Thinking of Clevo... few questions?

Hello

I've been lurking around the Clevo forum for a while now, reading through some of the reviews and threads. I was in the market to replace my ageing Dell M6600 which has provided stellar service so far but is just becoming too much of a lump to carry around for its performance so I'm due an upgrade. I'm considering either a smaller Clevo machine at 15", or go all out with a beast (I've seen reviews of the P870DM-G!) (which is about 1kg heavier than the M6600), as the Dell options for my laptop seem mediocre and more style over substance.

I know the new GTX 1080 has been released, so am holding off my purchase until they come out, had a few general questions

1) Is it likely that Clevo will release 15" versions with the top end card, as I understand they run cooler than the current generation?
2) I've read posts from buyers in the US who have resellers who offer Silicon Lottery chips and Delidding - do any EU resellers offer the same?
3) I was really pleased with Dell's service and warranty packages - how do Clevo resellers compare?
4) My Dell machine has a metal chassis, I can see Clevos may have metal lids but seem to use plastics for the base. How do people find this for durability? I will be carrying the laptop around in a laptop rucksack and the Dell hasn't had any issues.

Many thanks for your input.

 

Anything you hear currently will be hearsay until an official announcement on new models and hardware is released, but I'd say a 1080M at least is likely (consider the P750ZM/DM).

To each their own on this. You can check the reseller feedback section here on the forum, or browse the interwebs for reviews. Resellerratings.com is another source for reviews.

The opinion here is also subjective, of course, although most users find Clevos pretty robust. Definitely check out the reviews on the systems; NBR features some, and there are many posted in the forums (e.g., HTWingNut's reviews).

 

1) Very likely we'll see a 1080M based 15" model but you'll have to wait until around September/October.

2) You can try asking @XMG if they do it, don't know many other resellers. I know HIDEvolution does it and offer international warranty.

3) Dell's warranty will be better than any reseller. They have next day onsite which is hard to beat.

4) I've owned the M4800 and also an Alienware M18xR2 which also has a metal chassis. I currently have a P870DM and previously owned a P570WM. The Dell and Alienware's chassis was much more sturdy than the Clevo's. However the P870DM's chassis is pretty nice. I can't speak for the P750/770DM but they are probably a bit inferior compared to Clevo's P870DM flagship. They're not bad but don't expect Precision build quality.

 

Double post lol

 

You'd want to look around at resellers and see who maybe has the warranty/service options or upgrade options you might be looking for. There are quite a few company reps that hang out here that will help answer questions if you send them a message. Generally, Alienware does have pretty good cases, but Clevo will typically offer more upgrade and customization options, or features like raid configurations that are missing from Alienware.

 

1. Not sure about this
2. It really depends on Reseller. As far as I know, in the United States, only HIDEVOLUTION offer such service.
3. This also, it really depends on the reseller. For myself, I didn't really had any problem with "MY" Clevo seller.
4. I am currently using Clevo P770ZM, and it is not a bad machine in terms of build quality. It certainly is not going to be as good as Razer Blade or Macbook Pro, but as far as plastic goes, it is decent.

 

Thanks for all the replies. I'm waiting for the new models to come out before making my decision, it does look like I will go for a Clevo!

 

Yeah, as they look to be coming up soonish, if you aren't dealing with a failing computer and needing to upgrade asap, it's worth waiting to see what comes out next.

 

Thankfully Clevo is apt to adopt new hardware very quickly. New models should be right around the corner.

 

With regards to the 15 inch models, ours are always some of the fastest around while still keeping prices and battery life reasonable

 

1 - Yes
2 - obsidian-pc.com/ offer delided cpu´s
3 - XMG is excellent on this regard
4 - As long as you choose a mid-high or high end model you´re good to go. Still have a 9 year old M570RU running fine and my P751ZM seems to really have a better build.

 

Since 1 & 2 are well covered, I'll throw in my 2 cents on 3 & 4.

3. Dell's warranty packages at the business level is second to none, I always appreciate NBD onsite service + accidental damage protection. Resellers don't have that kind of resources to throw around, so unless you're local, it'll be mail-in + a few days turnaround. If you value NBD service, stick with Dell.

