The Clevo P870DM2 / Mythlogic Phobos 8716 Laptop Review: DTR With GTX 1080
by Brett Howse on October 27, 2016 2:00 PM ESTFinal Words
What else is there to say about this notebook? If you are after a desktop replacement, the market shrinks considerably, and very few companies offer desktop class processors in notebooks these days. Clevo is one of them, and they have shoehorned a full 91-Watt overclockable processor into this notebook. On CPU bound tasks, it is very likely that there is no other high volume notebook that is faster than this one. The performance is very impressive.
On the GPU side, there are plenty of options here too, but all of them based on the new Pascal architecture from NVIDIA. With just a 1920x1080 panel to push, even the GTX 1070 is going to have very good performance, but the GTX 1080 is such a big step up in the notebook market that it’s almost difficult to believe. It is basically twice as fast as the outgoing GTX 980M in real-world gaming tests. The GTX 980M was no slouch, but with NVIDIA moving to the full desktop class GPUs in notebooks this year, the jump in performance is as big as any seen in recent years. For those that really want the best of the best, Mythlogic offers this laptop with SLI GTX 1080 (or 1070), and choices of a 1920x1080 IPS 120 Hz display, 2560x1440 120 Hz G-Sync display, and 3840x2160 60 Hz G-Sync as well. The lower resolution display does have the advantage of being a 120 Hz display though, and the GTX 1080 can pretty easily drive most games at or above that refresh rate. The 2560x1440 seems like a great sweet spot for the non SLI models though, especially with G-Sync.
There are a lot of configurations available, which is typical of these types of systems, and it’s nice to be able to pick and choose your components a bit more than the larger OEMs allow. There is room for multiple M.2 SSDs, multiple 2.5-inch SSDs, and four SO-DIMM slots for memory. All of the components can be accessed through the bottom, or by removing the keyboard.
The chassis is far from the best around, with it being a large, thick, machine, made entirely of black plastic. The styling is ok though, with no crazy artwork or anything, and honestly for a notebook that is going to live its life on a desk, it is going to be absolutely fine.
What isn’t as fine is the keyboard. MSI has a fully mechanical keyboard in the GT83VR Titan, Razer has low profile mechanical switches in the new Razer Blade Pro, and Alienware has really worked hard at improving their keyboard as well with this generation. The Clevo keyboard feels like it is from about a decade ago, with very little travel despite the notebook being almost two inches thick. The keys themselves have very little bevel to them, and all of the keys are packed in so tight that it is very easy to lose where you are and hit the wrong key by mistake. If you are going to use this as a true desktop replacement, I suppose an external keyboard is an option, but it really shouldn’t need to be this way. The trackpad is just average, but here it’s difficult to be too critical since almost everyone that purchases a laptop like this is going to use it with a mouse.
At the end of the day, I am not the target market for this device. I have a desktop, and I haven’t moved houses in over a decade, but you can certainly see the appeal of having all the performance of a desktop in something you can move around a lot easier. Maybe you travel for work, or maybe you go to school, but being able to pick up a full desktop with the display attached and put it in a big is going to be a nice perk. And, even with all of these powerful components inside, the pricing is very reasonable. It’s hard to say something that starts at $2250 is inexpensive, but for what you get it is not. The base model still has a GTX 1070 and a desktop class 65-Watt CPU, and a 120 Hz display. You can tack on a lot of options to really drive up the price, but even this review unit with a GTX 1080, 32 GB of memory, and a Core i7-6700K still comes in under $3000. For that money, you won’t be able to find another laptop with this much performance available.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
61 Comments
View All Comments
DanNeely - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
I know there aren't any officially published numbers, I was hoping you could measure power to get approximate ones.Ratman6161 - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
"Clevo is one of the few laptop makers that is in the DTR market"Not really true. Dell, HP, and Lenovo all make laptops in the 15 to 17 inch size with quad core CPU's, loads of RAM, NVMe drives etc. They are lighter, less expensive (generally speaking) and with better battery life. Of course the specs you have are saying they are using desktop CPU's instead of somthing like the i7-6700HQ, an actual quad core mobile CPU as used in the others. As workstation focused machines they also tend to use the Quadro GPU's rather than the gaming focused. But it doesn't take too much looking to find DTR class laptops.
