Review Schenker XMG P703 (Clevo P177SM) Notebook

The case has not been manufactured by Schenker, but by the Taiwanese gaming expert Clevo. With its rubberized surfaces, the P177SM barebone of the Schenker XMG P703 reminds us more of its dual CPU colleague P370EM (Schenker XMG P722) than the already mentioned single GPU sibling P170EM (Schenker XMG P702).

Both the lid and the palm rest sport a soft-touch finish. Still, these rubberized surfaces remain a matter of taste. While offering more of a premium look than plastic and quite a pleasant feel, the laptop is extremely prone to fingerprints, especially so with greasy fingers. Eating greasy food while playing almost becomes a no-go. At least stains can be easily removed with a wet cotton or microfiber cloth.

The build quality of our test device was also far from perfect. While the base unit was generally well-constructed, the display frame (finally without any gloss!) felt very uneven and wobbly. We were easily able to pull the frame out or press it in by a few millimeters which led to actual distortions on the display. Depending on the viewing angle, even the display lighting units could be made out at a few sections of the frame - a flaw which might be due to its pre-production status.

Apart from the lid, the rest of the case is rather torsion-resistant and sturdy. Only the keyboard and the area surrounding the fingerprint reader give way when a lot of pressure is applied. Considering the size (414 x 286 x 54 millimeters) and the high weight (almost four kilograms), the notebook can be called colossal. The 17-inch is basically unsuited for frequent traveling. The brand-new and even chunkier P170SM barebone, successor to the P170EM, is similarly massive.

The design is once again subject to a personal matter of taste. We personally disliked both the tribal emblem on the touchpad - which will be replaced by a logo of Schenker's choice in the customer version - and the glossy bar right above the keyboard. Even worse: As it appears, the volume display cannot be deactivated. This is a shame, as we found the frenzied flashing to be so annoying that we have simply duct-taped this "disco ball". We suppose that many users will feel the same way about this "feature".

Still, overall build quality was more than decent. Of course, one shouldn't expect such a quality as that which is found with Alienware or Asus (it might be interesting to compare the P703 to the M17x R4 or the G75VX). By the way: The final customer version will sport an XMG logo on its lid.

One of the biggest advantages of barebone makers is the clean Windows install they offer. No annoying bloatware or unnecessary manufacturer software is included, thus leaving us with a responsive system without constant popup messages. As shown by the screenshot on the right, Schenker concentrates on hardware drivers.

Delivery contents

Our test device only came with a driver DVD while the customer version will probably ship with a manual as well. Those who order an OS version do actually get an original Windows DVD. Some words concerning the 230 watts power adapter: It weighs 0.9 kilograms while measuring 178 x 88 x 35 millimeters. The 8-cell battery offers a capacity of 77 Wh, coming in at 420 grams.

Warranty

The P703 ships with a standard warranty time of 24 months, which can be increased to three or four years for another 100 or 200 Euros (~$130 or $260) respectively. Schenker claims this to be a pickup & return service, including several months of "instant-repairs". Outside of Germany, only a bring-in service is offered.

Our favorite feature concerning the keyboard is its homogeneous, incremental backlighting. Each of the three "zones" of the keyboard can be illuminated by one of eight colors, e.g. red, yellow, cyan, green or the default, a dark blue. There are several operation modes to choose from, among them crazy ones like "Dancing", "Flash" or "Wave".

But even apart from this key feature, the keyboard fares rather well. Pressure point, keystrokes and feedback felt (and sounded) fine. The keys are also sufficiently large, although they lose 4 of their 17 millimeters due to their graded rims. Both the four-column numpad and the practical special keys are plus points. The F-row contains, among other things, brightness and volume controls as well as (de)activation keys for the display, the touchpad, the webcam (with 2.0 megapixels) and the radio module.

What we cannot understand is why Clevo chose to exchange the Fn and Windows keys. Clevo's usage of a single-rowed return key has been tradition since their first backlit keyboards. We are not impressed by the overall layout - no matter whether we are talking about the German or US layout. As with MSI, the ><| is strangely positioned (as can be seen on the GT70). At least the arrow keys are standard-sized. Still, prolific writers might want to choose a different laptop.

