AVADirect Clevo P180HM Gaming Notebook

AVADirect should include a bumper sticker with its Clevo P180HM notebook that says, "My desktop replacement beat up your Ultrabook and defiled your MacBook Air." Don't get transfixed on the notion that someone would be silly enough to own both of those ultraslim systems rather than choose one over the other. The point we're trying to make is that the P180HM is big, it's mean, and it makes a complete mockery of the mobile form factor. And you know what? We're totally cool with that.

Let's talk a moment about portability versus mobility. These aren't one in the same, and if that has you scratching your head, follow along, it will make sense in a moment. A Zenbook is mobile. So is your typical 15.6-inch notebook, and even some 17-inch systems. But there's a line in the sand between notebooks and desktop replacements, and once you cross it, your system is no longer mobile, it's portable.

 

The P180HM weighs upwards of 12 pounds, which is too heavy to toss into your bag on a whim or open up in a coffee shop and blend in inconspicuously with the other patrons. No, you carefully close up the P180HM, lift with two hands, and pack it neatly into your oversized laptop bag that's big enough to accommodate an 18.4-inch notebook. When you take it out at Starbucks, you mark off your area with yellow tape, tell everyone to stand back, and then place it on the coffee table with a thud. Your latte sits on the floor next to your foot, because there isn't room for it on the table, and because the P180HM would probably guzzle it up anyway. And you better be sure you're near a power source, there's no such thing as all-day computing on a desktop replacement.

The trade off you're making with systems like the P180HM is far less mobility for a whole heck of a lot more power in a form factor that's still portable. To wit, the customizable P180HM we received rocks a fast Core i7-2760QM quad-core processor, a heaping pile of RAM (12GB), and not one, but two GeForce GTX 560M GPUs configured in SLI. It's built for gaming on the go, and with an 18.4-inch LED backlit display, it's big enough to at least consider using as your main system at home. In fact, the P180HM is better spec'd than most mainstream desktops, and even rivals higher end machines. But unlike your desktop tower, you can have the P180HM packed up and ready to head out and kick some tail at the LAN party across town in under a minute. That's what we mean when we say it's portable. But is it practical to drop over two and a half large on a notebook of this caliber? Let's tackle that question beginning right now.

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There are a boatload of customizations you can make to the Clevo P180HM, and the one AVADirect sent our way is a higher end configuration with a price tag to match. Cost of entry is just shy of $1,870 and includes the same mammoth display and dual-GTX 560M configuration. AVADirect opted to surround these parts with lust-worthy components, including 12GB of DDR3-1333 memory, a wicked fast 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS solid state drive to make the OS fly, a 1TB Western Digital drive to store all our naughty files, a Blu-ray reader, and even a Bigfoot Networks Killer Wireless-N card. This thing is a beast; let's find out if it roars.


We're often critical of vendors who don't include a lint-free cloth with their systems, especially ones as glossy as the P180HM, so we were thrilled to see AVADirect toss one in with the accessories. As you'll discover in a moment, there's a lot of real estate to wipe down, so it's a good idea to keep the cloth handy (and your fingers clean).

What really excites us, however, is the included laptop bag. Remember, this is an 18.4-inch machine that isn't going to fit in your 15.6-inch bag, and will even give some 17-inch laptop bags a workout. Because AVADirect includes one, you don't have to worry about shopping for a compatible laptop bag that's big enough to hide a body inside. Other accessories include:

• Power cord and brick
• Various documentation
• 3.5-inch adapter bracket (in case you ever decide to port the SSD over to your desktop)
• CyberLink Creative Media Suite 8 CD
• Drivers and Utilities disc

It's a fairly small bundle, albeit one you're able to pile onto depending on which accessories you order through AVADirect, such as additional software, game controllers, and so forth. Noticeably absent from the system we received is a Windows disc or restore media, which is a bummer. However, you can add a recovery partition or bootable DVD to your system for $30, or $45 for both.

There isn't much in the way of desktop clutter on the P180HM, and the few items that are there are mostly utilities, not bloatware. One of the icons will disappear as soon as you activate the THX software, and the rest are related to the webcam, Bigfoot Networks NIC, macro key bindings, CyberLink software, and navigating Windows.

It took us 40 seconds to cold boot the P180HM into Windows and load the startup items, and 11 seconds to shut down. Not record breaking, and not too shabby either.

