iBuyPower Valkyrie CZ-17 Notebook Review: MSI and iBuyPower Tangle With Alienware
by Dustin Sklavos on August 21, 2012 12:01 AM ESTApplication and Futuremark Performance
It goes without saying that without an SSD in our review unit, the iBuyPower Valkyrie CZ-17 just isn't going to put in a strong performance against the other notebooks in PCMark. PCMark continues to bias extremely heavily towards SSDs, and while it's true an SSD can appreciably improve the computing experience, PCMark's reflection of this is a matter of some debate around here. That said, upgrades to SSDs from iBuyPower are far, far less expensive than from a major vendor like Alienware, so if you're custom building it may not hurt to stretch your budget a bit.
As expected, the PCMark scores range from being alright to a bloodbath. Virtually every other system tested enjoyed a faster storage subsystem than the CZ-17 did. So let's see what happens when we shift the load back to the CPU.
The improvements in Ivy Bridge's efficiency coupled with the higher clocks allow even the entry level i7-3610QM to put in a strong showing.
The 3DMark scores, on the other hand, paint a rosier picture. The GTX 675M trades blows with the 580M, essentially boiling down to slight differences in CPU performance and driver optimizations. There's a reason this chip was the top of the heap for a while, but also keep in mind that the CZ-17 is among the least expensive, if not the least expensive, notebooks on this chart. There's an awful lot of value here.
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JBird7986 - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
"keep in mind that way back when the Mobile Athlon 64 was launched, eMachines/Gateway was doing roughly the same thing by taking notebooks built by Arima and rebranding them."I still have my old eMachines M6811 and it runs like a champ since I upgraded the RAM to 1.25GB. I'm currently using it as a Windows 8 test machine since I have a newer laptop. It was a crazy awesome laptop for its day. Hard to believe it's 8 years old now.
Akaz1976 - Friday, August 24, 2012 - link
Those benches are missing. Did it not run on that PC?seapeople - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link
I thought you guys were going to do throttling reviews on your laptops going forward considering that it's a huge metric of performance in today's world of under-cooled over-turbo'ed laptops.I was very interested to see how a thicker laptop like this does with full CPU/GPU + gaming loads. Now I realized you did noise/thermals, and the thermals looked good, but again it's impossible to know whether this is because the cooling is so good the laptop can run full blast without issues, or whether the laptop is actually throttling some to target lower thermals. Given this is a gaming machine I expect the former, but it would be cool to know for sure.
In summary, please don't giveth (the awesome throttling reviews) and then taketh away!
BlueBomber - Tuesday, October 16, 2012 - link
The price of the laptop is alright, but I honestly wouldn't want to purchase anything from Ibuypower. They've seriously got some pretty bad horror stories out there. When I was buying my first gaming pc a few months ago I was really looking at going with Ibuypower. The price was right and I like theit options, but after reading all stories about them i decided not . A few people who had horrible experiences with IBP also recommended going with another company, Ironside Computers instead, and I'm glad I did. The price was better then IBP considering they have free shipping, and the computer arrived in perfect condition. I couldn't be happier.Drittz121 - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
Just do yourself a favor. STAY AWAY from this company. Yes they look good. But when it breaks and it WILL. All they do is give you the run around. They have had my system for over 2 months trying to fix the garbage they sell. Worse company out there for support. DONT BUY