This laptop is seriously crazy, it’s got a desktop CPU inside, which I guess is fitting
as it’s more of a desktop replacement rather than something you would actually want on your lap.
It’s the Clevo X170KM-G, which is sold here in Australia as the Prime-X by Metabox,
or in Europe from XMG as the Ultra 17.
There are some seriously crazy specs here, including a desktop i9-11900K processor, Nvidia
RTX 3080 graphics, 64 gigs of memory, 12TB of SSD storage in RAID 5, and mine has a 4K 60Hz screen.
There are also other options like high refresh 1080p screen, up to 128 gigs of memory,
up to 32TB of storage, and other CPUs or GPUs, including the 10 core 10th gen
10900K - there’s a lot you can customize using the links down in the description.
It’s got a brushed metal finish both on the lid and interior, and it feels seriously solid, which
is probably why this beast weighs so much that the 5 kilo limit of my scales gets tripped with
the power bricks. The laptop by itself is 4.7kg or nearly 10.4lb, while the two 280 watt bricks alone
and cables are more than some gaming laptops. Combined we’re looking at 7kg or 15.4lb total, so
not exactly portable, and that’s confirmed when we look at the dimensions, it’s both large and thick.
There’s no optimus with this laptop,
so we’re stuck to Nvidia graphics only which is why it’s sold with the cheaper KF processors
as those don’t have the iGPU. You can use processors that have an iGPU,
but I believe the motherboard isn’t physically wired to support the iGPU so you can’t use it.
I asked for the 4K option because with this level of hardware 4K gaming should be no problem,
but there are 1080p high refresh options if your priority is on fast paced gaming,
and either option supports G-Sync.
The colour gamut and contrast with the 4K option was excellent,
and we’re looking at over 400 nits at maximum brightness, a nice result.
The only real downside is the fact that it’s 60Hz, so a lower screen
response time is expected, granted for 4K gaming that’s probably less of an issue.
Backlight bleed wasn’t ideal, but that will vary between panel and laptop.
There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle, no Windows Hello support though.
This is what the camera and microphone look and sound like, this is what it sounds like
while typing on the keyboard, and this is what it sounds like if we set the fan to full speed,
so it’s not doing a great job of isolating my voice over the fan noise.
The keyboard has per key RGB backlighting, and it gets quite bright. There are 4 levels
of key brightness or you can quickly turn it off with the function plus numpad shortcuts. I liked
typing with the keyboard, it feels similar to others from Clevo with slightly tactile presses.
Speaking of RGB, there’s also a light bar that runs along the back on the bottom,
so this alone will probably give us a 50% boost in gaming. This is
also controlled with the same software as the keyboard with some built in effects.
The power button is separate to the keyboard, so no chance of an accidental mispress.
The precision touchpad is fairly big and works fine. It doesn’t click down as it’s instead
got physical left and right click buttons which aren’t super loud and clicky sounding like others.
On the left from the back there’s an air exhaust vent, SD card slot,
two USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A ports, and separate 3.5mm mic and headphone jacks.
The right has two USB 4.0 Gen3 by 2 Type-C ports with Thunderbolt 4, and both have displayport
support, a third USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A port, there’s an air exhaust vent on this side too, and
Kensington lock up the back, granted no one will be stealing this thing without skipping arm day.
The rest is on the back between two large air exhausts. From left to right
there’s a USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port, two mini DisplayPort 1.4a outputs,
HDMI 2.1 output, 2.5 gigabit ethernet, and the two rectangular charging ports on the right.
All of the display outputs connect directly to the Nvidia graphics as there’s no iGPU used here,
and there’s also no USB Type-C charging, which I suppose isn’t that unexpected
given you need both power bricks to actually charge the laptop.
It doesn’t even charge just using one of those 280 watt bricks, you need both of them.
There’s basically no flex to the keyboard even when pushing down hard,
it feels extremely solid, though light touches easily cause fingerprints,
though they’re not too hard to clean with a microfiber cloth.
There was more flex to the metal lid, but the hinge feels quite sturdy so
it doesn’t really wobble when typing or moving it.
The bottom panel is plastic and the back section has plenty of holes for
air ventilation with big rubber feet at the back.
Getting inside is very easy, the removable battery comes out without any tools needed,
then the rear cover slides back off after taking out 8 Philliops head screws.
Inside we’ve got plenty of cooling, four M.2 storage slots which are covered by heatshields
with thermal pads, and two memory slots. Three of the M.2 slots are on the left are PCIe 3.0 and
can be configured in RAID. Two of these support SATA drives while all three support PCIe drives,
while the right slot is PCIe 4.0. Unfortunately if you use a 10th
gen CPU, that slot will be disabled rather than downgraded to PCIe 3.
