AVADirect Clevo X7200: Six Cores, SSD RAID, and GTX 480M SLI Yields World's Fastest DTR Notebook

Fifteen Pounds of Potent Performance

Do you want a light laptop with great battery life? How about something that won't cost an arm and a leg? Or perhaps you'd prefer a nicely balanced system that does well in all areas even if it never truly shines? No? You want pedal-to-the-metal performance at all costs—weight and battery life be damned? Well, then, whip out your checkbook and get ready to blow your intended house down payment, because that sort of notebook doesn't come cheap.

What will $4000 to $6000 get you? If you don't absolutely need the transportability factor, you could buy three potent gaming desktops for the same price as a single Clevo X7200. However, the X7200 includes a display and all the accessories, plus a 30 minute UPS, and it can hang with midrange SLI and CrossFire desktops when it comes to gaming performance. If that's what you're looking for—or perhaps you need a mobile workstation so you don't have to try and pack around a 50 pound desktop, plus the LCD—then look no further. This is the new gold standard for DTR performance.

We've railed against the Clevo designs in the past, for looking cheap and using far too much plastic. The X7200 also improves on those areas, and it's easily the nicest Clevo notebook I've tested over the past three years. Brushed aluminum on the LCD cover and palm rests is a welcome change and less prone to attracting fingerprints. I'll even give Clevo a pass on the glossy LCD, because let's be honest: no one is going to try using this thing outside. 30-45 minutes of battery life is the most you'll get, unless you want to carry around a portable generator in a backpack.

But with all the good, the old Clevo keyboard layout rears its ugly head again and makes us wonder why so many companies refuse to make a proper notebook keyboard. My first encounter with this keyboard was in the old Clevo M570RU—the first DX10 8800M notebook we tested. Three years later and the GTX 260M is about the same as that old 8800M GTX. But while NVIDIA has at least improved performance and power requirements on their G92-based mobile GPUs, the Clevo keyboard hasn't changed one bit. It was weak then and it's even worse now; what's really sad is that all they need to do is grab something similar to the Dell M6500 or ASUS G73 keyboard and we wouldn't need to have this paragraph. Can you type on the keyboard? Sure, but every time I want Home, End, PgUp, or PgDn I'm reminded that Clevo thinks I'm stupid for using such keys, and an Fn key combination is required. And don’t even get me started about the 10-key….

So in summary, there are four major drawbacks with the X7200: the price, the weight, the battery life, and the keyboard. AVADirect counters such naysayers with performance, performance, performance, and more performance. As a gaming notebook or a portable workstation, the Clevo X7200 excels, closing the gap between desktops and DTRs once more. Yes, you're still paying essentially twice as much for the same level of performance, and you simply can't get the equivalent of desktop GTX 480 SLI (or HD 5870 CrossFire) in a notebook, but you can run every game currently available at 1080p and high detail settings, often with 4xAA enabled.

There's also the question of stability, and here again we can report that the X7200 was exemplary. We had a few snafus with some benchmarks not wanting to run properly (i.e. 3DMark Vantage didn't like PhysX on the GPU with the current drivers, and Furmark manages to pull more power than the PSU can supply so it switches off and leaves you on battery power), but the system never crashed, shut down unexpectedly, or any other troublesome behavior. All of our gaming and application tests ran without a hitch, delivering the expected performance.

As this is a Clevo "whitebook", the usual suspects like Sager, Eurocom, and others will ship similar systems. Sager looks to be slightly more expensive than AVADirect with fewer customization options, while Eurocom takes the opposite approach with the Panther 2.0 and charges significantly more but includes extras like HDMI input, support for a fourth HDD (if you omit the DVD/BRD), up to 3x8GB RAM, Xeon CPUs, and several other GPU options. AVADirect gets our recommendation by virtue of being the least expensive if you want "reasonable" options, but Eurocom is probably worth the price premium if you're looking at a mobile workstation/server with a Xeon CPU, Quadro GPU, and gobs of memory. Such notebooks aren't for your average Joe, but if you have a need for speed, the X7200 delivers.