The Metabox P750TM-G is a pretty crazy laptop, featuring a desktop Intel i9-9900K CPU and
Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics, making a great desktop replacement or portable workstation, but just
how well does it perform and what temperatures are we looking at? Let’s find out!
Let’s start with the specs as they’re pretty insane. For the CPU there’s an Intel
i9-9900K, so the full desktop chip with 8 cores and 16 threads and is also available
with the 9700K too.
I’ve got 32GB of DDR4-2666 memory running in dual channel, but it supports up to 64GB
at DDR4-3000.
For storage there are two 2.5 inch drive bays and two M.2 slots with NVMe and SATA support,
in my configuration I’ve got a 1TB M.2 SSD and 1TB hard drive installed.
For the graphics there are three options as it uses the MXM standard, so you can pick
from Nvidia GTX 1060, 1070, or even 1080 like I’ve got here. This powers the 15.6” 1080p
144Hz screen, but it’s also available with 4K.
For network connectivity there’s a gigabit ethernet port, 802.11ac WiFi and bluetooth,
with a number of WiFi card options to choose from.
The lid and interior of the laptop are both a matte black and sort of rubberised material,
it does feel quite nice but it will be interesting to see how it lasts longer term.
The dimensions of the laptop are 38.6cm in width, 26.2cm in depth, and about 3.8cm in
height, so fairly thick but definitely not unreasonable considering the specs.
The starting weight is listed as 3.4KG, but this will vary based on hardware selection
and mine came in at 3.6KG. With the massive 330 watt power brick and cables for charging
the total weight increases to over 5KG.
As mentioned the screen is 15.6 inches, and unsurprisingly we’ve got thicker bezels,
as thinner bezels are a result of a smaller machine which isn’t the case here. You’ve
got the option of 60Hz, 120Hz, or 144Hz 1080p screens, or 4K 60Hz, and the 60Hz and 144Hz
1080p ones have G-Sync. I’ve got the 144Hz one here, but I have also benchmarked games
at both 1080p and 1440p.
I’ve measured the current colour gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results returned
98% of sRGB, 69% of NTSC and 74% of AdobeRGB, so alright results, but this will vary depending
on which panel you end up selecting.
At 100% brightness I measured the panel at 301 nits in the center, and with a 900:1 contrast
ratio, so about average brightness for a laptop.
Backlight bleed was very bad in my unit. I’ve taken a long exposure photo in a dark room
as a worst case backlight bleed test, although this wasn’t really needed. The top left
corner was often visible during normal use, though this will vary between laptop and panel.
There was an average amount of screen flex while intentionally moving it, but as a fairly
thick plastic it did feel sturdy, and having the hinges out towards the far corners helped
with stability.
Given it weighs 3.6KG there’s absolutely no issues opening it with one finger, it’s
stable on your lap but not recommended given the weight and heat output.
Above the display in the center is the camera.
As usual with most of these Clevo machines, the camera is 1080p and actually looks alright,
the microphone also sounds above average.
The keyboard was pretty good to type with, no problems there. It’s got backlighting
which can be customized in three separate zones and there are a few built in effects.
Here’s how typing on the keyboard sounds to give you an idea of what to expect.
There was almost no keyboard flex at all even while pushing down hard, it was extremely
solid.
Above the keyboard is the power button in the center, as well as some LED indicators
for caps lock and more. Right up the back below the screen are the two 2 watt speakers.
They sound really good for laptop speakers, fairly loud yet still clear with a little
bass, and they still work with the lid closed.
The touchpad was smooth and worked well. It uses synaptics drivers and has physical left
and right click buttons as well as your usual gestures in Windows, and there’s also a
fingerprint scanner in the top left corner.
Fingerprints show up quite easily both on the lid and interior, and they can be a little
difficult to wipe away on this material.
On the left there’s a gigabit ethernet port, two USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C ports, and the first
has Thunderbolt 3 support, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports and SD card slot.
On the right there are four 3.5mm audio jacks including headphone, microphone, line-in and
S/PDIF, USB 2.0 Type-A port, third USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A port and Kensington lock.
The back has large air exhaust vents on the corners, so no hot air blowing on your hands,
then in the middle there’s a HDMI 2.0 output, two mini DisplayPort 1.3 outputs and the power
input.
The front is plastic with status LEDs towards the right and a small light bar in the center.
The light bar can be customized through the included software just like the keyboard,
so you can have matching effects.
