As far as that goes the only problem with this thing is the keyboard is not fully functioning. But that is usually not a problem as I intend to stick an external keyboard for home use anyway as a direct replacement for the Dell Precision T3500, removing most bottlenecks and platform limitations found on the old X58 Architecture.
SPECS:
CLEVO P950HR - Nomenclature SAGER NP8952R
CPU: Core i7 7700HQ
RAM: 16GB DDR4 2400MHZ RAM, CAS Latency timings 17-17-17-39
GPU: nVidia GeForce GTX 1070 with Max-Q Design, 1101 - 1229 MHz Core, 8GHz 8GB GDDR5.
Display: 1920 x 1080p 15.6" 16:9 60Hz.
Drives: 250GB Samsung 960 EVO nVMe Drive, 2.5" empty bay.
Power: Battery - 60Wh, AC Adapter 180W
OS: Windows 10
Dimensions:
Weight: 2.1 Kg, 4 lbs 7 oz. Laptop.
I/O: 3x USB 3.0 Type A, 2 USB 3.1 Type C, SD Card Reader, Ethernet, 3.5mm Microphone jack, 3.5mm Headphone jack, HDMI, 2 mini Display, Kensington Lock.
Maintenance:
The P950HR can be serviced with a standard Philips Head Screwdriver. The opening of the bottom panel requires taking out the screws at the bottom, then pushing out / removing the keyboard by passing the bottom screw hole with a long screwdriver of stick, and removing the screws from the keyboard side. Often I find maintenance which requires the removal of the keyboard abit of a pain but it's easy enough once you crack this open a few times. Once opened though, users have access to every major components for cleaning, including cooling systems, CPU and GPU, RAM and drives which is pretty nice.
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| After removing the keyboard and the screws under it, as well as the screws at the bottom panel, maintenance is actually pretty straightforward. You can change the RAM, Wireless Card and drives. I tested both an 840 SSD and a 500GB HDD. |
Hardware:
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| CPU-Z and GPU-Z numbers. Also includes a slight overclock I did on the GPU that I've been testing for a week. |
Although Coffee-Lake is already out for a while, the i7 7700HQ is still plenty powerful even if the Clevo Power saving features locks the clock speeds on Intel extreme utility and can't be overclocked or tuned. In terms of clock speeds, cache and pretty much everything, on paper it looks identical to the 4810MQ, which is a Haswell based CPU and it so happens I have a laptop to compare to, see performance later. 4 Cores and 8 Threads is still viable to this day, even if Core i5 Mobile CPUs now take this performance now.
Samsung 960 EVO 250GB
The Samsung 960 EVO drive is actually an nVMe M.2 drive, the first of such drives I am using. 250GB isn't exactly a lot but it is fast for a boot drive. A 500GB would have been nice but it still beats having a Hard drive as a primary drive. The internals do have room for a slim 6mm 2.5" drive which I intend to put another 2.5" SSD in it.
Just so you know that OS Support for this lappie is limited to the later versions of Windows, so Windows 7 much as I tried to get it to work won't boot off it. However it can boot Windows 10 in both the nVMe drive and the 2.5" drive when I tried with a 500GB Slim Hard Drive. The nVMe drives boot quick from cold boot and only takes 3-5 seconds to wake from sleep. Do take note that only slim drives of 7mm and thinner can be slotted in the bay. The older thicker laptop drives just can't fit.
GTX 1070 Max-Q:
The GeForce GTX 1070 for laptops ranks in the higher echelon of single gaming GPUs in the mobile workspace. The Max-Q design optimises power draw and heat consumption. Its base clocks is 1.1GHz, with up to 1.266GHz of advertised boost clocks. It seems pretty low at first but the GPU can be overclocked and the 120W Power brick that I have instead of a 180W can take it, even it's just pushing it. Doesn't support power or voltage tweaking but it's no such a big deal.
Just note there are 2 types of 1070 Max Qs, one has the 1.101GHz base which mine has, the other is a 1.215 GHz Base which the 1.1GHz Max Q GTX 1070 can easily hit. I'll talk more about core clock speeds later on because even if it's Max-Q, I was blown away by how much clock speeds I can get out of it. Memory wise, the card has 8GB of GDDR5 VRAM with a 2 Ghz memory clock which effectively runs at 8 Ghz.
