Kobalt G150 (Clevo P150HM with Geforce GTX485M) Gaming Laptop Review

The G150 boasts almost every connection we could ask for, with only one notable exception.  For some reason, Kobalt haven't included an Expresscard slot in the G150.  The left side of the machine contains two USB3.0 ports, a USB2.0 port, a mini-Firewire port, a gigabit Ethernet jack and an SD card reader.

Moving round to the right hand side of the machine, we find the Blu-Ray drive, a USB2.0 port, a Kensington lock slot and four 3.5mm audio jacks.  From left to right these are: headphone output, microphone input, S/PDIF output and line-in.  Around the back of the machine we find the HDMI 1.4 port, a USB2.0/eSATA port and an AC-in jack.

Kobalt are using the latest Intel Centrino Ultimate 6230 wireless card in the G150 that supports A, B, G and N wireless bands and Bluetooth.  For those who want better wireless performance, there is an optional upgrade to the Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 wireless card which supports higher wireless speeds but doesn't have Bluetooth.

Despite having an understated exterior design, the internals of the G150 are definitely something to boast about.  In our sample Kobalt have installed the Intel Core i7 2630QM Sandy Bridge processor, clocked at 2.00GHz, which provides a decent compromise between price and performance.  This CPU supports turbo boost which lets the system increase the clock speed on one or two of the cores up to a maximum of 2.9GHz to improve performance in single or double threaded applications.

For those who are wondering, the G150 has the Intel HM65 chipset which suffers from the current Sandy Bridge problems.  That said, Kobalt won't be shipping any Sandy Bridge notebooks to consumers until the revised motherboards are ready, so there won't be any SATA longevity issues with production machines.

Kobalt have chosen to use the nVidia GeForce GTX 485M in our sample which is an immensely powerful mobile solution.  This should ensure that gamers are able to max out the graphics settings in all but the most demanding games on the market.

The base model of the G150 comes with the nVidia GeForce GTX 460M GPU which doesn't provide as much power as the GTX 485M but you will save £320, so this will probably be the choice of the majority of consumers.  As you can see from the photo above, there are three thick copper heatpipes and a sizable fan providing airflow to the heatsink.  Unfortunately this heat is generated because of the large power requirement of this graphics card which doesn't leave us with much hope for battery life.

The G150 is one of the only laptops on the market that has four RAM slots which means there are a whole host of RAM configurations available, from 4GB to 16GB.  Our sample has 6GB of ram in the form of 3x 2GB DDR3 Corsair modules which run at 1333Mhz.

Although the G150's real world performance would benefit greatly from the inclusion of an SSD, there is only room for one drive due to the space limitations of a 15.6″ chassis.  A lot of users won't be willing to pay the extra cash for a sizable SSD so Kobalt specified our review sample with their standard 500GB 7,200rpm Western Digital unit.  For those who can afford a solid state drive, Kobalt have a whole host of different drive options in their online configurator to make that decision even harder. If you already have an SSD, then purchase the machine with the basic drive option, clone the drive with Acronis and swap it out.

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