An Improved Screen

Maybe Clevo uses a panel lottery, or maybe they've just slightly updated the X7200, but either way our review unit has a different panel than the last one. It's an improvement in some areas, but unfortunately it's worse in others.

First, the bad new: the new panel doesn't have anywhere near the contrast ratio as its predecessor. Jarred tends to rate that as the most important metric, at least until you reach 500:1 contrast, but in some cases raw brightness can win out. That brings us to the good aspects: the new panel is brighter overall and has substantially improved color accuracy with a gamut that almost perfectly matches the sRGB color space.

The previous unit used a HannStar panel, but our current review unit has an LG panel. There's a slightly bluish cast to the image, but generally speaking it goes with our conventional wisdom: if you want a quality notebook screen, go 1080p. Thus far we've only seen one that's been less than impressive, with the rest being of reasonable quality. Anyone looking for a mobile workstation with a good screen can at least consider the X7200. HP's DreamColor and Dell's RGB-LED panels are still the best laptop LCDs we've seen (and the Lenovo ThinkPad's upgraded panel would be similar), but most of the 17.3" 1080p panels are pretty good.

Heat, Noise, and Battery Life Conclusion: Nothing Wrong with the Radeon
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  • bobbyh - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link

    cool laptop.first!
  • Sufo - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link

    Yay, first to reply to first!
  • tipoo - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link

    I vote that all "first" or similar comments constitute a temporary ban
  • Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link

    As long as the first comment doesnt include hawking nik e, jord an, and pr ada it is ok by me.
  • m.amitava - Saturday, June 4, 2011 - link

    Yeah..let the kids play! :P
  • Jamahl - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link

    To waste your first comment with such a crap one.
  • mustafaka - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link

    But it is really cool, so not a complete waste :)
  • wordsworm - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link

    the author wrote that AMD took the crown. But then he says for $600 more you might be able to do better? He doesn't know? Well, what is it? Is it the holder of the crown or not? When I see something like that, it looks like the article is not really objective and that it's really just a, as some say, sign of fanboyism.
  • Will Robinson - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link

    Umm...eew k...in other words,you wanted to see NVDA win ...somehow...never mind.
  • wordsworm - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link

    I don't care. Shy of becoming very wealthy, I won't ever buy a computer that's more than 2k, or a laptop that's more than 1k. So, it's all out of my ball park. I was just saying that it's misleading and false as well. I am, therefore, more interested in what's going on with Llano than this kind of stuff. I was drawn into reading it because of the misleading title.

    If he doesn't know which setup is better, then he should have said so. It's a cheap page-hit trick that I expect from Daily Tech, but not from Anandtech. For some reason, I have very high expectations here. Most of the time, the articles are not like this.

    @Creig The author was saying that this setup holds the crown. If he hasn't tested the 485M in SLI, then he shouldn't have said it. More honest would have been, AMD's high end SLI significantly improves on AMD's previous effort.

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