being kept constant. Drop the settings a bit and you’re more likely to start seeing 10-25% performance improvements, at least provided nothing else becomes a bottleneck.

Overclocking?

There’s another topic regarding performance that we’re only going to briefly mention here, and that’s overclocking potential. There are two overclocking targets to discuss, the first being the CPU and the second being the GPU. The former is actually pretty easy to sum up: there’s not much headroom for overclocking the i7-4790K in the Clevo P750ZM, or at least not on our test system. We tried pushing clocks up 100-200MHz across all cores, and while there were a few cases where the CPU would hit 4.6GHz on a single core, in practice the thermal limits end up kicking in and the CPU will generally throttle back to the point where performance is essentially the same as what you’ll get simply running stock clocks. Even at stock, it’s possible to hit 99C on the CPU (we’ll see this later), which is both too hot for my long-term comfort as well as causing a drop from maximum Turbo Boost clocks on a regular basis.

Overclocking the GPU is the other option, and while the current NVIDIA 347 series drivers have officially locked out overclocking, we’ve done some testing with the 344.75 drivers. Perhaps more pertinent to the discussion here is that where the CPU often hits close to Tj Max and reduces clocks, the GTX 980M seems to have a lot more potential for pushing clocks. Without getting into the deeper discussion of GPU overclocking, we’ll simply note here for the time being that tweaking the GPU clocks can yield some great results (roughly 20% in some cases). We’ll have a separate article on the subject in the near future, but it will be interesting to see what NVIDIA ends up doing regarding locked clocks. Because while NVIDIA has officially announced that they’ll re-enable mobile GPU overclocking with a future driver, the GTX 970M and 980M VBIOS are now shipping locked. VBIOS mods are almost required to properly overclock regardless, but really you need both an unlocked VBIOS and unlocked drivers or there’s nothing to be done.

Summing up the current state of mobile gaming performance, the P750ZM doesn’t radically alter what we think of the GTX 980M. It was the fastest mobile GPU when we first looked at it in the MSI GT72, and while the P750ZM is often a bit faster, it’s typically not enough to make a meaningful difference in any current games. Drivers have just as much potential to cause differences as the CPU (e.g. we saw a huge jump in performance in Alien: Isolation and BioShock Infinite when moving from 344 to 347 drivers, but are two of a handful of major changes), but with the same driver set most notebooks with a 980M will perform similarly.

Clevo P750ZM General Performance

General performance on high-end notebooks and laptops doesn’t usually add much to the performance story, but in this case we’re actually able to see what happens when we pit the fastest current mainstream desktop CPU against other mobile solutions. I’d love to have numbers from the i7-4860HQ as well as the i7-4710HQ, as that would obviously close the gap, but given the i7-4790K is priced roughly the same as an i7-4710HQ/4710MQ, you should get more bang for the buck.

Here’s a look at our standard CPU and system benchmarks, along with 3DMark for reference; WiFi performance is also included near the bottom of the page. Note that the MSI GT70 and GE60 were both equipped with hard drives for storage, so that will affect some of the PCMark results in particular.

There are no surprises here: the P750ZM with a Core i7-4790K is basically the fastest notebook we’ve tested. A hex-core or octal-core LGA2011 chip could win out in multi-threaded scenarios, but that’s not really going to push gaming performance any higher, and even mobile workstations may not really need more than four cores.  There are individual tests where the P750ZM doesn’t place first, but those are often influenced by other factors – e.g. faster quad-RAID SSD storage or access to Intel’s Quick Sync. When we get to CPU-centric testing, however, there’s no competition from the mobile parts; Cinebench and x264 encoding show a solid 20-25% improvement in performance over the next fastest processor.

Interestingly, in 3DMark we again see the combination of desktop CPU with GTX 980M typically outperforms the 780M SLI setup in the Alienware 18. SLI puts a heavier load on the CPU to begin with, so it makes sense that the Kepler mobile parts in SLI are unable to keep up. SLI GTX 980M would obviously change things, but we haven’t had such a system in for testing yet.

