Crossfire, Single, i5.... =(

foxorroxors · 28 May 2013 at 10:11

hey guys, im looking for a new laptop budget is around 1000 atm, i currently own a L855 toshiba with i5 3210m 6gb 7670m.

I was thinking of getting a clevo bare bones from S*** with 7970m x2 and dropping the i5,ram,hdd into it until i can afford a nicer cpu, ssd, more ram.

Anyone had exp with doing this? will the i5 gimp the system totally? surly it will still perform decently with the i5 @ 1080p?

Any thoughts/opinions welcomed.

fox

drakioned · 28 May 2013 at 10:46

I think you should be okay for most games.

foxorroxors · 28 May 2013 at 10:55

ty for the reply, was curious to which model chassis your laptop is? 4 s/hdd?

drakioned · 28 May 2013 at 12:26

I have the Clevo P370EM.

The four SSDs (I'll update my sig later to remove the HDD) are:
256gb Samsung 830 (regular)
250gb Samsung 840 (regular)
256gb Crucial M4 (mSATA)
120gb OCZ Vertex 2E (replacing the blu-ray drive that it came with)

foxorroxors · 28 May 2013 at 16:51

how are the 7970s in xfire? and do u raid 0 those two sammys? intrested as im looking to get the p370 nxt month...

drakioned · 28 May 2013 at 17:15

Honestly, I don't use my laptop nearly as much as I expected to, especially since I went and got two 7950s in Crossfire on my desktop a few weeks afterwards during a sale.

On the few times when I've been without my desktop, I haven't experienced any slow downs on the laptop (as you would expect with that spec), and on paper (according to 3D Mark), the laptop is even faster than my desktop due to the i7 (although actual game benchmarks disagree).

I don't raid the two Samsungs, they are different sizes and difference speeds and I'm not sure I'd gain anything from RAIDing them.

One thing I would say about the P370EM (and maybe Clevos in general), use the Clevo drivers for graphics (they have newer ones on their website than on the CD), not the generic AMD drivers. The generic AMD drivers break brightness control (and may cause some other problems).

The two gripes I have about the P370EM are:
a) the weight, although that goes with the territory, the Alienware m18x is even heavier
and
b) the click pad, it's a single click pad rather than a touchpad with 2 buttons

The clickpad has some annoying defaults (not sure whether this is Clevo or Synaptic's default), the default behaviour is as a single click pad, using single finger click as right click, and two finger click as right click, also, the default two finger scrolling is reversed (Mac-style). You can change all of this using the Synaptics control panel, but it's just irritating.

drakioned · 28 May 2013 at 17:20

oh, and the P570WM that OcUK stock is about 40% heavier than the P370EM as well

foxorroxors · 28 May 2013 at 19:52

Cheers for the info mate.