Novatech X1 GTX Pro (Clevo M980NU) User Review

Novatech X1 GTX (Clevo M980NU) Review

by Henry Butt

The X1 GTX is a brand new product for Novatech coming in right at the top of their range. It combines the most powerful dual cure mobile CPU from Intel with two of the latest nVidia 280M GTX graphics cards to produce probably the most powerful gaming notebook you can buy today.



Specification

• Screen: 18.4” (1920 x 1080) Full HD with Gloss Finish
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T9900 (3.06GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 6MB Cache)
• Memory: 4GB DDR3 RAM
• Storage: 2 x Samsung 64GB SSD, 1 x 500GB 7200RPM HDD
• Optical Drive: Blu-Ray / DVD+-RW
• Wireless: Realtek 8187B (AGN)
• Graphics: 2 x nVidia GeForce 280M GTX 1GB DDR3
• 2 Mega Pixel Camera
• Battery: 12 Cell Lithium Polymer
• Dimensions: 439mm x 299mm x 44mm
• Weight: 4.9KG with Battery
• OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit
• Retail Price: £2741.50 inc. VAT

Build and Design

There is no other way of describing the appearance of the X1 but breathtaking. From the sleek black gloss finish highlighted by LED system lighting to the borderless screen and macbookesque keyboard. The only slight disappointment to the high end finish is the plastic used for the area around the keyboard which, although makes a nice contrast, also looks slightly cheap and out of place. As always however, the acres of glossy plastic are very easily marked by fingerprints and small scratches so you have to be careful while using this laptop. It is obvious that this machine is designed with gamers in mind – aside from the “look at me” system lights there is eight user programmable gaming shortcut buttons to the left of the keyboard.



As one would expect for a notebook of this price tag, build quality is exceptional. All of the plastics are of the highest quality, even the cheap looking matte plastic around the keyboard, and the entire machine feels like it has some substance. There is no palm rest flex altogether and applying pressure to the back of the screen produces no show through whatsoever The hinges also feel very solid and in fact are all that holds the lid shut when the notebook is closed. It is noticable however that the furthest you can set the screen back is at a 45 degree angle which some users may find annoying, however is not surprising considering the size of the screen. The notebook itself is around 6 cm thick when closed so it is no surprise that it weighs a hefty 4.9kg including the battery.



The LED system lighting is something which really sets this notebook out from the crowd. It is a great feature although could have been implemented slightly better. It is a shame that the keyboard is not backlit as even some much lower spec machines feature backlit keyboards and it’s also a shame that only the lid and vent lights change colour, with the majority remaining blue all of the time. It is also a shame that you cannot switch the lights off as they are quite intrusive when watching a movie in the dark.



Screen

The X1 has one of the best screens I have ever seen on a notebook. Aside from being bright and clear it has a 16:9 aspect ratio which is favourable for watching DVD’s and Blu-ray as it eliminates the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. The screen itself is Full HD (1920 x 1080) so is perfect for gaming and watching movies in high definition and also has the almost standardized glossy coating which improves clarity and contrast although is a little over-reflective compared to some others. The screen has great viewing angles from the sides, however is not so good vertically. Overall the screen is very impressive however it may be nice to see Novatech offering some sort of LED backlit display to improve brightness and power consumption.



Speakers

The speakers on the X1 are way above average for a notebook. They produce a surprising volume and have reasonably bass for their size. This is probably due to the sizable (for a notebook) subwoofer on the underside. They do however lack substance do not seem well balanced, even when you switch between the optimized modes using the media button above the keyboard.



Although the X1 uses integrated audio by Realtek, it still produces 8 channel output via the software configurable audio jacks on the right hand side, and also has a digital output.

Processor and Performance

The X1 sports the latest Intel Core 2 Duo T9900 which is the most powerful mobile dual core processor that is available at the moment, running at a healthy 3.06 GHz. This is supported by dual nVidia 280M GTX graphics cards which are also the most powerful mobile graphics cards available at the moment, making this one of the most powerful gaming notebooks available today. If this power isn’t enough for you however, Novatech provide the option of upgrading to the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9300 processor, although this upgrade costs in excess of £500.



Being such a large machine, the X1 has enough room for three hard disk drives and in the Pro configuration, they are filled by two Samsung 64GB Solid State Drives for extreme performance and a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive for storage.