Underneath is pretty clean looking, and the rubber feet combined with heavy weight did
a good job of preventing movement while in use. The battery can be removed easily without
tools, otherwise the rest needs a phillips head screwdriver. The panel next to the battery
has the two 2.5 inch drive bays and one of the two M.2 slots. Behind the final panel
we get access to the second M.2 slot, heatsinks and two memory slots. There are apparently
4 slots in total, so the other two are probably hiding on the back.
Powering the laptop is an 8 cell 82 Watt hour battery, and with a full charge and just watching
YouTube videos with the screen on half brightness, keyboard lighting off and background apps
disabled, I was able to use it for 2 hours and 36 minutes. Not great, but honestly not
unexpected considering the powerful hardware, though still better than some others like
the Scar II with 1070.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for 1 hour and 5 minutes, and the frame rate didn’t drop at any point.
Thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 25 degrees Celsius, and
there is a single heatpipe between the CPU and GPU, so a change in temperature of one
may affect the other.
The stress tests were done with Aida64 and the heaven benchmark run at the same time
in order to try and fully utilize both the processor and graphics, and this is resulting
in thermal throttling on the CPU at 98 degrees Celsius. Even with varying settings including
maxing out the fan, boosting the default 95 watt TDP limit or undervolting the CPU by
-0.1v nothing changes in this workload in terms of temperature, but it was a little
cooler in the gaming tests at stock, but we see thermal throttling once we boost the power
limit and apply the undervolt. There are no separate tests for gaming with the fans maxed
out as they were already at maximum in this test.
These are the clock speeds for the same tests just shown. In the stress tests we can see
that the clock speed of the CPU rises by around 10% once we undervolt the CPU, boost its power
limit, and overclock the cores, although the overclock isn’t actually doing anything
here. The all core turbo speed of the i9-9900K is 4.7GHz, and this isn’t being hit here
in our stress test, the best we can reach is 4.4GHz on all 8 cores, so still not bad,
but this does mean that overclocking in sustained multicore load will not benefit us, as we’re
not even hitting the max stock turbo boost speed due to the previously mentioned thermal
throttling. Despite this, this is still a very impressive result for a laptop, even
with the expected thermal throttling we’re getting incredible performance for a laptop.
I thought higher CPU performance may be possible in a CPU only workload with the GPU idle,
but interestingly with the Aida64 stress test in particular I was never able to pass 3.6GHz
on all 8 cores. I noticed the max non turbo boost ratio was set to 36, as shown in Intel
XTU, and this was already maximum and couldn’t be increased. I did get higher clock speeds
in Cinebench though, so not exactly sure why this only affects some workloads. As clock
speed doesn’t change regardless of undervolting, CPU only temperature stays the same, and fairly
cool compared to the thermal throttling at 98 degrees we saw earlier.
To demonstrate how this translates into performance I’ve got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks here.
I’ve included the i7-8750H down the bottom for comparison as it’s a pretty common good
laptop CPU at the moment. I’ve also included the results of a 9900K at stock in a desktop
PC to get an idea of how the laptop stacks up, and it is a bit ahead due to less thermal
throttling. I’ve got a lot more CPU benchmarks with this laptop in another video, check the
card in the top right corner if you’re interested.
Here are the GPU only clock speeds while under a graphical only stress test, and with a 120MHz
core overclock applied on average there was a 90MHz improvement under this workload, and
the overclocking increased GPU temperatures by three degrees Celsius.
I’ve used my thermal camera to check out the areas where you’ll actually be putting
your hands, and at idle it was in the mid 30s, pretty normal. While gaming it got to
about the mid 40s in the center, cooler than I was expecting, and then very similar results
with the CPU and GPU stress tests running. With the fans maxed out and undervolt applied
it’s perhaps just a touch cooler, so despite the hot internals it’s nice that we don’t
really feel it here.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
At idle it was fairly silent, only just audible. While under stress test it was a little louder
than most other gaming laptops I’ve tested, and while gaming and with the fan maxed out
it was quite loud.
Finally let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks, although I’ve got a 1080p screen
here I have also attached an external monitor in order to test 1440p, as I think the specs
we’ve got are too high to only focus on 1080p.
Fortnite was tested using the replay feature, and we’re seeing some pretty crazy frame
rates, over 400 FPS averages at low settings, and even at epic with everything maxed out
at 1080p it was still 145 FPS. Stepping up to 1440p the frame rates are still pretty
good, the game is still easily playable with max settings.
Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode rather than multiplayer as it’s easier to
consistently reproduce the test run. Even at ultra settings we’re still able to hit
100 FPS, and at 1440p 100 FPS was still possible with medium settings.
CS:GO was tested with the Ulletical benchmark, and again we’re seeing very good results
at 1080p, even maxed out around 300 FPS was possible in this test. At 1440p the frame
rates are still pretty high, and even better than most other laptops at 1080p.
