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 ESTBattery Life
It stands to reason that even with a 77Wh battery, the P170HM's running time off the mains is not long for this world. That has been true of most of the high-end gaming notebooks we've reviewed: when your GPU alone draws north of 50 watts under load, it's hard for the battery to be anything more than a glorified UPS system. With that said, Sandy Bridge has brought big gains in terms of power efficiency and Clevo has outfitted the P170HM with a beefier battery than we're used to seeing.
Sandy Bridge helps the P170HM beat two hours in two of our tests. Compared to the other gaming notebooks, it's actually a reasonably efficient machine (although it doesn't benefit from NVIDIA's Optimus technology), but one look at Compal's NBLB2 can tell you what a different less of a GPU can make. The P170HM is also nearly nine pounds, making it less than ideal for anything other than being moved from table to table.
Noise and Heat
In keeping with Sandy Bridge being a healthy step up over Clarksfield and the GeForce GTX 485M being a healthy step up over the 480M, it's reasonable to expect heat (and consequently noise) will be less of an issue for the P170HM than it was for the W880CU that had to contend with cooling those older parts.
Indeed, the P170HM produces excellent thermals at both idle and load, doing a fine job of keeping both the processor and GPU cool. In a desktop those core temperatures would be more alarming, but in a mobile chassis it's not uncommon to see a CPU hit nearly 80C. Meanwhile 83C on the GPU is impressively low given the TDP of the chip.
Surface temperatures for the P170HM are also very reasonable even under load, with no major hot spots forming during gaming.
Unfortunately the great thermal performance does come at a cost: fan noise is constant and the P170HM does spin up noticeably under sustained load. It isn't jet engine loud and you're not going to call your friends over to tell them how stupidly loud your new gaming notebook is, but the fans definitely make themselves known during gaming.
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7Enigma - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link
Possibly because this is a gaming notebook?SteelCity1981 - Monday, February 28, 2011 - link
ver impressive especially when it goes head to head with the 980x and even beats the 980x in some benchmarks.FXi - Monday, February 28, 2011 - link
I can live with some glossy - don't mind the screen being that way if "some" antiglare coating was applied to the glossy part (sort of like camera lenses). But the lack of displayport is a major oversight these days. I bet longer term owners will end up a bit disappointed in this oversight.And why send a "test" notebook without the 2920 in it? /sigh Well guess it wasn't needed, judging from the scores, but it's what should have happened anyway.
2920 and 485m sli would be incredible.
mczak - Monday, February 28, 2011 - link
then it'll look much less impressive. Just marginally (if at all) faster, and (afaik) much more expensive.JarredWalton - Monday, February 28, 2011 - link
That's coming as soon as we can test it....Lunyone - Monday, February 28, 2011 - link
Is it me, or is ther mobile 5870 GPU missing in over 1/2 of the graphs?? Is this by design or is this because the 5870 wasn't tested on the given games listed?? One could consider this a marketing plot or something like that, but just would like some clarification on it before I label this as a marketing stunt.JarredWalton - Monday, February 28, 2011 - link
The last time we had a 5870 was before we added Mafia II, Metro 2033, and (I think) StarCraft II to the benchmarking suite. Anyway, we'll have the 6970M reviewed soon enough....PlasmaBomb - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link
We patiently look forward to that review...carage - Monday, February 28, 2011 - link
Once again, no Express Card slot...jcandle - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 - link
It would be nice to see this nvidia card inside more notebooks that seem less cheaply made. With the move to a single graphics option I was surprised the new Alienware M17x R3 didn't include an option for the 485m. Its certainly not an issue with cooling. I have a M6500 and it already has a 100W graphics adapter in a similar cooling configuration.And slightly OT... anyone else see the notebook and think they could slap together a better product with a shorty 1U with a notebook keyboard and monitor slapped on top. Honestly, if you moved the PSU outside, added a battery in its place, and were willing to sacrifice your eardrums, it could be a workable solution in similar brick sized form factor and tonnage.