Eurocom D90xC Phantom-X User Review

I am calling the Eurocom Phantom-X "The Notebook Performance King" in this review for reasons that will soon become apparent. This is my second review of a unit housed in the very successful D90xC chassis - the prior review being that of the first quad core model http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4096 to become available in this chassis. The D90xC platform proves to be phenomenal and I'm sure looking forward to further revisions of this line.

The test unit specifications are as follows:

• Windows Server 2003 Enterprise (self-installed)
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 (3.0GHz, 12MB L2, 1333MHz FSB)
• 17-inch WUXGA display (1920 x 1200)
• Dual nVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX in SLI mode (1024MB each)
• Triple 128GB Memoright-GT SSD's in RAID 0 performance mode
• 8GB DDR2-800MHz RAM
• Intel Wireless 4965AGN
• 2X Blu-Ray Burner
• 12-cell integrated "UPS"

Reasons for Buying

The D90xC chassis is also available from other vendors, but I chose Eurocom, a boutique brand, for their willingness to support me in my custom configurations. In fact, at my time of ordering, Eurocom wasn't offering the Memoright drives as a built-in option (now they are available at www.eurocom.com). I contacted their exceptionally helpful support and they informed me that they would be happy to accommodate my custom requirements. This was very helpful of them and wouldn't be the last time I got great service either. Their excellent support continues after the sale ... as we will find out later in the review.

The reason I chose this particular notebook model is simpler to explain: it's simply the best configuration available today in a 17" form factor (or, for that matter, any notebook form factor). You cannot find a better configured system (even among the gargantuan 20" models). In fact, at the time of this writing you cannot even find equally configured models from other leading vendors such as Dell, Alienware, or HP. When investing this amount of money in a system, I want to get the best and only the best, so the choice was clear.

Build and Design

In fairness to the chassis, this isn't a system optimized for your "viewing pleasure," but performance. Expect to find the eye candy on the screen and not the external appearance of the notebook. Fitting three hard drives, two video cards, and a quad core desktop processor on top of that inside a 17" form factor is not easy.

With that in mind, the unit does look reasonably glossy and polished. Did I mention it's half as thick as a can of soda and the power brick alone is bulkier and heavier than many ultraportables notebooks?

Display and Camera

This is where the eye-candy part comes in. As befitting a notebook with this kind of graphical horsepower, the display is amazing. There is no light leakage and the colors are wonderfully reproduced on the glossy LCD. The contrast is fantastic and the ultra-brightness helps render lucid images. You can look at the display from any angle you like and it still looks perfect. This makes me feel like I'm getting my money's worth and that the notebook is delivering its weight's worth!

The camera is also very impressive. I was surprised how bright it was able to capture images and video, especially compared to my external USB cameras which are always too dark.

Speakers

Again, making full use of the available room in the case, we find four speakers, each very powerful. This is absolutely the best sound I have ever heard coming out of a notebook, the sound easily fills up a large living room and has surprised my guests on more than one occasion. Again, the notebook justifies its weight and form factor, delivering accurate sound reproduction and even surround sound for superb gaming or listening enjoyment.

I also appreciate the four jacks in the front of the notebook - both in the richness of their number, and also in the flexibility of being able to dynamically adjust the input/output signals going to/from each jack. You can plug anything anywhere you like and the sound card application lets you dynamically configure your sound source or output, not based on what physical jack you used, but entirely in the software. This makes your four physical jacks do a lot more than would have been possible with four "physically hard-coded" jacks.

Processor Performance

Ready for more good news? Well here we start off with the benchmarks. We have record-breaking scores across the board and the 3.0GHz quad core CPU is no exception. 37 seconds in Super PI, a single threaded application, ensures that the 3.0GHz clockspeed is being put to good use. 15 seconds in wPrime, a multi-threaded CPU benchmark, is the fastest I have ever seen on a notebook, not in the least due to wPrime's ability to utilize all four processor cores.

Cinebench rendering scores are also the fastest I have ever seen in a portable system. 3,289 is the single core score and 11,669 is the quad core score, with 3.55x being the quad core acceleration factor as reported by Cinebench itself.

Leaving synthetic benchmarks aside, I can personally attest to the wonders of the quad core effect. You would be foolish to think that you'll never need more than two cores. In fact, with most applications and games already targeted for dual cores, you're not well equipped without a quad core system. A rogue application that would normally freeze your computer barely registers on this system, with three cores available for further processing. You could compress/encrypt/or perform an otherwise lengthy arithmetic operations on one core, surf the web with another core, leave a core for a misbehaving or poorly coded application to abuse, and still have room for more. This should be the definition smooth computing and dramatically improves the user experience.

