AVADirect's Clevo P170HM with GeForce GTX 485M: High-End You've Been Waiting For..

Introducing the Clevo P170HM and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 485M

When we reviewed the Clevo W880CU and, by extension, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480M, we were perplexed. Certainly NVIDIA had reclaimed the mobile graphics crown and no one could dispute that, but at what cost? The 480M was a cut-down mobile version of the already dire desktop GeForce GTX 465M. We even begged the question: "Wouldn't the prudent thing to do have been to let ATI have their cake for the time being and try and push GF104 into laptops?" Today we have a better answer. AVADirect has been kind enough to send us a Clevo P170HM notebook outfitted with NVIDIA's latest and greatest, the GF104-based GeForce GTX 485M.

We're not going to lie; this is the mobile part we've been waiting for from NVIDIA ever since the GeForce GTX 460 was released. GF104 has been recently succeeded by the GF114 powering the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, but in a strange twist of fate, only notebooks will ever see a full-blown GF104. While the desktop version was trimmed down to 336 shaders, the mobile one powering the 485M features all 384.

AVADirect was gracious enough to provide us a Sandy Bridge notebook during a period when Sandy Bridge has been incredibly scarce from any angle, and the Clevo P170HM is the successor to the previously-reviewedW880CU. This is the configuration they shipped us:

Clevo P170HM Review Unit Specifications
Processor	Intel Core i7-2720QM (4x2.2GHz, 32nm, 6MB L3, Turbo to 3.3GHz, 45W)
Chipset	Intel HM67
Memory	2x4GB DDR3-1066 (Max 4x4GB)
Graphics	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 485M 2GB GDDR5 (384 CUDA cores, 575MHz/1150MHz/3GHz Core/Shader/RAM Clocks)
Display	17.3" LED Glossy 16:9 1920x1080 (LG LP173WF1-TLC1 Panel)
Hard Drive(s)	Crucial RealSSD 300 128GB SATA 6Gbps SSD Seagate Momentus XT 500GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gbps Hybrid HDD/SSD
Optical Drive	BD-ROM/DVD+-RW Combo Drive
Networking	JMicron PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Realtek RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
Audio	Realtek ALC892 HD Audio Five speakers and subwoofer 5.1 audio jacks with S/PDIF
Battery	8-Cell, 10.8V, 77Wh battery
Front Side	Infrared port Wireless switch Indicator lights
Left Side	CATV jack Ethernet jack 2x USB 3.0 USB 2.0 4-pin FireWire port MMC/SD/MS reader
Right Side	Optical drive Headphone jack Microphone jack Line-out/digital out jack Line-in jack USB 2.0
Back Side	Kensington lock Exhaust vent eSATA HDMI DVI AC adaptor jack Exhaust vent
Operating System	Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Dimensions	16.22" x 10.87" x 1.65"-1.79" (WxDxH)
Weight	8.60 lbs
Extras	2MP Webcam Flash reader (MMC, SD/Mini SD, MS/Duo/Pro/Pro Duo) Blu-ray drive USB 3.0 Bluetooth 5.1 integrated sound 103 key keyboard with 10-key
Warranty	1-year limited warranty
Pricing	Available starting at $1611

The two banner items in our review unit are going to be the Sandy Bridge-based Intel Core i7-2720QM and the shiny new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 485M. The Cougar Point chipset bug took a major bite out of the industry, so we appreciate AVADirect being willing to send us a review unit despite that. The Core i7-2720QM is one of those moronically fast new Sandy Bridge processors, built on a 32nm process and equipped with four Hyper-Threaded cores and 6MB of L3 cache. Turbo speeds are impressive to say the least: the i7-2720QM has a nominal stock clock of 2.2GHz, but is able to turbo up to 3GHz on all four cores, 3.2GHz on two cores, and 3.3GHz on just one core. A 3GHz mobile quad core, especially with the kind of performance Sandy Bridge yields, would've been unheard of not too long ago.

Of course, the really big news item here is NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 485M. Since the GF104 was released (and later refreshed by the GF114), I felt like that was the core that really should've gone mobile. The GF100-based GeForce GTX 480M was too horribly trimmed, essentially a lower-clocked version of the disappointment that was the desktop GeForce GTX 465, and as a result it wasn't the homerun AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5870 killer we wanted. That changes with the 485M.

NVIDIA has kept the stratospheric 100W TDP of its predecessor and used that thermal budget more efficiently. The 485M is a full-fledged GF104, something we never saw on the desktop. It sports 384 CUDA cores, with reasonable clocks of 575MHz on the core and 1150MHz on the shaders. The anemic 2.4GHz clock of the 480M's GDDR5 has been supplanted by a more reasonable 3GHz clock (though still a healthy distance from the 3.6GHz AMD is able to achieve on the Radeon HD 6970M), and that GDDR5 enjoys a healthy 256-bit memory bus. The net result is a chip that sports substantially higher clocks and a higher shader count than its predecessor.

