AVADirect Clevo P170EM: Has AMD’s HD 7970M Got Game?
by Jarred Walton on October 2, 2012 1:35 PM ESTClevo P170EM 7970M General Performance
We’re covering well-trodden ground here, so we won’t have too much to add. AVADirect equipped our test notebook with a 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM, along with the i7-3720QM CPU and HD 7970M, so we should see excellent general performance. And we do.
There’s a difference of opinion on what to do with PCMark 7 results on laptops with switchable graphics; as one of the few benchmarks/applications that can benefit from Intel’s Quick Sync technology, it’s nice to see what that can do in things like the Computation and Creativity suites. On the other hand, it also skews scores pretty badly—though not quite as much as the presence of an SSD will change the results. Take the overall score as an example: with HD 4000 running in place of the 7970M, the P170EM result improves by 19%. On the other hand, adding an SSD to a notebook like the iBUYPOWER (MSI GT70) would improve the overall score by over 50%. In general, any modern notebook is plenty fast for regular applications, but we do continue to recommend SSDs for midrange to high-end notebooks as they make a noticeable impact in day-to-day use.
Something else to notice is that while PCMark 7 does quite well with hybrid storage devices like ExpressCache, Intel’s SRT, and the Seagate Momentus XT, PCMark Vantage isn’t nearly so forgiving. I’d actually suggest PCMark Vantage may be closer to the truth here, unless you happen to run a very light workload that allows the hybrid storage to cache nearly everything. Personally, I’d much rather have a 256GB SSD and forego conventional storage completely—and if you need more capacity, external devices with HDDs can hold your other data. With a quality SSD like the Samsung P830 256GB now going for under $200, and value offerings like the Kingston V200 256GB at $160 and Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 240GB at $165, the days of $1000+ laptops cheaping out by going with hard drives for storage are hopefully coming to a close.
Turning to our CPU-centric benchmarks, the P170EM is right with the other i7-3720QM equipped offerings. It wins in the x264 first pass compared to the M17x R4, most likely because of the SSD storage, while it ties or falls slightly behind in the other tests.
We’ll get to the games in a moment, but we did find it interesting that the initial HD 7970M drivers on the P170EM are quite good at the 3DMark suites. Perhaps they just use the hardware in such a way that the GPU underutilization issue doesn’t crop up, or maybe they rate higher on the optimization list due to their ubiquity as a benchmark. In 3DMark Vantage we see an 8% performance increase with the hotfix and a 2% increase in 3DMark06, further reducing the gap; on the other hand, the hotfix drivers failed to complete the 3DMark11 test suite so at least the latest driver build doesn’t appear to be too focused on 3DMark scores. Moving to the inevitable NVIDIA comparison, the GTX 680M in the M17x R4 is ahead of the HD 7970M, but the gap is only 7-12%. If AMD could stay that close to the GTX 680M while being priced around $300 less, they’d have an extremely compelling offering. In practice, that doesn’t always happen, so let’s see how AMD does in real-world gaming tests.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Hey, whaddayaknow! I totally missed those. I couldn't figure out why Clevo wouldn't have such keys, but for some reason the shortcuts on the 10-key area just never registered. Text updated. Thanks!junky77 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Wouldn't it shed some light upon the issue of under utilization?junky77 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Also, according to the notebookcheck review of the m17x-r4, the performance gets much much better without the Enduro problem, even besting the 680m in many cases. Are their results really so out of course?JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
We have not been able to test non-Enduro 7970M yet; I'm hoping to get the M17x R4 + 7970M in some time in the near future. At that point we can get a better view of the performance with/without Enduro. (And we might have another driver updated from AMD by then as well.)ThreeDee912 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Looks like somebody forgot to add in the battery life charts...?JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Fixed, thanks!halbhh2 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
It was very interesting to me to see the excellent battery life of the Samsung 7. So I know which I'd get if I suddenly needed a new laptop in that price range. Really enjoyed this article, and mostly for the detail/nuances.transphasic - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Hey Jarred. Is this a realistic solution to this Enduro nonsense?It would seem like this would be a better solution to this problem than by cobbling together a patchwork of drivers month after month for specific games in a seemingly vain and futile attempt to bypass these Mux design/Enduro problems in order to increase FPS scores.
Since AW users have a physical switch to turn it off completely, AMD should just create
a software patch to shut the stupid Enduro thing off and disabling it, and thereby solve the problem that way.
I am at a point, like a lot of 7970m owners, where I am wondering if I would be just better off spending the extra $800 for a Nvidia 680m upgrade, or just waiting for the rumored soon to be released 7990m GPU upgrade that SUPPOSEDLY has no Enduro issues. I really cannot believe that even with some supposedly better AMD drivers on the way be the end of the year that it will even come close to closing the enormous gap in gaming performance between our 7970m and the 680m.
Your thoughts?
JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
This won't work. To turn Enduro off (like on the Alienware M17x), you need actual hardware muxes on the motherboard to route the video outputs to the iGPU or the dGPU. The P170EM (AFAIK) only has the outputs connected to the iGPU, so it will always be in Enduro or Optimus mode. Sorry!Harmattan - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
I've owned both p150em and p170ems and generally agree with the assessment, albeit I felt it a bit harsh. The keyboard was not as bad as described, neither was the build quality. The p150em is, IMO, the best 15" gaming laptop available in terms of performance and size.But yes, AW has it all over Clevo on build even with a 2-year old design.
On the bright side, they did finally listen to people (after 3 years) and put back-lit keyboards on their new line.