Clevo X170SM-G (Eluktronics THICC-17) Initial Review

[Mnky313]

So, my THICC-17 finally arrvied and they weren't kidding when they said THICC. Even though I was expecting it the first thing I noticed taking it out of the box was how massive it is, it's basically the same thickness as my Mech-17 sitting on ~3/4 inch stand made from legos I had it on. But who cares? If your buying a desktop replacement you probably couldn't care less about how big it is so lets start the actual review.

 

External Port Selection

Obviously one of the huge selling points for me was the port selection, it has just about everything. My only complaint it there is only 3 USB A ports (though they all run at 10gbps, there are 3 type Cs one of which is thunderbolt 3, one is 20gbps and one supports DP so...)
2.5Gb Ethernet is a nice touch but I currently don't have any 2.5Gb or WiFi6 stuff so it's not really in use for now...

Internal Ports/Upgradability

This is a HUGE reason why I bought this machine and I hope clevo doesn't let me down XD. 
For internal upgrades there are 4 SoDIMM slots (only 2 are populated on my 16GB config), there are also a total of 5 M.2 slots though 1 is for WiFi and 1 only accepts SATA drives, the other 3 all accept NVMe drives.
My 1 complaint here is no 2.5" HDD but I can deal with it when there are spots to put 4 SSDs...

As for the upgradability, the CPU and GPU are both upgradable with a full LGA 1200 socket and an MXM slot.
This laptop should support 11th gen Rocket Lake CPUs with a simple BIOS update and hopefully Clevo with continue making MXM cards (though they are the last to be doing so I believe) for 30 series and beyond.
What gives me hope is Clevo's previous machines like the P775 used the same chassis for multiple CPU and GPU generations allowing for easy upgrade kits that have new boards supporting the new Intel CPUs.

Performance

I went ahead and fired up Cinebench just to see how fast the 10900k could run with all 10 cores under full load... Turns out, not very fast. This is where my first issue started, I was expecting (from seeing other reviews and looking around that even the 10900k should be able to run at almost it's max turbo on all cores but for some reason I'm having a weird issue where instead of staying at turbo it goes up to the max turbo for ~1 second and immediately sits at base clock only pulling 90W (before undervolt, ~75W if I set -100mV). Idk exactly what's causing this and I'm still trying to figure out what is up. I also tried disabling the 'overclocking support' thing in the BIOS but that makes no difference.

That being said, it's still not slow by any means. 10 cores and 3.7GHz is still impressive for a laptop considering the CPU sat around 80c.

 

I've fixed the weird downclocking by installing Clevo Control Center and setting it to Performance mode, downside is running something like Cinebench has temps pinned at the high 90s however it's running at 4.7GHz all core! I'm still impressed, in lighter tasks it runs at up to 5.0GHz all core or 5.1GHz 2 core).

As for the GPU (mine has a 200W 2080S MAX-P) I have basically no complaints, with +100MHz core and +800MHz mem (haven't actually dialed in anything yet, +150MHz crashed in 3dmark) the card sits at ~1900MHz and pulls all 200W of it's TDP while staying below 70c.

 

Here are some benchmark results for Time Spy and Cinebench

You can see towards the end of the Time Spy graphs what I'm talking about where it jumps between turbo and base clock constantly (though this was run with 5.0GHz all core set so it's probably temp related, those spikes were over 90c, I still don't know why it's not dialing it back normally and instead opting to just drop to base clock though...)

OVERALL

Initial impressions besides the weird CPU issue have been great, I don't care about the size and even having 2 power bricks is still not a huge deal to me. I'll continue to try and what I can get out of the 10900k.
For anyone wondering why I didn't just go for a 10600k/10700k I got it from Eluktronics as theirs was anywhere from $500 to over $1200 less than competitors (even with lower specs) so it made sense just to get the higher end one for cheaper.

I would love to see a full LTT video on this machine (there has been a shortcircuit and it's shown up a few times in videos but there's no full review yet).