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was tested with the built in benchmark, and although it seems
to be a poorly optimized game we’re still able to average around 60 FPS at ultra settings
1080p. At 1440p the frame rates are still pretty decent with good settings, especially
considering the game doesn’t really need a super high frame rate to play.
Far Cry 5 was also tested with the built in benchmark, and these are the best results
I’ve ever seen in a laptop, easily able to pass 100 FPS averages at ultra settings,
and around 140 at low. At 1440p the results are still quite good and better than many
other laptops at 1080p.
Rainbow Six Siege was another that was tested with the built in benchmark, and as a benchmark
that runs very well on modern hardware we’re seeing some very nice results at 1080p, over
200 FPS averages even with ultra settings, with the 1% low still sitting at 144 FPS.
At 1440p even ultra settings are still above 100 FPS for the 1% low, with very high average
FPS regardless of settings.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built in benchmark too, and yet again
at 1080p to no one's surprise the frame rates are very high for this test. At 1440p there
was a massive drop off in performance, much larger than I was expecting.
PUBG was tested with the replay feature, and at 1080p even with ultra settings that frame
rates were quite good and actually very playable, rarely the case with most other laptops. At
1440p the results are still pretty good, with over 100 FPS averages possible at medium settings
with the 1% low results not too terrible.
Ghost Recon was tested with the built in benchmark, and I usually say that laptops have pretty
much no chance of playing this one at ultra, but this beast is almost able to get us 60
FPS averages at 1080p. At 1440p the frame rates drop back a bit but still easily playable
with good settings without issue.
Watch Dogs 2 is another resource heavy game, but given I can play it perfectly fine with
a solid 30 FPS considering we’re averaging close to 80 FPS at 1080p with ultra settings
is pretty crazy. Even at 1440p ultra was still playable, though I’d probably play at lower
settings given this doesn’t give you much extra visually and take the better performance.
Dota 2 was tested using an intensive replay that does not represent actual game play,
and even in this worst case the results are still quite high for this test. I did play
a quick game too, and even with the settings maxed out I was seeing 110 to 120 FPS averages.
As expected these crazy specs are giving us very nice results in games, really high frame
rates at 1080p and then most of them are still quite playable without issue at 1440p as well.
Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike, Timespy, and VRMark from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want
a detailed look at these results.
As we saw earlier we’ve got the option of overclocking the graphics and CPU and undervolting
the CPU to boost performance, so let’s see how this actually helps in gaming. The exact
same Windows updates, game updates and Nvidia drivers were installed so there shouldn’t
be any changes other than the ones listed here.
Far Cry 5 was retested using the built in benchmark, the average frame rates at ultra
settings were 3.8% better compared to stock speeds, but a much larger 15.8% improvement
to 1% low.
I think most of the boost is from the GPU overclock, because I retested three games
with only the CPU undervolted, overclocked and power limit boosted and saw basically
no change.
Storage benchmarks will vary depending on the drive that gets selected when ordering,
my 1TB NVMe SSD was performing quite well though, and even the 1TB 7,200 RPM hard drive
was giving me above average performance. The SD slot was going alright too, not the best
I’ve seen but I’ve had much worse.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording, here in Australia the base model starts at $2650 AUD. If you
spec it out with the 9900K, GTX 1080, 144Hz screen and extra memory and disks like I’ve
got here that price rises to just under $5000 AUD, not too surprising given the specs in
this form factor though. For my US viewers that’s around $3200 USD taking away our
taxes.
So what do you guys think about the P750TM-G laptop? Obviously this isn’t something for
everyone, I’m not even sure it’s for people that want a serious gaming machine. To me
it seems to be a desktop replacement, it’s more of a portable workstation I think. As
expected it does get very hot when the CPU is under load, which should be expected in
a laptop, the 9900K is a crazy hot chip even in a desktop PC with good cooling. That said
though it still does perform quite well, and if you need plenty of raw CPU power in a laptop
I think this one is unmatched at the moment. Despite the fairly big battery though it still
doesn’t last too long given these high end power sucking specs, and the other issue I
had was the bad backlight bleed, though that will vary. Basically if you’re after extreme
power in a still fairly portable size this is the best in that regard I’ve tested so
far.
Let me know what you guys thought about the Metabox P750TM-G laptop down in the comments,
and leave a like to let me know if you found the review useful. Thanks for watching, and
don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this one.