Rounding out our review configuration of the Clevo P170HM is a Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB solid state drive, currently one of the only SSDs on the market supporting SATA 6Gbps, along with a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB hybrid drive pulling mass storage duties. The SATA 6Gbps functionality of the HM67 chipset is certainly in full effect, too, and looks to be supported in both drive bays. AVADirect also included a Blu-ray reader and the Clevo has a healthy amount of connectivity: USB 3.0, eSATA, FireWire, and gigabit and wireless networking are all accounted for. In fact the only curious omission is the lack of an ExpressCard slot, though given how everything else—even digital 7.1 audio—is accounted for, it's hard to imagine what you'd need to add.

Fast Hardware in a Candy Shell?

Around here it's fair to say we've been...unkind...towards Clevo's notebook builds. There's good reason for that: Clevo notebooks may support some of the fastest mobile hardware available, but they haven't traditionally housed it in the nicest chassis. When Jarred reviewed the Clevo X7200, he found that had changed somewhat, and the P170HM seems to be another moderate step forward.Superficially the P170HM is very clearly a Clevo design, and as a result is utterly devoid of color. Black is always going to be in fashion so there's no real argument here: the lid is black aluminum with a glossy black plastic trim that feels like the kind of accent glossy plastic was always best suited for. That understated use of glossy plastic continues when we open the notebook.

Except on the screen bezel. I am utterly mystified as to why the screen bezel has become the last outpost for glossy plastic on modern notebooks when it's one of the worst places for the material. The reflective nature of it is distracting and liable to only further irritate users who have largely grown weary of screens with glossy finishes. Mercifully the gloss only materializes in one other place: a tasteful trim around the aluminum palm rest beneath the keyboard. The rest of the interior surfaces of the P170HM (excluding the white-LED infused indicator bar) are a black matte plastic that seems sturdy enough if a little chintzy.

The keyboard, of course, remains the bane of Jarred's existence. That's understandable: as far as chiclet keyboards go, Clevo's remain among the worst we've seen. The keys are loose, extremely clicky, and you can hear the entire keyboard rattle if you're a key abuser like I am. Worse still, the layout is utterly moronic and Clevo seems steadfast in their refusal to change it. There's a massive amount of wasted space on either side of the keyboard on this chassis (and indeed, even on the 15.6" models), and the non-standard layout of the 10-key makes it next to useless. The whole point of a 10-key is to be able to use it by touch in a hurry, not to be constantly perplexed as to why the enter key is where the decimal point is supposed to be. This is a completely thoughtless design, but on the bright side Clevo did make one update to their keyboard: they painted red arrows on the W-A-S-D cluster. Because that was what was poorly engineered and unintuitive.

Fortunately the rest of the build is still a step up and feels less brutally cheap than old Clevo notebooks. There's still a way to go; a notebook this pricey (and it costs this much just about everywhere, so you can't fault AVADirect) should have a classier, sturdier chassis, especially given the expensive and powerful components it was designed to house. Hopefully if we keep harping about this eventually someone at Clevo will get the memo, but until then you should feel at least reasonably confident that the P170HM has a better build than its predecessors did.

Sandy Bridge: Breaking Hearts and Records

We've had a chance to look at some faster Sandy Bridge kit previously, but the Intel Core i7-2720QM we requested in our review unit promises to supplant the commonly seen older i7-720QM and i7-740QM floating around in the marketplace today. Those chips sport Turbo clocks that peak on a single core below what the 2720QM is capable of on all four cores, so our application testing is liable to be a bloodbath for last generation's gaming notebooks.

Even ignoring the way PCMark tends to skew in favor of SSD-equipped notebooks, it's still impressive to see the Core i7-2720QM take nearly every chip on the block to task. Only the Clevo X7200, with its hex-core, 130-watt i7-980X is able to best it: last generation's i7-820QM can't catch up.

Futuremark's 3DMark suite bears out the equally improved performance of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 485M: it trounces the 480M and Mobility Radeon HD 5870 by extension, and is only eclipsed by the X7200 with its pair of 480Ms in SLI. Of course, if you were completely insane you could always order the X7200 with two 485Ms and get in the mobile space what was, at least for a time (and arguably may still be), one of the best desktop GPU pairings available. Sure it'll cost you an extra $1,400 for the upgrade over the stock 460M, but that's still an awful lot of performance to be able to pick up and move.

Gaming: What the GTX 480M Should've Been

I don't make any effort to hide my disappointment with NVIDIA's misbegotten GeForce GTX 480M: trying to cram a chip that was already hot and inefficient by desktop standards into a notebook was ludicrous. Thankfully the era of the 480M has passed, and the era of the 485M is upon us. On paper the 485M is promising, with only AMD's Radeon HD 6970M to really oppose it. We'll be looking at a laptop with that chip soon enough, but it's unlikely to bridge the gap between HD 5870 and the GTX 485M.

At our "high" preset, the GeForce GTX 485M is able to handle all of our games at up to the P170HM's native resolution of 1080p with power to spare, often dwarfing the Mobility Radeon HD 5850 and 5870. The 480M also remains largely outclassed here: this is the chip we wanted the 480M to be.

