iBuyPower Valkyrie CZ-17 Notebook Review: MSI and iBuyPower Tangle With Alienware
by Dustin Sklavos on August 21, 2012 12:01 AM ESTBattery Life
NVIDIA's Optimus technology has done some pretty crazy things to the gaming notebook market. Batteries in gaming notebooks used to be glorified UPS systems, but now you can actually get halfway decent running time out of a hulking gaming notebook. iBuyPower's Valkyrie CZ-17 isn't going to compete with an ultrabook or even an 11" monster like the Clevo W110ER, but it puts in a strong showing nonetheless.
Probably owing to the increased efficiency of Ivy Bridge, the CZ-17 is competitive with the Alienware M17x R3, which is really the test we wanted to see. More importantly, we have a hulking desktop replacement notebook that's still able to run off the mains for more than four hours (gaming notwithstanding). Progress is good, and it's doubly nice to see an ODM notebook that's able to hang with a bigger vendor as battery life optimization is often one of the first things to go in systems like these.
Noise and Heat
iBuyPower's Valkyrie CZ-17 comes built on MSI's extra thick GT70 chassis, but the GT70 bulk doesn't go to waste. The cooling system is remarkably efficient and because of the increased thickness of the fan, the actual pitch of the system noise is lower as well. Despite hitting 47dB over an extremely heavy load (100% load on both CPU and GPU), the low whooshing noise is much more tolerable than the high-pitched whine smaller fans like the ones in the Razer Blade produce.
Thermals are actually pretty strong, too. The CPU is still running in the low 80s instead of at spec as most vendors like to push them these days, and the GTX 675M, despite being a 100W TDP part in a seven pound notebook, still peaks at just 80C.
Display Quality
The display employed in the iBuyPower Valkyrie CZ-17 is manufactured by Chi Mei, and while some of its measurements aren't excellent and it's still a TN panel, I found it to be a tangible improvement over the display on my M17x R3 in practice owing chiefly to the matte finish. Viewing angles are also quite good, but some users may take issue with the slightly grainy matte finish used.
As you can see it's among our best and brightest, producing good to excellent results in all of our tests. While it's not on the level of an IPS display, the Chi Mei panel in the CZ-17 will be more than adequate for most users and is in a completely different class than the panels typically used in consumer notebooks.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
35 Comments
View All Comments
xTRICKYxx - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
I don't understand why they chose a rebranded 580M over the 7970M....And 4GB of VRAM is absolutely overkill for 1920x1080 even with maxed anti-aliasing.
The pricing is actually quite good for what you get, but the 7970M is cheaper and beats the 675M....
Mugur - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
Optimus?Freakie - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
This. Once AMD can compete on the battery front, then they will find themselves very successful in this market because in this economy, people want to merge devices into one package and having a gaming rig with low battery life is hard to justify over a dedicated desktop for gaming and a laptop for when you're somewhere else. But if you throw in 4+hrs of 720p video watching, then suddenly you can combine your two devices and save some money in the mean-time.But of course, AMD has to completely change the way they do Drivers to pull that off. Nvidia has done damned good work on their drivers to get Optimus to work so smoothly, and it took a few hiccups along the way. And as we've seen with AMD, they really suck at implementing new software features over a whole family of products.
But I of course await the day when AMD can become more competitive :)
jtd871 - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
I was actually shopping this unit w/ the 7970m within the past 24hrs as a replacement for my 5-yo lappie (ThinkPad T61p with Core 2 and Quadro NVS140M - don't laugh still runs great for older stuff).However, I then learned about the recent Enduro (AMDs Optimus) issues with laptops using the 7970m (and possibly all GCN dGPUs), and stopped shopping as seriously until such time as AMD works out their issues with Enduro.
That having been said, I'm still glad to have Dustin's opinion on the rest of the build.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
I'm meeting with AMD tomorrow to discuss Enduro/Switchable Graphics, so hopefully they'll have something to tell/show me in regards to drivers. [Crosses fingers...]mpschan - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
I'm sure you're planning on it already, but please let us know if there are any developments on that front (assuming no NDA of course). AMD desperately needs this feature in the mobile space.TheHolyLancer - Wednesday, August 22, 2012 - link
As an owner of a saiger NP9170 w7970m that is having massive driver issues (since the NP9170 is optimus enabled, and something about how the output from the GPU has to go thru the IGP....)I would love to know what will their response to this issue.
ATM, I have to run the old custom version of the driver from saiger as the newest offcial driver will not install willingly, if I force it by pointing the driver update to an extracted driver folder's right location and update to the newest version, I get issues if I run two copies of eve online (or two copies any any two game that uses discreet). The performance boost is very nice tho, granted at the point it was more like 100 fps vs 60-70 fps so I reverted to the old driver that lets me run multiple games at the same time without crashing badly.
jtd871 - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
Whoops, must have confused this with the Origin/Sager/AVA machines. iBuyPower doesn't show AMD graphics as an option for the CZ-17...hardwareguy - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
My M17xR4 with the 7970 can hit about 4 hours on battery with pretty high web use and visual studio. Buddy with same laptop who does everything through RDP gets about an extra hour.xTRICKYxx - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
Nice! I didn't know the Walter White got an Alienware.