Small vendor, humongous machine
Prior to receiving the Nine X7200, we were unfamiliar with Malibal, and its motto, “Enlighten Transmute,†was equally mysterious. But the company claims to make the World’s Fastest Laptop, a concept that needs no explanation—only proof.
To be honest, calling this 17-inch desktop replacement a laptop is somewhat ludicrous, as you’d probably do bodily harm bearing this machine’s 13-plus pounds atop your lap for any extended period. Shoot, you could strain a muscle just lugging this beast from one room to the next (remember, lift from the knees!). Yes, we’re talking about one of Clevo’s characteristically burly workstations here.
With two GeForce 480M cards and a big 1920×1080 glossy screen, the X7200 is a natural for gaming.
The portability issue aside, Malibal’s X7200 is indisputably fast. How can it not be when housing Intel’s top-dog Core i7-980X desktop processor? This hexa-core CPU is clocked at 3.33GHz, giving it a beyond-unfair advantage over our zero-point notebook in all the benchmarks. The only benchmark where the X7200’s scores didn’t enjoy a lead that was near to or exceeding 200 percent was in Photoshop, which isn’t optimized for multithreading. There, the X7200 was only 86 percent faster.
This kind of CPU power isn’t unprecedented in a notebook. The Eurocom D900F (another Clevo system) we reviewed in August sported the same CPU. But Malibal’s X7200 is the first system we’ve received with Nvidia’s new Fermi-based 480M GPU—well, actually, two of them. Each 480M has 352 CUDA cores and a 256-bit memory interface to 2GB of GDDR5 RAM. That’s a lot of graphics muscle for a notebook of any size. It certainly far outpaced the needs of our gaming benchmarks, where the X7200 hit average frame rates of more than 100fps. When we upped the ante by running Far Cry 2, the more challenging of our game tests, at the notebook’s 1920×1080 native res, with detail settings maxed out, the X7200 still hit an impressive 77.18fps. Looking for something even more demanding, we ran Unigine’s DX11 Heaven benchmark, which stresses hardware tessellation, and we were pleasantly surprised by the 41.2fps result, not to mention the relative speed and smoothness at which the benchmark ran.
Other hardware choices that reflect the X7200’s go-for-broke philosophy include 12GB of DDR3/1333 and a 6x Blu-ray burner. Two Intel X25-M SSDs in RAID 0 offer up maximum speed in data access times, but in a machine that’s otherwise loaded for bear, 160GB of total storage capacity seems a little unbalanced. You can add a third drive to the mix for additional storage, but at an added cost. Since the sticker is already at $5,300, we’d have been happier with a single 80GB SSD for the OS and other select apps, paired with a 750GB or even 1TB hard drive. But that’s just us.
It might be big, heavy, and incapable of lasting even an hour on battery, but Malibal’s X7200 proves itself to be the fastest notebook that we know of.
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