As for wireless performance, the dual-band Killer 1525 802.11ac solution worked fine during testing. We’re still not at the point where WiFi can actually outperform GbE, but for short distances we’re at least getting closer. It’s also worth mentioning that WiFi testing can be highly variable, even in the same location. Both the MSI GT72 and P750ZM used the same WiFi adapter, so either there are differences in the antenna that caused a drop in throughput or else the change in environmental conditions had an impact. This is another reason wired connections are often still desirable.

Clevo P750ZM Battery Life and Power

Battery life is one area where the P750ZM really falls short, but we knew that going before even testing. MSI’s GT72 at least has the option to switch to Intel’s HD 4600 Graphics and can hit 5+ hours; with a desktop CPU and no integrated GPU option, P750ZM has no chance of doing much more than an hour and a half of mobility. It’s a case of going after performance at the cost of battery life.

As expected, the P750ZM ends up offering the worst battery life of any notebook we’ve tested in the past couple of years. Even the Alienware 18 wins by a large margin, as it can be manually switched to integrated graphics. We ended up just shy of two hours in our Light workload, and nearly 1.75 hours in our Heavy testing. If you were to get a 1080p display instead of the 4K IGZO, you could probably break two hours on the P750ZM but not by much.

We also did a test of gaming battery life; interestingly, it appears that Battery Boost works, and not only that but it was forced on when we tested. Disabling Battery Boost had no impact, and the FPS target was stuck at 30. Newer drivers may have addressed this issue, but the only thing that would happen is that battery life would go down. With a 30FPS target running Tomb Raider at 1080p Ultimate settings, we measured battery life of one hour. Battery recharge time was 140 minutes, which is pretty good for an 82Wh battery.

Switching over to power draw, even at idle the P750ZM shows close to 40W power draw at the outlet, which basically reinforces the above results. Things change a bit on battery power, but in the Light test the P750ZM uses ~42W (give or take) and ~47W in the Heavy workload. Plugged in and running games, however, the power draw can easily crest 200W sustained.

Clevo P750ZM LCD: 4K IGZO

HiDPI panels are becoming increasingly commonplace, and while there are still compromises involved (e.g. at least a few games that we tested didn’t like having scaling at something other than 100%), it’s definitely more of a future-looking decision. I’m not sure anyone other than an eagle would really use the Windows desktop at 4K with 100% scaling on a 15.6” display, but that option is always there. Personally, 2560x1440 would have been more reasonable, and you can even add that option via the NVIDIA control panel (which I did), but IGZO does generally mean you get one of the best quality panels currently available. Let’s see how it looks.

Uncalibrated, the maximum white level of 350cd/m² is good if not chart topping. The black level of 0.29 nits at max brightness is also great, leading to a roughly 1200:1 contrast ratio. However, we noticed at lower brightness settings that the contrast trails off – we measured closer to 1000:1 at 200 nits for example. The average CCT isn’t perfect but it’s not terrible. Still, looking at the various delta E results shows the display could benefit from calibration.

Post-calibration the LCD is nearly perfect in most colors, with a few that still fall above 3.0 dE. Most of these problem colors are orange or blue hues, but there are plenty of close colors that are well below 3.0 as well. The greyscale Delta E is essentially perfect, as are the primary colors, but the saturations and colorchecker results are a bit higher. In short, it’s a great display overall and better than most other laptop panels…but it’s still not perfect.

Clevo P750ZM Thermals and Noise

Considering the high-end hardware present in the P750ZM, the thermals and noise are going to be of particular interest. Performance is great but if your notebook is screaming loud or has to routinely throttle the clock speeds any time you use it as intended then you might end up looking elsewhere. Thankfully, while the P750ZM certainly won’t qualify as a silent or exceptionally quiet laptop, it’s also not horribly loud – even at maximum fan speed. More importantly, the thermals on the GPU are really quite good…though the CPU thermals aren’t necessarily all that great.

