Introducing the Compal NBLB2

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been wanting to get my mitts on a Compal notebook for review for a while. Compal has had essentially this same chassis on the market for years, periodically updating and refreshing the components as new hardware became available, but reviews of this line have been scarce. It wasn't until we got in touch with CyberpowerPC and let them know how difficult it's been to secure one that they sent us a review unit.

And what's not compelling about it? We know there's a demand for 15.6" notebooks with 1080p screens and reasonably powerful graphics, and this Compal model has generally been reasonably priced across the different vendors (much less across generations of hardware). So what is our review unit packing?

Our review unit comes to us equipped with Intel's fastest dual-core mobile chip, and our testing has shown that the Core i7-640M's nominal 2.8GHz stock clock and blistering 3.46GHz Turbo clock allow it to trump the entry-level i7-720QM in all but the most heavily threaded tasks. Note that this chip is a $134 upgrade off of the standard and still reasonable Core i5-560M, and represents the biggest jump in price for our review configuration. You can upgrade to a quad-core chip, too, but we're not entirely certain how well this chassis would cope with the increased heat dissipation and it would most certainly have a catastrophic effect on battery life.

By now the rest of Arrandale and the PM/HM55 platform should be old hat. Cyberpower ships the NBLB2 with 4GB of DDR3 standard, but what we're really interested in is the AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5650. This wouldn't be the first time we've tested the chip, not by a longshot, but it's actually going to be the first time our testing platform (updated months ago) is going to see a 5650 that isn't encumbered by a slow AMD mobile processor, low stock clock, or worse, both. As a result, the 5650 is going to get to stretch its legs here. At 550MHz it's not running at the fastest spec clock AMD defines for this particular chip (that would be the HD 5730, clocked 100MHz higher), but it's not the brutally slow 450MHz we saw before either.

The hard drive in our review unit is one you should all be familiar with by now: the Seagate Momentus 7200.4, a 500GB 7200-RPM hard drive that seems to have become the de facto standard for all industry players large and small. It's likewise coupled with a bog standard DVD+/-RW drive.

That leaves the other highlight: Compal doesn't ship this notebook with anything but a 15.6", 1080p screen. It has been increasingly our experience that these high-pixel-density screens offer substantially improved viewing angles, backlighting, and overall quality than the usual cheapo 1366x768 panels. Hopefully our testing will bear that out again, but subjectively the panel is very attractive.

It Isn't a Shark, Compal

Let me explain: the shark is one of nature's perfect predators, and has thus undergone very little evolution over the preceding millennia compared to other species. It hasn't changed because it hasn't really needed to; the Big Buddha stamped that project "complete" some time ago. Compal's NBLB2, on the other hand, looks like the relic of a bygone era. Notebook styling has changed fairly substantially over the past few years—heck even in the past year—but you wouldn't know it from looking at this one.

The lid marks the return of everyone's favorite: glossy black plastic. There's no pattern, just solid black, and it looks nice enough but the industry has started moving away from this kind of styling for a reason. Our CyberpowerPC unit has a company logo on the top left (or is it bottom right?) corner.

When you pop the notebook open you find that same wonderful glossy black plastic in the same place we've kvetched about before: all around the screen bezel. Oh well, at least they're consistent, and it makes more sense than ASUS using the glossy plastic only on the screen bezel. The hinges for the screen feel fairly strong, and the webcam is exactly where you'd expect it.

Moving down to the body, we find a patterned silver glossy plastic shell and what has to be the first 10-key-free 15.6" notebook keyboard we've seen in a while. The real estate saved to the right of the keyboard is used for the power button, the USB charging toggle, and the fingerprint reader, while the left side is barren. Above the keyboard are the speakers along with a bar of touch-sensitive buttons that didn't actually do anything in our review unit.

And the keyboard itself? A quaint sort of "old-style" layout (read: tried and true) using generic matte plastic keys. Compared to the chiclet-style keyboards we're getting accustomed to seeing these days, the NBLB2's oldest-school keyboard feels a little mushy despite having a comfortable layout. There's a little flex in the center of the keyboard, too; not enough to become a serious issue but still noticeable.

The touchpad below it, on the other hand, feels brutally cheap. Cordoned off from the rest of the palmrest by a printed outline and nothing else, the texture is unpleasant and tracking is difficult. The toggle button next to it is handy at least, and will probably see use long enough to turn the touchpad off for good. Beneath it is a single rocker that serves as the left and right mouse buttons and is about as much fun to use. This is a bad design that's in dire need of updating, but depending on how you intend to use the notebook it's not a dealbreaker. 

