A couple weeks back, we posted something of a first look at the Clevo P170EM when we did our overview of AMD’s upcoming Enduro 5.5 release. As one of the readers put it, the driver update from AMD is the “great white hope” for HD 7970M owners with Clevo notebooks. We’re told that the initial public driver release should be out in the next week or so, but prior to that launch we have our “full” review of the AVADirect notebook. The jury is actually still in deliberation as far as gaming performance is concerned—more on that in a moment—but while we await that verdict we can still take some time to check out the underlying hardware and design and see how things are shaping up.
For this review, we have two parts: this first part uses a Clevo P170EM from AVADirect equipped with a Radeon HD 7970M GPU and AMD’s Enduro technology. Part two will show how AMD’s top mobile GPU stacks up to NVIDIA’s best, the GTX 680M. With NVIDIA having just released their latest 306 series WHQL driver, we’re still running benchmarks, so we’ll need a bit more time to uncover the full story. Until then, we have the Alienware M17x R4 as a comparison point; read on for our first full review of the HD 7970M and Clevo’s updated P170EM chassis.