 

[SETT4742]

im thinking about buying this computer could you please do some more benchmarks for me like- 3DMark Fire Strike-3DMark Port Royal and maybe even-SteamVR Performance Test.

this would help me so much

[Mnky313]

5 minutes ago, SETT4742 said:

im thinking about buying this computer could you please do some more benchmarks for me like- 3DMark Fire Strike-3DMark Port Royal and maybe even-SteamVR Performance Test.

this would help me so much

I happen to be on the forum so yeah, I attach them here in a bit once they're done. (except Port Royal, I don't own it... Guess it's not included in advanced edition)

[SETT4742]

thank you so much im trying to see the difference between the Msi GT76 titian because the specs are the same but the price diff is huge

 

[Mnky313]

Firestrike is in the top 21% of 2080Super Desktop results (even with discord and stuff running in the background so scores probably could be slightly higher if you close all background tasks):

 

6 minutes ago, SETT4742 said:

thank you so much im trying to see the difference between the Msi GT76 titian because the specs are the same but the price diff is huge

 

performance should be similar, I like the Clevo because of the better port selection, other stuff like the GPU being MXM (couldn't find out if MSI's is MXM) (so hopefully clevo will keep making mxm GPUs for 30 series and later) and fingerprint reader. I also couldn't find if the MSI has dual power bricks, limiting the machine to 330W (or potentially less) could cause worse performance, I know the CPU pulls ~160W and the GPU around ~200W under load.

[SETT4742]

would you recommend waiting for the rtx 30 series because i dont have to get a new laptop at the moment?? 

 

[Mnky313]

2 minutes ago, SETT4742 said:

would you recommend waiting for the rtx 30 series because i dont have to get a new laptop at the moment?? 

 

I'd wait and see if clevo/dell/msi cooks up a desktop 3080 GPU in a laptop/MXM card, mobile 3080 is basically the same performance as these desktop replacement 2080 Supers

The 3080 notebook GPUs as they are just aren't work it IMO. That being said the performance on these 200W 2080S machines is damn good and even if no desktop 3080s end up in laptops the price of these machine's will probably fall.

[SETT4742]

ok thank you very much for the help you have just given me the info to buy this computer or wait for the 30 series if i ever need help with the computer in the future could i come to you for advice?

 

[SETT4742]

1 minute ago, SETT4742 said:

ok thank you very much for the help you have just given me the info to buy this computer or wait for the 30 series if i ever need help with the computer in the future could i come to you for advice?

 

i also emailed the company they said that have no plans for giving the laptop the 30 series and once again thank you

[Mnky313]

3 minutes ago, SETT4742 said:

ok thank you very much for the help you have just given me the info to buy this computer or wait for the 30 series if i ever need help with the computer in the future could i come to you for advice?

 

Thanks! I'm only on the forum occasionally, you're probably better off just asking questions on the forum instead of straight to me.

 

1 minute ago, SETT4742 said:

i also emailed the company they said that have no plans for giving the laptop the 30 series and once again thank you

Which company? Clevo? or Eluktronics?

[SETT4742]

Just now, Mnky313 said:

Thanks! I'm only on the forum occasionally, you're probably better off just asking questions on the forum instead of straight to me.

 

Which company? Clevo? or Eluktronics?

Eluktronics and in the future could you technically replace the cpu because its a desktop cpu? 

[Mnky313]

Just now, SETT4742 said:

Eluktronics and in the future could you technically replace the cpu because its a desktop cpu? 

AFAIK Clevo would be the ones making the MXM cards to upgrade the GPU to 30 series (idk if they are or what their plan is though)
And yes, because 11th gen Intel is supported on z490 it should be a drop in upgrade to an 11900k.

[SETT4742]

couldn't you also technically  upgrade the GPU later with the MXM 30 series?

[Mnky313]

1 minute ago, SETT4742 said:

couldn't you also technically  upgrade the GPU later with the MXM 30 series?

yep, however most manufacturers stopped making MXM cards with 20 series (except Clevo, who still makes MXM RTX 20 series cards). So as long as Clevo decides to make MXM 30 series cards they should work fine in this laptop.

