CyberPowerPC FangBook Gaming Notebook Review
by Dustin Sklavos on May 1, 2013 12:01 AM ESTTwo Conclusions
When evaluating the CyberPowerPC FangBook, we're really evaluating two completely separate things. The first is the performance of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX, which has completely supplanted the GTX 675M in this chassis and largely supplanted it in the marketplace. The second is how good of a deal the FangBook is compared to competing boutiques. Any evaluation about the quality of the notebook's build would essentially echo my review of iBuyPower's own Valkyrie CZ-17, though it does bear mentioning that the FangBook was a bit of an eyecatcher when I had friends over the other day, and I think CyberPowerPC's panelled lid design has a nice pop to it.
The improvement Kepler brings to the 675M in the form of the 675MX almost feels too incremental, but NVIDIA also painted themselves into a corner by rolling the 580M into the 675M in the first place. The 675MX is definitely faster than the 580M/675M, in the neighborhood of about 10-15%, and it will afford you a modest bump in settings or slightly smoother gameplay depending on what you prioritize. It should also use less power under load, which is certainly a benefit. Where I think NVIDIA runs into trouble is that they have a frankly massive performance gulf between the 675MX and the 680M. AMD addresses this gap with a Radeon HD 7950M, and while drivers remain an issue on their side of the fence, they've also been steadily improving. The flipside is that AMD's Radeon HD 7900M series is also relatively scarce, with the high end essentially dominated by NVIDIA right now.
As far as the 675MX goes, consider this. While ultrabooks got a big boost from Ivy Bridge, gaming notebooks received a far more modest one, and much as Sandy Bridge users shouldn't have felt any rush to upgrade to Ivy Bridge, users with a HD 6990M or 580M/675M shouldn't be trying to track down a 675MX (much less a 670MX) on an MXM card.
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The other part of the FangBook equation is its value for your gaming dollar. Our review unit runs $1,578, which is pricey but not unheard or unreasonable for a beefy gaming notebook. It gets you an i7-3630QM, a 60GB SSD system drive, and a 750GB storage hard drive, all alongside 16GB of DDR3-1600 and the GeForce GTX 675MX. For this configuration, AVADirect charges you $1,635, and you actually downgrade to a GTX 675M. iBuyPower will charge you $1,564, which is basically a wash. Other boutiques with this chassis are basically a wash, so if nothing else, CyberPowerPC is pretty competitive on price. Clevo notebooks tend to be a little pricier, and though I still think the M17x R4 is the most ideal gaming notebook available, it will punch you in the wallet until every last ounce of change comes out. So if you want to hang out in the FangBook's performance neighborhood, you're looking at roughly a $500 premium to go Alienware.
With all that said, this isn't how I'd personally configure the FangBook, and you can get a better deal if you work the angles a bit. For about $60 less, I'd go for a single 250GB Samsung 840 SSD (remember there are two drive bays so you can always upgrade later), cut the RAM down to the stock 8GB of DDR3-1600, and upgrade the wireless to a dual-band card. I'm almost completely sold on SSDs and 5GHz Wi-Fi at this point and consider them both to be worth the sacrifices.
Bottom line, this MSI chassis is still an excellent one for gaming. iBuyPower and CyberPowerPC are basically competitive with each other and the least expensive options on the market, so it's going to be a matter of styling and customization options that will sway you one way or the other. Now if they could just customize the keyboard, we'd have something truly noteworthy to discuss.
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kjohio - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Excellent observation. Heat is definitely a big issue while playing games. Would love to have any updates on this topic. Thanks,darkhawk1980 - Friday, May 3, 2013 - link
Since this chassis is based off the older MSI GT70, the most likely cause is that it has the same problems the GT70 did in production, and that the heatsink compound and heatsinks were not done properly, do you were not getting efficient cooling. After re-applying compound and remounting the heatsinks, it should be better. Atleast, if this is based on the GT70 as much as it looks like. They could have skimped on the heatsink more than MSI did, which might help explain the heat issues.whyso - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Does the 7950m even exist? I've never seen it.cknobman - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
I'd rather have the MSI GX60 for $1200.It boasts a 7970m and is overall a nicer laptop.
TH did a review on it yesterday and while it lacked the raw cpu horsepower of some of the intel models the review proved that when it came to games it really did not make that big of an impact and it could still play everything at max settings on 1920x1080. It also had pretty decent battery life.
Bob Todd - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
That's actually a very interesting gaming laptop. I love the tear down pics of the cooling design. CPU performance obviously isn't earth shattering but about the only intensive thing I do on my laptop these days is playing the occasional game anyway. I wish they made a more subtle looking version. Also, I checked the usual places and the versions they are selling lack the dual mSATA RAID 0 array. It's still a good deal of gaming performance for the money, but the SSDs would make it a pretty phenomenal piece of gaming kit for the money.DanNeely - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Consumer SSD raid0 is a benchmark chasers/suckers gimmick only. You won't notice the performance difference vs a single larger drive any more than you will the difference between a cheap and high performance SSD.You will however have doubled your risk of losing data to a drive failure.
Bob Todd - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
Understood, and I don't really care that it's set up as a RAID 0 array. What I'm really after is just mSATA (or NGFF now) + 9.5mm HDD. I'll gladly give up a few millimeters in any laptop for a full height HDD. Newegg had the HGST 1TB drives for $65 for quite a while. That plus a 256GB mSATA is an ideal setup for me. Unfortunately Lenovo seems to be the only manufacturer including mSATA/NGFF support into most of their lineup. And I wouldn't really care if they throw two mSATA drives in RAID 0. I have sysprep'd OS images set up how I want them, and anything important goes to a home server with 2 disk redundancy, with the stuff I really care about in the cloud as well. I screw around with my hardware enough that wiping the system drives on any of them isn't going to make me lose any sleep. If one of the mSATA drives died I'd just replace it and restore from the last daily backup.Majes - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
I was pretty dissapointed in the MSI GX60... The video card did not switch as advertised for some of my games, and was quite a hassle to deal with. Would have rather they just put in the 7970m as a dedicated card than do all the switching based on program. I returned my laptop in less than a week I was so dissatisfied.My two cents anyway :-/
will54 - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 - link
notebookcheck reviewed the GX60 a while back and the CPU bottlenecked the GPU so bad that some games were below the 660M and 3630QM.whyso - Thursday, May 2, 2013 - link
The a10 bottlenecks quite badly. It can be seen in the toms hardware review or the notebookcheck review. Even looking at the bf3 singleplayer benchmarks we see a cpu problem at lower settings (and looking at other bf3 reviews practically any cpu will not bottleneck bf3 singleplayer). BF3 multiplayer is going to kill this thing. Hitman is flat out unplayable. You can see a lot in that review that in a lot of games you are limited to only 40-50fps in current and old games, as hardware requirements rise you are going to be cpu limited to 30 fps or below.In my opinion gpu bottleneck is much preferable to cpu bottleneck. You can always work around a gpu bottleneck but a cpu bottleneck is much harder. Its better to have a laptop than can play all games on average settings than one that can play 75% of games on high and 25% not at all.