The other two memory slots can be accessed by taking out two screws
from underneath and then carefully removing the keyboard. The keyboard is attached with
ribbon cables so don’t just rip it out. It’s worth noting that with 11th gen and
using 128 gigs of RAM it will run up to DDR4-2933, if you want DDR4-3200 on all
4 slots you’ll need a 10th gen CPU. The WiFi card is also found under here too.
The front appears to be all speaker grill, but we can see there are two
speakers on the left and right, with subwoofer on the right here,
so on the left when you’re sitting in front of it. The speakers sound great for a laptop,
they’re clear, there’s bass and they can get loud at max volume. There is some wrist rest vibration,
but I’ve felt worse in quieter laptops. The latencymon results were looking good too.
The 8-Cell 97Wh removable battery is an uncommon feature,
but in theory if you can buy a spare then it would be very quick to swap in a new one.
This would be great, because battery life isn’t amazing as you’d probably expect from this level
of hardware inside with no optimus. The YouTube playback test lasted for less than two hours,
similar to other desktop replacement machines like Alienware’s 51m.
Personally I like to think of the battery as making it more like a UPS,
it makes it a little portable and you can move it around if you need to,
but you won’t be doing any serious work on the battery.
Let’s check out thermals next.
The Control Center software lets us change between different performance profiles,
which from lowest to highest are power saving, quiet, entertainment
and performance. The software also gives us some basic CPU and GPU overclocking options,
though I had to enable the overclocking menu in BIOS first for this to appear.
The options aren’t anything special if you’re familiar with Intel XTU or MSI Afterburner.
We’ve also got some fan control with the ability of setting the fans to maximum.
The idle results down the bottom were a little warm, but no problem. I’ve run stress tests with
both the CPU and GPU loaded up to represent a worst case, as well as playing an actual game.
The CPU, shown by the blue bars, was thermal throttling at 98 degrees Celsius in the stress
tests when in performance mode. Using a cooling pad wasn’t enough to change this,
but applying an undervolt to the processor was able to greatly reduce temperatures.
Silent mode was thermal throttling on the GPU, whether under stress test or playing the game,
but as you’ll hear soon it’s extremely quiet so that makes sense. The game was running
much cooler than the stress test once we get into entertainment mode and above.
The clock speeds weren’t much different in the game outside of quiet mode, I was running at
1440p so perhaps there’s just less load for the CPU as it wasn’t otherwise throttling,
and like we can see in the stress tests higher CPU speeds are certainly possible. We’re actually
able to hit the all core 4.8GHz turbo boost speed of the 11900K with the cooling pad and
undervolt in place. Technically at this point we could start trying to overclock in this workload
as the all core boost clock is actually being hit, but I haven’t done that here.
Silent mode is still running the GPU up to 60 to 70 watts despite the laptop being almost silent,
so lighter weight games should still run ok, otherwise we can see above 150 watts on the
GPU when boosting, but then this lowers a bit when the processor is being smashed.
We’re seeing over 100 watts for the CPU in the stress test with the GPU also doing similar,
pretty crazy stuff. This lowers back a bit with the undervolt because this reduces power,
and less power means less heat which is why it was cooler too.
Here’s how an actual game performs with these different
modes in use. Both performance and entertainment mode were reaching
the same frame rate at 1440p, and quiet was still above 60 FPS too.
Here’s how the different modes perform in Cinebench R23, so hardly much difference
at all really between entertainment and performance modes, just like we saw in the game.
It’s not surprising to see that this is the best single and multicore result I’ve ever
recorded from any laptop, though at the same time I also found it
interesting how close some of the Ryzen 9 5900HX mobile chips were.
The performance on battery was cut significantly though, half the multicore score now and being
beaten by 6 core options like the Dell G5 SE, granted single core performance is still up there.
Now that CPU performance is definitely excellent for a laptop, but as I’ve shown
in this video over here, generally the last gen 10900K is better than the 11th gen 11900K,
especially in productivity and multicore workloads as the 10900K has 2 extra cores,
so it could be worth considering instead. Plus XMG charges more
for the 11th gen option, while here in Australia they’re both priced the same.
The keyboard is around the mid 30 degree celsius point when idling,
so normal stuff. WIth the stress tests going it’s only a little warmer, but as we saw earlier power
limits are low which results in less heat. Entertainment mode is actually cooler despite
performing better because the fans increase, and in performance mode it felt cold to the touch
which is pretty crazy considering what’s going on inside - let’s have a listen to the fans.
It sounded silent to me when idling, and even with the stress going in quiet mode it’s still
extremely quiet. Entertainment mode was much louder comparatively, and this was
also the same as using performance mode with or without the fan maxed, so this particular
workload was maxing the fan out anyway which is why I didn’t also test max fans separately.