At 1080p the difference is only more pronounced. Keep in mind that the Quadro 5000M in the HP EliteBook 8740w is the workstation equivalent of the GeForce GTX 480M, and is basically run roughshod over by the new chip. In fact the only instance where the 480M SLI solution makes a major difference in playability is in our grueling Call of Pripyat test: the 485M is otherwise the king of the hill.

Battery Life

It stands to reason that even with a 77Wh battery, the P170HM's running time off the mains is not long for this world. That has been true of most of the high-end gaming notebooks we've reviewed: when your GPU alone draws north of 50 watts under load, it's hard for the battery to be anything more than a glorified UPS system. With that said, Sandy Bridge has brought big gains in terms of power efficiency and Clevo has outfitted the P170HM with a beefier battery than we're used to seeing.

Sandy Bridge helps the P170HM beat two hours in two of our tests. Compared to the other gaming notebooks, it's actually a reasonably efficient machine (although it doesn't benefit from NVIDIA's Optimus technology), but one look at Compal's NBLB2 can tell you what a different less of a GPU can make. The P170HM is also nearly nine pounds, making it less than ideal for anything other than being moved from table to table.

Noise and Heat

In keeping with Sandy Bridge being a healthy step up over Clarksfield and the GeForce GTX 485M being a healthy step up over the 480M, it's reasonable to expect heat (and consequently noise) will be less of an issue for the P170HM than it was for the W880CU that had to contend with cooling those older parts. 

Indeed, the P170HM produces excellent thermals at both idle and load, doing a fine job of keeping both the processor and GPU cool. In a desktop those core temperatures would be more alarming, but in a mobile chassis it's not uncommon to see a CPU hit nearly 80C. Meanwhile 83C on the GPU is impressively low given the TDP of the chip.

Surface temperatures for the P170HM are also very reasonable even under load, with no major hot spots forming during gaming.

Unfortunately the great thermal performance does come at a cost: fan noise is constant and the P170HM does spin up noticeably under sustained load. It isn't jet engine loud and you're not going to call your friends over to tell them how stupidly loud your new gaming notebook is, but the fans definitely make themselves known during gaming.

1080p Remains Better

We had a great run of quality 1080p panels for a while, right up until the ASUS N53Jf went and boned everything. Even still, the N53Jf's screen offered better quality than the 1366x768 panels we review tend to have. The P170HM sports one of the lesser 1080p panels we've seen, generally landing in the middle of the pack.

The essential problem with the P170HM's screen is that it's simply too dim. The low maximum brightness results in a fairly poor contrast ratio, but on the flipside, the color accuracy and gamut are among the better we've seen.

Unfortunately, viewing angles are less than ideal. The P170HM's screen suffers from "sweet spot" issues; it's very hard to find just the right angle to keep the top or bottom from getting washed out. This shouldn't be a major problem unless you're playing something like Doom 3 or Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but it only serves to underline the continuing problem of cheap TN panels plaguing the market. 

Conclusion: A Win for NVIDIA, a Mixed Bag for Clevo

At CES I had the opportunity to express to NVIDIA personnel both my enthusiasm for the GeForce GTX 460 and my stunning lack thereof for the GeForce GTX 480M. The GF100 really never should've been shoehorned into notebooks, and mercifully NVIDIA finally obsoleted it in the mobile sector in favor of the vastly more streamlined GF104.

It took us until GF114 to see what a GF104 with all of its cores might look like, but now it looks like NVIDIA may have been harvesting those fully functional GF104 chips for the 485M. Speculation isn't necessary here, though, only the bottom line: the GeForce GTX 485M is the leap in mobile graphics performance we've sorely needed. The 480M was incrementally faster than the Mobility Radeon HD 5870, which was incrementally faster than the 285M, which was incrementally faster than the 280M, ad nauseam. This is real progress, and it's easy to recommend...if you have the cash for it.

Clevo's P170HM is more difficult to recommend. This is definitely a better built, better feeling chassis from Clevo, so we can be thankful that they're not shipping notebooks in candy shells anymore. Unfortunately complaints old and new still loom over this machine: Clevo's keyboards remain both punishingly cheap and badly designed, and the 1080p screen would be perfectly serviceable except were it not for having such a finicky sweet spot.

I'd be remiss in not mentioning the Intel Core i7-2720QM beating at the heart of the P170HM, however briefly. Unless you've missed all the coverage, it should be plainly obvious by now that Sandy Bridge is another massive jump in processor performance. If you're going to shell out this kind of cash for a notebook, Sandy Bridge is absolutely worth waiting for. AVADirect offers a preorder on this and other Sandy Bridge notebooks; if you're the kind of performance-oriented user a notebook like this is catering to, that's going to be a better option instead of going the Veruca Salt route: "But Daddy, I want a gaming notebook now!"

We would like to thank AVADirect for graciously sending us the P170HM despite the Sandy Bridge recall so we could get a chance to test NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 485M with Intel's best and brightest backing it up. We expect the Cougar Point issue to finally fade away later this month, with widespread availability of Sandy Bridge notebooks and desktops in April.