iBuyPower Valkyrie CZ-17 Notebook Review: MSI and iBuyPower Tangle With Alienware
by Dustin Sklavos on August 21, 2012 12:01 AM ESTBattery Life
NVIDIA's Optimus technology has done some pretty crazy things to the gaming notebook market. Batteries in gaming notebooks used to be glorified UPS systems, but now you can actually get halfway decent running time out of a hulking gaming notebook. iBuyPower's Valkyrie CZ-17 isn't going to compete with an ultrabook or even an 11" monster like the Clevo W110ER, but it puts in a strong showing nonetheless.
Probably owing to the increased efficiency of Ivy Bridge, the CZ-17 is competitive with the Alienware M17x R3, which is really the test we wanted to see. More importantly, we have a hulking desktop replacement notebook that's still able to run off the mains for more than four hours (gaming notwithstanding). Progress is good, and it's doubly nice to see an ODM notebook that's able to hang with a bigger vendor as battery life optimization is often one of the first things to go in systems like these.
Noise and Heat
iBuyPower's Valkyrie CZ-17 comes built on MSI's extra thick GT70 chassis, but the GT70 bulk doesn't go to waste. The cooling system is remarkably efficient and because of the increased thickness of the fan, the actual pitch of the system noise is lower as well. Despite hitting 47dB over an extremely heavy load (100% load on both CPU and GPU), the low whooshing noise is much more tolerable than the high-pitched whine smaller fans like the ones in the Razer Blade produce.
Thermals are actually pretty strong, too. The CPU is still running in the low 80s instead of at spec as most vendors like to push them these days, and the GTX 675M, despite being a 100W TDP part in a seven pound notebook, still peaks at just 80C.
Display Quality
The display employed in the iBuyPower Valkyrie CZ-17 is manufactured by Chi Mei, and while some of its measurements aren't excellent and it's still a TN panel, I found it to be a tangible improvement over the display on my M17x R3 in practice owing chiefly to the matte finish. Viewing angles are also quite good, but some users may take issue with the slightly grainy matte finish used.
As you can see it's among our best and brightest, producing good to excellent results in all of our tests. While it's not on the level of an IPS display, the Chi Mei panel in the CZ-17 will be more than adequate for most users and is in a completely different class than the panels typically used in consumer notebooks.
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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