Before we get to the results of our thermals testing, we ran the P750ZM in two modes. The default cooling is just what you’d expect: as the temperatures increase, fan speeds increase in response. There’s a second mode that is often available on gaming notebooks: a maximum fan speed mode. The idea is to keep the system as cool as possible, hopefully avoiding any throttling or variability in frame rates. This mode is activated by pressing Fn+1, and it has a nice side effect of letting us know what the absolute maximum noise level will be.

Thermals and Throttling

It’s interesting to look at the results of our thermal testing. The GTX 980M likely uses around 100W, perhaps even as much as 125W; the i7-4790K by comparison is supposed to use at most 88W. We mentioned earlier that the cooling arrangement seems to put more of an emphasis on keeping the CPU cool, with five heatpipes on the CPU and chipset compared to four heatpipes on the GPU MXM module; the above results help explain why that was likely done. With a higher thermal density (88W with a die size of 177 mm² compared to 125W in 398 mm²), even though the GPU has more total heat to dissipate the CPU has a more difficult time staying cool.

What ends up happening is that even at stock clocks, depending on the game there will be some fluctuations in CPU clock speeds. For our testing, I used Dying Light, a recent title that tends to be one of the more demanding games when it comes to CPU and GPU workloads. Power draw for the entire notebook at the wall tends to be around 200-210W, which is up to 40W more than what I noticed with some other games. Part of the reason for the heavy CPU load is that we’ve set the draw distance to maximum, so even at maximum quality settings Dying Light can end up partially CPU bottlenecked (at least with the GTX 980M).

The net result of our thermal testing is twofold. First, the GPU generally plugs along merrily at maximum clocks with no trouble – we measured a maximum temperature of just 77C, and the fans aren’t at maximum speed for this test. On the other hand, the CPU gets into the high 90s, even hitting 99C on occasion, and it does undergo a bit of throttling to keep thermals in check. We need to be careful about that word “throttling”, however, as there are differing opinions on what that actually means. For some users, anything less than maximum Turbo Boost might be considered “throttling”, but in general we only use the term if clock speeds drop below the rated non-Turbo clock speeds (4.0GHz in this case), and more importantly it the CPU reports that any of the cores are throttling.

We used HWiNFO64 to log temperatures, clock speeds, and other system variables; one of the things HWiNFO64 reports is whether or not the CPU cores are throttling. In the case of the i7-4790K, under any sustained CPU load we do see reports of throttling on all of the cores (usually only one or two at a time). However, clock speeds are still typically above the rated 4.0GHz, with only occasional drops to lower clocks. It’s also important to note that it’s not clear if the drops are actually being triggered by the CPU throttling or if the game periodically does something that drops its demand on the CPU for a moment (e.g. loading additional assets from the storage subsystem might cause a momentary hiccup). Either way, with CPU temperatures hitting high 90s, it’s certainly at least a bit of a concern.

Interestingly, when we activate maximum cooling (Fn+1), that’s enough to fix the problem with CPU thermals and throttling. Instead of topping out in the high 90s, the maximum CPU core temperatures are now in the low 90s or upper 80s. Perhaps more importantly, the minimum CPU clocks on any core are all at 4.2GHz, where without the higher fan speeds we saw periodic drops as low as 800-1000MHz. Average CPU clocks are also up more than 100MHz over a period of an hour or so of testing. GPU performance doesn’t really change any, but temperatures also drop with a maximum of 67C now.

As far as surface temperatures go, as you’d expect the P750ZM does get a bit warm at the back near the CPU and GPU, but the plastic chassis does help to avoid conducting too much heat into the surfaces of the laptop. While the exhaust temperatures are well above 50C, most of the laptop surfaces are closer to 35C even under load, and it’s only the back inch or so around the exhausts that gets to 40C. Again, maxing out the fan speeds does reduce the exhaust and surface temperatures a decent amount if needed.

Cooling overall is good, and at high fan speed it’s very good. But what about noise levels?

