The Eurocom Sky X7C (Clevo P775TM1-G) Gaming Laptop Review: True Desktop Replacement
by Brett Howse on August 5, 2019 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
The Eurocom Sky X7C comes equipped with an 80 Wh battery, which is quite reasonable considering it’s not the type of device that should really be expected to be run on battery for any length of time. The battery in a desktop replacement such as this is really a glorified UPS, and Eurocom even calls it as much in their mobile server versions of their notebooks.
Light Battery
Battery life was somewhat better than expected, coming in at close to three hours of runtime with the display set to 200 nits. Considering the desktop processor and no NVIDIA Optimus support, that’s quite good.
Web Battery
This test has a more demanding workload than our light test, but on large gaming laptops the base power draw is generally high enough to mask the extra CPU power required, and that is the case here with the Eurocom running four minutes longer than the light test. It’s still a reasonable result though considering the class of components inside.
Movie Playback
Ultrabooks can excel at media playback because the video decode is handed off to fixed function hardware in the integrated graphics, which is extremely power efficient. That same thing happens here, except it’s handed off to a power-hungry RTX 2080, and as such the movie playback is shorter than the previous two tests.
The Tesseract score is the movie playback time divided by the length of The Avengers, and you can barely make it through one sitting of this movie before the power runs out.
Normalized Results
Removing the battery capacity from the runtime allows us to get a glimpse at efficiency, and you can instantly see what a difference NVIDIA’s Optimus makes here, as both the Acer Predator Triton 500 and MSI GE75 Raider both offer Optimus so the RTX 2080 can be powered down. The other notebooks have the dGPU connected directly to the display, limiting efficiency.
Battery Conclusions
On a system such as this, the battery life is a secondary goal at best, and the results coincide with this. The maximum battery size allowed on an airplane is under 100 Wh, meaning that is the practical upper limit for battery size. The Eurocom Sky X7C actually offers an 80 Wh battery, which is really larger than it needs to be for this class of machine where it is going to be plugged in almost all the time, so the battery life is actually quite good considering.
Charging
Eurocom offers a standard 330-Watt AC Adapter with the Sky X7C, which is easily sufficient to power the system even with the Core i9-9900K and RTX 2080 at stock speeds. However they do offer a 780-Watt adapter as well, which they shipped out with this system, and it is literally a small-form factor desktop PSU with a custom connector to go into the laptop. The PSU offers a digital readout of amperage, voltage, watts, and temperature, and includes active cooling as you’d expect on a PSU this large.
If you are into overclocking, you may want to upgrade to this unit, since the stock 330-Watt adapter is going to run into power limits if you do try overlocking. The CPU can easily draw 150-Watts stock, and the GPU would be around the same. It’s unlikely you’d ever need the full 780 Watts, but it certainly is impressive, and the digital display is very informative compared to a black power brick like you’d see on most notebooks.
That doesn’t really impact the charge rate though, since the battery charging is limited to protect the battery life, and as such the time to charge this notebook is about the same amount of time as you can use it on battery.
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TheUsual - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
The elephant in the room: Alienware Area 51-M. It is more expensive but if you wait for the Dell semi-annual sale, the price is much closer. The Dell has a better keyboard layout, is quieter and looks better.not_anton - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
If my coworker starts a 60dB laptop I am gonna throw it out in a window.And little kids don’t have four grand to spend on a cool gaming machine. Who is it made for?
Calista - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
It seem like a rather sensible build - for what it is. At the same time and for the money asked someone could build both a high-powered desktop and buy a highly portable laptop. But I guess that's not the target demographics for these, rather the gamer moving from a few times a month from place to place, say a young kid with divorced parents, someone staying at a boarding school etc.Anyway, these tend to age really badly in regard to residual value, and I guess it says a lot of the way we as consumers value these once their are no longer top of the line.
madhupkumar - Thursday, August 8, 2019 - link
How long will Clevo persist with the twin 2.5" storage slots? All that space inside could be used for more cooling, a dozen of m.2 2230 SSD cards, or a warm slice of pizza :Pballsystemlord - Friday, August 9, 2019 - link
Spelling and grammar corrections:"As before, we're looking for results under the yellow line of 3.0 error level, and almost none of the color achieve that."
Missing "s":
"As before, we're looking for results under the yellow line of 3.0 error level, and almost none of the colors achieve that."
"...but TN display tend to not offer the greatest results,..."
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MandiEd - Monday, August 12, 2019 - link
Have they fixed their bios? Clevo should really sort their software mess.