Storage Subsystem and Overall System Performance

Considering that this unit has three SLC SSD hard drives, each of which alone costs more than most gaming notebooks, our expectations are set high. Are these high expectations met?

Yes, they are. As evidenced in the attached HDTune and HDTach screenshots, this machine screams. The three SLC SSD hard drives are put to great use with the RAID 0 array. The characteristic "flat-line" performance of solid state technology is evident in the charts, offering consistent performance across the entire "surface area" of the drives, whereas with rotating disks, performance tapers off near the drive's end. The seek times are also negligible - .01 ms - which is in fact where the majority of noticeable performance enhancements come from in SSD technology. Yes, read/write speeds are also better, but not by three orders of magnitude as in the seek times - which is what you're really noticing when applications instantly launch on SSD's. Memoright drives are very expensive but they deliver the best performance, period. Their cost is due to their SLC architecture which makes these drives the only SSD drives able to outclass 7200rpm disks in random writes. No stuttering or other problems that you may have experienced with cheaper MLC solid state drives here. You're getting your money's worth, dollar for dollar, with these disks. Random writes, random reads; sequential writes, sequential reads; it's all spectacular.

One might expect the synthetic benchmarks to perform even better, and rightly so. The Memoright drives are somewhat handicapped by their SATA-I interface (which apparently is not even really a genuine SATA interface, but really a PATA-bridge to these drives that are internally configured with PATA technology). Fortunately the RAID 0 array overcomes interface bottlenecks in this regard, splitting the data across three drives. While the synthetic results could have been much better (as they are with other, cheaper MLC SSD drives), don't let them concern you.

Some real world experience: I've booted four virtual machines running on VMware on this rig without any hiccup. All machines start simultaneously and extremely rapidly. You can then start installing gigabytes of data onto these VMs, again all simultaneously. On traditional hard drives, the drive heads would be begging for your mercy. On MLC solid state disks, the entire operating system would be brought to its knees due to the intensity of random writes. On this system, you just sit back and enjoy the show! You get your work done in record time and actually enjoy the process, with your hardware no longer holding you down.

The amazing PCMark05 score of 11,823 also serves as further testament to the power of this machine, with its CPU and storage subsystems combined. You can really tax the CPU and the hard disks as much as you want; they deliver without an iota of complaint.

Windows Vista seems to think this machine is really the performance king! The Vista performance index of 5.9 across the board whets our appetite to see beyond the 5.9 barrier. Fortunately, Windows 7 has just entered beta and I was able to obtain a Windows 7 performance index too. Surprisingly, RAM performance fell to 5.5 on Windows 7, possibly due to driver issues - after all, Windows 7 did just enter beta. Desktop graphics were awarded the peak score of 7.9 while 3D graphics were rated at 6.0, with the remaining two scores in the 7.x range. This machine is definitely future proof.

Gaming Performance

The synthetic benchmark scores of 15,569 3DMark06's in SLI and 11,742 3DMark06's without SLI provide some indication of the gaming power available in this system, but to truly appreciate it, you have to test it in the real world with games. I used FRAPS for real world gaming benchmarking and also the built-in benchmarking tools of the games themselves where available.

I tested all games at the phenomenal 30" resolution of 2560 x 1600, and suffice to say that except two of the most demanding games today, framerates we spectacular. Those two games, you probably guessed them right, were Crysis and Grand Theft Auto IV. For these, I have also enclosed benchmark results at 1920 x 1200 resolutions, just to prove that at "reasonable" resolutions, absolutely no game today can withstand this machine's prowess. All games, including Crysis and Grand Theft Auto IV, were benchmarked at maxed out details - everything single slider pushed to the maximum limit ... plus some black-hat tricks to allow the games to go higher than their developers had intended.

For Grand Theft Auto IV, I had to use the feature unlocked commandline.txt file tweak to have it allow me max everything out. Paraphrasing the publishers of the game, they intentionally limited the maximum details that can be enabled in the game settings panels, because "current hardware does not allow the game to run at full settings, and the game will provide for many years of enjoyment as graphics hardware improves and more features of our product can be unlocked in the future." Well, Rockstar, looks like that future has already arrived in the body of the Phantom-X. The 9800GTX cards with their 1GB memory come in real handy for this game; the 8800GTX card series have only 512MB memory which becomes a serious limitation for this video-ram intensive application. For instance, I was able to test the Dell XPS 1730 equipped with dual 8800GTX's with Grand Theft Auto IV, and results were even less than half-as-good compared to what I was able to obtain with this system. Stay away from the 8800GTX if you can, I certainly am glad I did! As the results demonstrate, I was able to play Grand Theft Auto IV at 2560 x 1600 with acceptable framerates, and when resolution dropped to 1920 x 1200, performance left no room for complaints.

