Eurocom M5 Pro Review (Clevo P650SE)

The Eurocom M5 Pro is a built-on Clevo P650SE chassis. This 15.6" notebook is an upscale gaming unit packing the latest technology, including Nvidia's GTX 970M graphics card and a 4K display. We especially enjoyed its great design, quality components, excellent overall performance, and 4K display though it does come at a price.

Is this the customizable gaming notebook that your should spend $1400 (or more) to own? Keep reading to find out.

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Not sure why a con is the 4K display? You can just turn down the resolution down to regular full HD for demanding games, in which the video chipset won’t keep up at full 4K resolution. It’s great for watching movies on.
But there must be something I'm missing because I see people rant on other articles about why pay for a 4K screen on a laptop when you can't play new games at full resolution and full details.

 

Putting an LCD in a non-native resolution results in a less sharp image hence the aversion. Whether that's bothersome is dependent on the person.
For the purposes of this review, I pointed out this notebook is incapable of playing most modern games at a 4K resolution with a playable framerate despite its powerful graphics card options. It's not a con, just a fact. Realistically you need SLI'd Nvidia graphics cards to play games at 4K.

 

So playing the same game at the same graphical settings at 1080p on the 4K screen versus on a 1080p native, results in a less sharp image? Just trying to understand

 

On an LCD/flat panel display, the native resolution is the sharpest. Setting the resolution to anything other than the native resolution will result in the image being stretched over the pixel grid and therefore being less sharp - you'll notice straight lines and text especially are a little blurry. It's always preferred to run applications at the screen's native resolution.

You can try this on your own computer; (Win7/8): right-click the desktop > Screen Resolution > change it to something other than the native resolution and Apply.

 

This is the normal case with scaling, but 4K->1080p is something of a special case, is it not? 4K is exactly twice as many pixels wide and as tall as 1080p, so each pixel of the 1080p image would be represent by four display pixels, thus avoiding stretching, at least theoretically.

I have the Sager NP8651 (based on the same Clevo barebones) with the Sharp 4K panel, and when I have it set to 1080p, I can't tell the difference from a true 1080p display. It doesn't hurt that the Sharp is just a phenomenal all-around screen, not even counting the resolution, so 1080p images still look amazing on this display.

 

I'd like to think that would be the case but I can't confirm since I didn't try with the review unit.

Ours had the Samsung panel which was decent but I wasn't blown away. It is much less money than the Sharp panel in Eurocom's configurator at present, though.

Side note - my buying advice when it comes to monitors/displays is to get one with the resolution you want and to intend on running it at that resolution in all situations. If the latter isn't true (e.g. you have to change the resolution for certain applications), then it's not the right display.

Personally, I'd not buy any display size/resolution combo that requires the use of Windows scaling since scaling is less than perfectly implemented even within Windows/MS software, let alone third-party applications. Right now the highest I'd go is 1920x1080 on displays 15.6" and up and 1600x900 on displays 14" and below (though with the right eyes, 1920x1080 at 14" can be OK). I'm really banking on Windows 10 fixing the scaling issues.