4. Some high end dells Latitudes and Precisions are military spec 810 rated (or at least partially), I'm pretty sure the M6600 is one of them. Quality wise, that's very difficult to beat, especially when you consider that 810 ratings are essentially hell for electronics.
Clevos are meant for consumers, if you're used to the M6600, a Clevo's material quality will seem... underwhelming (not to say its bad, its quite good for a consumer level product, but its a consumer level product).
Price for performance wise, it'd kick any dell configuration in the ass any day of the week.

Just my $0.02

Cheers,

 

In terms of chassis Clevo doesn't fair as good as Dell. But I assure you, the chassis is usually the last thing to give away and is the cheapest to replace. People usually judge build quality on the chassis not on the soldering of the motherboard. But it's the soldering and electronics that matter, chassis says nothing about long-term reliability unless there is a good chance you will physically abuse your laptop. So don't judge a book by its cover ;-).
I had the pleasure of having to deal with Dells and Alienwares and I can say electronic wise they are inferior to Clevo. If you want a reliable machine, forget about Dell, unless you are buying a Precision, go with Clevo. These guys know what they are doing. The only other company that I would rate as good as Clevo is MSI.

 

Dell? Really? (Nothing against them.)

We really rarely see "broken" chassis. Occasional cracks, scratches, stains, or broken screw standoffs from accidental damage, but the shells on most models are pretty robust - and yes, a sub $100 piece of plastic is a lot easier on the wallet than a $400 motherboard.

 

TL ; DR
For consumer machines, brand doesn't matter. Price/ performance ratio matters, and customer service matters. I wouldn't hold your breath for exceptional build quality, even if you paid $5000 for it. You're paying for features and service, not quality.

If you want a machine that lasts, get a professional machine.

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Regular version:
That's only true when you buy Inspiron, Alienware and XPS machines (consumer machines). Consumer line product from ANY manufacturer is essentially hit and miss, sometimes you get lucky and get one that lasts 8 years, sometimes you get a newer model of the same machine and it'll only last you 2 years. Also, component choice and soldering for consumer products are more or less the same among different vendors (i.e. they're all made by the Chinese, whomever has the cheapest quote for the contract at the time.), to say that one is inferior than the other is simply not true, as they are highly batch dependent.

The OP currently has a business/ professional machine, which by default come with slightly better components and manufacturing. Proper professional machines like Latitudes, Precisions, ThinkPads, EliteBooks etc. go through a hell a lot more than their consumer counterparts and they are built (and priced) to reflect market needs. So its unwise to just dismiss products from entire companies be it Dell, Lenovo, HP or any other vendor.

As for MSI, i'd say they're about the same as any other vendor, nothing special about them, quality or service wise. In my experience, they're actually a little below average in the service department, they take forever to answer emails and they don't pick up their phones.

To put it in perspective quality wise, I'd give my Precision 7510 a 9/10 for quality. My buddy's new XMG P706, I'd give it a 4.5 (this is even overlooking the fact that it didn't work right out of the box, in which XMG has promised to fix on the double), and I'm being generous here. Don't get me wrong, performance is fantastic with the P706, but its lacking significantly in build quality and they cost about the same.

If the OP is adamant on having the latest GPU with all the bells and whistles, by all means pick a clevo, msi, asus, alienware, whichever gets you the most for the dollar. If the OP is focused on build quality and a "good enough" gaming experience, I'd say get a mid-high end professional notebook and it'll handle most games on decent settings perfectly fine.

EDIT: Added TL ; DR

 

Except when the piece of plastic is no longer produced 12-18 months after product launch (I'm looking at you HP ), and you'd have to buy a new machine because the computer is literally falling apart.
Also, "robust" is fairly subjective. We have tried to deploy consumer machines (which are great for price/ performance and looks). But they all come back eventually with catastrophic failures within 18 months.

 

To be fair in a business when the machine is not theirs people are careless with their machines.