Unfortunately, the port selection also betrays Compal's general unwillingness to update their design. The four USB 2.0 ports and HDMI port are welcome, and having a hard wireless toggle switch instead of handling it in software is a nice throwback, but the infrared port is horribly outdated. Worse, without FireWire, USB 3.0, eSATA, or ExpressCard, you're stuck using either USB 2.0 or your network to transfer files to and from the hard drive. Frankly I'm surprised there isn't a PC card slot on this notebook.

Compal may have studiously continued to update this notebook's internals over the past couple of years, but the overall design feels borderline ancient in an industry that moves forward as fast as this one. AVADirect didn't want to send us one of these at all and to an extent I can understand why, but I'm not sure the notebooks Clevo makes are much of an improvement. Overall build quality of the Compal is actually a little better (Clevo notebooks feel like they have more of a candy shell than any kind of actual construction), but the design is staggeringly dated.

Application and Futuremark Performance

If the NBLB2 isn't that exciting to look at, the performance should definitely be there. The Intel Core i7-640M is a known quantity that remains an extremely respectable alternative to even Intel's mobile quad-core processors, and again the AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5650 will finally be able to stretch its legs. One of the perks of buying a notebook from a boutique builder like Cyberpower or AVADirect is that it's not liable to ship bogged down with extraneous software or pack-ins, either, so performance out of the box is stellar.

The Intel Core i7-640M in our review unit puts in a dynamite showing that proves it could very well be worth every penny of the $134 upgrade. It screams past every other processor on the charts and generally meets or beats the i7-720QM in performance, only losing to it in the most heavily multithreaded tasks. AMD's dual-core P520 with the same GPU also looks pathetically slow, but keep in mind that general application performance is "fast enough" for most people even on such a CPU, and the price is also a feather in the Acer 5551G's cap.

When we get into the 3DMarks they tell a similar story, although NVIDIA's chips seem to fare well here. The 5650 in the NBLB2 is no longer heavily limited by being strapped to an AMD chip and as a result performance improves, sometimes dramatically. The 5650 is also finally starting to break away from the last generation 4650.

Gaming Performance

With the AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5650 essentially off the chain, let's see how it fares compared to NVIDIA's recent 400 series GeForces in our "Low" setting gaming suite. Also keep an eye on the same GPU when coupled to the Athlon II P520.

At these CPU-limited settings the NBLB2 essentially takes on all comers, even producing playable performance in nearly every game at the native 1080p resolution. While the GeForce GTS 350M should be more powerful and is generally considered a higher class part, at least on paper, the i7-740QM it's strapped to could be bogging it down. The Acer 5551G also sits back anywhere from 10% (STALKER) to as much as 45% slower (BFBC2) thanks to the CPU deficit. What happens when we ratchet up to our "Medium" preset?

Performance is again excellent, and the 5650 trades blows with NVIDIA's lineup, new and old. In most games the NBLB2 is overall able to provide playable performance even at 1080p. That said, performance isn't entirely smooth at that native resolution, and with most games you may want to back down to 1600x900; 1080p seems to push the bandwidth-limited GDDR3 too hard, and this is true with either vendor's graphics hardware. AMD's P520 remains a noticeable bottleneck even at medium detail, with the i7-640M delivering anywhere from 6% (STALKER again) to 36% (BFBC2—or 31% in SC2) better frame rates. That gap will finally disappear at our 900p High settings, though.

When we get to our "High" preset, the NBLB2 falters: the 5650 just can't take the increased stress. This is true of all the parts in this class, as evidenced by the performance of the high-end GPUs. At this point it doesn't matter what processor the 5650 is paired up with, because it's entirely GPU-limited.

Battery Life

It's at this point we should mention that the battery pack in our review unit has specifications at odds with the Compal NBLB2 sold on CyberpowerPC's site (along with Sager's): they advertise a 4800mAh battery while the one in our unit is marked as 5200mAh. There shouldn't be a massive difference in running time, but it's worth mentioning nonetheless.

This is also where we expect NVIDIA's Optimus technology is going to come in handy and a place where AMD really needs to pick up the slack on pretty much all fronts. AMD mobile processors generally offer poor power consumption compared to their performance, and they don't have anything in their graphics hardware that competes with Optimus.