2013 is the year of Intel's promising Haswell CPU architecture. While still being manufactured using the 22 nm process, the successor to the Ivy Bridge platform is supposed to offer superior performance thanks to numerous optimizations.

The HM87 motherboard of our test device is fitted with a Core i7-4900MQ, one of the most powerful new CPUs. It comes with 8 MB of L3 cache and a CPU clock speed of 2.8-3.8 GHz, similar to the old Core i7-3840QM despite an increased thermal design power (TDP) of 47 watts instead of 45 watts. For comparison: The 2.7-3.7 GHz model, the Core i7-4800MQ, comes with just 6 MB of L3 cache.

As usual, Hyper Threading allows the quad-core to be accompanied by four virtual cores, enabling eight parallel threads. In order to save electricity while idle or being used on simple tasks like office usage or web browsing, the P177SM is capable of seamlessly and automatically switching between the dedicated GPU and the integrated HD Graphics 4600 - a technology called Nvidia Optimus (the counterpart to AMD's Enduro).

We will further discuss whether Haswell manages to completely outperform the still-potent Ivy Bridge generation below.

Nvidia's GeForce GTX 780M is its strongest laptop GPU for gamers. According to its technical specifications, it is basically a faster variant of the GeForce GTX 680MX (Kepler architecture as well) which so far has been used exclusively in Apple's iMac. The memory interface (256-bit), the memory clock speed (2500 MHz) and the shader pipelines (1536 computational units) are identical.

4096 MB GDDR5-VRAM should be more than enough, even for the foreseeable future. While the clock speed of the GeForce GTX 680M (respectively GTX 680MX) comes down to 720 MHz, the GeForce GTX 780M manages 823 MHz, 14% more.

According to the tool GPU-Z the graphic-turbo (GPU Boost) hits 849 MHz. The older high-end models lacked such an automatic overclocking option. The DirectX 11 GPU manufactured in a 28 nm process offers PhysX, CUDA and - with the right hardware - 3D Vision.

We were actually surprised by the preinstalled GPU driver: The ForceWare 311.27 was already several months old when we conducted this test. No official Nvidia driver support for the GeForce GTX 780M existed at the time of writing.

Schenker did not only equip our test device with two 1 TB HDDs, but also with a 256 GB mSATA SSD, a Samsung SSD PM841 (MZMTD256HAGM), which doesn't have to shy away from competing with "actual" solid state drives.

With a sequential reading speed of 515 MB/s and a sequential writing speed of 245 MB/s, the PM841 comes close to its 2.5-inch sibling, the Samsung SSD 840 in the AS SSD benchmark. Still, the 500 MB/s writing speed of the top variant, the Samsung SSD 840 Pro, is a far cry away. The PM841's access times of 0.07 m/s and 0.03 m/s (reading / writing) are superb.

Both 1 TB HDDs are also way above average. Hitachi's Travelstar 7K1000 (HTS721010A9E630) is one of the best HDDs which can be bought right now, achieving sequential reading and writing speeds of around 130 MB/s as measured with CrystalDiskMark. Seagate's hybrid hard drive, the Momentus XT 7200.1 (ST750LX003) which also spins at 7200 revolutions per minute, offers comparable real-life performance.

Exemplary: On its website, Schenker offers a large variety of HDDs, SSDs and SSHs of numerous manufacturers (Crucial, Intel, Plextor, etc ...).

Unsurprisingly, the GeForce GTX 780M is powerful enough to run almost all current PC games smoothly with maximum details and activated anti-aliasing. Only extremely demanding games such as Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs manage to bring the GTX 780M close to its limits (~30 fps with everything on ultra).

BioShock Infinite is a perfect example (as can be seen in the table below this section) which shows that the outdated GPU driver is responsible for limiting the graphics performance in newer titles. With the most recent ForceWare version (314.22), the performance of the GeForce GTX 680M is on par with its successor (~47 fps, maximum settings).

Apart from this issue, the new GPU generation offers no quantum leap, but a significant improvement in terms of performance, routinely beating both the GeForce GTX 680M and the Radeon HD 7970M by approximately 30%, crunching numbers twice as fast as the GeForce GTX 765M. When compared to desktop graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 780M comes close to a GeForce GTX 660 Ti.

