My experience with ClevoCenter - P650HS-G

First time buying a somewhat powerful laptop, I had some ultrabooks and while I liked their portability and battery, they just didn't have enough power for my needs, I'm pretty clueless when it comes to laptops as I have always been more of a desktop person.

Looked around and I wasn't liking what I was seeing (gaudy desings and very high prices from MSI/ASUS/etc) till I remembered reading about Clevo some years ago and started doing some research and found exactly what I wanted, so here we are.

Ordered the laptop from ClevoCenter (Portuguese reseller) with the following specs:

CPU: i7 7700HQ
GPU: GTX 1070 8GB
Display: 15.6" IPS 60Hz

RAM: 16GB DDR4 2400Mhz G-Skill
SSD: Crucial MX300 525GB
Wireless: Intel M.2 AC8265 VPro Wireless LAN + Bluetooth4.0

For a total of 1805.64€

Customer service was excellent, they walked me through all the process and answered my questions.

Now, apparently they had a problem with my order and it got delayed by 5 days, they decided that as a compensation they would upgrade the CPU to a 7820HK for no additional cost which I was completely not expecting (I expected them to just send me a generic apology and go on their merry way), which really upped my opinion of them, they had a problem and took responsability for it. The laptop didn't even take 24 hours to arrive after they shipped it.

Once I got the machine I started to do some testing, there is no noticeable backlight beed as far as I can tell, no dead pixels and the temperatures are good (they used Kryonaut). All in all very pleased with the laptop and their excellent customer service.

I'm just kinda bummed at how locked down BGA machines are, once (if) Prema releases a BIOS for this model I guess I'll be able to tinker with a bit more as ClevoCenter has access to them.

 

Congratulations. I'm glad to hear you had a great experience with ClevoCenter. It was awesome and righteous that they upgraded your CPU because of the delay.

@Prema BIOS makes ordinary and inferior products awesome and excellent. Once it is available for your machine it will be quite an upgrade. It is not only BGA machines that are castrated with filthware. It is an unfortunate and sad truth that ALL LAPTOPS have sucky locked-down garbage for stock firmware, including the superior machines that are not BGA. Coming from desktops, it must be quite the shocker how crippled things are. It's a sin and crime. There is no legitimate excuse for laptops to not have all of the same advanced BIOS options that desktop enthusiast mainboards have other than the incompetence and goofed up priorities of the laptop ODMs.

 

It really is, I've been tweaking and overclocking my machines for the past decade so it was quite a shocker to see the BIOS so barren, I wasn't going to overclock the laptop since it's not going to be my main computer, but since I ended up with a 7820HK I got curious and wanted to know how far I could take it, but alas, the BIOS is really stripped down and couldn't do much.

It's such a shame how locked everything around laptops is from a hardware standpoint, there's only a couple of machines that don't have soldered CPUs/GPUs and from what I've read, even then you're still limited on upgrades by the BIOS. Wish laptops were more like desktops in that sense.

 

Here is what you can expect with a @Prema BIOS when that becomes available for your model... night and day difference. (There could be some variations by model, but it should be very similar.)