It Was a Monster Mash....

When Alienware announced the Ivy Bridge refresh for its gaming notebook lineup, one model was conspicuously absent. Word filtered out that the smallest member of the range, the 11.6” M11x, would not be refreshed and that Dell was preparing to discontinue the line. For ultramobile gamers, the loss of the M11x is a huge blow, because it was one of the more unique notebooks out there—a near ultraportable with legitimate gaming aspirations, backed up by gaming performance that lit the class standards on fire. It was a truly standout notebook, and it will be sorely missed.

But now, a spiritual successor emerges in the form of Clevo’s W110ER. We have this unit courtesy of Eurocom, who are calling it the Monster 1.0, but other boutiques selling the W110ER include AVADirect, OriginPC, Sager, and XoticPC amongst others. We typically see this with larger notebooks from Clevo and Compal, but it hasn’t been as prominent with smaller notebooks until now, with the exception of some ASUS models from years past.

The W110ER spec sheet actually reads like a pipe dream, something that you would come up with if things like thermal limits didn’t exist. The performance-class GPU is present and accounted for—Clevo ships every W110ER whitebook with a Kepler-based GT 650M (2GB DDR3, 384 CUDA cores, Optimus). But the most impressive thing here is that the W110ER has support for Intel’s new IVB 45W quad-core CPUs. Yeah seriously, a quad-core 11.6” notebook. Just to refresh your memory, the M11x made use of Intel’s low voltage dual-core parts, so this is a significant step up in CPU performance. It’s a ridiculous amount of performance stuffed into a tiny notebook.

The two closest competitors are probably the M11x R3 and the Sony VAIO SA (along with the forthcoming Ivy Bridge updated SA). The M11x is pretty soundly outgunned—the low voltage dual-core SNB vs. the IVB quad-core is not much of a comparison, and the update to Kepler on the GPU side is also a significant upgrade. The SA is an interesting point of comparison, because it’s not marketed as a gaming system, but it’s a 3.6lb 13.3”er that runs the normal-voltage SNB chips alongside an AMD HD6630M. Potent, yes, but both the Sony and the Alienware are relatively outdated at this point. IVB has power and thermal characteristics that make it possible to do ridiculous things like putting a quad-core in an 11.6” notebook, and the new 28nm GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA are generational leaps from their predecessors. It’ll be more relevant to reevaluate the segment after the Ivy Bridge update round completes; until then, the W110ER stands alone.

Let’s take a look at the Eurocom Monster unit that we received for evaluation. Eurocom shipped this unit with a Core i7-3720QM, the midlevel Ivy Bridge quad, along with 8GB memory, the glossy display (unfortunately the matte AU Optronics B116XW display was unavailable at the time our review unit was shipped), and a 750GB hybrid hard drive. I chose the hybrid hard drive purely out of curiosity—I hadn’t had one in a notebook before, and I was curious to see how it compared to the SSD experience. More on that later on.

Our particular review unit retails for $1389 based on Eurocom’s online configurator, but you can get a system with an IVB quad for as low as $921 (or $825 with an i5 SNB dual-core). Granted, that’s with 4GB RAM, a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive, and no Windows install, but that’s not too bad. Eurocom’s RAM upgrades are questionably priced ($128 to get bumped to 2x4GB DDR3-1600 from the base 4GB DDR3-1333; you can get a 2x4GB PC12800 kit from Newegg for a hair over $40), but the hard drive options are more reasonable.

Honestly, I’d get the base system with the cheapest IVB quad and the matte screen option ($138)—the AUO B116XW02 should be a significant upgrade over the standard glossy 11.6” panel made by Infovision Optoelectronics. From there, I’d probably add an 8GB DDR3-1333 SoDIMM into the empty RAM slot (for a total of 12GB memory) and drop in an SSD of some sort, probably an Intel 330. Sans Windows, that’s a system that goes for approximately $1250. Spec rundown: i7-3610QM (2.3GHz, Turbo up to 3.3), GT 650M 2GB, 12GB DDR3-1333, 120GB Intel SSD 330, and a matte 11.6” display. That’s a light-the-world-on-fire kind of performer for not that much coin.

Like I mentioned earlier, there are a number of companies offering variants of the W110ER for sale. The only differences between the retailers are pretty much just price/options and branding, along with custom paint options in certain cases. Eurocom appears to be one of the very few offering the upgraded screen option, and for that reason alone, I’d recommend buying it from them. As always, feel free to shop around—we discussed several other resellers in our Clevo W11ER pipeline.

Everything But the Kitchen Sink?

