MySN XMG P502 (Clevo P150EM) Notebook Review

1. Introduction2. XMG P502: Packaging and Bundle3. XMG P502: Design4. XMG P502: Connectivity5. XMG P502: Hardware6. BIOS and Testing Methodology7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage9. Synthetic: PCMark 710. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven11. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201212. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.513. Synthetic: Super Pi14. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Real World: MKV Playback17. Real World: Blu-Ray Playback18. Gaming: Battlefield 319. Gaming: DiRT Showdown20. Technical: Acoustics21. Technical: Thermal Dynamics22. Technical: Battery Life23. Technical: Power Consumption24. Closing Thoughts25. View All Pages

Over the past few years there have been significant changes in the gaming notebook market as large multinational computer manufacturers such as MSI and Asus have diversified their product ranges to include high-end gaming notebooks.  This has pushed a number of the smaller independent manufacturers out of the market as they can't compete with the buying power of these large companies.

At present, Schenker Notebooks is the largest independent performance notebook manufacturer in Germany and have been established for about ten years.  They produce three different notebook brands, XESIA for home users, XERIOS for business users and XMG for gamers.

Schenker have recently opened a dedicated UK office for sales and support and are looking to take the UK gaming notebook by storm.  They are currently only offering their XMG branded gaming notebooks to UK customers which are built to order in their manufacturing facility in Germany. Their full range of notebooks can be seen on their website, MySN.co.uk.

Today we are going to look at one of MySn's fully loaded gaming notebooks, the XMG P502, which combines a powerful Ivy Bridge CPU with nVidia's all singing, all dancing GTX 680M graphics card.  All of this is contained within a 15.6″ form factor which isn't much more bulky than your average multimedia machine.

Specification

• Display: 15.6″ (39.6 cm) Full-HD 1920×1080 Matte Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680M 4096MB GDDR5
• Processor: Intel Core i7-3610QM Quad Core – 2.30 – 3.30GHz 6MB 45W “Ivy Bridge”
• Memory: 8GB (2×4096) SO-DIMM DDR3 RAM 1600MHz CORSAIR Vengeance
• Hard Drive: 750GB SATA-II 7200rpm Seagate Momentus 7200.5 (ST9750420AS)
• mSATA Storage: 128GB mSATA-III SSD Crucial M4 (CT256M4SSD3)
• Optical Drive: Blu-ray Combo (Blu-ray reader / DVD RW) – without Software
• WIFI Card: Killer Wireless-N 1102 (without Bluetooth)
• Keyboard: Backlit Keyboard UK
• Warranty: Standard Warranty : 24 Month Collect & Return (inc parts, labour, support, shipping)
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
• Office Software: Microsoft Office 2010 Starter (only available with Windows 7 purchase)

The XMG P502 is supplied in a plain brown cardboard box which doesn't give any clues that a beast lies within.  The box itself is quite compact but actually contains a further box inside for added protection.

We find a few items bundled with the laptop but nothing particularly special.  The bundle comprises of a software CD, a user manual and a rather large AC adapter.

XMG use a Clevo P150EM chassis for the P502 which is understated in design, especially compared to some other gaming machines on the market such as those from Alienware.

The lid and palmrest area of the chassis are finished in matte black paint which makes the notebook look and feel quite expensive.  The base is constructed from harder wearing plastic which is less prone to picking up scratches and marks.

The notebook itself is quite substantial in size compared to your average multimedia machine.  However, it's quite thin for a gaming machine and the wedge shape makes it look much thinner than it actually is.  It weighs in at around 3.1 KG which means it's reasonably portable.

Unfortunately, the P502 is plagued by the same issue as other Clevo-based notebooks we've tested in the past.  Even though Clevo have updated this chassis with a new backlit keyboard, it's no better to use than the old chiclet design.  The keyboard feels very cheap for a high-end machine like this and is vastly inferior to the keyboard on our much cheaper Lenovo Thinkpad X220 notebook.  Also, the ‘UK' keyboard isn't a proper UK keyboard and is actually a US keyboard with a ‘£' symbol.

There are seven different colours available on the keyboard with three lighting areas.  These are shown in the image above.  The colours available are dark blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow and white.  There are a number of different lighting effects including random, wave, breath and dancing.

The touchpad is integrated seamlessly into the palmrest so it features the same rubberised finish as the rest of the chassis.  This provides a little too much friction for our tastes but we got used to it after a couple of hours use.

While there's nothing wrong with the way the touchpad operates, when typing we found ourselves accidentally activating the touchpad every few words causing the cursor to move to a different position on the screen.  There is a function button on the keyboard to disable the touchpad, but this isn't really ideal.

Above the keyboard there is large speaker grill which spans the width of the machine.  The machine features ‘Onkyo' speakers which are a big improvement over those we've tested in other Clevo-based machines.  There are three speakers in total, two under the large speaker grill and a subwoofer on the underside of the machine.

