Maingear 13.3" Clutch 13 Ultraportable Notebook

Performance with Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Gaming Performance

To touch on gaming performance, we chose two games that draw moderately on system resources, Half-Life 2 Episode 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. We then ran a pre-recorded demo of each at a resolution of 1280x720. The resulting performance achieved is indicated in frames per second in the graph below.

And this is the part where the Clutch 13 cowers. We don't expect every ultraportable to handle games with ease, but we have seen $499 netbooks (the Asus Eee PC 1215N comes to mind) handle 3D games with more poise than this. Now, it's acceptable for some machines to not be well suited to games like this, and when a weaker GPU leads to longer battery life, that's oftentimes an acceptable substitute. But as you'll see in the next page, this isn't the case here. The battery life on the Clutch 13 is rather poor. Again, for a $1500 machine, we expected a little more in terms of the GPU.

The $1091 base configuration also has this configuration. Even at ~$1100, we don't think it's too much to ask to have an Optimus setup.