While the internal hardware is basically second to none, I have mixed feelings about the Monster from a device hardware standpoint. Clevo has never been mistaken for a design powerhouse, and the Monster does nothing to change that. Like most other Clevo notebooks, the design is a bit staid. It’s inoffensive, but relatively boring. The word that comes to mind is generic. In stark contrast to the heavily design-centric ultrabooks coming out these days, it’s a bit jarring. Obviously, the form factor isn’t conducive to a sleek and beautiful design, but even so, there aren’t any distinguishing characteristics to the design in general.

The chassis is constructed primarily of plastic, with a rubberized soft-touch finish on the interior and lid. There’s a square patterning on the palmrest, touchpad, and lid, giving all the surfaces you touch a subtle texture that feels nice to the touch. It feels pretty solid, no creaks or anything of the sort, and the lid is pretty resistant to torsion. It’s a pretty chunky laptop, and it’s built to match. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s rugged or tough in the same way as a ThinkPad, but this is a notebook that can take some abuse, something you can toss around without being afraid of scratching or denting.

From a form factor standpoint, the Monster is pretty interestingly situated. It has a smaller footprint than the M11x (the W110ER comes in at a quarter of an inch wider but almost an inch less deep), though a little bit thicker. The LCD bezel is thankfully not nearly as large or as distracting as the one on the M11x, but a major complaint we had with the smallest Alienware was that it had a chassis large enough to accommodate a bigger screen; that holds true for the W110ER as well. While a 13.3” screen would have required too many dimensional changes to fit (unlike the M11x, which already had the depth to fit a 13” screen), a 12.5” screen could easily fit within a slightly widened chassis (see the 12.5” Samsung Series 3 or ThinkPad X220 at 11.75” and 12.0” wide, respectively). The 1.8kg/3.95lb weight is roughly where one would expect, heavier than Sony’s 13” SA-series but a half pound lighter than the outgoing M11x R3. Considering the computing prowess on tap here, the weight and thickness are small sacrifices to make. Still, it would be nice if the next person to make a notebook in this vein would drop the pretense of a gaming 11.6” ‘ultraportable’ and spec a screen that fit the chassis better.

The thickness actually makes a surprising difference. There’s a steep taper near the front of the notebook that allows Eurocom to quote 0.51” at thinnest point, but it’s basically 1.25-1.5” thick through most of the body. Hilariously, it’s more than twice as thick as the ASUS Zenbook UX21. Compared to ultrabooks and even newer non-ultrabook thin and lights, this feels like a notebook from a different era. Specifically, it reminds me a lot of the 12-13” notebooks from around five years ago—Dell’s XPS M1210, the ASUS W5F and W7J/W7S (a notebook that I have a lot of affection for), even the Lenovo V100 and MSI S262. Note that all of these systems came out with Core Duo processors (and were later upgraded to Merom), so we’re talking the early-mid 2006 timeframe. Alienware had a similarly chunky system in the M11x, but it had styling and details that made it look and feel like a modern system, and the design language made it instantly recognizable as an Alienware. The Monster simply lacks that distinctive characteristic.

OriginPC offers a custom lid design with their W110ER (called the EON11-S), a sleek looking part that’s actually very reminiscent of the M11x lid. They offer it in matte black, matte red, or glossy metallic silver, and based on the pictures, it seems like a nice improvement over the stock lid. However, it’s worth noting that the EON11-S is more expensive than Eurocom’s Monster and doesn’t offer the upgraded screen as an option either (at least not at the time of writing).

Looking around the Monster, we see a healthy allocation of ports—Gigabit LAN, VGA, HDMI, headphone/mic, and two USB 3.0 ports on the left side, along with a USB 2.0 and the AC port on the right. The left side also has a large vent, while the back is dominated by the removable 62Wh battery. The front has notification LEDs for power, battery, and disk usage but is otherwise clean. The Synaptics touchpad works as expected and features multitouch gestures and scrolling—two finger scroll works well, and the presence of physical mouse buttons is a relief.

The most offensive part of the design is actually the keyboard, which has slightly shrunken keys and a layout designed to confuse and frustrate. The entire right-hand side feels truncated, with the forward slash and right shift keys narrower than normal and the arrow keys also narrow (but still full height). For reasons I cannot fathom, there is a second Fn key on the right hand side, located just above the right arrow key. Page up/down and home/end both exist only in the land of Fn keys, and the Esc key is also oddly small. Safe to say, I’m not a fan. The downsized keys don’t bother me much at all, though I suspect that a larger guy like Jarred would probably curse the keyboard anytime he had to use it. On the bright side, the keypresses are positive, with a decent amount of travel in the z-direction, and there's a pleasing lack of flex in the keyboard overall. Once you get used to the layout of the secondary keys, it's a decent keyboard.

A Powerful 11.6" Laptop

Well, this is the part everyone has been waiting for. I’ll just let the numbers speak for themselves here. The Monster is fast by notebook standards, phenomenally so when compared to other machines in this size class. It’s just an order of magnitude faster than just about anything else in the 11-13” range. The M14x R2 is probably the closest you’re going to get, and that’s a solid two pounds heavier than the Monster.

