The Metabox Alpha-X NH58RD is a well priced laptop for the specs that you get, and it’s
using one of the best Clevo models I’ve tested to date which offers above average
levels of performance, so let’s find out just how well it performs and see what’s
on offer in this detailed review.
For the specs my configuration has an Intel i7-9750H
CPU, Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics, 16GB of memory running in dual channel, a 15.6” 1080p 240Hz
screen, and a 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD. It’s also got gigabit ethernet, WiFi 6, and Bluetooth
5, however hardware can be customized while ordering, you can check the options as well
as updated pricing using the link in the description.
The laptop has a silver body, with a metallic lid while the interior seems to be plastic.
The edges are smooth, but I found the front corners a bit rough if you push up against
then, otherwise overall it feels quite well built.
The weight of the laptop is listed at 2.2kg barebones, so expect differences based on
hardware selection, though mine was under this. With the 180 watt power brick and cable
for charging included the total weight rises to 2.7kg.
The dimensions of the laptop are 36.1cm in width, 25.8cm in depth, and just under 2.8cm
in height, so not exactly thin but not quite thick either. The smaller overall footprint
gives us thin bezels around the screen, which are about 9mm based on my own measurements.
I requested mine with the 240Hz panel, as I haven’t previously had the chance to test
one from them, so now we can get some data. It’s a 15.6” 1080p IPS screen, but you
can pick from 60Hz, 120Hz, 144Hz or even 4K 60Hz options when ordering, however there’s
no G-Sync with this model.
I’ve measured the colour gamut of the screen using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results returned
96% of sRGB, 68% of NTSC and 74% of AdobeRGB. At 100% brightness I measured the panel at
316 nits in the center, and with a 860:1 contrast ratio, so decent results overall.
Backlight bleed looked fine here, just some very minor glow patches, but it was perfectly
fine when viewing darker content, though this will vary between laptops and panels.
There was some screen flex, however it seemed quite sturdy with the hinges being out towards
the far corners.
It couldn’t quite be opened with one finger, as there’s more weight towards the back,
including the cooling and battery, but it still felt stable on my lap.
Despite the thin screen bezels the camera is found above the display in the center.
The camera’s a bit blurry but the audio sounds pretty good. Here’s what typing sounds
like, and this is what it sounds like when we set the fan to max speed, so you can still
hear me over the fan.
The keyboard in my unit has RGB backlighting, however you can only customize the entire
thing in one zone with the included control center software. It’s got 4 levels of brightness
or can be turned off, and even the secondary functions on all keys get lit up. Overall
I liked typing on the keyboard, the small shift on the right may annoy some but I don’t
personally use it so didn’t notice, here’s how it sounds to give you an idea of what
to expect.
There was a little keyboard flex while pushing down hard, which I think should be expected
given the keyboard is removable, no issues during normal use though.
The touchpad has precision drivers and worked well, it was smooth to the touch but doesn’t
actually press down, it’s got separate left and right click buttons though.
Fingerprints and dirt are harder to see on the silver finish, and as a smooth surface
it’s easy to clean.
On the left there’s a Kensington lock, air exhaust vent, USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A port, USB
2.0 Type-A port, and 3.5mm microphone and headphone jacks.
On the right there’s a USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A port, mini DisplayPort 1.2 output, SD card
slot and air exhaust vent.
On the back there’s one air exhaust vent on the left corner, the right isn’t actually
a vent as the battery is there, then from left to right we’ve got a USB 3.1 Gen 2
Type-C port with DisplayPort 1.3 support, no Thunderbolt though, HDMI output, the version
isn’t specified but I could run an external 4K monitor at 60Hz which seems to indicate
2.0, gigabit ethernet port and the power input. I like that they’ve got the bulky I/O such
as HDMI, ethernet and power on the back and out of the way.
Meanwhile the front just has some status LEDs towards the right hand side.
On the lid there’s the Metabox logo in the center, and the bits on the side light up
white from the screen’s backlight.
Underneath it looks like there’s heaps of ventilation holes, however not that many of
these cut out areas actually allow air through, but we’ll see how the cooling does soon.
The speakers are found towards the front left and right corners, they sounded ok for laptop
speakers but were a bit tinny with no bass. Here’s what we’re looking at in terms
of maximum volume with music playing, and the Latencymon results looked ok.
The bottom panel can be removed by taking out 12 screws with a Phillips head screwdriver,
and the two screws in the back corners are slightly longer. The battery is also easily
removable, so if you have a spare you can quickly swap in a fully charged one, a nice
and uncommon feature these days. Underneath the battery there are three more Phillips
head screws to take out before the bottom panel can be removed, so 15 screws all up.
Once inside, from left to right we’ve got access to the WiFi card, single 2.5 inch drive
bay, two memory slots in the middle, and two M.2 slots towards the right which both support
NVMe PCIe drives.
Powering the laptop is a removable 4 cell 49 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 3 hours and 17 minutes. The
Intel integrated graphics were in use during this test due to Nvidia Optimus.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for 56 minutes, and the frame rate didn’t drop at any point. Both
results were a bit below average, though it is a smaller battery paired with decent specs,
however it is also removable, so in theory you could get spare batteries to quickly swap
in.
