Cryo Mercia Laptop System Review

The Cryo Mercia is a fantastic looking Clevo chassis – very plain, corporate and understated, just the way I like them. I am not a fan of glowing lights and pulsating keyboards, so this particular unit really impressed me, out of the box.

The touch pad is slightly off centre (to the left) and has a feeling of ‘texture' when running your finger across it. This is not one of the glass style trackpads which are becoming more common place today.

Shots from both, back and front. This follows a traditional PC design, which gets thicker when we move from the front to the back.

The Mercia is held closed by the strength of the mechanism alone, there are no catches or magnets, it works in a similar fashion to the latest Apple MacBook Pro chassis.

The Mercia laptop offers considerable connectivity on both side panels and the rear. One the left side is a USB 2.0 port, modem and IEEE 1394 connection, a card reader and dual layer DVD drive. On the right side are audio and microphone connections as well as another USB 2.0 port, expansion slot, eSATA connector and dual link DVI out. On the rear are two more USB 2.0 ports, HDMI out, power connector, Gigabit LAN and a lock system for security.

Underneath we can see the overview of the chassis design – with a cover bottom left to cover internals and cooling panels at the rear on both sides

Copper heatsinks can be seen through various vents and there are substantial vented areas to allow for large levels of airflow throughout the chassis. More on this later.

The battery is a Li-Polymer pack rated at 3,800 mAh – 42.18Wh. This covers around a third of the chassis, including the 500GB Scropio Blue hard drive seen above left under a protective shroud. We will analyse battery life later in the review.

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