Introducing CyberpowerPC's Compal PBL21

The last time we took a look at a Compal whitebook (again courtesy of CyberpowerPC), we noted to Compal that their whitebook wasn't a shark, perfect and needing no further evolution. Their 15.6" shell had gone largely unchanged since the dawn of the 15.6" form factor, missing modern connectivity like eSATA and USB 3.0 and exhibiting an aesthetic that seemed like a relic from a bygone era. When Compal updated the exterior of their 15.6" flagship along with the interior update to Sandy Bridge, it sounded like a good opportunity to see just how much the notebook had evolved. Exit the old NBLB2, enter the PBL21.

The march of progress has been a long time coming for Compal. Ever since the start of my tenure way back at NotebookReview, people have been consistently curious about their 15" notebooks. These machines always featured high-resolution screens and powerful dedicated graphics in an appealing form factor. The shell stagnated for a long time, but with the PBL21 that era comes to a close. Updates to Sandy Bridge and NVIDIA's GeForce 500M series accompany a healthy change in style.

I find the more notebooks I test the more fond I become of Intel's Core i7-2630QM. Last generation didn't really have a proper entry-level quad-core unless you count the Core i7-720QM, and that chip was a rare find south of a grand. But Intel seems to be pricing the i7-2630QM to sell, because I'm seeing it pop up all over the place; on NewEgg you can find it in an Acer notebook for just $699. It's a good thing, too, because while the i7-720QM occasionally found itself having a hard time competing with its dual-core brethren, the Sandy Bridge-based i7-2630QM is plenty fast. It starts at a 2GHz clock speed and can turbo all the way up to 2.9GHz on one core or 2.6GHz on all four cores, and each of those cores is Hyper-Threading enabled.

Strapped to the i7-2630QM's memory controller is 8GB of DDR3-1333 in two DIMMs, and supporting it on graphics duty is NVIDIA's GeForce GT 540M with 2GB of DDR3 (honestly far more than this GPU can really take advantage of). I'm curious to see how well the GT 540M competes with the last model's AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5650. In the Compal PBL21, the GT 540M features 96 of NVIDIA's CUDA cores, with a base clock speed of 672MHz and the shaders operating at 1344MHz. That 2GB of DDR3 is thankfully strapped to a 128-bit memory bus and running at an effective 1.8GHz. It's not blazingly fast, but mercifully the benefit of a 1080p 15.6" screen is that running at a lower than native resolution doesn't look that bad.

For storage duties, CyberpowerPC equipped this review unit with a 128GB Kingston SSDNow V Series SSD. It's not the fastest SSD on the market, but it still beats mechanical storage for speed and it keeps costs down. Connectivity has gotten a small but much appreciated boost with the new chassis, though: the Compal PBL21 is now USB 3.0 enabled (but still no eSATA).

Compal's Shark Evolves

While the internals have gotten their usual refresh, I'm pleased to report that the PBL21 has given the chassis a real update this time, too. In some cases it's two steps forward, one step back, but progress is always appreciated.

The lid and screen bezel have unfortunately gone almost completely unchanged, though. Glossy black plastic abounds, playing hell with photography and with the general appearance of the notebook. We've already been over my feelings regarding glossy plastic on the screen bezel so it doesn't bear repeating, but the takeaway here is that the top half of the PBL21 has the same issues with gloss that its predecessor did.

When you get to the main shell, though, you'll see Compal has divorced itself from the glossy gray of old and recognized what many of us already knew: black goes with everything. The frame of the keyboard is a glossy black accent, but the palmrest and touchpad are a textured black matte plastic that's a major improvement. Shortcut buttons and touch controls above and around the keyboard have been replaced by two physical buttons above it: power, and a toggle for USB charging.

Unfortunately, the PBL21's keyboard is more of a lateral move than anything and I'm beginning to think that despite the ability to cram a 10-key into a 15.6" chassis, manufacturers should probably just avoid it. If the NBLB2's keyboard was mushy and flexy, the PBL21's has some of the same issues with flex along with being incredibly noisy and clicky. The layout itself isn't terrible, but the 10-key is borderline worthless. The whole point of a 10-key (a point Clevo doesn't understand either) is that it's standardized to allow you to use it by touch. But moving keys around the way Clevo and Compal do makes the keypad pointless. I'm also not at all a fan of using the keypad as shortcuts for document navigation, much preferring the column of document navigation keys on the right side of the keyboard (assuming a lack of 10-key) or a row above the number pad. Thankfully the keys are still the same classic matte style keys and not an island-style keyboard, so users who hate the chiclet keys that have become so common with modern keyboards will be happy with the PBL21.