System Noise

Anyone expecting a silent notebook with a desktop CPU and GTX 980M is expecting a bit much. However, that doesn’t mean the system needs to be exceptionally noisy. At idle the P750ZM tends to be pretty close to the noise floor of my house (30dB), though on occasion even in lighter workloads like surfing the web the fans will kick on for a little bit and it will go up to 35-37 dB. For gaming or CPU intensive workloads, the system gets quite a bit louder; after a few minutes the fans settled in at 41.3 dB, which isn’t too bad. Maximum fan speed on the other hand gets pretty loud, reaching nearly 48 dB.

While we’ve tested notebooks that run a lot quieter – including the MSI GT72 and ASUS G751 – they also don’t have to deal with a full voltage desktop CPU. There’s a reason this sort of processor isn’t typically used in notebooks, and even in desktops it needs fairly potent cooling to run properly. That the P750ZM mostly runs the i7-4790K without problems is good news, and as we’ve shown already performance is certainly higher than any mobile CPU we’ve tested. If the extra 10-25% boost in performance (relative to mobile parts) is helpful, the P750ZM is definitely worth a look.

Clevo P750ZM: Potent DTR

Similar to the MSI GT72, the Clevo P750ZM / Eurocom P5 Pro is a top performance notebook with a price to match. For the vast majority of users, I think it makes more sense to pick up the MSI GT72 or some other notebook, but if you can use the extra CPU performance and you’re not willing to go with the LGA2011 DTRs (e.g. Clevo P570WM3) – or if you want as much CPU performance as possible in a 15.6” chassis – then the P750ZM can make sense. Being a desktop replacement, the usual caveats apply: battery life takes a big hit, and the system is definitely not a thin and light laptop. But it packs performance and tops nearly all of our benchmark charts.

For gamers looking just at frame rates, something like the P750ZM doesn’t really make that much sense – even though there are times where it outperforms the GT72 in our tests, it’s often less than a 5% difference. Running at lower quality settings can result in a larger margin of victory, but then we’re looking at frame rates well above the 60Hz most laptops run at. The real reason to go for the P750ZM over the GT72 is pretty simple: there aren’t any HiDPI displays available for the GT72, and in fact just finding a decent IPS display will require you to shell out $3000+.

Testing the 4K Sharp IGZO display shows that there are good reasons to shell out an extra $300-$400 for the display upgrade, but at the same time 4K is often too much for a single 980M in games and scaling issues continue to be a concern. A middle ground 3K or even 2560x1440 IPS display would probably be a more sensible option, but then finding a 3K or 2.5K display that can match the 4K IGZO might not be possible. While the 4K displays may not be perfect, though, they’re probably the next best thing. You can still get HiDPI and the best quality display the P750ZM supports and deal with DPI scaling and reduced performance at native resolution, or you can run at 2560x1440 with non-native resolution for gaming (it’s actually not that bad, since the pixels are hard to see with the naked eye).

For Eurocom, it’s also important to point out that they’re now offering GPU MXM upgrades for a variety of notebooks – you don’t even need to own a Eurocom system. Right now the GTX 980M is the fastest mobile GPU around, and if you happen to own an older notebooks like an Alienware M17x R4 they’ll sell you a 980M upgrade for…$891. Okay, that’s a lot of money, but the M17x R4 is still a capable system so you could upgrade from a GTX 680M to the fastest mobile GPU, skipping two generations of mobile GPUs in the process. Provided Eurocom keeps offering this service, in a couple more years you should be able to go from the GTX 980M and jump the Pascal architecture to whatever NVIDIA does next.

Ultimately, the P750ZM like all DTR notebooks is going to involve compromise. You have to decide that battery life (two hours or less) and weight (over 10 pounds with the AC adapter) is less important than performance, but if you’re willing to make that trade I don’t have any other complaints. The industrial design might not wow as much as a MacBook Retina or Razer Blade 14, but when it comes time to fire up a game or run some heavy number crunching, the P750ZM excels. I’m happy that the keyboard layout and feel as well as the touchpad all work well, and the cooling system is able to keep up with the power hungry components. With a starting price of $2000 the Eurocom P5 Pro is a serious investment, but it’s a solid notebook that should keep chugging for years to come.