 

@Look_a_bird__ , at my place of employment we usually buy machines with 24 month parts warranty on Sager/Clevos to ensure this shouldn't happen. Surprised HP wouldn't have the same kind of planning if someone purchased and extended warranty.

 

@jclausius Businesses purchases are generally setup differently than their consumer counter parts. We have service agreements with Dell for parts and service in our mission critical machines, they HAVE to be able to provide NBD onsite service for those machines, even if its in the middle of nowhere, or its a breach of contract. Although I'll say that they're very good at stocking parts for Latitudes and Precisions, so its never been an issue.

Extended warranties on the consumer level doesn't mean they'll stock the part for more than 12-18 months (sometimes its as low as 6 months). If you read carefully, most extended warranties from the big vendors has phrasing along the lines of "[Vendor name] will repair or replace the machine at its discretion". If they think its cheaper for them to replace the machine with a newer one, even its a lower end model, they'll do it and you'll have absolutely no say in it because you agreed to their terms when you bought the machine. If Clevo has business contracts, that'd be different to consumer level service, but most business contracts of that nature are tied to a certain purchase volume.

But I think some of you guys are missing the point here. OP has a high end Dell Precision at the moment, that's his reference point. I'm not aware of any Clevo/Sager re-seller that has the resources to do NBD onsite. Nor can Clevo/Sager match the build and component quality of a high end mobile workstation from Lenovo, HP or Dell, as MIL-STD-810 is hard to beat. If Clevo/Sager thinks that their machines can match the quality of an M6600, they can get the certification and that'd open a lot of doors for them. If they can't get the certification, then that tells you something.

 

Clevo components are actually better. This is from comparing my dads $3000 Military Thinkpad (got it from the Air Force) and my P870DM-G. Only thing that i found impressive, was the shell and how well everything was shielded and protected.

What businesses pay for is the services and support nothing more. All these components are made pretty much the same way ,and mostly by the same manufacturers / suppliers.

Ill agree though the Clevo casings aren't as good as Thinkpads or similar counterparts, but their internals are way better.

 

Components may be made the same way by the same manufacturers, but they are most certainly binned and tagged (e.g. an i7 and a celeron is made in the same plant with the same process, but a celeron is just a defective i7), and higher specs (or nicer looks) does not necessarily mean better quality.

Businesses pay for two things, reliability and service/support, as no business in their right mind would buy machines that consistently breaks in the field and suffer up to 24 hours of downtime every time that occurs. As my firm develop and build high end precision machinery for industrial clients, I'll tell you that to hit certain reliability figures, you have to either 1. use better quality components or 2. build in multiple redundancy with cheaper parts. We take the first approach, but others take the second one.

Another thing to consider is the length of warranty a vendor is willing to provide. Warranty in fact has a lot of fairly complicated math behind it, because it has so many variables. Component and product failure rates follow a "bathtub" curve. Meaning that they'll die from either infant mortality, or at the end of their rated lifespan. Failed products cost money to repair or replace, and NBD onsite costs a lot of money to service (in many instances, it exceeds the cost of the machine itself to get someone out to the field to do a repair). Properly engineered products will have on average a <5% failure rate between the beginning of the curve and the rated lifespan (we aim for <1% at my firm). Vendors like Dell, HP, Lenovo have a pretty good idea on how long their product will last based on their engineering and component choices, which is reflected in their NBD onsite warranty (which is 3, 4, or 5 years).

Now, consider the Clevo machines, extended warranties are up to 3 years. Meaning that beyond 3 years, the manufacturers is no longer confident that their product will maintain a <5% failure rate. Most logical reason is that they've used components with a shorter rated lifespan. Whatever length of time you're getting beyond the 3 years is purely based on luck.

Actually, I'm curious to why you think Clevo machines have "way better" quality components. Do you have access to their internal documents with vendor and part lists? or do you have access to their MTBF figures? One thing you have to keep in mind that many professional machines look fairly ugly on the inside, but at the end of the day, a butt ugly 10,000 hour rated capacitor is better than a spiffy looking 2000 hour capacitor.