16GB DDR4 2400:
16GB of RAM seems to be my go-to amount of RAM for it these days, although 8GB is usually enough for most tasks. The RAM is already in Dual Channel which gives optimal performance off the bat although it can be expanded to a pair of 16GB sticks for a max RAM of 32GB. At 2400 MHz, the RAM speed is above average of 2133 Mhz typically found.
Ports:
Optical drives may be the thing of the past, but I am just not ready to say goodbye to them, not by a long shot. But I understand to keep a slim and compact form factor, some things had to give. Ports are numerous for the Sager Laptop, with 2 mini Displays, HDMI 2.0, 4 USBs which include a nice selection of 2 3.1 Type C and 2 Type As and power jack on the left. And on the right side, one more set of USB C and USB Type A, mini SIM, SD Card Slots, Ethernet port and a pair of jacks for headphones and microphones. It's a shame that the Type C ports are only for 3.1, not for Thunderbolt 3 which for the original price of 2K, there's no excuse not to add it in. But at least there's 2 USB Cs, which will cover in the future tweaks.
But mini SIM is very nice for LTE / 3G / 4G Connectivity on a laptop so you don't really need to rely on WiFi if it isn't available. And since internally there's a M.2 WWAN slot, able to get full connectivity may be a key advantage
Performance:
Performance of the Laptop should be highly respectable for a laptop that I got this cheap and this compact for a 15.6". I used the FireStrike Benchmark as usual since it has tests individually for the CPU and GPU and both in tandem. I compared that with the following systems I have to test architectural generation upgrades in terms of CPU, and of course the GPU in general and it is quite easily the most powerful system I have gaming wise.
Dell Precision T3500: Xeon 5670 + 3GB GTX 1060
Clevo W110ER: i7 3630QM + GDC Dock mPCI-e eGPU GTX 970 / 980 Ti.
Clevo W370SS Gigabyte P27Gv2: i7 4810MQ + GTX 860M
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| The GTX 1070 Max Q when overclocked can match with a GTX 980 Ti quite nicely and comfortably beats a 3GB GTX 1060. CPU even matches within margin of error with a 6 Core Xeon X5670. |
The overclock I got is a +100 MHz core offset, which can give a boost of just over 1420 MHz. I did actually hit 15077 in one run but the CPU throttled a tiny bit which resulted in a lower overall score of 12112. Nonetheless a GPU score of 15000 was a nice score. For comparison, Asus Zephyrus GX501 which hit the GPU score of 16165, a score for a GTX 1070 Max Q is quite insane.
In terms of CPU, what's interesting is there's a very small bump from a 3rd Gen to a 4th Gen mainstream Laptop CPU. However, much bigger gains can be had from upgrading to a 4th Gen 4810MQ to the 7700HQ, an almost 2000-point gain, even though on paper, their speeds and cache are identical on paper. So much so, that's enough for the 7700HQ to perform as well as the 6 Core X5670.
Gaming Performance:
Thanks to the GTX 1070 Max Q which is still quite a beast of a GPU despite its low clocks, the laptop can easily plow through 1080p gaming and 1440p to a large degree. Because of the number of AAA games that really varied in performance, we do have some ground to cover.
Doom has been out for 2.5 years now and this GPU just slaughters it at a minimum of a 100 FPS. Now it's considered a light title for it and other lightweight games like this can use VSync to reduce the thermal load exerted and eliminated screen tearing. The original system killer, Crysis 1, for how old it is, can still push systems really hard and at maximum settings as high as they can go in 1080p, that can result in lower Average FPS even than Crysis 2 and Doom for reasons I can't explain. Going back to that question though, 'Can it play Crysis?' Yes, it can.