eriri-el - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
I can't seem to find anywhere that a TI/Burr Brown DAC in in this thing. Sources below says audio is powered by an ESS Sabre DAC, which is known for its bad implementations by alot of manufaturers, making it sound way inferior compared to other DACs.https://www.mythlogic.com/2016_Models/phobos8716.p...
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/official-c...
Hopefully you can clarify if it exists, where can get the TI/Burr Brown DAC edition, thx.
LaggLad - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
Yes they have the ESS Sabre DAC and Burr Brown AMP.Meaker10 - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
ES9018 + LM49720 + OPA1622 ;)df2rools - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
"If so, fret not. The GTX 1080 does not too bad on this game."That sure is some English right there. (dota 2 performance section.
boeush - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
I have a Clevo in the same chassis (built by Sager), bought early last spring - so I'm a little behind on components now, what with a 980M and only 16 GB of RAM -- but still with a 6700K. I might upgrade the GPU later in 2017, when the next-gen stuff comes out with HBM2, better power/perf/process optimizations, and/or what-not. But I'm stuck with a 1080p screen since the 1440p wasn't available for order back then.Anyway, yeah some aspects of this rig are unnecessary or unrefined and garish. The LED highlights on the lid, for one. Why, indeed. The weird randomized keyboard backlighting on boot-up, with user-customized settings not kicking in until you log in and load the Windows desktop. Yeah, the touch pad is a little glitchy (on occasion it stops working; the workaround is usually to disable/re-enable it via a function key combo.) I had to get a Windows 7 Pro running on it for some work-related reasons, so I set up an MBR boot on the secondary SSD and have to manually toggle the UEFI boot off in the BIOS every time I want to boot into Win 7; after playing around I was able to get it all working but for whatever reason the Windows 7 boot under BIOS emulation sees only ~2 GB of the installed RAM (so after the OS takes its share, applications only have ~1 GB to play with.) I consider this a design bug, though probably not too many people would care at this point and so it's not likely to ever be fixed; plus, none of the drivers (including UEFI/BIOS firmware) for this machine have any updates available from Sager since October of 2015... (Maybe Mythlogic is better than Sager about that? Or maybe not; I wouldn't know...)
I do wish the keyboard was better, and that overall the user-facing design elements better leveraged the available real estate. There are huge - unbelievably and utterly wasted - margins around the keyboard; it would have been better if the keys were larger and/or better spaced out, with the keyboard spanning the entire width of the laptop. Ditto for display. The bezels are obscenely enormous; they could (and should!) have easily fitted in an 18"+ screen with thinner bezels.
Ascaris - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
Why would you have to disable UEFI boot and use MBR to boot Windows 7 on the secondary SSD? That would suggest it is the x86 version... would x64 not work with your work-related stuff?boeush - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
Yeah, forgot to mention for work it has to be the 32-bit version of Windows 7, not x64 (yeah I know, it sucks - but one would still expect it to see/use 4 GB of the installed RAM, instead of just 2...) Anyway, Windows 7 won't even install on a disk unless it's formatted with MBR (you can't select GPT disks as targets in the installer UI - they are disabled/grayed out.) And unless UEFI boot is disabled, the machine automatically boots from the primary GPT-formatted disk (where the Win 10 install is that came with the machine and I otherwise use regularly.)boeush - Friday, October 28, 2016 - link
BTW, you might think one possible workaround could be to just run the 32-bit Win 7 in a VM - but unfortunately I need hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to work correctly, and VMs still tend to have big problems with that even today.