EDIT: Reliability figures dont apply for nVidia GPUs, it doesn't matter if its a $100 or $5000 card, they all die within 3 years of heavy usage.

 

We use HP workstations here at the studio i work at, the 2 Workstations that i have daisy chained one running Windows and one Gnome. Both are 32 Core Xeon systems with 128 GB of RAM each. Wanna know how many times they have been replaced in the past 6 months? 4 Times each.
I myself have taken apart both these machines, and both times it was issues with the motherboard. Wanna know how much each machine costs with custom ordered cases for better ventilation since both have 2 x M5000's? Upwards of $10,000 each.
The whole "reliable" component thing is hogwash. The firms dont know ****. For systems like server blades that run in a controlled environment its possible to asses reliability, its basically stock up and shut up moto.

Oh, and i have worked for Dell as a systems Dev/Engineer (catering to the Visual Effects Market) and NVIDIA as a Pipeline TD. Over the years, the only thing these companies brag about is support. And the only thing to love about them is the NBD on site services.

Id really love to go on and on, but this is a never ending discussion. End of the day, you get what you pay for. Consumer level tech will handle better in gentle hands, because they are not meant to take a beating, but hey what would i know , my 10 year old Comaq laptop is still running just fine and so is a 5 year old Sager.

 

Well, I appreciate your input, but I find the failure rates of your two workstations rather strange and anomalous.
We currently have over 200 Latitudes, Precisions (mobile, desktop and rackmount [those were $45,000 each]) and Optiplexs deployed. As well as about 50 or so Thinkpad T and W series floating around, this isn't even counting the computers we send out for use with our products. We have people running massive simulation workloads, software development, model rendering and so on. The number of failures can be counted with two hands, and they are fixed within 24 hours. There's a reason why my firm's IT dept is so small (can't fix it if it ain't broke), and why I'm the backup sysadmin when the other 2 guys goes on vacation. Bad batches of components happen, even in mission critical environments. But it seems to me that HP has repeatedly failed you here.

Yes, I agree, this argument will go on and on. Each person has their own opinion and they are welcome to state it.

But, at the end of the day, I'll stick to my original statement.
- Buy a professional machine if you value durability, reliability and service.
- Buy a consumer machine if you value features and aesthetics.

 

Nope, its not just limited to these 2.
We were dealing with Dell before this, and that was even worse.
And - - Buy a professional machine if you value durability, reliability and service.

 

Huh? What kind of contract were you guys signing with Dell? There are clauses in ours that stipulates what is acceptable in terms of failure rates and anything higher is a breach of contract.

Edit: Also, how's durability being contested? Have you see what some of the "road warriors" do to these things?

 

I dont have the details, but we ended up giving all our remaining workstation for super cheap, because they even refused to sort whatever issues were plaguing the batch that they supplied us with.

At least with HP, they try to help us out. And they latest service team knows what we work with so they save a bunch of our time when trying to troubleshoot.

 

We had the opposite experience. With HP, the machines were solid and never really broke, the one time it broke, took HP a week to get out here to fix it. Needless to say, we did not renew with HP.

 

Yeah, its a hit or miss a lot of times.

At least with HP here, they listen to us and even add non standard (GeForce cards) or consumer motherboards when we ask them to. But none of them are saints, im sure they charge us an arm and a leg at least.

 

Yup, can confirm, Dell contracts with reliability clauses cost both arms and legs, and they still wont offer us conformal coatings.

 

Just wanted to say thanks to all posters for the informed discussion.

Yeah, my m6600 is a beast in terms of build quality, the hinges are still tight even though I've opened and closed it every day, I've got 4 hard drives in it, chassis is easy to work on for upgrades etc and if it wasn't the performance I would gladly look into upgrading it.

But clevo does look promising, and I want to avoid soldered chips so it's pretty much the only option the way things are going. Waiting for the new releases now!

 

Yeah that one's a shame, even the new Precisions have BGA chips and we cant drop in a better CPU anymore. You can thank Apple Inc. for this, they've started this solder down everything nonsense.