The touchpad is once again part of the shell, only this time even less well demarcated from the rest of the palm rest. I still hate how this looks on modern notebooks; it takes away some of the magic and just feels chintzy. The flipside is that because Compal switched to a matte plastic for the palm rest, the touchpad is now vastly improved and much, much easier to use. Tracking and texture are solid, and though I still hate the rocker-style mouse button, it gets the job done.

All in all the Compal PBL21's build still feels a bit generic and spare as is customary with whitebooks, but it's much improved from its predecessor, seeming less bulbous and more streamlined.

Application and Futuremark Performance

Starting out with PCMark 7 performance, it's important to note that the Sandy Bridge reference notebook we reviewed enjoys the benefits of an SSD (just like the Compal PBL21 we have in for review), so its results are going to be somewhat skewed. Still, the i7-2630QM is mostly a known quantity so everything should line up reasonably well.

Honestly, these results seem...a bit bizarre. PCMark 7's subscores seem to be all over the place, with the PBL21 hopping all over the board. The computation score clearly isn't getting the most out of the hardware, and Dell's similarly equipped XPS 15 (minus the SSD) often manages to beat the Compal. Let's see if PCMark Vantage and our other CPU-related benchmarks smooth things out some.

The beauty of the other benchmarks is that they're much more precise and less prone to variance. Cinebench R10 lines up beautifully, and we can see the PBL21's i7-2630QM is performing right where it should be. x264 encoding favors Dell's XPS 15 in the first pass, then flip-flops to the PBL21 in the second. It's worth noting that the i7-2630QM also demolishes the respectable last-generation i7-640M dual-core in the Compal NBLB2. Things are essentially where they need to be, though, so let's take a look at 3DMark.

3DMark at least seems to favor the NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M compared to the AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5650 that powered the last generation Compal laptop. It's worth noting the formerly "entry high-end" GeForce GTS 350M is essentially matched by the GT 540M as well, and the Clevo's GTX 460M is roughly twice as powerful as the GT 540M. If raw gaming performance is what you're gunning for, the GT 540M may not be quite enough.

Gaming Performance

For testing the Compal PBL21's NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M, we'll run through our "medium" and "high" testing suites. It's fast enough that it'll handle any of our "low" presets with aplomb; at the same time, the 128-bit memory bus and DDR3 attached to the GPU will, as you'll see, basically ensure that the PBL21 can't really game at its native resolution. While we don't show minimum framerate results, suffice it to say even if the game is able to exceed an average of the magical 30fps at 1080p, it's a muddy experience.

Generally speaking, the NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M is a practical improvement over the last generation's AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5650. The blows traded between the Dell XPS 15 and Compal PBL21 can be mostly attributed to differences in drivers the units shipped with, but either way the two are essentially comparable. At these framerates, the medium presets are really where the GT 540M is going to be most comfortable; 1080p performance is rocky, and that old GPU killer Metro 2033 takes its toll at any resolution.

1600x900 is really about the limit a GPU with a 128-bit memory bus and DDR3 is going to hit before things get too shaky, and the Compal PBL21 bears that out. 1080p is a lost cause at our "high" preset. If you're willing to fiddle with the settings in most of your games 1600x900 is probably going to be the sweet spot for compromising between performance and image quality, but the GeForce GT 540M is just not powerful enough to drive games at 1080p.

Battery, Noise, and Heat

Once again, as with our review of the NBLB2, it's worth noting that the notebooks advertised on CyberpowerPC's site offer a 48Wh battery while our review unit sports a 58Wh battery. This seems to be fairly common, but given the relative size of the battery in the unit I have to wonder if it's just an error on the site.

Either way, the PBL21 gets to take advantage of NVIDIA's Optimus technology, while hybrid graphics solutions from AMD still seem to be somewhat rarefied. The Alienware M17x R3 we reviewed recently had switchable graphics off of its Radeon HD 6970M, but it was nowhere near as seamless as Optimus has been. Ironically the best place to find good battery life with solid AMD graphics right now may very well be Llano!