Crysis was hacked using the feature unlocking graphics profile files, which enable DirectX 10 features on the DirectX 9 version of the game. Crytek are well aware of these hacks and have completely removed this artificial limitation in Crysis Warhead and Crysis Wars, fortunately. With all graphics details thus unlocked, Crysis was again very playable at 2560 x 1600, with superb framerates at 1920 x 1200 resolution.

For every other game 2560 x 1600 resolution was simply perfect; with extremely high framerates. The Phantom-X is a dream machine and moreover a testament to not only the power of notebook gaming, but PC gaming as well. Being able to play GTA4 on my PC with the same level of detail as a Playstation 3 is certainly satisfying and reassuring for the future of PC gaming.

Heat and Noise

The notebook doesn't get hot, which is remarkable given that it houses two video cards, four processor cores, and three hard disks. It doesn't run very quiet, but noise levels are never bothersome.

One very nice tweak is pressing the Fn+1 button combination. This turns on the "turbo-fans" until the key combination is pressed again (do not mistake the key combination with F1). While the "turbo-fans" are actually loud and would get to be a bother, they ensure that your computer will never overheat and leave you stranded without a save game in that level you've been playing for hours to crack. It's nice to have this option even if you would never have to use it.

Customer Support

Customer support from Eurocom has been absolutely phenomenal. Unfortunately, my Memoright RAID array experienced a failure, due to a problem with one of the disks. Eurocom arranged a direct shipment of new disks for me from Memoright, even before they confirmed receipt of my return disks. To be frank, I expect nothing less in customer service after having invested so much on the drives and the machine overall. But it was still very pleasing to see that "they cared" and got me replacements before they had even received my return of defective parts. This post-sale support has been truly phenomenal and is very reassuring, especially given the cost of the replacement drives. I will certainly continue to do business with Eurocom as they really know how to support their customers - as this post-sale catastrophic failure demonstrated.

Do-It-Yourself Upgrades

One of the main strengths of the D90xC chassis is how easy it makes user upgrades. No need to send this one back to the factory for a retrofit. In fact, when I first received this system, it was equipped with dual 8800GTX video cards, a 2.83GHz Intel Q9550 processor, and 8 MB of 667MHz RAM. And as aforementioned, I also had to swap out the hard drives when they failed with brand new ones.

Replacing the processsor was really fun. These desktop models do not have any pins on them, so you can handle the chips really comfortably. After removing the bottom panel of the notebook, the CPU heatsink is easily detached, which reveals the CPU assembly. The insertion socket is very easy to operate and requires absolutely no force. It was really very simple to swap out the old processor and put in the new one.

The RAM is located right by the processor and was probably the easiest of all to replace, much like any other notebook RAM. Interesting here was the addition of a fan directly on top of the RAM cards, ensuring these high speed parts stay cool.

The dual graphics cards are accessible in the same area - the underbelly of the laptop. Again, you first detach the heat sinks and then remove the cards. The SLI bridge cable looks very small and cute, especially in comparison to its desktop version. The cards slide in and out very easily, actually much like RAM sticks. Proving the concept of modular, upgradeable notebook cards on notebooks, these dual MXM4 slots are a protection of your investment in this notebook. I only wish that we'll see more of these slots on more machines and smaller form factors.

More good news on the upgrade front is that the D90xC chassis seems to have a lot more life in it. Apparently this platform has already been successfully migrated to the new i7 Intel microarchitecture based on the X58 chipset, and will offer support for nVIDIA's GXX architecture (G280 anyone?) with DDR5 video memory and DDR3-1333 main memory. The fantastic folks at Eurocom assure me that when these upgrade parts are officially available, they will provide an upgrade path for current D90xC chassis owners, keeping this model current for as far away in the future as we can see right now. Like I said, Eurocom have some fanatical support!

Conclusion

I don't remember the last time I was so satisfied with a purchase. I am really happy that while major brands fall behind on specs and support (but not prices), I have been able to find a boutique alternative in Eurocom, for comparable prices but superior performance and support. I will definitely not hesitate before my next Eurocom purchase knowing well that my investment is well-protected by their fanatical support - not only in the case of hardware failure, but also by future-proofing me with seamless, self-serviceable upgrades in the D90xC chassis.

