AVADirect's Clevo P170HM with GeForce GTX 485M: High-End You've Been Waiting For
by Dustin Sklavos on February 28, 2011 7:15 PM ESTConclusion: A Win for NVIDIA, a Mixed Bag for Clevo
At CES I had the opportunity to express to NVIDIA personnel both my enthusiasm for the GeForce GTX 460 and my stunning lack thereof for the GeForce GTX 480M. The GF100 really never should've been shoehorned into notebooks, and mercifully NVIDIA finally obsoleted it in the mobile sector in favor of the vastly more streamlined GF104.
It took us until GF114 to see what a GF104 with all of its cores might look like, but now it looks like NVIDIA may have been harvesting those fully functional GF104 chips for the 485M. Speculation isn't necessary here, though, only the bottom line: the GeForce GTX 485M is the leap in mobile graphics performance we've sorely needed. The 480M was incrementally faster than the Mobility Radeon HD 5870, which was incrementally faster than the 285M, which was incrementally faster than the 280M, ad nauseam. This is real progress, and it's easy to recommend...if you have the cash for it.
Clevo's P170HM is more difficult to recommend. This is definitely a better built, better feeling chassis from Clevo, so we can be thankful that they're not shipping notebooks in candy shells anymore. Unfortunately complaints old and new still loom over this machine: Clevo's keyboards remain both punishingly cheap and badly designed, and the 1080p screen would be perfectly serviceable except were it not for having such a finicky sweet spot.
I'd be remiss in not mentioning the Intel Core i7-2720QM beating at the heart of the P170HM, however briefly. Unless you've missed all the coverage, it should be plainly obvious by now that Sandy Bridge is another massive jump in processor performance. If you're going to shell out this kind of cash for a notebook, Sandy Bridge is absolutely worth waiting for. AVADirect offers a preorder on this and other Sandy Bridge notebooks; if you're the kind of performance-oriented user a notebook like this is catering to, that's going to be a better option instead of going the Veruca Salt route: "But Daddy, I want a gaming notebook now!"
We would like to thank AVADirect for graciously sending us the P170HM despite the Sandy Bridge recall so we could get a chance to test NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 485M with Intel's best and brightest backing it up. We expect the Cougar Point issue to finally fade away later this month, with widespread availability of Sandy Bridge notebooks and desktops in April.
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Hrel - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link
There a few notebooks I'd REALLY love to see reviewed.Clevo: P151HM1, W150HN. Both with 1080p screen. The first has the GTX460M and the second has the GT540M. I already have a solid idea of performance with the given parts, but I'm very interested in speaker quality, chassis quality, keyboard quality. Things Jarred, you tend to hit on well. Unfortunately these still aren't available in actual stores so the only way I can find this stuff out is a really good review; or buy it and take that risk.
Compal: I don't know the model number cause I can't find it anywhere anymore but a 15.6" 1080p Compal with the GT540M and Sandy Bridge.
What are the chances of getting these in house for a review? And what kind of time frame would we be looking at? Thanks!
Hrel - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
Jarred! Why have you ignored my comment?SimKill - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link
"Begging the question" in your first paragraph isn't what you think it means.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
Otherwise, a great article!
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link
Interesting. I've never heard this before, and honestly it strikes me as one of those areas where the language has changed and the "modernized" usage has become accepted. The thing is, to beg (ask earnestly; entreat) for a question hardly seems to be a clear translation of "petitio principii" (petitioning for a principle point). Honestly, I'm not going to change my usage on this one, simply because I have never heard it used before as "assuming the initial point" -- certainly not by anyone I know! I suppose maybe if I were a lawyer it would have come up before.jcompagner - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link
I am waiting and waiting for the real high end, ok there is one already there the 17" of apple but i rather have a "normal" windows laptop but then as apple does in a high end 16:10 configuration (1920x1200)alephxero - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link
It seems kind of disingenuous to list the starting price but not the configured price. Looking at AVADirect's site the price for the reviewed model is in the $2600 range, a far cry from the 1600 base price.JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link
You're correct, and we usually list the configured pricing. I'll update the table.bennyg - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
Powafulest GPU feasible for multimedia performance... check.CPU good enough to run it with room to spare... check.
Enough of a thermal solution to keep them both from burning up... check.
Great quality LCD panel...
Even if all Clevo focus on is incremental improvement in their products, like remedying the tiny battery of the w8x0cu designs, why would they settle for a mid-range screen on a top-of-the-range laptop...
-1 buyer of this laptop as a result.
Also, just give me manual graphics switching already! I don't care about Optimus and it's performance tradeoffs - to have the same hardware present and capable that cheaper/smaller laptops use to run >5hrs on battery - but no interface to use it - is just silly. I would get great benefit out of this feature, I don't use my laptop just for multimedia.