AVADirect Clevo X7200: Six Cores, SSD RAID, and GTX 480M SLI Yields World's Fastest DTR Notebook
by Jarred Walton on October 7, 2010 12:30 AM ESTClevo X7200: This is your games on 480M SLI
Take the fastest desktop CPU and two of the fastest mobile GPUs, stuff them in a 17.3" chassis with a monster power brick, and you've got the Clevo X7200 in a nutshell. While we still question the sanity of spending this much money on a gaming notebook, if you have the necessary funds or a "need" for serious gaming performance—and you don't want a desktop or even a mini-ITX gaming system—the X7200 is the new champion. Most of our previous high-end laptops were tested prior to our latest gaming suite, but let's put things in perspective first by looking at how gaming performance stacks up at our high detail gaming settings relative to other recently reviewed laptops.
We're running at non-native 900p for comparison; the X7200 pushes 50% to 125% more frames per second relative to the W880CU with a single 480M. It also manages 50% to 150% higher performance than the old GTX 280M. We also ran a couple other gaming tests that we haven't widely benchmarked, Mafia II and Metro 2033; we used the built-in benchmarks on both.
Maxing out all the graphics options, Mafia II still manages to run at 52FPS at the native 1080p; turn on High PhysX and that drops to 33.3. Metro 2033 isn't quite so forgiving; DX11 and "High" detail results in a reasonable 49FPS, but bump up to Very High and enable antialiasing and you're looking at high-teens for frame rates (we measured 19.2FPS). If you want to max things out and enable PhysX, Metro 2033 drops to just 17.3FPS—and that's on the beefiest laptop hardware around. That said, the difference between "High" and "Very High" isn't enough to warrant the performance hit, and antialiasing in a demanding game like Metro isn't a luxury you can afford.
Can you play games at maximum detail on the X7200? Yes, yes you can! In fact, it's so much faster than most notebooks (hello: an average of 4x faster than the Toshiba A665-3DV, which topped our midrange notebook performance charts) that we're going to move up to comparisons with desktop systems to really see what it can handle.
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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 ;)