Benchmarks

CPU-Z



GPU-Z



Windows Experience Index



HD Tune

-SSDs (in Raid)



- HDD



3DMark06



- SLI Disabled



-SLI Enabled



3DMark05



-SLI Disabled



-SLI Enabled



Super Pi



Cinebench R10





Heat and Noise

Thanks to the insane amount of high performance components under the hood, the X1 sports three cooling fans, the larger cooling the CPU and two smaller ones cooling the two GPUs. Under normal usage, the fans are barely audible, in fact, when the “silent” mode where the machine clocks down the CPU and GPUs, the fans actually speed up! One area where the X1 does get slightly warm is the right palm rest, under which the third hard drive and batter reside, although this is far from unbearable.



Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard is one of the few areas that the let X1 down. Although it has been designed to mimic the integrated style of a Macbook keyboard, it sadly suffers from a noticeable amount of flex all over, although this isn’t really noticeable during normal usage. It is also noticeable that the keyboard isn’t central to the rest of the machine – although this doesn’t affect operation majorly, it takes a while to get used to and makes the machine seem slightly unbalanced. This does however provide room for the eight user programmable gaming buttons to the left of the keyboard which are a welcomed addition considering the nature of this laptop. It might however have been better to have four on each side of a centred keyboard; however this is only personal preference.



Above the keyboard there is a variety of touch sensitive buttons which are mainly to control built in functions such as the web camera, Bluetooth, wireless, and volume. The buttons are reasonably sensitive and change colour when they are pressed so you know the touch has registered. The volume control is in the form of a touch slider which works very well – the only drawback being the feedback noise from the computer when this is altered. It would have been nice to see some media control buttons alongside these which are now standard on most notebooks.



The touchpad is another area which lets the X1 down slightly. Although it is large and well placed it has a gloss finish which makes it difficult to navigate around it and it also seems quite unresponsive. This is largely due to the borderless nature of the touchpad as it is part of the palm rest which also has a gloss finish. It is also noticeable that the touchpad buttons are a little far from the actual touchpad and the fingerprint reader in between the buttons is far too easy to knock accidently which brings up the included software.



I would definitely recommend using a proper mouse with the X1 which you will probably be doing anyway if you are using it as a gaming notebook, however this is no excuse for the poor touchpad.

Input and Output Ports

The X1 has almost every connection you could possibly need from a notebook and probably more. It includes both a DVI port and an HDMI port for outputting high definition video to an external display. The audio connectors are well placed on the right hand side of the notebook, however it would be nice to see more of the connectors on the rear side so the cables are kept out of the way.

All descriptions are from left to right



1. DVI
2. 2 x USB 2.0
3. Ethernet Jack
4. HDMI
5. Optical Drive
6. 5 in 1 Media Card Reader
7. Expresscard Slot
8. Mini-Firewire Port



1. Headphone Jack
2. Microphone Jack
3. Line Out
4. S/PDIF Out
5. CATV Jack
6. 1 x USB 2.0
7. 1 x USB 2.0 / E-SATA
8. Kensingon Slot
9. Power Button



1. Speaker
2. Status Lights
3. Speaker



1. GPU Exhaust
2. AC in
3. CPU Exhaust


Wireless

The X1 makes use of the Realtek 8187B AGN card which has a reasonable range and achieves decent speeds even when only using a G connection. Sadly this card isn’t quite up to the level of the Intel cards and it would be nice on a notebook of this price to have a slightly better card as standard. The X1 also features Bluetooth which is expected on a laptop of this calibre.

Battery and PSU

Due to the nature of the X1, battery life isn’t an area in which it excels. Even though it sports a large 12 cell battery, you would be lucky to get 1h 30 out of it under minimal usage and brightness, however under load the battery life becomes negligible. It would have been nice if Novatech had included a binary graphics option such as the one available on the Alienware M15X to improve battery life however with the large screen, it is unlikely that it wouldn’t improve battery life significantly.



The PSU of this notebook is nothing but huge. It is almost twice the size of my M570RU’s one which is large itself. It weighs at least a kilogram so also detracts from the already non-existent portability of the notebook.

Operating System and Software

My review model of the X1 had Vista Home Premium 64bit installed, however it is available with most flavours of Vista or without an operating system at all. It is nice to see that for once, Novatech have included a disk as well as the system restore function. The only pre-installed software that the X1 ships with is a 60 day trial of Microsoft Office and the only disk which comes with it is a Driver disk which also contains a .PDF version of the user manual.



