AVADirect Clevo X7200: Six Cores, SSD RAID, and GTX 480M SLI Yields World's Fastest DTR Notebook
by Jarred Walton on October 7, 2010 12:30 AM ESTFifteen Pounds of Potent Performance
Do you want a light laptop with great battery life? How about something that won't cost an arm and a leg? Or perhaps you'd prefer a nicely balanced system that does well in all areas even if it never truly shines? No? You want pedal-to-the-metal performance at all costs—weight and battery life be damned? Well, then, whip out your checkbook and get ready to blow your intended house down payment, because that sort of notebook doesn't come cheap.
What will $4000 to $6000 get you? If you don't absolutely need the transportability factor, you could buy three potent gaming desktops for the same price as a single Clevo X7200. However, the X7200 includes a display and all the accessories, plus a 30 minute UPS, and it can hang with midrange SLI and CrossFire desktops when it comes to gaming performance. If that's what you're looking for—or perhaps you need a mobile workstation so you don't have to try and pack around a 50 pound desktop, plus the LCD—then look no further. This is the new gold standard for DTR performance.
We've railed against the Clevo designs in the past, for looking cheap and using far too much plastic. The X7200 also improves on those areas, and it's easily the nicest Clevo notebook I've tested over the past three years. Brushed aluminum on the LCD cover and palm rests is a welcome change and less prone to attracting fingerprints. I'll even give Clevo a pass on the glossy LCD, because let's be honest: no one is going to try using this thing outside. 30-45 minutes of battery life is the most you'll get, unless you want to carry around a portable generator in a backpack.
But with all the good, the old Clevo keyboard layout rears its ugly head again and makes us wonder why so many companies refuse to make a proper notebook keyboard. My first encounter with this keyboard was in the old Clevo M570RU—the first DX10 8800M notebook we tested. Three years later and the GTX 260M is about the same as that old 8800M GTX. But while NVIDIA has at least improved performance and power requirements on their G92-based mobile GPUs, the Clevo keyboard hasn't changed one bit. It was weak then and it's even worse now; what's really sad is that all they need to do is grab something similar to the Dell M6500 or ASUS G73 keyboard and we wouldn't need to have this paragraph. Can you type on the keyboard? Sure, but every time I want Home, End, PgUp, or PgDn I'm reminded that Clevo thinks I'm stupid for using such keys, and an Fn key combination is required. And don’t even get me started about the 10-key….
So in summary, there are four major drawbacks with the X7200: the price, the weight, the battery life, and the keyboard. AVADirect counters such naysayers with performance, performance, performance, and more performance. As a gaming notebook or a portable workstation, the Clevo X7200 excels, closing the gap between desktops and DTRs once more. Yes, you're still paying essentially twice as much for the same level of performance, and you simply can't get the equivalent of desktop GTX 480 SLI (or HD 5870 CrossFire) in a notebook, but you can run every game currently available at 1080p and high detail settings, often with 4xAA enabled.
There's also the question of stability, and here again we can report that the X7200 was exemplary. We had a few snafus with some benchmarks not wanting to run properly (i.e. 3DMark Vantage didn't like PhysX on the GPU with the current drivers, and Furmark manages to pull more power than the PSU can supply so it switches off and leaves you on battery power), but the system never crashed, shut down unexpectedly, or any other troublesome behavior. All of our gaming and application tests ran without a hitch, delivering the expected performance.
As this is a Clevo "whitebook", the usual suspects like Sager, Eurocom, and others will ship similar systems. Sager looks to be slightly more expensive than AVADirect with fewer customization options, while Eurocom takes the opposite approach with the Panther 2.0 and charges significantly more but includes extras like HDMI input, support for a fourth HDD (if you omit the DVD/BRD), up to 3x8GB RAM, Xeon CPUs, and several other GPU options. AVADirect gets our recommendation by virtue of being the least expensive if you want "reasonable" options, but Eurocom is probably worth the price premium if you're looking at a mobile workstation/server with a Xeon CPU, Quadro GPU, and gobs of memory. Such notebooks aren't for your average Joe, but if you have a need for speed, the X7200 delivers.
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Candide08 - Saturday, October 9, 2010 - link
Some companies, like mine, are no longer buying workstations. We are issued "desktop replacement" laptops, like HP 88740W with dual i7 quad cores and 8GB of memory. Throw in Virtual-Box and run one or two other VM's and its workable as a full function portable desktop with 1920 x 1200 screen resolution and a 5.9 Win 7 rating.The 8740W is not quite a spec'd-out as this, but its in the same league.
