CyberpowerPC's Compal NBLB2: Affordable Gaming
by Dustin Sklavos on December 21, 2010 5:50 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- AMD
- Intel
- CyberPowerPC
- Compal
Battery Life
It's at this point we should mention that the battery pack in our review unit has specifications at odds with the Compal NBLB2 sold on CyberpowerPC's site (along with Sager's): they advertise a 4800mAh battery while the one in our unit is marked as 5200mAh. There shouldn't be a massive difference in running time, but it's worth mentioning nonetheless.
This is also where we expect NVIDIA's Optimus technology is going to come in handy and a place where AMD really needs to pick up the slack on pretty much all fronts. AMD mobile processors generally offer poor power consumption compared to their performance, and they don't have anything in their graphics hardware that competes with Optimus.
And there it is. Nearly four hours of runnning time off the chain isn't bad at all, but the Optimus-equipped notebooks (outside of Clevo's B5130M) typically fare a lot better. With the advertised 4800mAh battery, we'd probably expect to lose about fifteen to twenty minutes, leaving running time floating in the neighborhood of three-and-a-half hours. Not shabby, but nowhere near as good as some of the others.
Noise and Heat
If the battery life of the Compal NBLB2 isn't stellar, heat and noise are. The fan spins up under heavy load but it's not too noisy and is easy enough to drown out with music or most game audio. So if the fan doesn't sound like it's working that hard, theoretically heat should be an issue, right?
Or not. The processor cores get a little toasty under sustained load, but nothing too extreme, and the Radeon actually runs at an impressively cool (for a notebook) 70C. It stands to reason the more intrepid user could probably safely overclock the GPU and get some free extra performance without overwhelming the cooling system in the NBLB2. By the same token, though, it looks like the dual-core i7's 35W TDP is already pushing what's comfortable with this chassis, so we're not sure we'd recommend upgrading to a quad-core. Cyberpower offers the 55W i7-920XM as an upgrade, but I have a hard time believing this notebook could cope with that kind of thermal stress.
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DanNeely - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - link
Apple went full glass on the top. Every designer of cheap laptops slavishly emulated the shiney bit as cheaply as could be done. Clueless PHBs then decided shiney was in and forced the rest of their designers to commit the same crime or be fired.JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 - link
I dislike the "edge-to-edge" glossy approach just as much as regular glossy; in fact, putting a glossy sheet over an LCD (typically with a small gap between them) is just brain dead. It's a case of two wrongs making a bigger wrong.Pylon757 - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 - link
Then get a Thinkpad or a comparable business laptop (e.g. Dell Latitude or HP Elitebook). Those don't compromise on usability and most are all-matte.5150Joker - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - link
With a 5650m GPU, you can hardly call it gaming worthy. Sure it's better than Intel integrated graphics but it's definitely not considered mid range in the notebook world. A midrange graphics chip in the notebook world is an nVidia GTX 260M or it's equivalent. The 5650 falls quite short of that.JarredWalton - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - link
I'd say GTX 260M is more of a high-end mobile GPU. It's not in the dream category like GTX 480M, but for mobile graphics it's in the upper echelon. HD 5650 is a good "midrange" mobile GPU, but it's really an entry-level gaming GPU. The 1080p LCD is a bit of a problem for 5650 as well if you're playing games, but again you need substantially more expensive GPU and everything else to make that happen.5150Joker - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - link
The 260M these days is mid range in terms of gaming video cards available. The top end consists of GTX 480M, GTX 470M, GTX 470M, AMD 5870m, 5850m. 2nd tier would be 4870m, GTX 280M and third tier is 260M (mid range by performance). The 5650 is even lower on the scale of performance thus IMO doesn't constitute mid range at all. It's lower mid range if anything. In January we're going to see even faster GPU's released so that will push the 5650 down even lower.synaesthetic - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 - link
For the most part I agree with this... the lack of GDDR5 is a problem with these midrange mobile GPUs... even the desktop 5750 has a gig of GDDR5.At stock clocks the 5650 isn't very impressive, but if you get a good one it can OC like a champ. My 5650 running at 850/900 clocks can give the Mobility Radeon 5830 a run for its money (10k 3dmark06). Yeah, I know benchmarks mean mostly jack, but this chip is great for the price, especially if you're a light game such as myself.
bennyg - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 - link
I agree - the GTX 260M is a cut-down high-end GPU, kind of the low end of the high end. Kind of the "4830" concept rather than "4670"... I am of course referring to a very short space of time when number names had some kind of internal consistency with the product-space-concept the product was occupying :/The core of the issue I think is the challenge to compare technology from different generations or model years - there is relative performance at release (where the 55nm G92b derivative chips were king), then there is relative performance right now (where they're still more powerful than 40nm midrange from both camps but not by very much), after it's been superceeded by a generation or two.
All I know as an individual, my (un-underclocked...) GTX260M runs the games I play at 1080p with good enough quality to keep me happy.
frozentundra123456 - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - link
A decent system, but the 1199.00 price is way out of line. For this, you can get the Asus G73 model at Best buy, and that has a mobility HD5870 and a 1.73Ghz quad core in a 17 inch chasis.If the NBLB2 is available for 899.00 as the artice stated it might be, then I would consider it.
warisz00r - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 - link
Would you be able to get the G73 with a 1080p panel at the same price? No? I guess as much.