Customer Support

Novatech provides some of the best customer support I have ever experienced from a computer manufacturer. Every issue I have had with the laptop I purchased from them has been dealt with in a professional and efficient way, and I have been nothing less than 100% satisfied with it. Novatech have both phone support and a live chat which I have tried out and both seem to be very helpful. I have to say their live chat is on a whole different level to that of Dell. As standard, all Novatech laptops come with a 12 month return to base warranty, however this can be upgraded to a 2 year C & R warranty which I think is a must have.

Conclusion

The Novatech X1 GTX is one of the most powerful gaming notebooks available today and produces an extreme amount of power allowing it to chew through all of the latest games at amazing frame rates and also anything else you throw at it. The main downside of the notebook is the sheer size of the thing – it is around six centimetres thick and is larger than almost all 17” gaming notebooks today. This is very much a desktop replacement laptop designed for minimal movement, maybe to the odd LAN party, but not to be used as anything which requires remote portability.



Pros

• Sleek design with a premium finish
• Desktop performance in a laptop form factor
• Available with a variety of OS’s or none at all
• Great Build Quality
• Amazing Screen
• Dual Graphics

Cons

• Keyboard Quality
• Touchpad
• Size

Thanks to Chris and Charmaine at Novatech for organizing this review unit for me.

 

Great review!

Now we'll wait for your benches.

 

Hehe they're running as we speak!

 

Mr. HenryButt sir, you are a highly-worthy addition to the NBR community. Bravo on another excellent review. However, no rep until those scores come in,

T'is a shame and a shock about the keyboard. But I still can only hope that future Clevo models such as the W860CU look as stunning as this when released. Gimmicky lighting designs always get a thumbs up in my book.

 

Ooo that reminds me of something I was meaning to add... you dont seem to be able to turn the lights off which could be quite annoying when watching DVDs etc

 

Forgot to say congrats man! You must be a happy camper right about now.

 

Haha... sadly its only a review sample that Nova are letting me have for a week or two... then it goes back and they send me something else!

 

Thanks for the excellent write up! It's a little sad to read, actually, because I fear that the keyboard flex, touch pad, plastic finish, and volume changing sound feedback could add up to be pretty annoying over time.

 

Although I don't care for it's looks, I really like how Clevo uses a layout that allows a direct cooling method for the GPU's rather than heatpipes. It seems to make sense doing it this way.

 

I may have overexaggerated the keyboard flex slightly... it is not noticable while typing but when you apply more pressure it flexes. The volume slider is fine apart from the noise it makes... which I'm sure you can turn off somehow. I do still hate the touchpad though...

Now updated with benchmarks

 

Thanks for the update. You didn't happen to get CPU/GPU temps while running did you?

 

Wow henrybutt,

Those 3DMark06 are extremely low. I was expecting this rig to score much higher even with stock settings and drivers.

Can you run Vantage? Maybe it will perform better there.

 

same here. i thought it would be higher as well.

vantage is the way to go. dont forget to disable physx in nvidia control panel

great review HB

 

damn...the laptop looks sick. like a spaceship

 

Good reminder about the physx.

And the Vantage score is................................

 

Hey... I just managed to pick up a virus with it so just getting some antivirus on there but will download vantage tonight and then try and optimize the config for the benchmarks... any other tips?

 

OMG! That was fast.

That blows man. Too bad somebody can't invent a proactive anti-virus that seeks out the source and blows it up.

henrybutt, are you able to overclock the processor via the bios on this model?

 

always remember to add antivirus before conecting to internet

there are some nasty viruses and bugs doing the round the world trip at the moment. 3 london hospitals were hit and they had sophos network antivirus loaded. 1 hospital actually closed its doors to patients and ambulances.


i thought my luck was in after i loaded 186.03 as my vantage score jumped up by over 5000 and then i had to disable physx and it came down to earth with a bump.

 

Stop....using....3dmark 06, we can all start the movement by ending usage of it on new machines like this and the M17x.

 

I got the virus by trying to install games the quick way using PowerISO and my external hard drive but the new version of PowerISO that i downloaded didn't work and after just doing a scan, has turned out to be a virus Think I have got rid of it now so will download vantage

I am blatently being a massive noob right now but what effect does disabling PHYSX have?

 

seconded


??please

 

Vantage is downloading at the moment and Crysis is installing for Crysis benchmark

 

Hmmm... just loaded up Crysis and the screen has these kinda blu bars flashing across infront of whats actually on the screen... is this a sign of a GPU problem?

