Fujitsu Celsius H970 (E3-1535M v6, P4000) Workstation Review

For the 2017 business notebooks, Fujitsu created a design that is shared in all their various models, from the Lifebook ultra-books such as the U747 and convertibles such as the P727, up to our test unit, a Celsius workstation. The H970 looks like a giant Lifebook U757. Similar to that, the Celsius H970 is also kept completely in black-gray, except for the small red stripe below the keyboard. It is not just in the coloring that the Celsius resembles the other Fujitsu notebooks; it is also similar in the design language as well, with flat angled surfaces on the sides towards the front. It is the same design, just bigger and thicker.

The similarities continue in the selection of materials: a plastic base and a metal palm rest. This is made from brushed aluminum, a surface that quickly shows fingerprints. There is one difference, however: the display lid which is largely made from magnesium is split into two. The top is made from plastic, probably to let the signal of the WWAN antenna pass through. The high-quality materials provide a good stability. Probably there is another magnesium frame inside, since the base unit is very firm and can hardly be twisted. The lid is not quite as stable but still in a good range for a 17-inch device. Only when pressing extremely hard does pushing on the back of the display have an effect on the panel.

However, the case is not without fault, since Fujitsu did not do a good job in one place: while the palm rest is firm, the keyboard is as flexible as a trampoline, especially in the area of the main keys. Even a gentle press on the keys will get the keyboard bouncing visibly. This is a cardinal mistake that should not happen in a device this expensive. Other than that, we could not complain about the workmanship, with the exception of the battery slot, since the battery does not fit 100%. When pressing on the battery, you can hear it creaking sometimes.

In a 17-inch laptop, the hinges have to hold up a display lid that is much heavier than in smaller laptops. The large hinges with their plastic caps, which in the Celsius sit on top of the base unit in the traditional way of construction, do a quite good job. Although the display bounces a little more than in smaller laptops, the hinges hold it up well. Thanks to the high weight of the base unit, you can open the display with one hand.

Fujitsu builds-in the full package: WLAN, WWAN (Sierra Wireless EM7305), and Gigabit-Ethernet (Intel I219-LM). The WLAN module is the Intel Wireless 8265, Intel's standard solution for expensive laptops. The 8265 is a 2x2 card with WLAN-AC support. In our benchmark, the Celsius did well on average and clearly put the more affordable Intel 3168 in the MSI WE72 7RJ in its place. During everyday life, the card did not show any weaknesses.

The two microphones and the 720p webcam are built into the display frame. These components offer a typical performance: just barely usable for video-conferencing, but otherwise simply very bad.

As is customary for business devices, Fujitsu does not skimp on the security features. A Kensington lock, a smart-card reader, and of course a fingerprint-reader are built-in. This reader is a swipe reader, so you unlock the PC with a swipe gesture. This works well, but touch-based fingerprint-readers are still slightly more precise and faster.

Besides these hardware features, there are also software security features such as TPM or anti-theft, which can be configured in the BIOS.

There is merely a single display option for the Fujitsu Celsius H970: a 17.3-inch, matte Full HD (1920x1080) display based on IPS technology. This is a little weak for 2017. There have been 4K-IPS displays (3840x2160) for 17-inch workstations available since last year. If you choose the Fujitsu Celsius H970, you have to do without a high-resolution display.

Thus it would be even more important that the single available display option is compelling. First, regarding the brightness Fujitsu speaks about 300 cd/m². Our test unit is equipped with an LG display with the model number LP173WF4-SPF3 which can on average clearly surpass that brightness value. At an average of 360 cd/m², it is even the brightest display in our comparison. The brightness distribution of 91% is very even, and this display has only very slight backlight-bleeding. Fortunately, there is no PWM.

The Intel Xeon E3-1535M V6 in our test unit makes its debut here at Notebookcheck, and this is the first time that we have this CPU in our test. The Xeon E3-1535M V6 is the fastest mobile CPU that Intel is currently offering. Like the processors of the Intel-Core-i7-7xxxHQ series on which the Xeon E3-1535M V6 is based, it has four cores (eight threads with Hyper-Threading) which have a base clock speed of 3.1 GHz and reach a maximum of 4.2 GHz with Turbo boost (in single-core mode). A particularity of the Xeon CPUs is furthermore that they are compatible with ECC RAM. More information on this and other CPUs is available in the CPU benchmark section.

So much for the theory. In practice, the achieved Gigahertz value depends to a large extent on the cooling of the notebook. First we take look at our CPU load test that we perform with Cinebench R15 64-bit in multi-core mode. This test simulates whether the CPU can maintain its speed constantly also over longer time periods and thus whether a reliable performance is offered. With the Fujitsu Celsius H970, this is clearly not the case. There is almost no benchmark run where it achieves the result of the previous run, but the performance varies widely from one test to another.

The Fujitsu Celsius H970 offers three slots for internal storage media, two 2.5-inch slots and one M.2 slot. In our test unit, only the M.2 slot is occupied and the 2.5-inch slots are empty. The 2280-M.2 slot is occupied by a PCIe-NVMe SSD by Samsung, or to be more exact, Fujitsu built-in the SM961 with 512 GB. This is a Samsung-PCIe SSD of the newest generation for OEMs. The Samsung-OEM SSDs with the "SM" model names are supposed to be faster than the widely used "PM" SSDs, so Fujitsu is using the fastest and newest.

Accordingly, the SSD does very well in the benchmarks, but the SM951 predecessor SSD is not really much slower. You can compare it with other SSDs in our SSD/HDD benchmark tool. 