[SETT4742]

with your knowledge are there better laptops than this one 

[Mnky313]

Just now, SETT4742 said:

with your knowledge are there better laptops than this one 

depends on what you need.
If you want a extremely fast upgradable desktop replacement style laptop, then this is just about the best.
If you don't need the upgradability and would rather have a thinner laptop, something with a 5900hx and high wattage 3080 mobile might have similar gaming performance depending on the game.

[SETT4742]

in the future if the MXM rtx 30 comes out would you personaly be upgrading your laptop with it and what about your game performance what do you play and whats your avarage fps and sorry im asking so many questions im just really trying to find the right laptop and i can stop if you want me to.

[Mnky313]

1 minute ago, SETT4742 said:

in the future if the MXM rtx 30 comes out would you personaly be upgrading your laptop with it and what about your game performance what do you play and whats your avarage fps and sorry im asking so many questions im just really trying to find the right laptop and i can stop if you want me to.

If Clevo manages to put a desktop 3080 die (with the full cuda/rt core count) on an MXM card I might be interested in upgrading it but if it's a normal 3080 mobile probably not, the performance difference between them is not that big. That being said we have no idea what nvidia is planning with 40 series or beyond.
I plan on keeping this laptop as long as I can, upgrading it when I can. I really hope Clevo supports this like they did with their P775 notebooks offering board/chassis upgrades to new chipsets with support for newer CPUs, etc.

Honestly most of the games I play don't tax the laptop very hard at all (stuff like Unrailed!, Overcooked 2, osu!, etc.). The only real demanding game I'm playing rn is BeamNG which runs great. I think the game is on high (and I know I have dynamic reflections maxed) with framerates well about 60fps (usually above 100 in most places).

I've also played Sea of thieves which I think ran at ~100fps on max settings. (this was well over a month ago so it might not be completely correct).

It's way overkill for pretty much everything I do right now but I'd rather it be fast enough to not have to worry if I can run a game or not for years then have to buy a new machine/upgrade an older one every couple years.

[SETT4742]

how did the computer perform out of the box is there anything you did to it you would recommend? 

[Mnky313]

Just now, SETT4742 said:

how did the computer perform out of the box is there anything you did to it you would recommend? 

those numbers in my review are pretty much the same as out of the box.
All I've done is dial in a CPU undervolt/overclock (which I haven't properly benchmarked in games and I doubt makes any difference to gaming performance)

and a small OC on the GPU:

 

The GPU OC took like 5 minutes, I tried +150 core and had some stability issues after a few hours so I lowered it to +125.

Even then both of these barely make any difference, I would say maybe a couple percent better in benchmarks and a handful of FPS, nothing that is a real game changer for performance.

 

I would recommend enabling 'overclocking support' in the BIOS and using XTU to raise the power limit to 160W instead of the default 130W and slowing bring the voltage offset down to find the lowest it's stable as this will help lower temps or at least lower the throttling under heavy CPU loads like cinebench.

[SETT4742]

ok and is there a difference in the eluktronisc and Clevo  laptops or are they the same or would you recommend one of those two over the other?

 

[Mnky313]

Clevo is the ODM, they basically make the laptop and Eluktronics (and many others) rebrand them and add CPUs, RAM, Storage, etc. and sell them to consumers. All parts should be interchangable between any of the companies that rebrand Clevo machines as long as they are using the same original laptop chassis.
I haven't had any problems with Eluktronics and their support seems super helpful. If you're in the US I think they are usually the best bet, unless you wanted to pay a little more for something special like Origin's custom top panel designs.

[SETT4742]

your so much better than any tech support i have ever had thanks for the help if i even have a small question i will be sure to come back if thats ok with you

[Deadeffect]

On 11/24/2020 at 6:41 PM, Mnky313 said:

So, my THICC-17 finally arrvied and they weren't kidding when they said THICC. Even though I was expecting it the first thing I noticed taking it out of the box was how massive it is, it's basically the same thickness as my Mech-17 sitting on ~3/4 inch stand made from legos I had it on. But who cares? If your buying a desktop replacement you probably couldn't care less about how big it is so lets start the actual review.