Pros:

• Simply the best notebook money can buy today
• Gaming performance on par with a Playstation 3
• Superb for demanding business applications
• Future-proof components with user-serviceable design

Cons:

• Inevitably, cost ... but you get what you pay for
• Weight ... near luggable scale

 

dude nice review, but it seems that u are too in love with it and praise everything this beast has. is it me or does this machine have nothing to yell about, small or big?

is this the best without any flaws?

btw- how much did the SSD costs? the machine?

 

Spending around 12000 dollar on such Eurocom system...

 

3 of that kind of SLC SSDs costs 6574 dollars at Eurocom in total. ($2052+$2267+$2267), the whole set up will cost $12,000+ inc delivery+3 year warranty.

 

LOL, I actually find that an insult, this notebook beast demolishes the consoles in gaming performance. I'd like to see them run multi-platform games like Fallout 3 and GTA4 at the same settings this notebook can.

 

I rather buy a honda civic that will last forever.

 

This review is almost cruel; here is the laptop that you will never have!

 

12k?may I offer you a coffee Mr. Gates?

 

, the voice of truth!

 

wow rich man!

stunning notebook i dont like that sager symbol on the top of the notebook this looks awesome though!

also i laughed at that luggage comment A+ reviews

 

I hope Clevo will update this sweet but outdated chassis soon to include things like E-SATA and HDMI ports.

 

wow.... nice review.

those HDD benchmark results are off the hook.

 

Great review,this machine is truly future proof.
I might be upgrading my system soon with GTX's!

 

hmmm you guys could see this review??? both home and work all that loads is the frist paragraph for me...

 

i cant see the review...

 

Well, putting a Desktop CPU in a notebook is not that big of a deal anymore. Since the mobile quad-core is able to rival that of desktop in terms of power.
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4638
So beside the Sli (which many have), this laptop will soon be dethroned as the fastest laptop. Unless they put a Core i7 in there.

 

It's not quite that bad -- more like "Here is the laptop you will have 2-3 years from now". Still, a very powerful machine, though somewhat big (and probably heavy) for my tastes.

 

I bet Lenovo would find a way to put a second video card in their W700ds for $12000.

Now that would be the King of notebooks.

 

Definitely one of the uglier machines I have ever seen. But, the specs are, of course, phenominal. I wish I had that much money to plunk down on a laptop.

 

$12,000 is I think, pardon my honesty, insane - for one notebook. Kiss- support or otherwise.

I'll stick with a Toshiba Qosmio X305-Q708 for $3800. It'll score 12,115 on 3DMark06, gets me a quad-core, SLI graphics, 5-speaker sound and an SSD.

Even a OCZ whitebook would do better, I've seen those hit 14k on 3DMark06 and cost near $3000 fully-loaded.

Nice review though. Those 3 SSD drives are sweet - save for a 512GB version.

 

Sli is not worth it, really. Almost 12000 3Dmark06 on one single card, adding another one only boosts it up to ~15000, not worth the money.

 

Thats just 3dmark performance, real performance is almost double in some cases.

 

Yeah, sure, if it's your money.

 

For $12 grand of course it's not worth it, I spent a little over $ 3 grand for almost the same performance(9800 MGT SLI), but you can't deny it's power!

 

The optimum of premium storage setup in terms of value/performance from Eurocom, is to just have a pair of 80GB Intel X25-M in RAID 0, and a 500gb for media (even a pair of 160GB X25+500GB will only cost a bit more than a 128GB MemoRight SSD); the whole three part kit will cost less than a 128GB SSD, yet offer similar if not superior performance, plus practicability.

But if one has money to burn...

 

All I can say is those Intel SSD really have really crazy read rate. X-25 extreme edition's write rate are also greatly improved; the performance of intel SSD are also significantly better in RAID 0 than most competiting products while offering okay value for money.

Could have probably got a nice specced M860 if he didn't spend $6K+ on those rather overpriced SSD.

 

Wow, I wish I had money like that to spend

Btw, I'd say that that notebook is wicked sick!!!

 

I can't see more than the first paragraph of the review either. This has been happening more and more on this site lately. I will try Firefox and I bet that will help. This has happened before using Internet Explorer.

 

Yet another Badass machine.

 

I didn't believe him at first when he said his SSD cost more than most ultra portables.... till i hit the Eurocom link and saw the price tag...

$2200 for a HD!!! That's more than I spent on my entire Sager!!

Sticker shock and money to burn aside... it seems like at some point in the quest for MORE power you ditch the lappy and build a desktop instead. (And I'm pretty sure that line is below $10k ) The "most powerful notebook in the world" (this week) is still going to lag behind upper end desktops if only because of power & space restrictions.

