Mobile Core i7 920XM, Clarksfield: Nehalem on-the-go

Test Setup

For this initial look, we're only going to include a subset of our performance benchmarks. Normally we would include results from PCMark, but the Clarksfield system shipped with an SSD and the other test systems have their own take on storage, making PCMark results meaningless. We all know SSDs are faster at certain tasks, but without using the same SSD in all three systems we can't really compare performance. That's part of the reason why this is only an abbreviated preview; we have a lot more benchmark results, but we're not just comparing CPU performance. We will have a complete review of all three notebooks in the near future, where we will go into further details about configuration options. For now, here's the skinny on what we are testing.

Clevo's W87CU is our Clarksfield test platform. Unfortunately (fortunately), Intel shipped it to us with their 80GB SSD and Windows 7. That creates a couple problems. First, all of our previous laptop results come from Windows Vista, and as we recently showed, your choice of OS makes a difference. Since we wanted to try to compare apples-to-apples, we replaced the OS with Vista on our own OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD (our disk cloning software wouldn't work with the W87CU hardware, so we left the original Windows 7 installation alone - we will go back to it in a later review). The system ships with a single GTX 280M.

Representing the old guard, Eurocom's M980NU XCaliber uses a Core 2 Extreme QX9300 - the pinnacle of laptop performance prior to the launch of Clarksfield. The CPU is paired up with two GTX 280M graphics cards in SLI, all stuffed into a gigantic 18.4" chassis. This is essentially the NVIDIA equivalent of the 4870X2 ASUS W90Vp, with a slightly faster CPU. (Remember that the W90Vp allows an easy overclock to 2.27GHz.) We will also test performance with SLI disabled in order to compare results with the other two notebooks.

The final entrant in our benchmarks today really muddies the waters. The Clarksfield i7-920XM is the fastest mobile CPU currently available, which makes the Clevo W87CU the fastest notebook available, right? Well, no, since Clevo already went and stuffed a desktop i7 Bloomfield CPU into their D900F - and not just any Bloomfield CPU; the D900F supports everything up to the top-end i7-975. AVADirect was kind enough to send us just such a system for review, and it also ships with a single GTX 280M. It also has dual 30GB SSDs for the primary drive, providing a ton of bandwidth for data transfers.

What we have are three top-of-the-line desktop replacement notebooks, using the three fastest CPUs you can find in a notebook (even if one of them is a desktop CPU). All of the systems use NVIDIA's GTX 280M, so when we look at graphics performance we can remove the GPU as a factor and see how the CPUs impact frame rates - if at all.