The Eurocom Sky X7C (Clevo P775TM1-G) Gaming Laptop Review: True Desktop Replacement
by Brett Howse on August 5, 2019 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
The Eurocom Sky X7C comes equipped with an 80 Wh battery, which is quite reasonable considering it’s not the type of device that should really be expected to be run on battery for any length of time. The battery in a desktop replacement such as this is really a glorified UPS, and Eurocom even calls it as much in their mobile server versions of their notebooks.
Light Battery
Battery life was somewhat better than expected, coming in at close to three hours of runtime with the display set to 200 nits. Considering the desktop processor and no NVIDIA Optimus support, that’s quite good.
Web Battery
This test has a more demanding workload than our light test, but on large gaming laptops the base power draw is generally high enough to mask the extra CPU power required, and that is the case here with the Eurocom running four minutes longer than the light test. It’s still a reasonable result though considering the class of components inside.
Movie Playback
Ultrabooks can excel at media playback because the video decode is handed off to fixed function hardware in the integrated graphics, which is extremely power efficient. That same thing happens here, except it’s handed off to a power-hungry RTX 2080, and as such the movie playback is shorter than the previous two tests.
The Tesseract score is the movie playback time divided by the length of The Avengers, and you can barely make it through one sitting of this movie before the power runs out.
Normalized Results
Removing the battery capacity from the runtime allows us to get a glimpse at efficiency, and you can instantly see what a difference NVIDIA’s Optimus makes here, as both the Acer Predator Triton 500 and MSI GE75 Raider both offer Optimus so the RTX 2080 can be powered down. The other notebooks have the dGPU connected directly to the display, limiting efficiency.
Battery Conclusions
On a system such as this, the battery life is a secondary goal at best, and the results coincide with this. The maximum battery size allowed on an airplane is under 100 Wh, meaning that is the practical upper limit for battery size. The Eurocom Sky X7C actually offers an 80 Wh battery, which is really larger than it needs to be for this class of machine where it is going to be plugged in almost all the time, so the battery life is actually quite good considering.
Charging
Eurocom offers a standard 330-Watt AC Adapter with the Sky X7C, which is easily sufficient to power the system even with the Core i9-9900K and RTX 2080 at stock speeds. However they do offer a 780-Watt adapter as well, which they shipped out with this system, and it is literally a small-form factor desktop PSU with a custom connector to go into the laptop. The PSU offers a digital readout of amperage, voltage, watts, and temperature, and includes active cooling as you’d expect on a PSU this large.
If you are into overclocking, you may want to upgrade to this unit, since the stock 330-Watt adapter is going to run into power limits if you do try overlocking. The CPU can easily draw 150-Watts stock, and the GPU would be around the same. It’s unlikely you’d ever need the full 780 Watts, but it certainly is impressive, and the digital display is very informative compared to a black power brick like you’d see on most notebooks.
That doesn’t really impact the charge rate though, since the battery charging is limited to protect the battery life, and as such the time to charge this notebook is about the same amount of time as you can use it on battery.
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DanNeely - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
It's good to see that 1440p laptop screens aren't dead yet (4k is overkill for high DPI uses) even if this model gives a rather poor showing.anactoraaron - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
$4,000 machine with literally the cheapest display they could find. Just embarrassing.airdrifting - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
While it might be equipped with a desktop 9900K, it will never run the same speed and temperature as desktop counter parts. 9900K is notorious to overheat and I have seen it easily hit high 90C during Realbench with many motherboards WITHOUT overclocking using out of the box default settings (AIO liquid cooling), good luck getting it to run inside a tiny laptop. I have to manually lower voltage on most motherboards just to keep 9900K under 80C full load since most motherboards set like a ridiculous 1.2-1.3V voltage by default.MrRuckus - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
If you read the article you would see they did exactly that. Loaded down the proc and were hitting 87c under load. Maintaining 4100-4200Mhz is very commendable in a laptop form factor. There could be more performance to be had by undervolting the Proc. As you say you do it on a desktop, it goes double for a laptop and can do wonders for throttling if there is any present. 80-90c is par for the course on Laptops that are desktop replacements.airdrifting - Tuesday, August 6, 2019 - link
"Maintaining 4100-4200Mhz is very commendable in a laptop form factor." 9900K on desktop Z390 motherboards is able to maintain 4.7GHz all core turbo. Now go back to read what I said in the very first sentence: "While it might be equipped with a desktop 9900K, it will never run the same speed and temperature as desktop counter parts." 4.1GHz < 4.7GHz, point proven.eastcoast_pete - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
Thanks Brett! I have a soft spot for these DTRs (I like the even older name for them: luggables). I wonder if Clevo&Co. could come up with a true hybrid design: portable notebook format with socketed CPU, and the main second GPU in a docking station with integrated large PSU, connected via a PCIE3-16 (or PCIE4) snap-in connector, all in a case with a handle. That would give the graphics more thermal headroom, and avoid the potential bottleneck of running the dGPU over TB3. And, with an optional smaller, maybe GTX dGPU card on board, the laptop itself would still be quite capable.MrRuckus - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
I think TB3 is going to be your best bet. I dont think external PCIe is going to be a thing due to length limitations and a needed external connector of some kind. The ribbon connectors aren't exactly made for unplugging and plugging in 100's of times. They have people who have done it, but the implementation is pretty wonky and you gotta have access to a Wifi card slot to do it. If I remember right they are also limited to PCIex1 so the difference between that and thunderbolt, thunderbolt can actually be faster. Just better off getting a laptop with a true thunderbolt 3.0 slot that can push 40gbps = PCIex4. Maybe Thunderbolt 4 will offer a true pound for pound replacement and get the throughput closer to 100% instead of the 70-80% now on external GPUs.imaheadcase - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
Um no laptop is a gaming desktop replacement.You literally showed it wasn't by the specs. THe price is insanely expensive, and the screen is laughable.
bennyg - Tuesday, August 6, 2019 - link
It's not cheap. The particular panel has just been plagued with issues since it was first put in these 17" models in 2015/2016. The original B173QTN01.0 had horrible banding on alternating rows of pixels and the individual panels are quite variable. This would be a 1.2 or 1.4 revision I'm guessing. A colour calibration is necessary for this panel in particular. But its the only >1080p 120Hz out there.I have a P870DM3 with the same 17" 4K IPS panel that's an option for this P775, being 400nit 95% gamut and good colour accuracy it's the content creation and general beautifulness option, but it's transition of >20ms is not great for fast games.
bennyg - Tuesday, August 6, 2019 - link
No idea how my reply got here, it was to the guy bagging the "cheap" panel on about page 4 of the comments.Same old stuff going on in the comment section at AT....