Fun to read review - I would have liked a few real numbers on your real life gaming FPS. "very playable" & "superb" framerates for Crysis tells me what I already know: your SLI 9800's beat my 9600M But by how much? Is very playable 26fps? 32? Is superb 50 or 200fps?

 

So youre happy with a $12k machine thats on par with a $400 machine?

 

for $12k you could have bought from K|N at a much cheaper price and gotten Mark's custom mods/support.

 

Fail. Sure, his laptop was amazingly overpriced because of 3 hard drives that cost 2k each, but to say it's on par with a $400 machine is just plain stupid. Don't say stupid things.

Nice review, although I don't think you found one thing wrong with it. I would be disappointed if I bought a machine with those specs and didn't even have HDMI or E-Sata. Especially that E-Sata... for transferring files to your amazingly fast hard drives

 

Exactly what I was saying. The chassis which is originally created by Clevo is outdated in terms of laptop life cycles. It dates back from at least March 2007, where E-SATA and HDMI weren't common on notebooks.

 

That thing is ridiculous... but I think it would be better to wait for the mobile HD4870 cards to come out. Of course, if you can afford one of these, you'd might as well just buy every updated version that comes out...

 

Regardless, he probably has the fastest laptop there is right now...
But, why does E-wrecked, with his $3500 OCZ, get higher 3Dmark 06 scores?
Also, Clevo is in dire need to upgrade the chassis, and add HDMI and E-sata.

 

Also, I'm curious, on the Sager website for the NP9262, it says this under the 8gb Ram option:
8GB memory available on NP9262 with 64bit edition of Windows VISTA, however due to hardware chipset limitation only 6.8GB max would be available for use.

Do you have this problem?

 

This is obviously a waste of money but anytime you buy the best of the best it's going to cost you more than it's worth. The money argument here is a bit weak. This is the beast of all beasts, and it costs a lot - that's how things work! I'm sure we can all think of a way to better spend 12k, but I don't think that's the point of this thread

 

Hell of a machine but nevertheless a demonstration of the law of diminished return.

 

Why spend so much on something that is not "really" portable?

I mean the whole point of getting a laptop and move it around. It's so big and heavy... Totally defeats the purpose of a "LAPTOP".

 

It's more like a "desktop replacement" rather than a "laptop". You don't wanna have this thing on your lap anyways

Also, what a way to spend $12k! At least you're happy. This might actually be the first D901C with three SLC SSD HDDs posted here on NBR~ +rep

 

Congrats on the sweet rig!

 

Its still far more portable than a desktop. Sure, its not ideal for taking with you everywhere like on a college campus between the library and classes but can be very useful for people that frequently go to LAN parties for instance and they are willing to sacrifice some performance for mobility that a notebook offers, even if a huge desktop replacement.

Now I'm waiting for the day when we can truly get desktop performance in these notebooks and don't need desktops anymore.

 

i think that day is fastly approaching. I mean its just a matter of time before we have GT 280 GPU's in mobile form haha

 

Christ. I hate the trolls swarming into a thread whenever someone mentions they've spent a lot of money on a laptop. When you have the money available, by all means, you can spend it however you like. He wants expensive SSDs. So what? That's his choice and he doesn't need stupid reactions to make him fell bad about the purchase.

Congratulations on the new laptop OP!

 

Sorry maybe i should clarify since thats the second time i got ripped for my post.

Being able to play GTA4 on my PC with the same level of detail as a Playstation 3 is certainly satisfying and reassuring for the future of PC gaming.

Pros:

* Gaming performance on par with a Playstation 3

The man says it himself, it is on par with a PS3. Now that may not be the actual case, perhaps his eyes can't see the difference, but if this is the price for him that equals a PS3 fine. DO NOT call me a troll for simply restating what he said in his review.

Anyways, this is an incredible machine and if you got the dough, why not. Congrats to you, but i hope you soon realize that your machine would melt a ps3 with its gaming power.

 

Well I'm glad you clarified because your original post basically only said you thought his laptop was comparable to the cheapest laptop you could buy at Best Buy. That's why a few people weren't impressed with your post.

 

My bad, I thought since he mentioned a PS3 a few times people would know what I meant, yeah looking back that could come across as f'in retarded.

 

I could never see myself buying this. I love the idea, but 12k...I'll just stick with a 2k laptop and a 5k desktop that's on par with this laptop...not that I really have either.

 

man, this machine is a beast! for 12k i can buy my dream car and fix it with left over! OMG!