And there it is. Nearly four hours of runnning time off the chain isn't bad at all, but the Optimus-equipped notebooks (outside of Clevo's B5130M) typically fare a lot better. With the advertised 4800mAh battery, we'd probably expect to lose about fifteen to twenty minutes, leaving running time floating in the neighborhood of three-and-a-half hours. Not shabby, but nowhere near as good as some of the others.

Noise and Heat

If the battery life of the Compal NBLB2 isn't stellar, heat and noise are. The fan spins up under heavy load but it's not too noisy and is easy enough to drown out with music or most game audio. So if the fan doesn't sound like it's working that hard, theoretically heat should be an issue, right?

Or not. The processor cores get a little toasty under sustained load, but nothing too extreme, and the Radeon actually runs at an impressively cool (for a notebook) 70C. It stands to reason the more intrepid user could probably safely overclock the GPU and get some free extra performance without overwhelming the cooling system in the NBLB2. By the same token, though, it looks like the dual-core i7's 35W TDP is already pushing what's comfortable with this chassis, so we're not sure we'd recommend upgrading to a quad-core. Cyberpower offers the 55W i7-920XM as an upgrade, but I have a hard time believing this notebook could cope with that kind of thermal stress.

Another Good 15.6" 1080p Screen

The other big reason we wanted to get our hands on the Compal NBLB2 was the screen: the notebook comes with a 1080p, LED-backlit screen standard: none of that weak 1366x768 stuff here. This is the third one of these we've seen recently and at this point it's fairly clear to us that if you want a halfway decent picture from your notebook, 1080p is just the way to go.

Once again, the 1080p screen ranks near the top of our list. While the color gamut and accuracy aren't among the best, they're not terrible either. Contrast is pretty stellar, though, and again the overall image quality is subjectively attractive. It seems like there's also much less fussing over finding the "sweet spot" with these 1080p panels.

Conclusion: You Can Make a Case for It

When we reviewed the competing Clevo B5130M from AVADirect (and also offered by Cyberpower), the conclusion was fairly clear cut: it'd be an easy sell if Dell's XPS 15 didn't exist. That was reasonable enough then: the two are comparable in spec, but Dell offers a better screen, better build quality, and better battery life. With the Compal NBLB2 in the mix, though, things get murkier.

Shopping around can get you an NBLB2 for $899 or better, which automatically places it above the B5130M because the 1080p screen is standard as opposed to an upgrade. Compal does well on the insides, too: the AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5650 often comes out ahead of the GeForce 420M/425M that the Clevo and Dell notebooks use, so if gaming is high on your list of priorities there's a strong case to be made for going with this notebook over the competition. You still won't be running most games at high quality settings—and certainly not at high quality and 1080p—but medium quality and 1080p is still within reach, especially if you tweak a few of the settings to get above 30FPS. Clearly, AMD had a great design when the HD 5650 launched, and it has held up well over the past nine months.

Unfortunately, getting decent gaming performance means a fairly large trade-off. The Compal notebook's design is horrendously outdated, and while the battery life is fine in and of itself it's still lagging behind our editor's choice-winning Dell XPS 15, thanks to NVIDIA's Optimus Technology. The Dell notebook also offers the potential for an even better screen than the already impressive one in the NBLB2. [Update: Well, at least it did when the 1080p upgrade was available; that's currently missing, presumably because of insufficient supply.] You'll have to contend with Dell's customer service instead of the more personalized service you'd get from a smaller boutique vendor, but we have to wonder if the trade isn't worth it.

Mercifully, at the end of the day the NBLB2 doesn't feel like a complete "also-ran." While the Clevo B5130M found itself butting squarely up against Dell's incumbent, the NBLB2 presents a viable alternative for those looking to get as much gaming performance as they can out of a 15.6" notebook. At $899 from Sager or $945 from CyberpowerPC the price isn't too steep, either. It's not competing with the freak deals Acer periodically throws into the wild for a couple months, but the Compal has a much nicer screen and a better keyboard. If gaming is a top priority but you don't want to break your back with a big notebook (or your wallet with a big budget), the NBLB2 is very nearly as good as it gets.

Of course, besides the build quality and aesthetic problems, there's one other item this Compal notebook has to contend with: Sandy Bridge is coming next month, along with some other hardware updates from the various parties. We can't go into performance specifics any more than Anand did in our preview, but Core 2010 and the HD 5650 are both due for replacement in the near future. When Compal inevitably updates the NBLB2 yet again, hopefully they can make a break with some of the current design points and deliver a product that's better on all fronts.