Now let’s find out how well this crazy laptop performs in games and compares against others,
but use these results as a rough guide only,
as they were tested at different times with different drivers.
I’ve tested Battlefield 5 in campaign mode at ultra settings, and I’ve got it highlighted in
red, right up the top, the best result I’ve ever recorded from a laptop in this game,
well I suppose desktop replacement, good luck running this thing on your lap.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the games benchmark tool with the
highest setting preset, and again a chart topping result with these crazy specs,
11% higher average FPS compared to the next highest model, MSI’s GE76.
Far Cry 5 was also tested with the games benchmark tool at max settings, once more
we’re at the top of the graph, though there’s now a larger 16% lead over the Alienware 51m,
which also has an 8 core desktop CPU, though from two generations earlier and with 2080 graphics.
Now I’ve just used 1080p because that’s the resolution I’ve got data for for comparing,
but these specs have absolutely no problem running games at 1440p and even 4K.
Here are the results from 3DMark for those that find them useful.
Now for some creator tests.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark. Like the gaming tests,
it’s sitting at the top of the graph, though the difference compared to
much smaller and more portable laptops like the Legion 7 isn’t all that much.
Adobe Photoshop generally depends more on processor performance,
and there’s a bit of a larger gap between it and the next one down,
regardless still the best result I’ve recorded from the test.
This isn’t changing in DaVinci Resolve either, another chart topping result,
but yeah also not that far ahead of much more practical and far cheaper laptops.
I’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
I’ve got three 4TB M.2 NVMe SSD’s in RAID 5, and the read performance was next level,
plus there’s always that fourth M.2 slot on the right in case you want to install up to 32TB.
The UHS-III SD card slot was maxing out my V90 card,
and the card clicks in and sits most of the way into the machine.
The BIOS was disappointing for such a high end machine,
only very basic options in here. The 10th gen model had a Prema BIOS available,
so that might be an option here too which would offer plenty of additional features,
but the BIOS it ships with will likely differ based on who you’re buying from.
I booted an Ubuntu 21 live CD to test Linux support. Out of the box the speakers didn’t work,
but WiFi, ethernet, touchpad, keyboard and screen brightness adjustments worked fine. I wasn’t
able to change the keyboard brightness with the keyboard shortcuts, so it must rely on software.
Now let’s discuss pricing. This is going to depend entirely on how you configure it,
so again refer to those links down below. Honestly I just had a fun
time setting crazy specs and seeing how much it would be.
At the time of recording, here in Australia they start at $4000 AUD from Metabox,
which is about $2800 USD after removing our taxes for my international friends.
With the insane specs I’ve tested in this video it’s more like $9000 AUD, or over $6000 USD.
Fully speccing out the one at XMG with a similar configuration is a bit more, but they also offer
more customization such as the option of no lid logo or keyboards for different languages.
Alright so with all of that in mind let’s summarise to find out if this crazy machine
is something worth considering. Obviously the biggest negatives are the size and weight. You
could at least argue that something like this is still at least portable compared to a desktop PC.
It’s one unit, with a PC you’d have to carry an extra monitor, keyboard, mouse and power source.
A machine like this is generally considered a desktop replacement, so it’s not quite
as portable as a regular laptop, but it also doesn’t take as much space as a full blown PC,
but as a result, and as we’ve just seen, that definitely does come at a price premium.
That said, this still isn’t something I would want to carry around daily with me,
and that gets further complicated by the requirement of the two power bricks to charge,
it would have been great if you could get by in lighter workloads with just one.
Powerfun hardware chews through battery, so it’s no surprise that even the 8-cell 97Wh battery in
this unit didn’t last all that long, again I like to think of it as more of a built in UPS.
Honestly apart from those things it is a very impressive machine. The performance is next level,
it’s literally topping the charts in both gaming and content creator workloads.
Despite the temperatures inside,
the exterior is always cool to the touch, but the fans can get loud.
The amount of user upgradeability is on another level as you can replace both CPU and GPU,
something most others don’t offer, as well as the battery or 4 memory
slots and 4 M.2 slots you’ve basically got unlimited power.
I feel like I’m only really scratching the surface of what this machine is capable of,
there’s a lot of tuning and customization that you can do,
granted to unlock most of it you would probably want a better BIOS,
it’s unfortunate that the one that Metabox ships it with isn’t that great, but in theory
you should be able to flash a BIOS from another company like XMG that has more options available.
I also would have liked to have seen high refresh 4K or 1440p options, 1080p high refresh at 17”
with this power or 4K 60Hz both feel like unnecessary compromises at this price point.
Let me know what you thought of this crazy machine down in the comments,
is it something you would actually consider? Get subscribed for future
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some of these other interesting videos over here, I’ll see you over in one of those next!