AVADirect Clevo P180HM Gaming Notebook Review
PCMark Vantage & PCMark 7
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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.
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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 |
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| 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 |
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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.