Whether the premium over cheaper variants is justified remains a matter of taste, although we were quite fond of the performance this luxurious graphics card had to offer.

We are also happy to write that the 28 nm GPU worked smoothly. Out of almost 30 games that we have tested, only a few had issues during start-up or with some graphics bugs. This is no small feat, recalling the bug-ridden launch of the Radeon HD 7970M.

The main competitor, AMD's Radeon HD 8970M, is supposed to be released at approximately the same time as the GTX 780M. As we did with the last generation (see our article here), we plan on writing a detailed comparison article about these two mobile GPUs.

Other than the noise emissions, we have nothing to complain about concerning the P703's temperature levels. 25 °C after two hours of being idle and 32 °C after one hour of stress tests (Furmark and Prime) are exceptionally good for a gaming laptop. Weaker high-end competitors such as the Toshiba Qosmio X870  (GeForce GTX 670M) often get noticeably warmer. Since both the palm rest and the WASD-part of the keyboard remain relatively cool with the P703, it is easily possible to game on comfortably for hours.

Naturally, the components need to cope with much higher temperatures. Both CPU and GPU reach almost 85 °C under full load, although this is not problematic. Two performance issues remain with our test device: During our stress test, the Turbo mode of the Core i7-4900MQ got deactivated and the core clock speed of the GeForce GTX 780M was reduced to approximately 700 MHz.

Sound quality has improved considerably in comparison to older Clevo barebones. Just like the dual GPU sibling, the P370EM, the P177SM also offers viable audio output. The combination of Onkyo speakers and Creative's Sound Blaster X-Fi MB3 technology (a screenshot can be found on the right) leads to more than decent results.

The SBX Pro Studio feature which leads to noticeable improvements in audio quality is actually useful. Three presets: "music", "movie" and "game" make it easy for the P703 to adapt to the specific usage scenario. Bass levels are fine too, thanks to a built-in subwoofer, although it might be advisable not to set them to their (high) maximum volume since they lose clarity in this case.

Still, the speakers could have been better, especially during audio playback, which is not always rendered with enough precision and balance. The XMG P703 thus doesn't come close to the Dynaudio systems of MSI (GT70).

A battery runtime of up to four hours is pretty much what one can expect from a gaming laptop. Browsing the web via Wi-Fi while reducing display brightness to 50% leads to around 3.5 hours of continuous usage while DVD playback with maximum brightness is possible for a little more than three hours.

Caution: The GeForce GTX 780M loses approximately 50% of its peak performance while running on battery. As with many gaming rigs, the P177SM has been designed with stationary usage in mind. By the way: Since the battery component contains one of the feet of the case, it is necessary for its stability.

The Schenker XMG P703 inherits most of the strengths and weaknesses of its predecessor. Maintenance and upgrade capabilities as well as its connectivity are nothing short of excellent. Four hard drive slots, four memory banks, distinct cooling circuits for the CPU and the GPU, a host of video, audio and peripheral ports: What more could a gamer wish for?

We are also quite fond of the backlit keyboard and the Schenker's clean Windows installation. Other assets are its Full HD panel (which sports a great contrast ratio and a matte display) and the fact that the P703 only gets moderately warm.

Of course, performance levels are great too. The GeForce GTX 780M is capable of rendering almost all 3D programs without any problems, especially so when aided by the quad-core Haswell processor. Demanding gamers set on uncompromisingly great image quality will have a hard time avoiding Nvidia's new high-end card. Also, the sound system is good enough to be used without any external solutions.

Still, the XMG P703 doesn't quite manage to deserve a "very good" mark. Next to some smaller issues with the build quality and an unstable display frame, the high noise levels - which we wouldn't have expected considering the enormous weight and dimensions of the laptop - are quite disturbing, especially when running 3D applications. The P703 also comes with a hefty power adapter and an annoying volume display.

It would have been nice to see some evolution in the P703's design. Clevo, the manufacturer of the barebone, should finally have gotten rid of some legacy issues (glossy elements, subpar fan controls, strange touchpad design, etc ...). Still, those who are looking for a freely configurable high-end laptop will have come to the right place here. Some high-performance alternatives to Schenker's laptop series are presented in the right-hand column ("Shortcut").