The Clevo P870DM2 / Mythlogic Phobos 8716 Laptop Review: DTR With GTX 1080
by Brett Howse on October 27, 2016 2:00 PM ESTSystem Performance
Although there are several processor options in the Clevo P870DM2, Mythlogic has outfitted the review unit with the highest performance model they offer: the Intel Core i7-6700K. For those familiar with Intel’s lineup of processors, they offer several model lines, with the lowest power ones being the Y series, which are 4.5-Watt, and then the 15/28W U series, and then the highest tier of their mobile processors in the H and HQ, with the latter being the quad-core mobile parts. These top out at 45-Watts, and we see them in almost all gaming laptops. Clevo is marketing this as a desktop replacement, and as such, every processor option is from the Desktop lineup. The majority of the processor options are in the 65-Watt series from Intel S lineup, featuring quad-cores and 6 MB of cache. The processor in the Phobos 8716 review unit is from the K series, with a 91-Watt TDP, 4.0-4.2 GHz, 8 MB of cache, and it is unlocked for overclocking. From a power perspective, the Core i7-6700K has just over twice the thermal headroom of a typical H series processor found in a gaming notebook. Twice the TDP doesn’t mean twice the performance, of course, but there is certainly a lot more potential performance on tap than any H series could offer.
To see how much performance is available, the Clevo P870DM2 was run through our standard lineup of tests, and then compared against several other systems. Of particular interest will be comparisons against the last Desktop Replacement notebook that we tested in the Clevo P750ZM, which was outfitted with the Devil’s Canyon Core i7-4790K, and that CPU actually has a slight frequency advantage over the i7-6700K, with the former topping out at 4.4 GHz and the latter at 4.2 GHz, but with the advantage of the Skylake architecture versus the Haswell architecture in Devil’s Canyon. As always, check out our notebook bench if you’d like to compare this laptop to any other we have tested.
PCMark
Our first tests are from Futuremark’s PCMark benchmark. This test runs through several real-world applications, and is a complete system test, from the storage to the CPU to the GPU. The Phobos 8716 sets a new bar here for performance in a notebook. That’s not surprising since it has the fastest CPU, the fastest GPU, and the fastest SSD in the Samsung 950 Pro.
Cinebench
This test tends to be focused on pure CPU performance, and more cores with higher frequencies tend to dominate on this test. We can see that as well with the Devil’s Canyon in the P750ZM slightly edging the Skylake i7-6700K, thanks to a higher turbo frequency available, but only on the single-core tests. On the multi-core tests, the Skylake pulls ahead with its more advanced multi-core turbo, and benefits like Speed Shift.
x264
The better multi-core performance of Skylake once again pulls ahead easily here, with performance significantly better than the Haswell Devil’s Canyon.
Web Tests
Finally, web performance is always a priority, although it can be heavily influenced by the browser and platform. It is still something that everyone does every day. When Windows 10 launched, we switched to Edge for our tests, from Chrome on previous versions of Windows. Each browser is marked in the results.
It should come as no surprise after the previous benchmarks that the Clevo P870DM2 / Mythlogic Phobos 8716 easily trounces all previous computers on our web benchmarks as well. Packing a desktop CPU into a notebook has some drawbacks in terms of heat dissipation, but at the end of the day the performance is a good jump ahead of any of the H series processors.
Storage Performance
As with any of these boutique computers, there is quite a bit of customization available on all of the components, and the storage is no exception. For the review unit, Mythologic supplied the Samsung 950 Pro NVMe SSD, and if you saw the review on that drive, you’d be aware that it is one of the fastest consumer SSDs available today, and in fact was only recently pipped with the introduction of the 960 Pro.
With the 256 GB model which is in the review unit, there are not the maximum amount of NAND dies to give the maximum performance, but regardless the results are still very, very good. Read rates approaching 2000 MB/s is likely going to be enough for almost anyone. Mythlogic will outfit the Phobos 8716 in multiple ways, and there are actually two M.2 slots if you need more SSD storage, and also two 2.5-inch SATA slots as well if you need a bit more bulk storage for game downloads.
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ZeDestructor - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
Picture of the innards clearly shows one MXM module populated with an empty slot for a second MXM module. With two MXM cards installed, the heatsink for each GPU is shrunk by half though (second card takes over the second fan and gimps the first card to only having the leftmost fan), so there will be a lower boost max.Glaurung - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
"Let's be real, you aren't moving this thing around. Just buy a desktop."A laptop takes up much less room than a desktop, and you can close the lid and stow it away in a drawer. Whereas a desktop is always going to be hogging space on your desk for its keyboard, mouse, and monitor. For someone with a small apartment or student dorm room, the ability to simply close the lid and stow the whole thing away is a huge benefit. Don't think of this as a battery powered portable computer, think of it as a compact, stowable computer that has a built in UPS.
andychow - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
While I agree with the statement that many buy laptops to be able to stow the thing away, this is a $2255-$5000 device. It's not something I would imagine people in small apartments or dorms would get. Then again, I see "poor" students with macbook pros all the time. You have a good point actually.nerd1 - Sunday, October 30, 2016 - link
Many students I know pay >70k for just tution and rent. $2500 laptop is not that expensive in that regard (especially compared to macbook pros with the same price range)Morawka - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
12 pounds for that model, its still a lot easier than lugging around a tower, monitor, cables, etc..this is a great mobile VR Rig.a
DanNeely - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
Do you have any power usage figures? I'm curious what the TDP for the mobile version of pascal is. A Desktop 1080 is 180W, did manage to knock 80W of the mobile card to match the outgoing 980m despite only dropping the clock rate a few percent (massive binning???), or is near desktop performance equivalence coming at a huge expansion in power consumption?BrokenCrayons - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
You can do some quick estimations based on the fact that the SLI version requires two 330W power supplies.Add to it the cooling configuration of six heat pipes and two radiators...but we need to go back a bit to older tech for the heat pipes. A Dell Latitude D630 with an Intel x3100 GPU has a single heat pipe for the chipset and 35W processor's cooling needs. Assuming the pipe design is better means that a single heat pipe can likely handle 45W total TDP and that's a pretty reasonable estimate, but let's be conservative and say one pipe can deal with only 30W TDP. 30 x 6 pretty much means 180W TDP for the mobile part. Take into account the GPU can't sustain a full load at its highest clock even with all that cooling capacity and I think we're looking at a mobile GPU with the same TDP as the desktop part. There's certainly a lot of compelling evidence pointing that way anyhow.
DanNeely - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
Full desktop power is certainly possible, but the need for a second power brick doesn't prove much beyond >~110W. 90 (CPU) + 30 (everything else) + 2x110 = 340W which would max out the 330W power brick.I don't think your handwaving with the heatpipe count argument holds any strength, the size of the heatsinks on the other end, the power of the fans, and what temperatures are considered acceptable puts too much variation to try and assign an N Watts capacity to a single pipe and scale off of that.
BrokenCrayons - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
It's all extremely rough estimation on my part and I admit readily it's rife with possible faulty thinking and off-the-cuff guesswork, but unless or until we get credible numbers either from NV directly or from a group equipped to perform accurate analytics, there's nothing left but idle speculation...which can be sort of fun in its own way even if it ends up being way off the mark.Brett Howse - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link
Please don't forget that this also supports overclocking, so they have to supply a big enough power adapter to avoid running out of headroom when overclocking, so you can't really make the assumptions you are.NVIDIA doesn't have formal TDP numbers for the mobile parts, but they are going to be somewhere under the desktop ones.