 

People will choose the thinner machine you can create without a socket adding z-height.

 

Well yes and no, there is a point where notebooks (and phones) are too thin. Like the MacBook, 1 port, like... come on!

 

Plus, form over functionality is not really a good thing.

 

Great discussion!

TBH, we made a switch from Name Brand (Dell, IBM, and HP) to Sager about 10 years ago. The Business vs. Consumer argument is moot at work. Now, were not a huge shop, only 10 or so lappies vs 30+ desktops. In the past, we thought along the same lines as @Look_a_bird__, we need Next Bus. Day., we need customer service. etc. But back around the time of the D900C, based on computing needs and being able to take a DTR to a customers site, we made a decision to phase out our existing laptops and switch to Sager/Clevo.

Now, it's not like we've had 100% uptime throughout the years, but to get around this we do a couple of things: a) in the beginning, we purchased 2 lowered end Clevos that would serve as 'loaners' if a machine needed to go into repair. If HDD or memory could be placed into the machine, it was done with little 'downtime', while the non-working machine was sent to Sager or AVA Direct. b) Since tech changes at a fairly decent rate, everyone gets an upgrade every 2 to 3 years anyway. So, those 'retired' machines migrated into the 'loaner' department. This also explains the 2 to 3 yr extended warranties we purchase with each machine.

I'm not saying this will work for all, but it has worked well for us for almost a decade.

 

I'm glad that this works for your business, it must've saved a lot of money over the years. I should clarify that our requirements are much much higher, since we view our deployed computers as mission critical (our machines don't work without our computers, since its all proprietary), if they go down in the field, it'll cost our customers (and in turn us), a lot of money. (Thus, NBD is mandatory).

The rest of the R&D, management staff and misc. personnel simply enjoy what we have in place, and everybody's expectation is slowly being raised. Which is both good and bad. Good in terms of that its much easier to justify the cost to management and accounting, since the counter argument is always "when was the last anything of our equipment went down due to failure?". Bad in terms of everyone now has relatively unrealistic expectations, had someone walk into IT the other morning wanting a repair (coffee spill) before his flight in the afternoon. (Like seriously Dell, conformal coatings!...)

Oh almost forgot, we tried to deploy custom non-name brand computers to our customers in the past (with conformal coating and all, which was really expensive in the quality we wanted). But, we consistently got the feedback along the lines of, "what, we paid you 7 figures for equipment, and you cant even give us a decent computer to go with it?" This of course is courtesy of the marketing machine from Dell, Lenovo, HP (to some extent Apple, but not really in an industrial environment).

Its a chain of somewhat unrealistic demands, our customers demand 99.9%+ uptime, we have to deliver or we're in breach of contract. Therefore, we demand our suppliers give us the best they have, or we'll take our business elsewhere. Latitudes and Precisions works for us, and it'll be pretty hard to convince us to change to anything else, since nobody wants to toss a wrench in the works just to save a couple of bucks. This of course trickles down to everybody that works there, and now everybody buys their personal machines through IT.

 

Interesting. I agree the time == money. Here, downtime is a function of what you need. If you need data on the machine that just went down, it may take 10 to 15 minutes to swap memory and a drive or two. If you know it was a CPU/GPU, and you need the machine, then you can swap them in 30 to 40 minutes. Then the machine is turned over to IT, and they handle the rest of the repair (shipping off to the Clevo shop, parts, etc.)

However, while laptops/computers are needed for our employees to be productive (a software development shop), when someone is not coding or working tech support, they're costing money. (Like I'm doing right now, posting here. LOL). So uptime is extremely important here as well.

Out of curiosity, if you are working with machines, aren't they tied to things like PLCs, SBCs or embedded computers?

 

Originally we wanted to that, but it was a design decision to use commonly available computer hardware with good reliability and NBD instead.
Mostly because custom SBCs and embedded solutions worked out to be more expensive, the accountants got us there lol.

EDIT: Plus upgradability, we offload certain amount of processing to the GPUs to save time, and its much easier to pop in new GPUs after validation than it is to replace it with a new custom SBC.