 

External Port Selection

Obviously one of the huge selling points for me was the port selection, it has just about everything. My only complaint it there is only 3 USB A ports (though they all run at 10gbps, there are 3 type Cs one of which is thunderbolt 3, one is 20gbps and one supports DP so...)
2.5Gb Ethernet is a nice touch but I currently don't have any 2.5Gb or WiFi6 stuff so it's not really in use for now...

Internal Ports/Upgradability

This is a HUGE reason why I bought this machine and I hope clevo doesn't let me down XD. 
For internal upgrades there are 4 SoDIMM slots (only 2 are populated on my 16GB config), there are also a total of 5 M.2 slots though 1 is for WiFi and 1 only accepts SATA drives, the other 3 all accept NVMe drives.
My 1 complaint here is no 2.5" HDD but I can deal with it when there are spots to put 4 SSDs...

As for the upgradability, the CPU and GPU are both upgradable with a full LGA 1200 socket and an MXM slot.
This laptop should support 11th gen Rocket Lake CPUs with a simple BIOS update and hopefully Clevo with continue making MXM cards (though they are the last to be doing so I believe) for 30 series and beyond.
What gives me hope is Clevo's previous machines like the P775 used the same chassis for multiple CPU and GPU generations allowing for easy upgrade kits that have new boards supporting the new Intel CPUs.

Performance

I went ahead and fired up Cinebench just to see how fast the 10900k could run with all 10 cores under full load... Turns out, not very fast. This is where my first issue started, I was expecting (from seeing other reviews and looking around that even the 10900k should be able to run at almost it's max turbo on all cores but for some reason I'm having a weird issue where instead of staying at turbo it goes up to the max turbo for ~1 second and immediately sits at base clock only pulling 90W (before undervolt, ~75W if I set -100mV). Idk exactly what's causing this and I'm still trying to figure out what is up. I also tried disabling the 'overclocking support' thing in the BIOS but that makes no difference.

That being said, it's still not slow by any means. 10 cores and 3.7GHz is still impressive for a laptop considering the CPU sat around 80c.

 

I've fixed the weird downclocking by installing Clevo Control Center and setting it to Performance mode, downside is running something like Cinebench has temps pinned at the high 90s however it's running at 4.7GHz all core! I'm still impressed, in lighter tasks it runs at up to 5.0GHz all core or 5.1GHz 2 core).

As for the GPU (mine has a 200W 2080S MAX-P) I have basically no complaints, with +100MHz core and +800MHz mem (haven't actually dialed in anything yet, +150MHz crashed in 3dmark) the card sits at ~1900MHz and pulls all 200W of it's TDP while staying below 70c.

 

Here are some benchmark results for Time Spy and Cinebench

You can see towards the end of the Time Spy graphs what I'm talking about where it jumps between turbo and base clock constantly (though this was run with 5.0GHz all core set so it's probably temp related, those spikes were over 90c, I still don't know why it's not dialing it back normally and instead opting to just drop to base clock though...)

OVERALL

Initial impressions besides the weird CPU issue have been great, I don't care about the size and even having 2 power bricks is still not a huge deal to me. I'll continue to try and what I can get out of the 10900k.
For anyone wondering why I didn't just go for a 10600k/10700k I got it from Eluktronics as theirs was anywhere from $500 to over $1200 less than competitors (even with lower specs) so it made sense just to get the higher end one for cheaper.

I would love to see a full LTT video on this machine (there has been a shortcircuit and it's shown up a few times in videos but there's no full review yet).

 

Hey I just got the same laptop last month. Would love to chat with you about them, currently sending mine back to Eluktronics for the Prema bios ( look into it if you don’t have it). Deadeffect#0542 on discord.

