Eurocom’s Core i7 Notebook: Walking The Panther

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[citation][nom]lordvader[/nom]I agree That makes so much more senseWould like to see there bench the Asus W90 benchmark to 20,000[/citation]

As previously stated, if Tom's could get the non-existent W90 the MSI wouldn't have been used. The W90 is a ghost now, Asus discontinued it...I believe almost imediately after introducing it.
 
[citation][nom]quicklite[/nom]So far, 900F offers more power than most could imagine. But it's not without flaws. This chassis has been around for longer than any of the competitor, its outdated in other word. In its golded age, it has no competition in performance, same can not be said anymore. Its hardware was designed for unparalleled performance, easy hardware upgrade; but not so much for user convinence.[/citation]

Ugly, too - I must say! Not that I don't want one, performance-wise it's great. But I have to admit aesthetics have become a more relevant selling point. Incidentally, yes, some of the backlit keyboards out on laptops now are beautiful.
 
I own the 725-074US and have had NO problems with overheating, even running turbo mode w/an 82F or so room temp.

Also your Vantage scores seem to be quite low, as I've seen the -075 equivalents (P9500) break 11k, although the difference may be explained away, I suppose, by the only 2GHz core clock rate of the quad part, which is why the quad option was just never enticing to me for the quad mobile CPU that they offered.

Turbo mode for the -075US and equivalent models pushes it up to c. 3.1GHz IIRC, and c. 2.8GHz for my model. This appears to be a FSB bump to achieve the overclock. I don't use it myself as I prefer not to stress what must already be a somewhat stressed system, a notebook.

Stalker SoC runs smoothly for me, although I don't have clear sky yet and have little interest in Crysis or Far Cry 2, but on the notebookreview forums -075US equivalent owners indicate that it is possible to play smoothly at native res 1920x1200 with slightly reduced quality options, plus driver and other tweaking. (There's a GIGANTIC GT725 owners thread there BTW including all sorts of info including one user tweaking his 4850 BIOS to near desktop speeds, although his temp sensor seems to be broken as it ALWAYS reports abnormally low temps.)

Other games, Oblivious, "Fallout" 3, Two Worlds, Civ IV, UFO series, UFO Extraterrestrials, NWN2, Drakensang, HL2, TF2, TFC, and many other games run fine at 1680x1050 (where applicable) with no tweaking and very high settings if not max.

Build quality of the GT725/1722 is MUCH better than the 625/1651.

Bad things:
mystery BIOS updates from MSI (no sign of a changelog)

protruding battery (worth it for 2.5h run time which is what I get in turbo batt mode + 50-60% backlight which looks like undervolting to me)

keyboard layout makes FPS gaming tricky, plus I'd really suggest a USB keyboard for such games as the keyboard isn't exactly the strongest but adequate for most gaming situations excepting those where you might unintentionally stress the kb more than "normal"

screen bleed at the bottom of the LCD panels seems to be quite common and is evident on mine(a Samsung LCD part) making it useless for graphics designers or so I've been told. I don't notice it unless I look for it, or look at just the right angle.

Colors seem to be a bit off sometimes for video, but I blame the catalyst drivers.

Catalyst drivers are OLDER than dirt, as you're stuck with MSI drivers as the generic ATI ones will NOT install w/o some tweaking or you can google dontargue.

the 1680x1050 models all seem to be shiny panels, which I terribly dislike. (Oh look! I can see my hands in the screen while typing! How wonderful!)

Ships with 4GB DDR2-800 DRAM, but is set lower in BIOS(600 IIRC). Likely because Turbo mode kicks the memory up to around 800 when enabled, although setting the memory to 800 still seems to work OK with Turbo mode although note that I VERY rarely enable it.

wrt above ships with 32b Vista?! -> ~3GB available DRAM to vista

Might have to do old fashioned linux text install and some manual config as the OSS drivers don't really support RV770 well. (I had to use alt install disk for Ubuntu and manually config networking(blast from the ancient past) to get catalyst drivers and, therefore, X.org up and running on it. 9.04 may just work now, but I just did a dist upgrade myself. Not sure about other distros as Ubuntu's been good enough to me so far, although I'm starting to get that distro switch itch again.