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| DOOM now is pretty lightweight on the GPU, at least in 1080p. GTX 1070 Max-Q just handles it in stride. |
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| The OG System Killer Crysis still tanks frame rates and GPUs hard. Around 70 FPS at fully max settings with 8X AA without any motion blur. GPU Clocks recorded 1659 MHz on the boost core clocks, albeit because it was overclocked. |
Talking about Clock Speeds
We're not done speaking about clock speeds again cause' this was the point I was blown away. Some bizarre reason the GPU boosts can go all the way to 1659 Mhz in gaming loads like Crysis and Borderlands 2 instead of the 1.45GHz on synthetics and most of the time I managed to clock in between 1.45-1.55 Ghz most of the time on Crysis 3. Well the lappie is meant for gaming rather than synthetic loads. But also my hunch is that my GTX 1070 MaxQ could very well be binned. So even if the GPU is designed in a Max-Q power envelope, take it with a pinch of salt that quite a bit more clock speeds can be squeezed out of it. We're around 15-30% higher boosts but understandably is cause' of the 125MHz Overclock.
Thermals:
Because of the slim chassis, it's gonna face challenges in terms of cooling. Face it, that is to be expected. In normal medium scenarios the CPU stays stable about 60C. However GPU temps will get hot especially after overclocking. It hits 82-83 degrees from Crysis 3 which seems to really push the card's heat capabilities a lot more than any of my other games do even if it's running at the same clock speeds. According to Notebook Check of the Eurocomm Q5 that uses this chassis, surface temps will get hot. This got me thinking of some possible experiments with regards to optimally cooling it.
Power Consumption:
As far as power goes, the laptop comes with a large 180W Power Brick which below, is quite a bit larger than my other bricks. But it's a slim one though, not as thick as other power bricks because their emphasis still lies in portability which the whole package somewhat is. However I'll take the 120W / 135W out to work as it's smaller and easier to carry around just a bit. And yeah, I tested and ran a few games off the 120W with the GPU overclock and it holds up.
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| (L to R) 120W, 135W bricks that I have, the 180W is quite a bit bigger. The Laptop can run on the 120W, but I think I'll settle for the 135. |
Future tweaks to Sager NP8952
For now, no major tweaks are needed for this laptop. Maybe 32GB of RAM would be an option further down the line. But 32GB RAM even at slower 2133 is pretty pricy and 16GB is fine. Since it has a 2.5" drive, an obvious option would be to put in an SSD with like 480-500GB of storage to make this a pretty quiet and fast machine. But I pulled a 500GB Slim HDD from an Alienware Alpha which ran dog slow on that Alpha. It runs fine on the P950HR after a defrag and CrystalDiskmark records about 110MB/s and 100MB/s for reads and writes, not bad for a 5400rpm drive.The integrated WiFi is very flaky but it does have on board drivers already for the Wifi USB Dongle I had. Instead of Thunderbolt 3 as mentioned, it does have 2 3.1 ports which opens up a tonne of external storage expansion, docks that contain a lot of USB ports and other stuff can be powered by just one hub. I wouldn't mind more USB ports because all 3 USB-A ports are used by WiFi, Mouse and Keyboard.
For cooling this will be subjected to another topic of Laptop Heat dissipation at some point. What I'll do is buy 2 different types of Laptop Coolers. One is the traditional Laptop one with a fan below and lifting the laptop over some height to give space and room for intake. And the other is a Vacuum based one that attaches to the vent. I may get one of the latter, maybe 2 and dedicate the dock just purely for cooling.
For how this laptop is gonna be repurposed, it makes a pretty decent bedside computer when you plop a monitor on top of the closed laptop with an external keyboard and mouse and you're set. Of course you can use it on the desk closed shut like you would with a desktop and output to an external monitor suspended via an arm with Keyboard, Mouse and Speakers and external docks. The GTX 1070 Max Q is a good match with a good size 1440p or 4K Monitor, so some recommendations.
Bottomline:
Now having thought about it, despite the flaws and the quirks in this laptop, 900 USD was really quite a bargain. Other laptops with a GTX 1070 Max Q or even just the GTX 1060 Max Q or 1050 Ti would have costed more than double of that.
PROS: Powerful gaming performance, Compact and Light for a 15" Laptop
CONS: Hardware maybe too powerful for some components to take, thermals could be better.
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