Yes, its heavy. Yes, the power brick is huge. Yes, I bought a rolling laptop case.
crackedwiseman - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Honestly, why not go for a desktop GPU with those sort of thermals? You could quadfire a mobile Juniper GPU, or use a vanilla, normally binned 5870 and still come in with the same power draw.Meaker10 - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
Because:A: It's easier to cool two separate sources of heat.
B: Moduals are of the smaller size are made already with mobile GPUs.
C: Quadfire would take up more space and would suck for efficiency.
D: Desktop drivers do not have some of the mobility options.
E: Mobile 480M crossfire is faster than a single desktop 5870.
rsgeiger - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I forgot if you guys ever got a review unit from Alienware, or are going to in the near future, but a comparison of the dual GPU notebooks out there would be fun to see.Otherwise great review! I really read closely this time the Powerdraw, heat, and noise comparisons. This always the most important buying decision I have when buying DTRs.
JarredWalton - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
We looked at the previous generation M980NU with QX9300 and SLI GTX 280M, which is pretty similar to the older M17x. Now M17x is doing up to i7-940XM, with either HD 5870 CF or GTX 285M SLI. (5870 CF is going to be faster than 285M SLI by around 20-25% I think, but no PhysX or CUDA.) Anyway we updated our gaming benchmarks and don't typically have the opportunity to rerun new tests on previous reviews, which is why we focused on comparisons to desktops.You can always get a rough estimate by comparing 3DMarks, but it's pretty safe to say the M17x needs a new revision before it's going to come anywhere near the performance of the X7200. Pricing for a maxed out M17x is currently $3900 without the RAID 0 C300 SSDs, so $5000 total with 5870 CF and 8GB RAM. But you have to look at what you're missing: 480M SLI is quite a big jump from 5870 CF, and the i7-980X is, as I mention in the text, about 50% faster than even the i7-940XM. Alienware does have a much nicer LCD panel, though: 1920x1200 with RGB LED backlighting.
Rasterman - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
CPU wise the 980x is 136% faster than the 940xm.http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
5150Joker - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
It's not "much faster" than an M17x with 5870m Crossfire + 940xm. If you look at NBR, you'd see that the 480M SLi barely outpaces the 5870s by a mere 500-800 3dmark vantage points. That's basically nothing. When both are overclocked, the X7200 again does not surpass the M17x, they are about even.The biggest advantage the X7200 has is the desktop processor but there's a program called ThrottleStop that allows end users to manipulate TDP/TDC + multiplier settings for the 940xm in the M17x. I've gotten the 940xm as high as 3.8 GHz on all 4 cores (8 threads) so again, the X7200's desktop processor advantage is diminished even if it is 6 cores.
You have to keep in mind the X7200 is severely limited by it's 300W PSU as you discovered so there's no real room for overclocking. One of the first users to purchase the X7200 on NBR discovered that his 480m SLI + 980x setup was shutting off during the Mafia 2 benchmark and he was running the system at stock!
JarredWalton - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
I'm out of town now so I can't test other scenarios, but I ran every benchmark several times and the only thing to ever overload the power brick was Furmark. All the other tests I saw topped out at power draws of around 310W, but it's possible some combination could get that higher. I'd like to know exactly what others have seen overload the PSU, though. Note that I did get beta drivers from NVIDIA for testing (260.80 I think -- the WHQL drivers should release "soon" according to NVIDIA), and that might be why I didn't experience other overloads.As for performance comparisons, you can't cite 3DMark Vantage as a meaningful item. I include it as a quick point of reference, but it's not a game and it doesn't really behave like most games. Simply getting GPU PhysX to work should boost the score I posted by 1000 or more, but it's ultimately the games that matter.
For gaming, the X7200 with 480M SLI beats the tar out of everything else in the notebook world. If you had a similar X7200 with HD 5870 CF, the difference would be smaller (thanks to having a fast CPU), but with a large cross section of games it's pretty clear 480M is faster. It's also more power hungry by a large amount, though, so I can understand going the 5870 CF route. It's too bad that the only way to do get 5870 CF is the M17x or Clevo X8100, since that also gives up the desktop CPU and you get areas where you're CPU limited.
Meaker10 - Sunday, October 10, 2010 - link
PhysX scores are not valid results for comparisons.The original intention of the test was for 3rd party physX cards at showing the potential in the future, even then the scores were not valid.
Nvidia twisted this and while it has not been removed, PhysX scores will not appear in comparison searches unless you specifically choose them to. They will never appear in the hall of fame.
Futuremark recommends that reviewers keep PhysX off when using 3dmark to review graphics cards.
silverblue - Thursday, October 7, 2010 - link
Ouch... :) I'd be surprised if mine is over 25lb, though it's hardly a power machine. I'd love to have a play with a 50lb desktop... see if the power/weight ratio is favourable. ;)