Tomshardware notebook reviews leave a great deal to be desired, although this seems to be endemic to all hardware site in which they are VERY good at reviewing desktop systems, build, parts, CPUs, etc. yet flounder around with producing meaningful notebook reviews. (notebookreviews is the only place that I've found w/halfway decent notebook reviews plus they have the BEST notebook forums.)

Oh yes, I've had my 725 since the beginning of March, ordered from newegg and barring the above it's been a very good experience.
 
Ooops forgot to mention that the AMD catalyst drivers are beyond AWFUL! Alpha quality at best, so if you want a good linux experience go for a nb with nVidia parts or something else if you don't need a great deal of 3D hp.
 
Er, another comment, sheesh triple post:
Highest temp (running ATI tool) that I've seen yet on the GPU was 80C running Stalker SoC.

Most other games seems to peak around 75C.

You might want to clean and re-apply thermal compound to your 725's heatsinks, although my factory standard setup is running as above.

@quicklite
MSI offers NO configuration options to their retail notebooks. You buy a GT725-XYZAB and you get the config matching -XYZAB @ price $SPQR.ST (It's like buying any retail nb, in that most vendors give you it as it ships while some of the smaller system builder might give CPU/RAM/hdd option at added cost.)

To do a heavily modded comparison you'd have to go to a builder, order the 1722 chassis, CPU, GPU (if they offer an option to swap it out as it comes standard with a 9600M IIRC), hdd, RAM, OS, and optical drive. That will be more expensive than the generic MSI retail options.
 
[citation][nom]cutterjohn[/nom]Er, another comment, sheesh triple post:Highest temp (running ATI tool) that I've seen yet on the GPU was 80C running Stalker SoC.Most other games seems to peak around 75C.You might want to clean and re-apply thermal compound to your 725's heatsinks, although my factory standard setup is running as above.@quickliteMSI offers NO configuration options to their retail notebooks. You buy a GT725-XYZAB and you get the config matching -XYZAB @ price $SPQR.ST (It's like buying any retail nb, in that most vendors give you it as it ships while some of the smaller system builder might give CPU/RAM/hdd option at added cost.)To do a heavily modded comparison you'd have to go to a builder, order the 1722 chassis, CPU, GPU (if they offer an option to swap it out as it comes standard with a 9600M IIRC), hdd, RAM, OS, and optical drive. That will be more expensive than the generic MSI retail options.[/citation]

I don't know where your view got skewed but, upon finding that little air was exiting the GPU sink because most of it was exiting the CPU sink, the system was opened to find out why. The GPU heatpipe was scalding hot while the CPU heatpipe was close to room temperature. Nothing was blocking the GPU sink, the air simply wasn't flowing through it...apparently from a DESIGN problem.
 
This is probably one of the worst review comparisons ever.

Why not grab you an Alienware M15X with 3.2Ghz EE Yorkfield M version, 9800GT video and 8GB or RAM and compare?

Because you might notice that there is hardly any difference at all. Imagine that, a fake 280GT is not much different that a 9800GT because, that is the same card.
 
Just a heads up, the M17x happily outputs 1920x1200 via HDMI

Nvidia also states on their product page for the GTX 280m (the GPU used in the D900f) that the maximum supported resolution is in fact 2048x1536

That being said, how can you expect to get 2560x1600?
 
[citation][nom]scook9[/nom]Just a heads up, the M17x happily outputs 1920x1200 via HDMINvidia also states on their product page for the GTX 280m (the GPU used in the D900f) that the maximum supported resolution is in fact 2048x1536That being said, how can you expect to get 2560x1600?[/citation]

It's not true for this product. This product is designed to use dual-link mode for anything above 1280x1024. This product relies on dual-link mode for anything above 1280x1024 on the DVI output, and limits the HDMI output to 1920x1080. And all three companies: Nvidia, Clevo, and Eurocom claimed 2560x1600 support via Dual-Link for this card.

Tom's only expects to get what the companies offer.
 
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