[Deadeffect]

On 11/24/2020 at 6:41 PM, Mnky313 said:

So, my THICC-17 finally arrvied and they weren't kidding when they said THICC. Even though I was expecting it the first thing I noticed taking it out of the box was how massive it is, it's basically the same thickness as my Mech-17 sitting on ~3/4 inch stand made from legos I had it on. But who cares? If your buying a desktop replacement you probably couldn't care less about how big it is so lets start the actual review.

 

External Port Selection

Obviously one of the huge selling points for me was the port selection, it has just about everything. My only complaint it there is only 3 USB A ports (though they all run at 10gbps, there are 3 type Cs one of which is thunderbolt 3, one is 20gbps and one supports DP so...)
2.5Gb Ethernet is a nice touch but I currently don't have any 2.5Gb or WiFi6 stuff so it's not really in use for now...

Internal Ports/Upgradability

This is a HUGE reason why I bought this machine and I hope clevo doesn't let me down XD. 
For internal upgrades there are 4 SoDIMM slots (only 2 are populated on my 16GB config), there are also a total of 5 M.2 slots though 1 is for WiFi and 1 only accepts SATA drives, the other 3 all accept NVMe drives.
My 1 complaint here is no 2.5" HDD but I can deal with it when there are spots to put 4 SSDs...

As for the upgradability, the CPU and GPU are both upgradable with a full LGA 1200 socket and an MXM slot.
This laptop should support 11th gen Rocket Lake CPUs with a simple BIOS update and hopefully Clevo with continue making MXM cards (though they are the last to be doing so I believe) for 30 series and beyond.
What gives me hope is Clevo's previous machines like the P775 used the same chassis for multiple CPU and GPU generations allowing for easy upgrade kits that have new boards supporting the new Intel CPUs.

Performance

I went ahead and fired up Cinebench just to see how fast the 10900k could run with all 10 cores under full load... Turns out, not very fast. This is where my first issue started, I was expecting (from seeing other reviews and looking around that even the 10900k should be able to run at almost it's max turbo on all cores but for some reason I'm having a weird issue where instead of staying at turbo it goes up to the max turbo for ~1 second and immediately sits at base clock only pulling 90W (before undervolt, ~75W if I set -100mV). Idk exactly what's causing this and I'm still trying to figure out what is up. I also tried disabling the 'overclocking support' thing in the BIOS but that makes no difference.

That being said, it's still not slow by any means. 10 cores and 3.7GHz is still impressive for a laptop considering the CPU sat around 80c.

 

I've fixed the weird downclocking by installing Clevo Control Center and setting it to Performance mode, downside is running something like Cinebench has temps pinned at the high 90s however it's running at 4.7GHz all core! I'm still impressed, in lighter tasks it runs at up to 5.0GHz all core or 5.1GHz 2 core).

As for the GPU (mine has a 200W 2080S MAX-P) I have basically no complaints, with +100MHz core and +800MHz mem (haven't actually dialed in anything yet, +150MHz crashed in 3dmark) the card sits at ~1900MHz and pulls all 200W of it's TDP while staying below 70c.

 

Here are some benchmark results for Time Spy and Cinebench

You can see towards the end of the Time Spy graphs what I'm talking about where it jumps between turbo and base clock constantly (though this was run with 5.0GHz all core set so it's probably temp related, those spikes were over 90c, I still don't know why it's not dialing it back normally and instead opting to just drop to base clock though...)

OVERALL

Initial impressions besides the weird CPU issue have been great, I don't care about the size and even having 2 power bricks is still not a huge deal to me. I'll continue to try and what I can get out of the 10900k.
For anyone wondering why I didn't just go for a 10600k/10700k I got it from Eluktronics as theirs was anywhere from $500 to over $1200 less than competitors (even with lower specs) so it made sense just to get the higher end one for cheaper.

I would love to see a full LTT video on this machine (there has been a shortcircuit and it's shown up a few times in videos but there's no full review yet).

 

After looking into it Prema looks like he( or the team) has the top score on our rig. Pretty exciting cant wait to see my results.