The Metabox P955ET1 is a workstation laptop featuring Nvidia Quadro graphics, so while
it is definitely capable of playing games like most of the other laptops I review on
the channel, it’s targeted towards more professional users, so let’s check it out.
Starting with the specs my unit has an Intel i7-8750H CPU, Nvidia Quadro P3200 graphics,
32GB of memory running in dual channel, a 15.6” 1080p 60Hz IPS screen, and 1TB M.2
NVMe SSD. It’s also got a gigabit ethernet port, and 802.11ac WiFi with Bluetooth 5.
Many of the specs can be customized when ordering though to get it how you want.
This Clevo chassis has a metallic body and both the lid and interior are matte black,
there are no sharp corners or edges anywhere and overall the build quality felt premium.
The dimensions of the laptop are 38cm in width, 25.2cm in depth, and under 1.9cm in height,
so on the thinner side for a laptop with this much power.
The weight of the laptop is listed at 1.9kg barebones, so expect differences based on
hardware selection. My configuration came in at around 2.2kg, and over 2.8kg with the
150 watt power brick and cable for charging included.
As mentioned the screen is a 15.6 inch 1080p 60Hz IPS panel, however you’ve got the option
of upgrading to 144Hz, or even 4K, and no G-Sync available with this model. The bezels
were on the thicker side, around 1.8cm on the sides and 2.2cm up top based on my own
measurements.
I’ve measured the current colour gamut of the screen using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my
results returned 92% of sRGB, 68% of NTSC and 71% of AdobeRGB. At 100% brightness I
measured the panel at 320 nits in the center, and with an 710:1 contrast ratio, so not bad,
but for a portable workstation I’d probably be looking at one of the better screen upgrade
options.
I’ve taken a long exposure photo in a dark room as a worst case backlight bleed test,
and there were some noticeable spots, mainly the top right corner, though this will vary
between laptop and panel.
There was an average amount of screen flex, overall it felt sturdy though as it’s got
the metal back and the hinges out towards the far corners which aids with stability.
There were no problems opening the laptop with one finger, demonstrating an even weight
distribution, no issues using it on my lap.
The camera is found above the display in the center.
The 1080p camera looks pretty decent, and the microphone sounds good too, but it does
seem to pick up some of its own internal noise, even with the fans on idle.
The keyboard in my unit had three zones of RGB backlighting which could be controlled
through the included control center software. I liked typing on this keyboard, the layout
was good and I liked the spacing between keys, here’s how typing sounds to give you an
idea of what to expect.
There was a little keyboard flex while pushing down hard, which is expected given the keyboard
is removed to take off the bottom panel. Despite this overall the chassis felt solid and there’s
absolutely no issues during normal use in terms of flex.
The two speakers are found above the keyboard and just below the screen on either side,
they're not excellent, about average and a bit tinny sounding at higher volumes.
The touchpad has precision drivers, was smooth to the touch and worked well. It doesn’t
click down, however it has physically separate left and right click buttons, along with a
fingerprint scanner in the top left corner.
Fingerprints and dirt show up fairly easily on the matte black interior, but as a smooth
surface they’re easy to clean.
On the left there’s a kensington lock, air exhaust vent, power input, HDMI port, two
mini DisplayPort 1.3 outputs, two USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C ports, no thunderbolt support
unfortunately, and two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports.
On the right there are 3.5mm headphone and microphone jacks, third USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A
port, SD card slot, and gigabit ethernet port. Initially I was thinking it was good that
most of the I/O and air exhaust were on the left, however having the ethernet port on
the right means it may get in the way of your mouse if you’ve got limited space, as those
cables are usually harder to bend.
On the back there’s just air exhaust vents towards the left and right corners, while
the front just has some status LEDs towards the left hand side.
Underneath there are quite a few ventilation holes to assist air flow, as well as long
rubber feet which did an ok job of preventing movement while in use.
The bottom panel can be removed easily by taking out 11 screws with a Phillips head
screwdriver. Next the keyboard needs to be popped off, and there are a further 5 screws
here. Once inside from left to right we get access to the battery, single M.2 drive slot,
WiFi card, two memory slots and 2.5 inch drive bay.
Powering the laptop is a 4 cell 55 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 4 hours and 29 minutes. The Intel integrated graphics
were in use during this test, thanks to Nvidia Optimus.
While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS
the battery lasted for 1 hour and 7 minutes, and the frame rate didn’t drop at any point.
Overall the battery lasted longer than I expected given the size and hardware, and I never saw
the battery lose power while using it, the 150 watt brick seemed to be adequate.
Thermal testing was completed with an ambient room temperature of 26 degrees Celsius, so
expect different temperatures in different environments. There’s also a single heatpipe
shared between processor and graphics, so a change in temperature of one may affect
the other.
The gaming tests were done by playing Watch Dogs 2, as I find it to use a good combination
of CPU and graphics, while the stress tests were done by running the Aida64 CPU stress
test and Heaven GPU benchmark at the same time as a worst case scenario. Overall the
temperatures were very good, despite my warm room temperature, not passing the mid 70 degree
Celsius point on the CPU while the Quadro P3200 graphics were even cooler in comparison.