There are LED activity lights on either side of the speaker grill as well as the power button on the left.

Our sample of the P502 was supplied with a 15.6″ matte finish 1080P screen but there is at gloss option available at no extra cost.  We actually prefer a matte screen as it is much less prone to picking up dirty marks and can be viewed in direct sunlight without issue.

Viewing angles are good and the screen is very bright indeed thanks to the LED backlighting.  The 1920 x 1080 resolution is perfect for watching Blu-Ray movies on this machine and is also good for gaming.

The lid of the notebook features a substantial silver XMG logo which breaks away from the subtle design of the rest of the machine.

The XMG P502 features a full complement of connections which should cater for the requirements of most users.  On the left hand side of the machine we find a mini-Firewire port, an RJ-45 ethernet port, two USB3.0 ports, a USB / eSATA port and a multimedia card reader.

Moving round to the rear of the machine we find a Displayport connector, an HDMI jack and a DVI-D connector alongside the power socket.

On the right hand side of the machine there is a USB2.0 port, four 3.5mm audio connectors and a Kensington lock slot.  We also find the optical drive on the right hand side of the system.

There are various options available including a standard DVD Writer and a Blu-Ray Writer.  Our test system was supplied with a standard Blu-Ray drive with DVD-RW functionality.

XMG have chosen to use a Killer Wireless-N 1102 Wireless Card in the P502 which is one of the best wireless cards available on the market for laptops.  This card doesn't feature Bluetooth but there are other cards available with Bluetooth if required.

The P502 is available with a plentiful selection of Intel's latest Ivy Bridge processors.  Our test system was configured with a Core-i7-3610QM processor which is clocked at 2.3 GHz.  This clock speed can be boosted to 3.3 GHz in turbo mode.

XMG use high quality Corsair Vengeance memory in their systems which reassures us that they are committed to using the best quality parts.  Our test system was configured with 8 GB of memory, comprised of two 4 GB sticks.  There is a third unpopulated memory slot under the keyboard if you want to expand the memory in the future.

As the P502 is a 15.6″ notebook, there isn't room for two standard 2.5″ drives.  However, there is room for an mSATA solid state drive alongside a mechanical hard drive should you wish to have both.

Our system is configured with a 128 GB Crucial M4 mSATA solid state drive and a 750 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM hard drive.  There are also a range of 2.5″ solid state drives available as well as hybrid drives and standard mechanical hard drives.

The most exciting component contained within the P502 is without doubt the graphics card.  It sports the latest nVidia GeForce GTX680M 4 GB graphics card which is currently the most powerful model available on the market for laptops.  The only laptops with more graphics power than this are those that support SLI configurations.

As you can see the inside of the notebook is full of thick copper heatpipes and substantial heatsinks to help cool the powerful components.  We look forward to seeing how the system performs in our temperature tests later on in the review.

BIOS

There isn't anything interesting to speak of in the BIOS.  Obviously there are no overclocking options due to the tight thermal restraints in laptops.

The main page of the BIOS shows us some basic information about the system including the installed system drives.

Moving onto the next page, we find a few basic settings to play about with.

On the security page, the only thing we can do is set a Supervisor password.

The ‘Boot' tab lets us set the boot configuration.  As standard, the system is configured to boot from the optical drive as a priority.

The final tab lets us exit the BIOS.

Testing Methodology

Today we are going to use a combination of synthetic and real world benchmarks to showcase the performance of the XMG P502.

Specification

• Display: 15.6″ (39.6 cm) Full-HD 1920×1080 Matte Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680M 4096MB GDDR5
• Processor: Intel Core i7-3610QM Quad Core – 2.30 – 3.30GHz 6MB 45W “Ivy Bridge”
• Memory: 8GB (2×4096) SO-DIMM DDR3 RAM 1600MHz CORSAIR Vengeance
• Hard Drive: 750GB SATA-II 7200rpm Seagate Momentus 7200.5 (ST9750420AS)
• mSATA Storage: 128GB mSATA-III SSD Crucial M4 (CT256M4SSD3)
• Optical Drive: Blu-ray Combo (Blu-ray reader / DVD RW) – without Software
• WIFI Card: Killer Wireless-N 1102 (without Bluetooth)
• Keyboard: Backlit Keyboard UK
• Warranty: Standard Warranty : 24 Month Collect & Return (inc parts, labour, support, shipping)
• Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit
• Office Software: Microsoft Office 2010 Starter (only available with Windows 7 purchase)

Software:

PCMark 7
3DMark 11
SiSoft Sandra 2012 SP3
Cinebench R11.5
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.5
VLC Media Player
Performance Monitor
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Super Pi 1.5 Mod
CPUID Hardware Monitor
CPU-Z
DiRT 3
Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. The benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

This test showcases the graphics performance of the notebook.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

We have an early indication of the impressive performance from the notebook.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

The test showcases the system wide impressive performance of this laptop.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

This test showcases the impressive graphics performance of the system.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. Sandra is a (girl) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

A solid set of results for the P502 in these tests.