The Dell XPS 15 doesn't just sport a bigger battery than the Compal PBL21, it uses it better too. Battery life for the PBL21 is actually quite poor, which is disheartening given the advantages it leverages. We're really past the era where three hours of useful battery life is an acceptable minimum; Sandy Bridge offers better efficiency overall and we should be using notebooks that take advantage of that. The Dell XPS 15 runs roughshod over Compal's offering; its battery may be less a little than twice as large, but it's pulling more than twice the running time of the PBL21. If you prefer a comparison with similar size batteries, here's how the PBL21 stacks up to the XPS 15 with a 56Wh battery.

Thankfully, it may be a testament to the PBL21 that I didn't notice it much during testing (apart from its bright, brilliant screen). Noise levels are comfortably low even under extreme load, and subjectively it didn't run particularly hot.

These temperatures remain reasonable for a mobile quad-core and decently-powered GPU. Given the PBL21's relatively quiet profile, Compal seems to have struck a good balance between thermal performance and acoustics.

Apart from a mild hotspot in the corner, the surface temperatures of the Compal PBL21 remain entirely reasonable and even a bit cool. Whether rendering out video or enjoying a gaming session, the PBL21 isn't likely to intrude too much.

That Same Great 1080p Screen

The model number of the screen in the Compal PBL21 appears to match up to the screen used in the NBLB2, although our tests do reveal some variance. That said, it's still basically excellent. Although we've had one notebook that disappointed us, generally speaking a 1080p screen is almost always a great investment: contrast, color gamut, color accuracy, and viewing angles all seem to be improved by the finer pitch. The screen on the PBL21 is a joy to use and thankfully it comes standard.

The screen on the Dell XPS 15 was a foregone conclusion as a clear winner; their B+RG LED backlighting produces an outstanding color gamut in their screens along with superior contrast. But the Compal PBL21 is still largely able to keep pace with the Clevo unit's 1080p screen, and is frankly an excellent upgrade over competing notebooks with their 1366x768 panels. There are also various reasons to prefer lower color gamuts, and in terms of coming close to the sRGB standard the Compal LCD wins out over the Dell. The Compal LCD is also quite bright at ~350 nits, which is useful if you happen to use it in brightly lit environment or outdoors (though you'd still want to be in the shade unless you have a ~600+ nits backlight).

Viewing angles on the PBL21 are likewise stellar. As I mentioned in my review of the Alienware M17x R3, a TN panel doesn't necessarily have to mean doom and gloom; TN panels are capable of being much better than they used to be, and the PBL21's panel is proof enough of that. For regular use or even color-intensive use, the PBL21 should do in a pinch.

Conclusion: If Not For Competition

The Compal PBL21 is a solid evolution of the NBLB2, bringing with it the upgrade to Sandy Bridge, slightly improved graphics hardware, and a much better chassis. Including USB 3.0 is a nice touch, and the 1080p panel is always welcome. In a vacuum, this would be an easy enough laptop to recommend.

Unfortunately, as with the NBLB2, the PBL21 doesn't exist in a vacuum. In our review it butts up squarely against two impressive competitors. The Clevo P151HM sports a great screen, too, and it has a vastly more powerful GPU that's actually capable of handling gaming at 1080p. CyberpowerPC is willing to sell you that notebook upgraded with the new GeForce GTX 560M (which also supports Optimus!) in an otherwise identical configuration to this review unit for $1,460, or about $300 more. At least there you have a reasonably hard decision to make, though if gaming is important to you it will be worth taking the plunge.

And then there's the Dell XPS 15. Jarred's been a big fan of Dell's revived XPS line and it's not hard to see why. Dell will sell you the XPS 15 in a comparable configuration for $1,344, although you sacrifice the SSD. In exchange you get better speakers, an even better screen, a good keyboard, and improved battery life.

Pricewise the PBL21 is more or less where it needs to be. It's the least expensive option in the bunch, with a fairly well-rounded form factor and a decent GPU. This is if nothing else a balanced design, and the benefit of ordering from a boutique like CyberpowerPC or AVADirect is that they're far less likely to rip you off on upgrade costs. Case in point: CyberpowerPC upgrades you from 4GB to 8GB of RAM for $69, while Dell will ding you $120 for the privilege. You can grab the Compal PBL21 (Xplorer X6-9600) with a quad-core processor starting at less than $1000, which is a lot of performance all things considered.

The price is right on the PBL21 and it's not necessarily a bad notebook. I just can't help but feel like it's a situation where you may want to budge in one direction or the other. But if you want a 1080p screen, quad-core processor, SSD, and a decent GPU at a good price, you'll have a hard time doing better.

We'd like to thank CyberpowerPC for giving us the opportunity to review the Compal PBL21.