Temperatures of the CPU could be improved further by maxing out the fan speed or undervolting
the CPU, as listed by UV, I was able to apply a -0.14v undervolt.
These are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown. No major changes to
the graphics, as I wasn’t able to overclock them, however the CPU sees the most improvement
by applying the -0.14v CPU undervolt. We’re still quite below the 3.9GHz all core turbo
speed of the i7-8750H CPU though, which explains why the temperatures were so cool in the previous
graph. I wasn’t able to boost the power limit while under these combined CPU and GPU
loads either, and tests were done with the control center software set to the performance
profile for best results.
These are the clock speeds I got by just running the CPU stress test only without any GPU load.
When we don’t have combined CPU and GPU load the CPU clock speeds are much higher,
as there was less power limit throttling now. At stock it wasn’t possible to reach the
full 3.9GHz all core turbo speed of the i7, however with the undervolt applied it was
possible to get there in this test. These are the temperatures from the same tests,
and once undervolted the temperature lowered by over 10 degrees Celsius while also boosting
clock speed.
To demonstrate how this translates into practical performance I’ve got some Cinebench CPU
benchmarks here. Full performance was achieved with single core in either test, as power
limit throttling only takes place under multicore workloads, and once undervolted we’re getting
full speed of the i7.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, at idle it
was in the mid 30s toward the bottom of the keyboard, otherwise fairly average. While
under stress test the keyboard area was warmer, getting to the mid 40s, again fairly average
and it was only warm to the touch, but then a bit warmer while gaming, reaching 50 degrees
in some parts.
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 almost silent, the fan was only just audible. While under stress test
it was about average, a little loud, and then with the fans at maximum speed it was a bit
louder but still similar to many other laptops I’ve tested.
Finally let’s take a look at some benchmarks. We’ll first take a look at the sorts of
applications you’d typically be using Quadro graphics for, followed by some gaming benchmarks
afterwards just for fun to see how well the Quadro stacks up.
Specviewperf is a standard benchmark tool that’s based on professional applications
and measures 3D graphics performance of OpenGL and Direct X, so these results can be used
to compare with other laptops that have also run the same benchmark.
LuxMark is an OpenCL benchmark tool, and I’ve run the LuxBall HDR, Neuman TLM and Hotel
lobby tests 3 times each to get these averages. I’ve also run these tests with both the
GPU only, and with Quadro GPU and i7-8750H CPU combined.
I’ve also got the results from Unigine Heaven, Valley and Superposition benchmark tools,
as well as 3DMark’s Firestrike, Timespy and VRMark, just pause the video if you want
a detailed look.
Now let’s check out the gaming results. While I fully understand that Quadro graphics
cards are not really intended for gaming, that’s what the GeForce series of graphics
are designed for, I was interested to see how it performed, and if you’re buying a
laptop like this for work you might also want to play some games on it too. All games were
run at a 1080p resolution with all Windows updates and these Nvidia drivers.
Battlefield V was tested in campaign mode, rather than multiplayer mode, as it’s easier
to consistently reproduce the same test run. In this game even with ultra settings I was
able to average above 60 FPS and it was playing alright.
Far Cry 5 was tested with the built in benchmark, and the results were decent for this test,
with over 60 FPS averages possible at ultra settings again, showing the Quadro P3200 graphics
are definitely capable of some gaming.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was also tested using the built in benchmark, and to achieve
60 FPS averages in this test high settings were needed, so again decent results.
The Witcher 3 was tested with hairworks disabled, and this was another game where 60 FPS averages
were possible even with max settings. For comparison most GTX 1060 laptops I’ve tested
seem to get less than 50 FPS averages at ultra.
I haven’t bothered testing any more games, as mentioned this isn’t really a gaming
laptop, but as we can see it seems to be performing close to 1070 Max-Q graphics which is great.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the storage, and the 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD was performing
quite well, however this will of course vary based on what drive you select when ordering.
The UHS-II SD card reader was also performing quite well, excellent read speeds and alright
writes.
For updated pricing check the links in the description, as prices will change over time.
At the moment the base configuration goes for around $3,000 AUD, so for my international
viewers without our taxes, conversion brings that to about $1,900 USD, which also seems
to be what other international retailers are selling it for.
As a professional workstation grade laptop with the Quadro graphics you’ll be paying
a bit more in comparison to the standard GeForce series of graphics cards. If a Quadro is something
you need though, this laptop could be what you’ve been looking for and it’s still
capable of playing many popular games at 60 FPS max settings when you’re ready to take
a break from work.
So what do you guys think about the Metabox P955ET1 workstation laptop? Overall it seems
quite good for a thin machine, the only issues I had with it were the slight backlight bleed
and that under combined CPU and GPU load the CPU didn’t get up as high as I expected,
although this did mean it ran cooler as a result, and the quadro graphics still performed
well.
Let me know what you guys thought about the P955ET1 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.