As well as the CPU being a first for Notebookcheck, we have not been able to test the GPU before, either. The Quadro P4000 by Nvidia is a professional graphics solution for mobile workstations based on the newest Pascal GPU generation, which can be recognized by the "P" in the model number. With 1792 shader cores, it is a very powerful graphics card, which currently has no GeForce equivalent, however. If there was a matching GeForce GPU, it would be a hypothetical GeForce 1065, since the Quadro P3000 is based on the GeForce 1060 and the Quadro P5000 on the GeForce 1070. The Celsius H970 is equipped with the P4000 variant with 8 GB GDD5 memory. 16 GB is the maximum. Its core speed is 1252 MHz.

You can see in the picture on the right that the GPU has a much more powerful cooling system than the main processor. In view of the P4000's TDP of slightly above 70 W, this cooling system is desperately needed. The GPU is also built-into the H970 in form of an MXM mode. Whether you can build-in other MXM GPUs here, is unknown. 

The Quadro P4000 is a very powerful graphics chip that can easily surpass the originally strongest Maxwell-based M5000M Quatro GPU, especially in the GPU-intensive benchmarks. Its own predecessor, the M4000M, is 50 to 60% slower depending on the benchmarks, which also shows the superiority of the Pascal architecture. The next-smaller Quadro, the P3000, is more or less clearly weaker depending on the benchmark. For example, in the LuxMark benchmark, the difference is only 1 to 5%, in 3DMark11, 28 %, and in the SPECPerfView12 benchmark 8 to 26% depending on the test. You can find further benchmark results of the P4000 and the opportunity to compare it with other GPUs in our GPU benchmark section.

As for the CPU, there is also no noticeable reduction in performance during battery mode.

Due to the spacious, thick case, the outer temperatures are not much of a problem despite the weak CPU cooling. Under load, we measure almost 50 °C (122 °F) at one hot spot at the bottom, which is not quite within the completely critical range yet. Also, the opportunities where you use the device on your lap should be limited, since the device is too big and cumbersome for that. A cool palm rest should be more important, and fortunately that hardly gets warm even under load.

A spacious case does not help much with the inside temperatures. After the Cinebench test result, we did not expect anything good in the stress test with Prime95 and FurMark. But surprisingly, the Celsius behaved similar to the Cinebench test where only the CPU was stressed. The reason for this is that the GPU cooling works well. During the stress test, the Quadro P4000 remains at about 80 °C (176 °F), and the maximum speed of 1252 MHz is maintained. The only problem is really the CPU which acts the same as in the Cinebench test: It heats up to 97 - 99 °C (207 - 210 °F, at a clock speed of 2.7 GHz, which is below the base clock speed), then thermal-throttling down to 800 MHz begins and the CPU cools briefly, before it heats up again to 97 - 99 °C.

As usual, we ran 3DMark 11 right after the stress test. This benchmark achieved a normal result. 

Fujitsu provides a removable lithium-ion battery that holds 96 Wh. Since it is removable, it offers the option to take an additional fully-charged battery with you to double the runtime. Devices with built-in batteries cannot offer this, so the ZBook 15 G3 has a disadvantage here.

For most users the runtimes that are offered with its battery by the Celsius should be sufficient: Nine hours in the WLAN test is quite good for a workstation with such powerful components, and the competition cannot even begin to reach that runtime of the H970. Only the battery performance under load is not quite as strong, with this being the more relevant test. The battery life test with Specviewperf 12 in a loop confirms the results of the load test with about 60 minutes of runtime. We run this additional test, since the Celsius is a workstation.

After a little more than two hours, the battery of the Celsius is fully recharged. While this is a rather good value for a 96-Wh battery, it is not outstanding.

It is not easy to service the market for workstations. There are only a few manufacturers with sufficient experience and reputation to play in this "royal" class of notebooks. Fujitsu wants to be one of these manufacturers - at least for now. However, the Fujitsu Celsius H970 cannot convince us. Fujitsu delivers a mobile workstation that is surprisingly good in some areas but just too weak in others. The good areas surely include the battery life, which is more than decent for a workstation notebook. It shows here, that with the new, more efficient CPU generations, quad-core processors do not have to necessarily be a reason for bad battery life. The display brightness is also compelling, and as in the battery life, the Celsius is best in class here. The GPU performance is top class, which is due to the effective GPU-cooling system. Finally, we surely need to mention the excellent maintainability as one of the advantages of the Celsius. It is only slightly marred by the fact that you need special cables to insert 2.5-inch drives.

Battery life and display brightness - are those the most important values for a laptop that you will probably only move from one stationary work space to another, due to its size and weight? Probably not! Unfortunately, the Fujitsu fails in more important places, such as the CPU-cooling system. Where the GPU-cooling system succeeds, the CPU-cooling system fails. It is simply too small. This makes the device very loud, since the fan has to run a lot to cool the CPU at all. Yet despite that, thermal-throttling cannot be avoided. This already occurs in the Cinebench test which does not even provide a lot of load, so that in everyday life, the Celsius is far from able to make use of the full potential of the built-in CPU. In this way, the expensive Xeon E3-1535M V6, which is really the fastest mobile Kaby-Lake CPU, becomes the slowest chip in our comparison. As if this was not bad enough, Fujitsu makes a further big mistake with the bouncing keyboard. Even though the display is bright, the colors are not particularly strong and it does not even cover the sRGB color space. Fujitsu does not offer a display with a higher resolution and color-space coverage.

Not passing: While Fujitsu's Celsius H970 has its qualities, in particular the deficient CPU-cooling system is out of place in a mobile workstation.

Due to these problems, the Celsius has a hard time against the established competition such as the ThinkPad P71, ZBook 17 G3, or Precision 7710. That it still suffices for a good evaluation is mainly due to the high performance of the new professional graphics card.