 

I actually have a list of A BUTT load of benchmarks



Crysis benchmarking tool (please provide a screeshot)
3dmark06 (for those people) @1280x1024 res and 1900 res
Vantage ( Run @ Performance mode.--- please list: Total score / CPU seperate and GPU seperate)
Devil May Cry 4 benchmarking tool (screenshot)
Farcry ( screenshot)
Street Fighter 4 (screenshot)
Last Remnant Benchmarking tool (screenshot)
Also,

Please run the following to test the CPU:

ORTHOS ( provide HWmonitor screen shoot afterwards
Wprime (screenshot)
SuperPi (screenshot)


For the GPU's please run the following:

Furmark (please post a screen shot of the max temp and the RES you ran @)
OCCT (highly recommended by a Forum user)

To monitor on your system components please use the following:
HWmonitor
CPU-z (display CPU information)
GPU-z (display GPU information and check your drivers)
Everest (little of everything, i highly recommend it)
Monitor TEMPs in game here

thaiphoonburner
spdtool these will help you change your Ram settings


To overclock your Card please use one of the following:
GPUtool (beta but worked great for me)
Ntune (official Nvidia App)
ATI Overdrive utilitys (not sure if they work on Nvidia's cards but they are Sweet apps)
SYSTool ( OC both CPU and GPU)



Other useful tools:
Fraps ( record and monitor FPS IN-GAME)
RMclock( CPU stuff)
CPUgenie (change CPU vcore...not tested)

 

Thanks... Love the pun

 

just for example first one is with physx on and second off.

theve gone up to 5100 since updating to 186.03 drivers with physx off but got no image saved.

 

can someone please run some sli enabled games

and do some crysis, farcry 2 and fallout 3 benchmarkings at the highest settings ...

Thanks

 

there is a bunch of M17x benchmarks (same performance)

I can try to dig them up if you would like ?

Or just to compare

 

well i would like to see the benchmarks directly from the m980nu itself ...

like to know if there are any ananomalies or not ...

wether if the sli setup on it has any problems ...

 

Ok... when I enable SLI I get these weird blue lines across the screen in Crysis and NFS underground (the 2 games I have installed so far) and also I believe in the 3Dmarks... does this mean the slave card is faulty?

 

ok i didn't know if you just wanted performance benchmarks

 

So updated 3dMark scores anyone? Can't laptops with single GTX 280m's get the same score as this laptop with SLI enabled? lol..

 

Does this look like your issue? LINK

 

Hmmm sounds similar... could this possibly be the reason there was a spare SLI cable included in the box?

 

That's odd. At least you have it to try.

 

Just run Vantage with one VGA for the first time. with physix on and off.

 

why it say nvidia SLI disable?
unless you don't have sli...

 

How do you turn PHYSX on and off?

 

Nvidia Control Panel. Same place where you turn SLI on and off.

 

never mind.. i just saw you got 1 gtx 280 in your sig

 

Appologies if it's already been mentioned but the only reason to run Vantage with PhysX disabled is because Futuremark see it as cheating and won't allow validated results with PhysX enabled. This is because with it turned on it affects the CPU scoring so gives an overall increase in results, not just the GPU scores. Of course this means with it on it's not very comparable to ATi card systems but then that's ATI's loss!

 

The review says 2.

 

Hey Mr. Butt. Can we have some benchmarks please? I would rather have these then 3dmark scores. But thats just me.

 

wouldnt it be nicer to have called him Mr. Henry ???

 

I figured the 3DMark06 scores would be higher with Dual SLi, but it's still pretty decent.

 

A rig with 3870's does better even stock. There is something going on with that laptop.

With that processor and dual 280's he should be getting around 16,000 stock.

Once whatever issues get ironed out, we'll see what it really can do.

 

Mandrake@M17X [email protected] plus Dual 280m gtx Oc'ed got 16200.

 

I had the same problem when I tried to play Bioshock with sli.. (blue bars flashing)

I noticed I had cpuid hardware monitor up, when I minimized it the flickering stopped.

If you hold the "light button" for a couple of seconds the lights turn off!

Btw is bioshock 1.1 the latest version? =p

edit
Also which bios version do you have??
edit2
just noticed I do not have any (free)antivirus either.. can someone recommend something? =D

 

Free antivirus? Sounds like trouble.

 

I can't wait to get mine today!!!
17/07/2009 8:00 OUT FOR DELIVERY