Cinebench R11.5 is the newest revision of the popular benchmark from Maxon. The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various different algorithms to stress all available processor cores.

In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. The test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects containing more than 300,000 total polygons and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights and shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is given in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

This test showcases the solid multi-threaded performance of the system.

Super Pi is used by a huge audience, particularly to check stability when overclocking processors. If a system is able to calculate PI to the 2 millionth pace after the decimal without mistake, it is considered to be stable in regards to RAM and CPU.

The P502 also showcases strong single threaded performance in this test.

CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.  The graph on the left is for the mSATA SSD and the graph on the right is for the hard drive.

Here we can see the SSD offers significantly better performance than the hard drive.  Even though the performance figures aren't amazing for a SSD these days, you'd be hard pushed to tell the difference between this and a top end SATA-600 unit in general real world terms.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 1.09GB 720p MKV file (44mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version of this program with full hardware acceleration enabled.

In this test we can see the significant performance benefits of enabling hardware encoding. Nvidia's GTX680m is a powerhouse!

Many people who have media systems will be familiar with the Matroska (.mkv) file format which is often used for high definition video. In this test we will be using VLC Media Player to play a 1080P MKV file while recording CPU usage using Performance Monitor.

The system performed well in this test, recording very low CPU usage throughout.

Cyberlink PowerDVD 12 is one of the finest solutions for the BluRay experience on Windows and we found this software to work perfectly with this chipset. We tested with the  Blu-Ray Disc of Independence Day.

Again, we see very good performance from the system in this test.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

Here we can see the capable graphics performance of the system.

Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.

In this test the system struggled a little bit more.  Reducing the graphics settings further would yield a boost in performance.

We measured the noise level of the system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We also recorded the noise level with the system idling at the desktop.

The system is very quiet during normal use but it does get noticeably louder when gaming.

We measured the temperatures of the system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We also recorded the temperatures with the system idling at the desktop.  The ambient temperature was maintained at 20 degrees C for the duration of our tests.

These temperatures are quite hot but these tests are designed to stress the components to their absolute limits.

To test the battery today we put the machine through three sets of real world situations.  Firstly we tested the machine while browsing the internet with WLAN enabled.  Secondly we tested the machine while watching a DVD and finally we tested the laptop while gaming.

The battery life isn't too bad for a gaming notebook but it's certainly not going to win any awards for strong battery life.

We measured the power consumption of the system at the wall while loading the CPU using Prime95 and GPU using FurMark. We also recorded the power consumption with the system idling at the desktop.

The power consumption of the system is quite high for a notebook but is much lower than a gaming desktop.

Everything considered, we're very impressed with the XMG P502 and we think it's a great option for anyone looking for an extremely high performance gaming notebook.

The build quality of the machine is reasonably good with the exception of the keyboard which is below average at best. We usually make a point of typing out the whole review on the laptop we're testing so we can get a good idea of how it feels.  In this case we barely made it past the introduction before we found ourselves itching to plug in our Corsair Vengeance K60.

The keys feel spongy and unresponsive but by far the most annoying part of the typing experience is the touchpad which seems to activate every few words and moves the cursor across the screen. Thankfully it can be disabled. It is nice to see XMG using LED backlighting on the keyboard, though.

We were very impressed by the performance of the XMG P502 as it showed excellent performance throughout our test suite.  We were especially impressed with the crazy performance of the nVidia GeForce GTX 680M graphics card which achieved some impressive framerates in our gaming tests. The CUDA power with media rendering is also very noteworthy.

The LED Backlit screen is excellent and boasts impressive brightness and viewing angles.  We love the matte finish of the screen on our test sample but there is a gloss option available at no extra cost for those who have a strong preference in that direction.

Even though the mSATA solid state drive is limited to SATA-300 speeds, it's great that you can configure the machine with both a SSD for speed and a hard drive for storage.  You can also configure the machine with a single large SSD if you want the best possible performance.

At a price of £1641.20 inc. VAT from MySn.co.uk for our particular configuration, the XMG P502 is quite pricey but this is the price you'll have to pay to get your hands on a gaming notebook of this calibre.

A similarly specified Alienware M17X would set you back well over £2000 which makes the P502 quite good value for money.  The base version is available from £839 with none of the optional extras we have on our test sample. We would recommend investing in a quality gaming keyboard, though, as the built in unit isn't up to scratch for intensive typing duties.

Pros

• Impressive screen.
• Attractive design.
• Good connectivity.
• Killer 1102 Wireless-N card.
• Powerful graphics.
• Good value.

Cons

• Awful keyboard.

KitGuru says: An impressive gaming laptop which is only let down by a substandard keyboard.

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