Jarred did a deep dive into the performance of the mobile IVB quad-core chips in the Mobile Ivy Bridge Performance Preview, so you can take a look at more benchmarks and the improvements in Quick Sync and the integrated GPU there. The ASUS N56VM we looked at in that piece had the same i7-3720QM processor as our Monster evaluation unit, so results are very comparable.

IVB is considered a tick+, bringing new lithography along with an architectural overhaul on the GPU side, but the CPU microarchitecture in IVB is pretty similar to SNB. As we noted in the performance preview, raw CPU performance hasn’t really improved that much over SNB, with differences in the 10-20% range. It’s decent, but not life-changing in the same way as the jump from Clarksfield to SNB.

A note on hybrid hard drives—if you’re looking for consistent SSD-like performance, you’re going to be disappointed. Which might sound obvious, but I’m not talking about it in the numbers sense; other than boot times, the Momentus XT just doesn’t feel as consistently responsive as an SSD tends to be. In fact, it doesn’t feel particularly more responsive than a typical 2.5” 7200RPM hard drive. The problem is down to the fact that the NAND cache isn’t predictive, so the first few times you do anything, it feels like a standard 7200RPM drive. Over time, it’ll eventually store the most frequently read data into cache and deliver near-SSD performance for that data, but until that happens, along with any workflows outside of the cached data, the drive will feel agonizingly slow. On a system that has this level of raw compute horsepower, the hybrid drive is a serious bottleneck. You’re better off with any newer SSD, and relying on a USB 3.0 external hard drive if you need extra storage space. With 120GB SF-based drives starting to go lower than the $1/GB mark, there’s no reason not to do it anymore.

Kepler's Got Game

First things first—the GeForce GT 650M is pretty close to the GTX 560M from a performance standpoint. Basically, in most gaming situations, the Monster comes within 10% of the performance of an ASUS G73. It runs rings around all generations of the M11x, and outpaces basically everything with less than a GTX 560M. Needless to say, mobile Kepler is impressive.

The GT 650M replaces the GT 555M at the top of the GeForce GT line and bridges the gap between more mainstream graphics cards and the gaming centric GTX line. It’s based around the GK107 core, with 384 shader cores and 2GB of VRAM. The Monster has the DDR3 variant, which has 128-bit DDR3 memory and clocks of 850/850/900 for core, shader, and memory respectively. The other variant of the GT 650M has GDDR5 memory and a core clocked at 735MHz; despite the slower core, the additional memory bandwidth should make it a higher performer in most situations. Even so, the Monster is a pretty potent gaming portable.

Basically, it's fully playable in our Value and Mainstream gaming suites. Note that our mainstream game test runs our suite at 1600x900 with maximum settings (no anti-aliasing), so even though we call it mainstream, it's pretty strenuous. Even through most of our Enthusiast test suite (1080p, max settings + AA), it's close to playable (which I'm choosing to define as 30fps, give or take 10%). The gaming performance on tap here seems a little bit like overkill considering that the display resolution is actually only 1366x768. You can max the settings on everything and still have almost all new games be playable at native res. That's insane, and something that not a lot of laptops can claim. And you can plug it into a 1080p display, whether that's a TV or a monitor, and game reasonably well on that. It's pretty impressive overall.

Gaming On the Go? Not Quite

This is where you end up paying for the upgrade to the quad-core CPU when compared to the M11x. The Monster comes with a 62Wh battery, and ends up delivering battery life slightly better than the Alienware M14x but well short of the M11x. The ULV Sandy Bridge chips were phenomenal under idle conditions, so the M11x R3 had awesome idle battery life, but in our real world use case scenarios, the M11x R3 had battery life about 20% better than the Monster. The two previous generations of M11x were similarly more power efficient than the Monster, but it’s a sacrifice worth making for the vastly more powerful CPU.

Clevo and Eurocom claim 410 minutes of runtime, and the Monster gets very close to that in our idle battery test, which is the absolute maximum you can expect from the system in an ideal case. Our internet battery test is a much more relevant real world use case scenario, and gives a more realistic estimate of day-to-day battery life, and it slots in at just above 5.5 hours of usable life. I’ve used the Monster as my primary portable for the last ten days or so (including a trip to China) and it’s definitely acquitted itself better than I could have expected.

In terms of gaming battery life (looping 3DMark06), I saw 75 minutes of battery runtime, which is actually pretty decent because we were running the GT 650 in the "prefer maximum performance" setting. For comparison, the ASUS N56VM that served as our IVB test platform ran out of juice at 77 minutes using the HD 4000. But generally, if you're gaming, expect runtime to suffer accordingly. 