I’ll also note that I never saw the battery drain with the 180 watt power brick plugged
in throughout any of my testing.
Let’s look at thermals next. Air is pulled in underneath the machine where there are
two fans and heatpipes shared between the processor and graphics. Thermal testing was
completed with an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, so expect different
results in different environments.
By default Metabox are applying a -0.1v undervolt to the CPU, which is great to see. They’ve
advised me that they’ll be doing this with their laptops going forward, so out of the
box we should see increased performance.
The control center software allows us to swap between different power modes, quiet, entertainment,
and performance. These basically set different power limits and fan speeds, and I’ve tested
with them all so we can see the differences.
At idle in quiet mode the temperatures were looking good, fans were only just barely audible.
The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU workloads, and are meant to represent
worst case scenarios as I ran them for extended periods of time.
The gaming results towards the upper half of the graph were tested by playing Watch
Dogs 2, as I find it to use a good combination of processor and graphics. The stress test
results shown on the lower half of the graph are from running the Aida64 CPU stress test
with only the stress CPU option checked, and the Heaven GPU benchmark at max settings at
the same time to fully load the system, so kind of a worst case.
In quiet mode thermal throttling was reported on the GPU. This is kind of expected though,
you’ll hear later how quiet it’s running, so this mode lets you run quieter at the expense
of thermals. Entertainment mode increased the power limits but also fan speeds, so the
GPU temperature drops back with minimal changes to the CPU. Performance mode further increased
the power limits, so we see higher CPU temperatures now as a result. 97 is higher than I’d like,
but as we’ll see in the next graph we’re getting high levels of performance here. Adding
a cooling pad was able to help out, additional undervolting may have helped a little too
but I figured the default -0.1v was good enough.
These are the clock speeds for the same tests just shown. We can see the low results in
quiet mode due to the thermal throttling which then increase quite a bit in entertainment
mode. In performance mode we’re almost seeing the full 4GHz all core turbo boost speed of
the 9750H in both tests, an excellent result, and this explains the higher CPU temperatures
that we just saw, many machines are not capable of this at all, and it’s clearly due to
the default CPU undervolt. With the cooling pad in use and temperatures being brought
under control we’re now seeing a solid 4GHz average in both tests, with the GPU clock
speeds also raising, presumably as GPU boost prefers cooler temperatures.
These are the average TDP values reported by hardware info during these same tests.
We can see that if we want the GPU to perform its best performance mode is required, as
this raises the GPU power limit up to 90 watts. Additionally the CPU is also running close
to 50 watts even in this combined CPU and GPU stress test, most other machines tend
to cap this at 45 watts for combined load, so this looks like a good result.
I could play most games alrightish in quiet mode, watch dogs 2 while doing the thermal
testing did have some lag spikes when thermal throttling was being hit constantly, less
demanding games may be ok though, otherwise entertainment mode and performance mode played
well.
It was a bit warmer compared to the lower specced configs of the same chassis I’ve
reviewed, but this is likely due to the higher powered 2060 graphics, so that’s going to
be a trade off for more performance.
I’ve got some Cinebench results here so we can get an idea of CPU performance. By
default we’re almost averaging 3000, a great result for the 9750H CPU, I’ve tested many
other laptops that get far below this due to lower power or thermal limits. That said
I was also able to further boost the power limit higher with Intel XTU and crack the
3100 mark.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle it
was in the low 30s, fairly average. While under stress test in quiet mode it gets to
the 50s in the center, as we saw earlier the internals were quite hot now but the fan was
also low. In entertainment mode the performance rises but so does the fan, so we’re looking
at much lower temperatures. In performance mode the fan was maxed out and the temperatures
are looking about the same.
As for the fan noise produced by the laptop I’ll let you have a listen to some of these
tests.
At idle in the quiet mode the fans were just barely audible. While gaming or under stress
test with the same quiet mode it was still very quiet, so you can see, or I guess hear,
why it was throttling there. Regardless of using entertainment mode, performance mode,
or manually setting the fan to max speed, it was reaching the same maximum speed. Despite
this it wasn’t too loud, about average when compared to most other gaming laptops. It
didn’t get up to 57 decibels like most others do though, which could explain some of the
warmer temps.
Next let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks, I’ve tested these games with these Nvidia
drivers with performance mode in the control center software enabled for best results.
Control was tested walking through the start of the game, and I’ve tested with RTX enabled
in the green bars, and RTX off in purple. I don’t think this game needs a very high
frame rate to play, for the most part high settings with RTX off went ok, but medium
still looks good so I’d prefer the higher frame rate. RTX on even with low settings
wasn’t great in terms of performance though, even if it did look nice.
Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode, and again RTX on results are shown by the
green bars. RTX played ok at medium settings, but when you can get higher FPS with RTX off
at ultra settings, and in my opinion have it look better, RTX again doesn’t seem too
useful.
Apex Legends was tested with either all settings at maximum, or all settings at the lowest
possible values as it doesn’t have predefined setting presets. It was still playing very
well even with max settings, but we could get higher results for our 240Hz panel at
minimum.
