The Clevo P870DM2 / Mythlogic Phobos 8716 Laptop Review: DTR With GTX 1080
by Brett Howse on October 27, 2016 2:00 PM ESTDisplay
Not too many years ago, gaming laptops were still shipping with TN displays on the large screen laptops. Luckily that’s no longer the case, and the Clevo P870DM2 / Mythlogic Phobos 8716 is available with two choices in display. The base model is a 1920x1080 IPS panel with a 120 Hz refresh rate. That’s great to see in a gaming laptop, and looking at the gaming results in the last section, this laptop can easily hit 120+ frames per second to keep up with that refresh rate. Mythlogic also offers a a 3840x2160 (UHD) AHVA panel with the more common 60 Hz refresh rate, but also includes G-SYNC. For those that want to meet somewhere in the middle, there is now a 2560x1440 AHVA 120 Hz panel option as well with G-SYNC.
The review unit has the lowest resolution panel, which is going to be the highest frame rate at the native resolution. The GTX 1080 in this review unit could likley handle at least the 2560x1440 though, and even the UHD would still give reasonable performance especially with G-SYNC.
To measure a display’s characteristics, we use an X-Rite i1Display Pro Colorimeter for brightness and contrast readings, and an X-Rite i1Pro2 Spectrophotometer for accuracy readings. SpectraCal CalMAN 5 Business with a custom workflow is the software used. Mythlogic shipped the device with an included ICC profile, but I found it actually was more accurate without the ICC profile, so the measurements below will be with it disabled.
Brightness and Contrast
333 nits is a decent brightness for a laptop like this, which is unlikely to get used outdoors very much. What is more impressive though is the excellent black levels, which gives a great contrast ratio over 1300:1. For those that like to use their computer in the dark, the display goes down to 16 nits, which isn’t the lowest measured, but should be adequate.
Grayscale
SpectraCal CalMAN 5 - Grayscale with included ICC Profile
SpectraCal CalMAN 5 - Grayscale with no ICC
The top image is the laptop with the included ICC profile enabled. It’s pretty clear how much it doesn’t help, and makes the grayscale have much higher errors, and the gamma is way too high. With the ICC disabled, the grayscale is fantastic at an average dE2000 of just 1.7. Gamma still has some issues, but overall it’s much better. I don’t provide ICC profiles of laptops I’ve reviewed because there’s no guarantee an ICC made on panel A will help panel B, and in this case, it makes it much worse. The white point is very good too, which is clear when you see how closely the red, green, and blue track at the different white levels. This is one of the best grayscales on any laptop tested.
Saturation
Unfortunately, the saturation results weren’t quite as good as the grayscale, but with an average dE2000 of 3.75, it is pretty good in a notebook of this caliber. There isn’t just a single color which is off pulling the scores up, with all of the colors having errors ever three at some point in the sweeps. Still, it’s a decent result for this type of laptop.
Gretag MacBeth
The GMB score is the worst of the bunch, but it’s still not too bad. 4.3 is definitely above the error levels under 3.0 that would be best, but the overall average is decent. The worst scores are the skin tones, and individual one color even has an error level over 8. Although better is always better, Mythlogic isn’t selling this notebook for color sensitive work, and if you are going to be doing that it would be best to get an external monitor. This is a pretty good result for a gaming notebook.
Overall, the 1920x1080 120 Hz display offers great out of the box white levels, with decent color accuracy. It could be better, but it’s far from the very blue displays seen a few years ago, and the higher refresh rate is going to be a benefit for gaming where movement can be very quick. The gaming I did on this notebook felt very smooth, which was also likely helped by the massive GPU available.
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ZeDestructor - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
Picture of the innards clearly shows one MXM module populated with an empty slot for a second MXM module. With two MXM cards installed, the heatsink for each GPU is shrunk by half though (second card takes over the second fan and gimps the first card to only having the leftmost fan), so there will be a lower boost max.Glaurung - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
"Let's be real, you aren't moving this thing around. Just buy a desktop."A laptop takes up much less room than a desktop, and you can close the lid and stow it away in a drawer. Whereas a desktop is always going to be hogging space on your desk for its keyboard, mouse, and monitor. For someone with a small apartment or student dorm room, the ability to simply close the lid and stow the whole thing away is a huge benefit. Don't think of this as a battery powered portable computer, think of it as a compact, stowable computer that has a built in UPS.
andychow - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
While I agree with the statement that many buy laptops to be able to stow the thing away, this is a $2255-$5000 device. It's not something I would imagine people in small apartments or dorms would get. Then again, I see "poor" students with macbook pros all the time. You have a good point actually.nerd1 - Sunday, October 30, 2016 - link
Many students I know pay >70k for just tution and rent. $2500 laptop is not that expensive in that regard (especially compared to macbook pros with the same price range)Morawka - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
12 pounds for that model, its still a lot easier than lugging around a tower, monitor, cables, etc..this is a great mobile VR Rig.a
DanNeely - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
Do you have any power usage figures? I'm curious what the TDP for the mobile version of pascal is. A Desktop 1080 is 180W, did manage to knock 80W of the mobile card to match the outgoing 980m despite only dropping the clock rate a few percent (massive binning???), or is near desktop performance equivalence coming at a huge expansion in power consumption?BrokenCrayons - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
You can do some quick estimations based on the fact that the SLI version requires two 330W power supplies.Add to it the cooling configuration of six heat pipes and two radiators...but we need to go back a bit to older tech for the heat pipes. A Dell Latitude D630 with an Intel x3100 GPU has a single heat pipe for the chipset and 35W processor's cooling needs. Assuming the pipe design is better means that a single heat pipe can likely handle 45W total TDP and that's a pretty reasonable estimate, but let's be conservative and say one pipe can deal with only 30W TDP. 30 x 6 pretty much means 180W TDP for the mobile part. Take into account the GPU can't sustain a full load at its highest clock even with all that cooling capacity and I think we're looking at a mobile GPU with the same TDP as the desktop part. There's certainly a lot of compelling evidence pointing that way anyhow.
DanNeely - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
Full desktop power is certainly possible, but the need for a second power brick doesn't prove much beyond >~110W. 90 (CPU) + 30 (everything else) + 2x110 = 340W which would max out the 330W power brick.I don't think your handwaving with the heatpipe count argument holds any strength, the size of the heatsinks on the other end, the power of the fans, and what temperatures are considered acceptable puts too much variation to try and assign an N Watts capacity to a single pipe and scale off of that.
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
It's all extremely rough estimation on my part and I admit readily it's rife with possible faulty thinking and off-the-cuff guesswork, but unless or until we get credible numbers either from NV directly or from a group equipped to perform accurate analytics, there's nothing left but idle speculation...which can be sort of fun in its own way even if it ends up being way off the mark.Brett Howse - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
Please don't forget that this also supports overclocking, so they have to supply a big enough power adapter to avoid running out of headroom when overclocking, so you can't really make the assumptions you are.NVIDIA doesn't have formal TDP numbers for the mobile parts, but they are going to be somewhere under the desktop ones.