From a heat standpoint, the numbers aren’t necessarily happy. At idle, temperatures hover in the 60 C range, but load the CPU and GPU and the temperatures climb to the low 90s. I started Furmark and wPrime 1024M (in a loop) and kept it going for a while. After about 10 minutes, temperatures leveled out around 90C for the CPU and motherboard, and 83C for the GPU. That’s….a lot, even higher than the Razer Blade that we tested previously. Do anything more strenuous than surfing and it gets simply too hot to have on your lap. And even under near idle situations like browsing or word processing, the system gets pretty warm to the touch and the fan noticeably kicks in at regular intervals, though unfortunately I don’t have an infrared thermometer to measure the case temps, nor a setup for testing fan noise.

What is very clear though is that the hardware packed into this system is definitely pushing the thermal envelope of the design. There just isn’t enough space to properly ventilate and cool the system via conventional methods. The mechanical engineer in me can think of a few ways that could probably aid in the heat transfer mechanism, but they’re unconventional at best. Quite simply, there needs to either be more surface area to dissipate heat or more airflow to allow for a greater amount of convective heat transfer. Assuming they’re close to constrained for the footprint (which they are, or at least close to it—there’s not too much room to fiddle with the x and y dimensions unless they change the screen size), they just really need to push air through the case. It’s not enough to have a fan for the CPU and GPU, there need to be legitimate case fans, along with a lot more venting. One vent on the left side and a handful of smaller vents on the bottom are clearly not cutting it. Taking certain cooling concepts from desktop cases wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Recommendation: Get the Upgraded Matte Display

The standard display is a glossy 11.6” WXGA panel made by Infovision Optoelectronics. And it is…terrible. The maximum brightness of 258 nits isn’t bad, but the 177:1 contrast ratio is appalling. Actually from a numbers standpoint, it matches up pretty well with the M11x R3 display. The less said, the better.

Happily, Eurocom offers another option—a matte AUO B116XW02. It’s rated to have a 500:1 contrast ratio and a max luminance of 200 nits, and the matte finish is always welcome. Interestingly, the part cost at various internet retailers is in the $60 range, but Eurocom charges $150 for the upgrade. Unfortunately, it wasn’t available to review at the time Eurocom shipped our evaluation unit, so I can’t verify the claims made in the data sheet, but it’s doubtless a major upgrade from the stock IVO display.

We haven’t seen too many impressive 11.6” displays, other than the one in the 11.6” MacBook Air. The MBA 11” has three different suppliers for screen—LG Phillips, Samsung, and AU Optronics. The AUO screen part number is B116XW05, and we measured one with a 575:1 contrast ratio back in 2010 (our 2011 review units had LG Phillips and Samsung panels—just part of the lottery). Food for thought.

Good Things in a Small Package

I love the Eurocom Monster. There’s no other way to say it. This isn’t to say that it’s a perfect system, because it isn’t close. The design is dull, the screen is miserable, and apparently the design team forgot that cooling is part of thermal design. It’s crazy that this system exists, and that’s why I love it. Like I said in the introduction, the spec sheet reads like a pipe dream—it’s the kind of thing that makes me giddy inside. The power/size ratio of the Monster is absolutely mind boggling. Having a 4 pound laptop that has nearly as much power as my desktop? Sign me up, yesterday.

It used to be that this kind of insanity was routinely served up by the likes of Alienware—anyone remember the original M15x from 2008 with the 8800M GTX? That one was also a 90C special, something with way more horsepower than cooling. That Alienware doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Between killing off the M11x and the relatively tame M14x (it’s potent, but not as out there as it could be—the GT 650M and IVB quad match the W110ER, but it’s two size classes up), I think Dell’s bean counters are putting a bit too much sense into a brand that used to be all about pushing boundaries (not to mention thermal envelopes).

I’ve been torn by the Monster. I’m a guy who really appreciates industrial design—I’m a fan of Apple notebooks, I loved the Razer Blade, hell, I even own a Dell Adamo. The Clevo appeals to absolutely none of those senses—it’s boring, doesn’t really look great, and generally doesn’t feel like ID was a huge part of the design process. It’s not an offensive design, but not one that’s particularly pleasing in any way. However, I’m also someone attracted to the crazy and unusual things in tech, and the Monster exemplifies those qualities in every way. It’s quirky and weird and in some cases not particularly functional. The computing horsepower is probably overkill. And I want one immensely.

Should you buy one? That depends. The upcoming Ivy Bridge replacement for the Sony VAIO SA will probably be a more well-rounded system (in fact, I’d argue that the current one is as well) with a better screen, a better design, better battery life, more portability, but way less computing power. And I am certain that there are a number of other upcoming IVB-based systems that similarly combine portability and GPU power, but I predict that none of them will hit upon a combination this potent in a package this portable. If it meets your needs and you know what you’re getting into from a design and thermal packaging standpoint, you’ll be as thrilled as I am.