CyberLink Media Suite 8 is a generation behind the latest version, but still packs an assortment of tools for media chores like ripping audio CDs, copying and backing up your data, converting video, and perhaps most importantly, watching Blu-ray movies, whether it be on the 18.4-inch Full HD 1080p display or hooked up to your swank big screen HDTV via HDMI.

For an additional $40 over the base price, AVADirect will upgrade the P180HM's 802.11b/g/n wireless adapter to a Bigfoot Networks Killer Wireless-N 1103 internal PCI-E card. If we were configuring one of these systems on our own dime, we'd skip this dubious upgrade and apply the funds elsewhere, or pocket the cash and stock up on Amp and Funyuns. But if you do spring for the professional NIC, this is what the interface will look like, giving you more fine grain control over your Wi-Fi than what's available with a basic wireless adapter.

Fair warning -- none of our pictures do the P180HM justice. We realize that's a terrible lead-in to this part of the review, but it's not a cop out for lazy photography. It's extremely challenging to photograph a system as glossy this one, which looks incredibly sleek and slick in person, even if it doesn't show up well in pictures when you're constantly trying to battle reflections. That's not a knock against the P180HM, and as far as glossy systems go, this is one of the better looking ones on the market.



The first thing you need to know about P180HM is that it's big. Really big. It has an 18.4-inch LED backlit display with a Full HD 1920x1080 resolution. It's bright and vibrant, although the viewing angle is a little restrictive. There's a lot of real estate on the P180HM, and if you spend a significant amount of time playing with it, like we did, it will make 17-inch laptops almost feel small by comparison.

You should also know that the P180HM is heavy. As we pointed out earlier, this system is portable, meaning you can move it from room to room or across town to a LAN party with considerably less fuss than what's involved with lugging around a desktop tower, but it's not mobile. It weighs more than 12 pounds, is unwieldy considering its size, and the amount of horsepower it's packing requires having a power source close by for any extended computing or gaming sessions.


 
The entire lid is covered with a glossy finish accentuated with a tribal tramp stamp in the middle of its backside. It glows when the system is turned on, and just like in real life, it means you're in a for a fast and wild ride (don't forget to bring protection if you plan on surfing the Web -- antivirus software isn't installed by default).

That big hole in the center of the grill is for the power adapter, which is flanked by vents on both sides. It takes a bit of cooling prowess to keep a pair of GTX 560M GPUs and a quad-core processor in check, and towards that end, the P180HM is louder than most laptops. It's not to the point of being obnoxious, nor will you hear it over your headphones or speakers, but you'll definitely know when it's turned on. 

Flip open the lid and you'll be treated to more gloss, a sleek trackpad, fingerprint security, and a full-sized keyboard. Along the top of the keyboard are several touch-sensitive media buttons and volume control, each of which glows when the system is on. Over on the left side of the plank are a series of customizable macro keys, further reiterating that the P180HM is first and foremost a gaming machine.


There's a numpad on the right-hand side, though Clevo shortened the zero key and enter key, and moved the decimal button to the top. That takes some getting used to if you're a data entry nerd, otherwise you won't skip a beat the few times you actually use it.

Clevo squeezed a whole bunch of connectivity ports onto the left side of the P180HM, and AVADirect tossed in a Blu-ray reader. From left to right, here's what you'll find:

• DVI-I output
• Two USB 2.0 ports
• RJ-45 LAN jack (GbE LAN)
• HDMI output (with HDCP)
• 9-in-1 memory card reader
• Two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports
• Mini IEEE 1394a (FireWire) port

We like that the USB 3.0 ports are the ones closest to the front, as that's where you're most likely to plug an external drive into, leaving the other two for a keyboard or mouse.

Turn the P180HM around to the right side and you'll find another pair of USB 2.0 ports (bringing the total number of USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports to six), the power button. Kinsington lock, ExpressCard 54/34 slot, and audio jacks (headphone, microphone, S/PDIF output, and Line-in).