Borderlands 3 was tested using the game’s built in benchmark tool, and high settings
was needed to maintain an average above 60 FPS.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built in benchmark, and these are the
best results I’ve seen with an RTX 2060 laptop so far, however we’ll compare this
game with some other laptops soon.
Far Cry New 5 was also tested with the built in benchmark, and we’ll also take a look
at how this game compares against some other laptops shortly.
CS:GO was tested with the Ulletical FPS benchmark, and is one of the esports titles that’s
actually capable of taking advantage of the 240Hz panel. Even with all settings maxed
out the averages were close to this point.
Fortnite also saw decent results, with medium settings getting above 200 FPS and looking
super smooth with the 240Hz panel, and it was also capable of reaching 120 FPS even
maxed out at epic settings.
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built in benchmark and is another title that may
actually be able to make use of the 240Hz panel at lower setting levels, where we were
just able to average 200 at low settings with a 100% render scale.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint was tested using the built in benchmark, and even the highest ultimate
preset was averaging around 60 FPS due to our decent GPU power, and 100 FPS was just
hit at medium settings and below.
To get some context let’s see how it compares with some other gaming laptops, use this information
as a rough guide only, as tests were done at different times with different drivers.
Here are the results from Battlefield 5 with ultra settings, and I’ve got the NH58RD
highlighted in red near similarly specced machines. This is the first and only time
I’ve had the RTX 2060 paired with a 9750H, so it could be beating the other 2060 machines
due to the better CPU, but regardless it’s in the lead.
These are the results from Far Cry 5 using the built in benchmark at ultra settings.
Again it’s ahead of the other 2060 machines, and a little better than our single GTX 1070
laptop, although as a CPU heavy test, again this could just be due to the slight edge
the 9th gen CPU offers.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider with the built in benchmark at highest settings, the NH58RD
was ahead again of the other 2060 machines I’ve recently tested, actually scoring the
same as the 2070 Max-Q in the Lenovo Y740, but again, there’s that small CPU difference.
Overall the gaming performance was good, all games ran well even at higher setting levels.
I’ve found the RTX 2060 to perform around 14% better than the GTX 1660 Ti, and in most
cases it does seem worth paying a little extra for. That said though, the 1660 Ti is still
a nice sweet spot and can also handle pretty much any modern game with good settings at
1080p no problem, as we saw in the NH58RC review. I think RTX on the 2060 is a little
underwhelming at the moment, I wouldn’t personally buy today just with RTX in mind,
but it may be more useful in the future, only time will tell.
I’ll also note that we didn’t really put the 240Hz screen to use outside of esports
titles, if this is what you’re mainly playing at lower settings then it could definitely
be a nice upgrade, but for most people I think the 144Hz option for $140 AUD less is a better
well rounded choice. I’ve tested a 240Hz screen in the past with an RTX 2070, and even
there it still only made sense with esports titles at lower settings.
Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,
as well as Firestrike, Timespy, Port Royal and VRMark from 3DMark, just pause the video
if you want a detailed look at these results.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the storage, and my 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD was performing
alright, but speeds will depend entirely on what drive you select when ordering, there
are quite a few options. The SD slot was pretty decent too, not amazing, but ahead of many
others.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the time of recording in Australia the base model goes for about $1,780 AUD. This
is with dual channel memory, though it’s $120 more for the 144Hz upgrade option which
I think would be a good match up for these specs for gaming.
For my US friends, that’s about $1100 USD without taxes, although to actually buy this
same Clevo chassis in the US from Amazon it starts from $1350 USD, granted that’s with
the more expensive 240Hz screen.
Let’s conclude by looking at the good and bad aspects of the Metabox NH58RD.
While having decent specs to play basically any modern game with good settings, the laptop
has a clean and professional design without the typical “gamer” aesthetic. The performance
is quite impressive once you consider that the fan noise is below average. It does get
warm under stress test, but in most games it seemed fine and the compromise was excellent
performance, likely thanks to the default -0.1v undervolt that they’ve introduced.
In Australia this thing is serious value, just for comparison the Acer Helios 300 with
1660 Ti is at least $400 AUD more money, and this was outperforming it in many games.
I liked that the bulky I/O including HDMI, ethernet and power are found on the back of
the machine and out of the way. The I/O is otherwise pretty decent, with SD card slot
and Type-C port, though USB 2.0 in 2019 is a bit odd, and as is usually the case with
these Clevo units no Thunderbolt 3 support. The removable battery is also nice to have,
you could buy spares and very quickly swap in a fully charged one if you want, which
would be good as battery life was on the lower side.
There’s not really much else to say, overall I found it quite good for the price.
Like the other Alpha-X model I’ve covered, this is easily one of the best Clevo units
from Metabox I’ve tested so far, based on the specs, overall performance, and price
I think the Alpha-X series is offering great value for money, especially here in Australia
where bigger brands cost way more than they do in the US. Let me know your thoughts down
in the comments, and if you’re new to the channel consider subscribing for future laptop
reviews and tech videos like this one.