To start things off, we fired up Futuremark's system performance benchmark, PCMark Vantage. This synthetic benchmark suite simulates a range of real-world scenarios and workloads, stressing various system subsets in the process. Everything you'd want to do with your PC -- watching HD movies, music compression, image editing, gaming, and so forth -- is represented here, and most of the tests are multi-threaded, making this a good indicator of all-around performance.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage Simulated Application Performance

That thunk you just heard is your jaw hitting the floor, just like ours did after we ran this benchmark. At one point while PCMark Vantage was running, we thought we heard the P180HM let out a yawn, as if to tell us, "Is that all you got? I'm bored." And just to be sure everything was kosher, we ran the benchmark numerous times with similar results. A large chunk of the credit goes to OCZ's 120GB Vertex 3 Max IOPS SSD, but there's more to it than just that. Asus' Zenbook is also rocking a solid state drive, and even though it's a much slower one, it's still spunky enough to outpace high-end notebooks built around a mechanical hard drive. The P180HM scored almost twice as high as the Zenbook, which in addition to superior hardware (CPU, RAM etc), it also means AVADirect did a number of things right when putting together this machine.

In PCMark 7, the P180HM showed that it's performance wasn't a fluke. While we don't have a large database of PCMark 7 scores to compare with, this is one of the highest we've ever recorded, and not just for notebooks. The P180HM scored even higher than past desktop systems we've reviewed.

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage Simulated Gaming Performance

Next we switched gears to Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage benchmark, which focuses squarely on gaming performance. Some of the technologies in 3DMark Vantage are only available with DirectX 10, making this a better barometer of modern gaming prowess than the the older 3Mark06 benchmark. And unlike previous versions, 3DMark Vantage puts a bit more emphasis on the CPU rather than focusing almost entirely on the GPU(s).

Having a second GeForce GTX 560M GPU in SLI gives the P180HM a shot of gaming adrenaline, and sometimes the difference is significant. It scored almost twice as high as the MSI GT683R and Asus G74SX systems, both equipped with a single GTX 560M and comparable CPU. The difference isn't quite as dramatic when compared with systems wielding a higher end GPU, like the Maingear eX-L 15's GTX 485. The reason for this is because the GTX 485 is a much stronger GPU. Let's take a look:

	GeForce GTX 485M	GeForce GTX 560M	GeForce GTX 570M	GeForce GTX 580M
CUDA Cores	384	192	336	384
Processor Clock	1150MHz	1550	1150	1240
Texture Fill Rate (billions/sec)	36.8	24.8	32.2	39.7
Memory Clock	1500MHz	1250MHz	1500MHz	1500
Standard Memory Config	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory Interface	256-bit	Up to 192-bit	192-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	96.0	Up to 60	72	96.0

As you can see, the GTX 560M has some ground to make up against the GTX 485M, which can be confusing if you assume a higher model number automatically means better performance. That isn't the case, and it explains why a pair of GTX 560M GPUs doesn't run circles around a single GTX 485M, though they're certainly faster.

Futuremark 3DMark11 Synthetic DirectX Gaming

Futuremark 3DMark11

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark11, is specifically bound to Windows Vista and 7-based systems because it uses the advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 11, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows.  3DMark11 isn't simply a port of 3DMark Vantage to DirectX 11, though.  With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated four new graphics tests, a physics tests, and a new combined test.  We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark11's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1080 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

Almost as if taking our above explanation as a challenge, the P180HM turned on the jets in 3DMark 11 and jumped way ahead of Maingear's single GTX 485M equipped system. It was roughly 100 percent faster than systems running a single GTX 560M. It couldn't quite keep pace with the Alienware rig, nor did we expect it to, given the GPU advantages.

Same story with our library of 3DMark 11 Extreme scores, which are in short supply. In case you're wondering, the above score is very good for the Extreme preset setting we ran.

Performance Summary: AVADirect's Clevo P180HM opened a can of whoop-ass in Futuremark's PCMark Vantage benchmark and never lost momentum until the battery test portion of this article. Even then it wasn't as disastrous as you might expect for a system spec'd like this one. Having a second GTX 560M GPU in SLI proved the difference maker on more than one occasion, in terms of getting playable framerates at the P180HM's native 1920x1080 resolution, versus watching pretty graphics stutter sadly across the screen. That's before dialing down the eye candy, which means it's going to be awhile before you need to think about upgrading this notebook.

Outside of gaming, the P180HM ran like a thoroughbred, with much of the credit being owed to the OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS solid state drive. But it wasn't the SSD alone that drove the P180HM, credit also goes to AVADirect's selection of parts and overall build quality, all of which was top notch.



source:http://hothardware.com